Hubris in the Media

In page 218 of the book entitled, Hubris, the authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn written the following statement: “In a way, the Times editors were behaving like White House officials: both institutions were standing by their prewar assertions.” To understand its meaning requires one to understand its context.

Preceding the authors' assessment, but still referring to texts found in Chapter 12, The Missing Weapons, the Iraq invasion had commenced and Hussein's republican guard had given little resistance during the few short weeks when American forces advanced towards Baghdad. The statue of Saddam was torn down on April 9, marking the end of initial operations, but where had the Ba'athists presumably hid their biological or nuclear weaponry which provoked America into its “do-or-die” push for war?

Judith Miller had been granted the assignment in covering military efforts to locate WMDs for the New York Times, at no surprise to anyone familiar with her previous work in Middle East affairs, (she had co-authored a book with Laurie Mylroie titled, Saddam Hussein & the Crisis in the Gulf, which helped launch neoconservative suspicions of Hussein becoming the next great American nemesis since 1990,) and especially her top-notched standing with both Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

Miller was embedded with the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha unit, and all searching efforts were concentrated in WMD allegations made by an unidentified Iraqi in a baseball cap, supposedly a scientist working in Saddam's chemical weapons program for ten years. According to Isikoff and Corn in Hubris, Miller wasn't allowed to speak with this mysterious source, whose directions hadn't yet led the MET Alpha unit to anything determinant, and the censorship was heavy under the agreements with the 75th Exploitation Task Force, yet the story had been written with a demeanor that it was only a matter of “when” and not “if,” according to concerns from Steven Erlanger, Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times.

But when Erlanger brought Miller's story to both Raines' and Boyd's attention for it's lack of skepticism, it was Erlanger himself who received a reprimand in Miller's defense. It was as if Miller received a free pass for her erratic assertions that WMD's exist in Iraq and an even more erratic aggressiveness to prove it. Even the MET Alpha team was becoming increasingly frustrated with Miller's seeming intentions to occasionally direct the expeditions herself at behest of Chabali's INC allegations, despite his increasing notoriety with CIA and Pentagon officials. Worse still, nothing substantial was found, making Miller only more fervent than second guessing.

Miller's obsession with finding Hussein's supposedly hidden WMDs as an embedded reporter was not an isolated incident in her attempts to conclude a story with erroneous sourcing. According to Franklin Foer's New York Times article titled, The Source of the Trouble, published May 31, 2004, Miller had written a long-string of articles which were eventually revealed to contain many factual errors, which could have been avoided if Miller had actually double-checked her leads for authenticity and with skepticism, starting from when Raines pulled her aside and told her to “Go win a Pulitzer,” shortly after 9/11.

“For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong,” Foer wrote.

It must be pointed out that when the New York Times had acquired the stigma for questionable reporting ethics, such as a Miller's failure to check sources for factuality, credibility, or hidden agendas, there had been other media organizations theoretically under social pressure to refrain from its standard objectivity for fears of appearing unpatriotic.

Eric Boehlert, author of Lapdogs, was interviewed in Bill Moyer's documentary, Buying the War, when he stressed that there existed a major imbalance between reporting arguments both for and against the once possible, now definitive, invasion of Iraq.

“I calculated in 2002, the Washington Post probably published 1,000 articles and columns about Iraq, in excess of 1,000,000 words, and one of the most famous Democrats in the country (Ted Kennedy) raised questions about the war, and the Washington Post set aside 36 words,” Mr. Boehlert said.

Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism advisor on the U.S. National Security Council under the Clinton Administration and Senior Executive Service member specializing in counter-terrorism under George W. Bush, testified at the 9/11 Commission hearings that both he and the current administration had failed the American people in preventing the attacks in September 11. Immediately after his testimony came an intense smear campaign from the White House to downplay Clarke's credibility and draw suspicions of ulterior motives. In an May 30, 2004 interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Clarke commented on how many journalists during the post-9/11 period took on a public relations position for the United States government.

“Karl Rove and company are quite good at character assassination. There are all these people, dozens of people in the White House, paid for by you and I, paid for by our taxes, writing talking points, calling up conservative columnists, calling up talk radio hosts, telling them what to say. It's interesting, they all say the same thing, use the same exact words,” Clarke said.

Fox News had been accused by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting of conservative- bias even years before the Bush Administration took office, and having Roger Ailes, former media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. as their acting chairman and CEO didn't help to refute these claims. To those believing the charge of right-winged slantedness would then hardly be surprised when Fox News touted neoconservative prewar party lines.

Bob McChesney, founder and president of Free Press, a national, non-partisan organization dedicated to media reform and democratization, was interviewed in Robert Greenwald's documentary, Outfoxed. He referred to the PIPA/Knowledge Networks Polls entitled, Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War, which showed that over two-thirds of Fox News viewers polled believed that the U.S. had found links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, when making this comment:

“All the research shows a very high correlation, in the case of Fox News, with people watching it, having a very confused notion of the world, on the one hand, especially at foreign policy in the Middle East, and also being strongly supportive of the government in power. This is an extraordinarily disturbing trend for the media, for any self-respecting journalist. If your told the more people consume your media, the less they'll know about a subject and the more they'll support government policy. That's exactly the worst thing a journalist should ever want to hear,” Mr. McChesney said.

The United States experienced a rude awakening in the aftermath of September 11, and in all times of crisis comes a need to relinquish divisiveness amongst citizens and unite to overcome the dangers, arbitrarily or not. It may be reasonable to conclude that many key figures within the mainstream media had felt the need to subside their usual course in political skepticism, so highly prominent during the Clinton Administration, then placed faith in the government to perform within the nation's best interest, as if the contention between Bin Laden and Bush allowed for only two options of discourse: Submit to one's doctrine or the other's.

But political platforms are based in ideology, not objectivity, and facts may not necessarily be important to a political party, so long as the power remains with them to further their agendas. All too typically, the consequences of decisions made by those at top first effect those at the very bottom, and when leadership finally catches a whiff of stink from their own policy making, it's the common man who's already drowning in it. With the Iron Law of Oligarchy so unrefutable during times of crisis, can the general public afford to allow the status quo an unchallenged precedent when the trademark of a human being is his own ability to fool himself?