Panel Corrections

At YearlyKos, I participated in a Journalism and Blogging panel. And I fear I spoke unclearly.

Ezra Klein maintained, on another panel, that we know all about Judy Miller’s being duped by her sources in the runup to this fiasco in Iraq because she is the exception, not the exemplar, in Traditional Media. She’s been exposed for her wrongdoing, and shamed; therefore she must be the only one. He didn’t answer my shouted question about Michael Gordon, who shared her Pulitzers and still shills for The Regime. Yeah, right, Ezra — the New York Times and Washington Post are entirely self-correcting enterprises.

Yikes. So let me clarify. The context here was a questioner who accused The New York TImes and The Washington Post of "getting Katrina wrong," which led to a discussion of the media getting...everything wrong. Just about always. I'm a bit softer on the MSM than that, and thought they did, actually, a fairly good job during Katrina, though there were certainly mistakes, and rumors that got reported as fact. But in the wake of a mega-disaster, you're going to have some of those, and given the quality of much of the reportage that did emerge from that catastrophe, to only focus on the fact that they reported a rumored murder in the Superdome is to miss the forest for a gnarled tree. I would argue that Katrina was one of the our press's finer moments.

Iraq, of course, is a different story. The run-up to the war was one of the American press's darkest moments. My point on Miller was that she was an almost uniquely pernicious journalist during that period, hence her current ignominy. But because she committed high crimes, doesn't mean others were innocent. Indeed, Miller didn't write in a vacuum, and within the context of a more broadly skeptical press, her work wouldn't have been uncritically published, nor capable of so totally setting the tenor of the reportage.

In the end, the failures of the media weren't mainly, or even primarily, about WMDs. Their mistakes on WMD's were rather expressions of their central failure: Undue deference to the office of the president, and an occasionally-spoken but always-present subtext that the proper role of the media in matters of war was something akin to softly-critical support, rather than hard-nosed skepticism.

That basic credulity enabled all the other failures, colored all the subsequent reporting, and governed the interpretation of all other data. This wasn't a failure of individual journalists, as I see it. Some, after all, got it right. But individuals journalists operate almost entirely within the context of their editors, what their outlets want to publish, what gets ratings, etc. Walter Pincus, who was succeeding, was being published on page A14 of the Washington Post, while the hype machine got A1. So more important, and more fundamental, than the actions of the individuals was the prevailing tenor of the profession. This wasn't so much a failure of journalists as it was a failure of journalism.