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Some thoughts on news
May. 19th, 2005 07:56 amNewsweek did a shameful thing this week.
It retracted a story in which it had done nothing wrong, and which the folks complaining about it could not show any substantive error in fact.
It may be the story was the catalyst which sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan, but the squib (it was a paragraph, in Periscope) was not enough, all by its lonesome, to account for all the fire that little match may have started. The dry wood and tinder were already there.
They have been taken to task by the usual chorus of the Sedition Act types. How terrible that they published something critical of the Armed Forces, of the Nation, of the way the "Global War on Terror" is being fought.
They have been screamed at for using an anonymous source.
They have been accused of letting their, "liberal bias" prevent them from looking at the facts before printing a libel.
In a word: Bullshit.
Newsweek, until it retracted, did it's job.
The plain fact of the matter is, without anonymous sources we'd have damned little accountability of the Gov't. Recall the anonymous sources no one seemed to mind when it was the Clinton's being investigated. Yeah, no one died as a result of that nonesense (at least not directly, but that's a whole 'nother can o' worms and not relevant to this issue). We spent umpteen million dollars and saw the NYT and Newsweek and the WaPo and LA Times and you name it led by the nose by leaks, tips and whispers from the shadows.
They failed their duty in that one. No doubt about it.
But not this time. The White House, and DoD, in high dudgeon (Lawrence diRita, Pentagon flack, said, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?" [as if the effects of the report reflect on its credibility] about Newsweeks source, and to some degree, by extention this, loss of credibility, has attached to Newsweek. I see lots of people blaming Newsweek for the riots, and saying they need to be held to account), but Newsweek did it right.
Josh Marshall has talked about his experience with the editor, saying he is a fiend for getting people on the record. Newsweek ran the piece past the Pentagon, which had no argument with it, before it ran, but is now crying foul when they see it in black and white.
The reports from those who were there (both prisoners, whom we released, so the Gov't says they aren't members of al Q'aida, and interrogators, and others [e.g. Chaplain Yee] who were inside Guantanamo) say such things happened. One of them (an interrogator) had his book cleared by the DoD. If I were the reporter, or the editor, and a source I'd worked with came to me with a report like that, one which had a host of outside stories of parallel nature, I'd find that credible. If it was newsworthy, I'd run it. If they demanded to be anonymous, I'd grumble, but I'd do that.
Anonymity is built into the system, into the the Federal law. There's a chunk of the sentencing code which says judges will be more lenient if a company has a compliance dept., which allows anonymous tips. We'd not have found out about Watergate without Deep Throat, who is still anonymous.
No, this isn't about accountability. The people who are crying out about accountabilty are laughing up their sleeves at the public, because there are lots of things which demand an accounting, but they don't care about them (or perhaps they do, but because that bill will be laid at their table).
Accountabilty is what the press supposed to be all about. Keeping those in power accountable to the people. We can't trust the police to police themselves (if you doubt that, look at the House Ethics Committee, even before they passed rules to prevent the Speaker from having to risk suffering for misdeeds, they were pretty toothless).
Some things I don't see the folks enjoying their moral outrage talking about.
Valerie Plame. A law was broken. Actual harm to U.S. policy was done. People have probably died. It sank without a trace. If someplace in Africa gets The Bomb, we can blame Robert Novak, and the White House staffer/confidante who leaked it to him.
Niger. The Memo was forged. It was poorly forged. Anyone who looked at it with any sort of objectivity to the contents knew, inside of ten minutes, that it was forged. It was used to justify a war.
The Downing Street Memo. Back in July 2002 Bush told Blair the war was going to happen. That means the decision was made not later than June. He admitted to Blair's people that the case was, at best weak, and Iraq had no real WMD, and their programs were on a par with Libya, and other non-players. Despite this we were told WMD posed a grave danger to the United States, and we couldn't wait to see this by way of a mushroom cloud over New York. We told the world they existed, and we said we knew right where they were.
As part of our proof we had... anonymous sources with axes to grind.
To paraphrase Lawrence daRita, "Those sonsabitches lied and people died. How can they be thought credible anymore?" But none of the loudmouths who bitch about moral absolutes, and holding the feet of the guilty to the fire, and heads rolling for errors is caterwauling for those things to be cleared up.
Nope. Because it isn't really about accountabilty. It's rather about avoiding it.
When Dan Rather ran the infamous memo, without taking time to look into them all the way, CBS made a mistake. They let the desire for a scoop take over. They got burned. So did we. Because the substance of those memos seems to have been true, but after that fiasco, no one could talk about it. The story was dead.
No accountabilty for the person the memos were about.
The Pentagon hasn't denied the meat of the matter (that Qu'rans are being desecrated). No, they have said they don't find the sources of such allegations credible. These are the same people who want you to believe that the problems at Abu Ghraib, Khandahar, Bagram and Gitmo are all, depsite common features to all of them (including timeline issues in terms of commanders) localised freaks, and failures of discipline.
Who's credible on that one?
So what happens now? The next time someone tries to talk about abuse at Gitmo, will they have to get the Pentagon to admit the truth of the story, on the record, before it becomes credible?
If so, Newsweek will be guilty of something far greater than the deaths of people in riots, if we allow it, we will be accomplices.
