'NY Times' Admits Errors: Too Little, Too Late?

By: William E. Jackson Jr. Rarely have so many waited for so long, only to be rewarded with so little. That is one way to sum up the May 26, 2004 note from The New York Times editors: "The Times and Iraq."

A "collective guilt" syndrome infects the convoluted effort of the editors of the Times, well over a year after the United States invaded Iraq, to atone for journalistic sins in misreporting some of the biggest stories driving the war. It is comparable to the growing phenomenon in Washington for civilian and military alike to claim, up and down the line, that "we all" bear some responsibility for the shame of Abu Ghraib. That is, everyone is responsible, but no one is individually accountable, certainly not at the higher levels.

Imagine a great newspaper in a democracy, hanging its reputation on defectors and partisan sources in the government.

Consider: "Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by U.S. officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one."

Did Times journalists wonder why they were so favored with "misinformation"? Could the newspaper of record not admit culpability until the Bush Administration admitted it had been had, and the number-one informer Ahmad Chalabi of the INC dropped from the government payroll? Who is flashing the green light for whom?

Consider: "The problematic articles shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks." Weeks? How about months?

Moreover, "in most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. Chalabi became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush Administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles." But why didn't this "sketchiness" raise suspicions at the time, 2002-2003, when the Gray Lady published many largely black-and-white stories on the presence of WMD in Iraq?

So is the intelligence community to blame? Or the civilian "neo-con" hardliners in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office? Combined, they led the Times' horse to water, but it most assuredly did not have to drink.

Now, the paper, in a note buried on Page 10A (without even a teaser on Page One) admits, "It looks as if we, along with the Administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers." Those two things were already painfully obvious.

There were examples, of course, in which the Times and the White House seemed to be synchronizing their pitch. On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, the Times led with "U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts." According to today's editors' note, the claim came not from defectors but "from the best American intelligence sources available at the time" (a patented Condoleezza Rice phrase). Referring to the speculations of government officials, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon wrote: "The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud." Both the Vice President and the National Security Adviser cited the front-page blockbuster on that morning's talk shows as evidence of an imminent threat.

As first pointed out by E&P's Greg Mitchell last night, Miller wrote or co-wrote four of the six most egregious articles cited by the Times today. Yet there is no mention of Miller by name in the Times' note, nor any of the editors at fault.

The question begs to be asked: Who at The Times continues to shield her from direct criticism, even by the paper's columnists (not one swipe at her so far) or in the letters to the editor?

The articles most closely dissected in the mea culpa were written by Miller, or co-authored with Gordon. Why not say so? She is a big girl, a veteran, a Pulitzer star reporter. She should have protected the Times from glaring conflicts of interest, and bad judgment -- as revealed in her May 1 e-mail to Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper ... He has provided most of the front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper."

Arguably, the Times was "had" by the INC more than any other national newspaper.

No editor is to blame for Miller's notorious conduct in the field while embedded with the military task force charged with searching for unconventional weapons. She is the one who was in the desert, throwing her weight around by invoking her ties to high-up Pentagon officials, claiming to have a "secret" clearance, losing all objectivity by referring to the task force as "my unit" and pinning medals on soldiers. She made the reader think there was no doubt WMD were in Iraq before the war, were being discovered during the war, or were about to be found in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

How to forget the preposterous claims in her "baseball cap" (worn by a fake scientist walking around in the desert) story of April 21, 2003, as American weapons-hunters followed American troops into Iraq? It will go down in the comic annals of journalism.

Yes, her editors should have reined her in. Are we meant to think of ousted executive editor Howell Raines as the root cause of her wild reporting? Is he the real fall guy here? Quote: "Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper." Sounds Rainesian to me.

Strikingly absent from the editors' note is any flat-out admission that the Times as an institution allowed the line to become indistinct between the Bush Administration's claims and the newspaper's own reporting. There is no admission that the nation's leading print outlet bears some responsibility for the march to war.

So this sentence does not exactly ring true: "It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves." For little light is provided on what actually happened. The New York Times became a "player" in a three-way echo chamber. The public aside, Times reporting influenced the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the Administration using the newspaper to get its story out. Exile groups "gamed" both, with grave consequence.

The editors' note concludes: "We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight." Public Editor Daniel Okrent now promises his own take this Sunday. But I predict that this is the only editors' note we will see on the subject.