A couple of updates at the end of
Greenwald's piece,
The NY Times returns to pre-Iraq-war "journalism", February 10, 2007, in response to today's
NYT article by Michael R. Gordon, entitled,
Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says, February 10, 2007.
UPDATE: As I noted the other day, The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin published a
list of basic journalistic rules for avoiding the media's government-enabling mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq. If the NYT set out to create a textbook article which violates as many of these principles as possible, it would not have been able to surpass the article published today by Gordon. Here are just a few of Froomkin's rules:
You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority
* Don’t assume anything administration officials tell you is true. In fact, you are probably better off assuming anything they tell you is a lie.
* Demand proof for their every assertion. Assume the proof is a lie. Demand that they prove that their proof is accurate.
* Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it should be make the headlines. The absence of supporting evidence for their assertion -- or a preponderance of evidence that contradicts the assertion -- may be more newsworthy than the assertion itself.
* Don’t print anonymous assertions. Demand that sources make themselves accountable for what they insist is true.
Provocation Alone Does Not Justify War
* War is so serious that even proving the existence of a casus belli isn’t enough. Make officials prove to the public that going to war will make things better.
Be Particularly Skeptical of Secrecy
* Don’t assume that these officials, with their access to secret intelligence, know more than you do.
* Alternately, assume that they do indeed know more than you do – and are trying to keep intelligence that would undermine their arguments secret.
Don’t Just Give Voice to the Administration Officials
* Give voice to the skeptics; don’t marginalize and mock them.
* Listen to and quote the people who got it right last time: The intelligence officials, state department officials, war-college instructors and many others who predicted the problem we are now facing, but who were largely ignored.
Is there a single journalistic principle which this article did not violate?
UPDATE II: As Greg Mitchell recalls in an article in Editor & Publisher, it was Michael Gordon "who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion," and Gordon himself "wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, 'aluminum tubes' story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows" (h/t Zack).
The fundamental flaws in this article are as glaring as they are grotesque. Given the very ignominious history of Gordon and the NYT concerning the administration's war-seeking claims, how can this article possibly have been published?The USS Bush Propagandist still sails merrily on.
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