It retracted a story in which it had done nothing wrong, and which the folks complaining about it could not show any substantive error in fact.
It may be the story was the catalyst which sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan, but the squib (it was a paragraph, in Periscope) was not enough, all by its lonesome, to account for all the fire that little match may have started. The dry wood and tinder were already there.
They have been taken to task by the usual chorus of the Sedition Act types. How terrible that they published something critical of the Armed Forces, of the Nation, of the way the "Global War on Terror" is being fought.
They have been screamed at for using an anonymous source.
They have been accused of letting their, "liberal bias" prevent them from looking at the facts before printing a libel.
In a word: Bullshit.
Newsweek, until it retracted, did it's job.
The plain fact of the matter is, without anonymous sources we'd have damned little accountability of the Gov't. Recall the anonymous sources no one seemed to mind when it was the Clinton's being investigated. Yeah, no one died as a result of that nonesense (at least not directly, but that's a whole 'nother can o' worms and not relevant to this issue). We spent umpteen million dollars and saw the NYT and Newsweek and the WaPo and LA Times and you name it led by the nose by leaks, tips and whispers from the shadows.
They failed their duty in that one. No doubt about it.
But not this time. The White House, and DoD, in high dudgeon (Lawrence diRita, Pentagon flack, said, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?" [as if the effects of the report reflect on its credibility] about Newsweeks source, and to some degree, by extention this, loss of credibility, has attached to Newsweek. I see lots of people blaming Newsweek for the riots, and saying they need to be held to account), but Newsweek did it right.
Josh Marshall has talked about his experience with the editor, saying he is a fiend for getting people on the record. Newsweek ran the piece past the Pentagon, which had no argument with it, before it ran, but is now crying foul when they see it in black and white.
The reports from those who were there (both prisoners, whom we released, so the Gov't says they aren't members of al Q'aida, and interrogators, and others [e.g. Chaplain Yee] who were inside Guantanamo) say such things happened. One of them (an interrogator) had his book cleared by the DoD. If I were the reporter, or the editor, and a source I'd worked with came to me with a report like that, one which had a host of outside stories of parallel nature, I'd find that credible. If it was newsworthy, I'd run it. If they demanded to be anonymous, I'd grumble, but I'd do that.
Anonymity is built into the system, into the the Federal law. There's a chunk of the sentencing code which says judges will be more lenient if a company has a compliance dept., which allows anonymous tips. We'd not have found out about Watergate without Deep Throat, who is still anonymous.
No, this isn't about accountability. The people who are crying out about accountabilty are laughing up their sleeves at the public, because there are lots of things which demand an accounting, but they don't care about them (or perhaps they do, but because that bill will be laid at their table).
Accountabilty is what the press supposed to be all about. Keeping those in power accountable to the people. We can't trust the police to police themselves (if you doubt that, look at the House Ethics Committee, even before they passed rules to prevent the Speaker from having to risk suffering for misdeeds, they were pretty toothless).
Some things I don't see the folks enjoying their moral outrage talking about.
Valerie Plame. A law was broken. Actual harm to U.S. policy was done. People have probably died. It sank without a trace. If someplace in Africa gets The Bomb, we can blame Robert Novak, and the White House staffer/confidante who leaked it to him.
Niger. The Memo was forged. It was poorly forged. Anyone who looked at it with any sort of objectivity to the contents knew, inside of ten minutes, that it was forged. It was used to justify a war.
The Downing Street Memo. Back in July 2002 Bush told Blair the war was going to happen. That means the decision was made not later than June. He admitted to Blair's people that the case was, at best weak, and Iraq had no real WMD, and their programs were on a par with Libya, and other non-players. Despite this we were told WMD posed a grave danger to the United States, and we couldn't wait to see this by way of a mushroom cloud over New York. We told the world they existed, and we said we knew right where they were.
As part of our proof we had... anonymous sources with axes to grind.
To paraphrase Lawrence daRita, "Those sonsabitches lied and people died. How can they be thought credible anymore?" But none of the loudmouths who bitch about moral absolutes, and holding the feet of the guilty to the fire, and heads rolling for errors is caterwauling for those things to be cleared up.
Nope. Because it isn't really about accountabilty. It's rather about avoiding it.
When Dan Rather ran the infamous memo, without taking time to look into them all the way, CBS made a mistake. They let the desire for a scoop take over. They got burned. So did we. Because the substance of those memos seems to have been true, but after that fiasco, no one could talk about it. The story was dead.
No accountabilty for the person the memos were about.
The Pentagon hasn't denied the meat of the matter (that Qu'rans are being desecrated). No, they have said they don't find the sources of such allegations credible. These are the same people who want you to believe that the problems at Abu Ghraib, Khandahar, Bagram and Gitmo are all, depsite common features to all of them (including timeline issues in terms of commanders) localised freaks, and failures of discipline.
Who's credible on that one?
So what happens now? The next time someone tries to talk about abuse at Gitmo, will they have to get the Pentagon to admit the truth of the story, on the record, before it becomes credible?
If so, Newsweek will be guilty of something far greater than the deaths of people in riots, if we allow it, we will be accomplices.
