Yes, it's STILL the Media, Stupid.
Matt Taibbi, New York Press: The problem with these
newsprint confessions is not that they are craven,
insufficient and self-serving, which of course they
are. The problem is that, on the whole, they do not
correct the pre-war mistakes, but actually further
them. The Post would have you believe that its
"failure" before the war was its inability/reluctance
to punch holes in Bush's WMD claims.
Right. I marched in Washington against the war in
February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can
pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of
those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That's
because we knew what the Post and all of these other
papers still refuse to admit—this whole thing was
never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five-
year-old, much less the literate executive editor of
the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching
Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were
going in anyway.
For God's sake, Bush was up there in the fall of 2002,
warning us that unmanned Iraqi drones were going to
spray poison gas on the continental United States. The
whole thing—the "threat" of Iraqi attack, the link to
terrorism, the dire warnings about Saddam's
intentions—it was all bullshit on its face, as stupid,
irrelevant and transparent as a cheating husband's
excuse. And I don't know a single educated person who
didn't think so at the time.
The story shouldn't have been, "Are there WMDs?" The
story should have been, "Why are they pulling this
stunt? And why now?" That was the real mystery. It
still is.
Break the Corporatist Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.nypress.com/17/33/news&columns/MATTTAIBBI.cfm
SORRY, OUR BAD
The Washington Post still doesn’t get it.
By Matt Taibbi
WITH ALL DUE respect to the Washington Post's Howard
Kurtz, who was polite to me when we spoke on the phone
earlier this year, I had to laugh at his 3000-word "We
Fucked Up on Iraq" piece that came out last week.
Kurtz's Aug. 12 piece, entitled "The Post on WMDs: An
Inside Story; Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often
Didn't Make Front Page," was the latest in what is
likely to be a long series of tepid media mea culpas
about pre-war Iraq reporting. The piece comes on the
heels of the New York Times' infamous "The Bitch Set
Us Up" piece from this past May, in which that paper
implicitly blamed hyperambitious hormone-case Judith
Miller for its hilarious prewar failures.
The Kurtz article was a curious piece of writing. In
reading it, I was reminded of a scene I once witnessed
at the New England Aquarium in Boston, in the
aqua-petting-zoo section on the second floor.
The petting pool contained a sea cucumber. Now, anyone
who has ever made it through seventh-grade science
class knows what a sea cucumber does when threatened.
Unfortunately, some parent unleashed a sixth-grader on
the pool unattended. The kid started fucking with the
sea cucumber, poking and prodding it like crazy. So
the sea cucumber pulled out its only defense
mechanism, turning itself inside out and showing its
nasty guts to the poor kid, who immediately thought
he'd killed the thing and ran away crying. Later, when
I made another turn through the same area of the
aquarium, the cucumber had reconstituted itself and
was sitting in its usual log-like position.
It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for these
post-invasion auto-crucifixions our papers of record
have been giving us lately.
The Post piece featured an array of senior and
less-senior reporters who let us in on the shocking
revelation that stories questioning the Bush
administration's pre-war intelligence claims were
often buried deep in the news section, while Bush
claims ran on the front. Revelations included the
heartwarming Thelma & Louise tale of Walter Pincus and
Bob Woodward teaming up to get Pincus' WMD skepticism
piece into the paper just days before the country went
over the cliff into Iraq. In fact, the second
paragraph of the piece is devoted to this tale of
editorial foxhole heroism:
…his piece ran only after assistant managing editor
Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the
drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus
recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time
getting into the paper." Even so, the article was
relegated to Page A17.
Quite a lot of Kurtz's article is devoted to such
backdoor compliments, with numerous reminders
throughout the text that the Post, relatively
speaking, did a better job than most papers on Iraq.
Much of the piece was framed in this "But on the other
hand…" rhetorical format, in which admissions of poor
performance surfed home on waves of somber
self-congratulation. Some examples:
The Post published a number of pieces challenging the
White House, but rarely on the front page.
The result was coverage that, despite flashes of
groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks
strikingly one-sided at times.
Quoting media critic Michael Massing: "'In covering
the run-up to the war, The Post did better than most
other news organizations…' But on the key issue of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the paper was
generally napping along with everyone else."
Given The Post's reputation for helping topple the
Nixon administration… the paper's shortcomings did not
reflect any reticence about taking on the Bush White
House.
Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national
news, says The Post's overall record was strong. "I
believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to
question the administration's assertions on all kinds
of subjects related to the war..."
Bob Woodward: "We did our job but we didn't do
enough."
When the Post wasn't reassuring readers of its
competence, it was offering excuses—lots of them. The
list is really an extraordinary one. According to
Kurtz's interview subjects, the Post was slow on Iraq
because: a) Walter Pincus is a "cryptic" writer who
isn't "storifyable"; b) there is limited space on the
front page, and executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.
likes to have health and education and Orioles
coverage and other stuff there; c) the paper got a lot
of depressing hate mail questioning its patriotism
whenever it questioned the Bush administration; d)
their intelligence sources wouldn't go on the record,
while Bush and Powell were up there openly saying all
this stuff; e) the paper had to rely on the
administration because Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus
had no "alternative sources of information," and
particularly couldn't go to Iraq "without getting
killed"; f) the paper, including Woodward, was duped
by highly seductive intelligence-community
"groupthink"; g) too many of the dissenting sources
were retired from government or, even worse, not in
government at all; h) stories on intelligence are
"difficult to edit"; g) there was "a lot of
information to digest"; h) the paper is "inevitably a
mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power";
i) a flood of copy about the impending invasion kept
skeptical coverage out [Note: This is my favorite.
We're already covering the war, so it's too late to
explain why we shouldn't go to war.]; and finally, j)
none of it matters, because even if the Post had done
a more thorough job, there would have been a war
anyway.
Here's how Downie put that last excuse:
People who were opposed to the war from the beginning
and have been critical of the media's coverage…have
the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's
coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been
a war.
Nothing like an editor with a firm grasp of
metaphysics. "It doesn't matter what we write, the
universe is still going to keep expanding…"
The problem with these newsprint confessions is not
that they are craven, insufficient and self-serving,
which of course they are. The problem is that, on the
whole, they do not correct the pre-war mistakes, but
actually further them. The Post would have you believe
that its "failure" before the war was its
inability/reluctance to punch holes in Bush's WMD
claims.
Right. I marched in Washington against the war in
February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can
pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of
those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That's
because we knew what the Post and all of these other
papers still refuse to admit—this whole thing was
never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five-
year-old, much less the literate executive editor of
the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching
Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were
going in anyway.
For God's sake, Bush was up there in the fall of 2002,
warning us that unmanned Iraqi drones were going to
spray poison gas on the continental United States. The
whole thing—the "threat" of Iraqi attack, the link to
terrorism, the dire warnings about Saddam's
intentions—it was all bullshit on its face, as stupid,
irrelevant and transparent as a cheating husband's
excuse. And I don't know a single educated person who
didn't think so at the time.
The story shouldn't have been, "Are there WMDs?" The
story should have been, "Why are they pulling this
stunt? And why now?" That was the real mystery. It
still is.
We didn't need a named source in the Pentagon to tell
us that. And neither did the Washington Post. o
Volume 17, Issue 33
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