The worst of Times

One of the very few points of agreement between "Hard News" and "The Record of the Paper" is that Miller's anonymously sourced front-page "exposés" in late 2002 and early 2003 about the alleged Iraqi WMD -- which now appear to have been false in virtually every detail -- got into print because of the Times' overpowering institutional predilection to hew to the perceived political center. Mnookin says that half a dozen Times sources have told him that Raines seized on Miller's WMD stories as a way to establish that his liberal views weren't driving his editorship.

For Howard Friel, an unaffiliated media watchdog, and Richard Falk, a retired Princeton law professor, the Miller stories are part of a far more insidious and sinister pattern. They argue that the Times, over the course of five decades, has consistently ignored questions of international law (which the U.S. has violated on numerous occasions) and treated government pronouncements with an almost childlike credulity. Their tone is sometimes intemperate -- it may not be incorrect to observe that many people around the world view Israeli premier Ariel Sharon as a terrorist, but it isn't especially helpful -- and their long, densely argued book is unlikely to reach beyond its Noam Chomsky-Howard Zinn core readership. But their case is difficult to refute.

Essentially, Friel and Falk contend that as American political discourse has crept to the right, the Times has crept along with it, maintaining a relative position that can plausibly be perceived as to the left of Republican orthodoxy but slightly to the right of the Democratic Party mainstream. During the run-up to the Iraq invasion in early 2003, for example, the paper tortured itself and its readers with a series of yes-but-no, no-but-yes editorials, finally opposing the war at precisely the moment it had become inevitable. Then there was the infamous story by Michael Ignatieff in the Times Magazine, suggesting that some coercive torture-lite procedures might be necessary to combat terrorism -- which was sent to the presses just before the first photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib reached our eyes.

Before the war began, the Times' Op-Ed page was overcrowded with the ruminations of the so-called liberal hawks: Democrats or independents who for various reasons favored military action but sought to remain distant from George W. Bush. Perhaps never in intellectual history have the soul-searchings of such a tiny quadrant of opinion been aired so extensively and so flatulently. (Salon, let it be said, was not innocent of this offense.) At no point, amazingly, did anyone point out in the pages of the Times that the proposed invasion was illegal under the United Nations Charter and, by extension, the U.S. Constitution. (Under Article VI, section 2, of the Constitution, international treaties ratified by the United States, such as the U.N. Charter, are "the supreme law of the land.")

It seems clear that the Times, like the rest of American society, isn't interested in international law because there's no precedent for our taking it seriously. Philosophically, Friel and Falk make a potent argument about the corruption of our empire -- we're violating the explicit dictates of our own Constitution -- but on a practical level it's hard to imagine what can be done about it.

During the Cold War, realpolitik dictated that the U.S. government acted in its own interests, ignoring international law; the Soviets sure weren't going to abide by it. In the post-Cold War period of American global dominance, there's been no global power structure even remotely capable of making the United States play by the so-called rules. The United Nations didn't even pretend it could do anything except stand on the sidelines and wail while Bush and Tony Blair started their illegal (and undeclared) war.

Even without embracing some utopian vision of international law, it might be possible for America's leading newspaper to view the policies and actions of its own government with a touch more skepticism (as it did, to its eternal honor, when publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971). Even if Friel and Falk sometimes state their case too broadly, I think they're right that the Times' "misguided go-along patriotism," especially in the wake of September 2001, has led to an "imbalance of knowledge" between the United States and the world. Most newspaper readers in other countries were aware that the proposed invasion of Iraq was illegal and that the WMD (and al-Qaida) charges leveled against Saddam Hussein were speculative at best. As of Nov. 2, at least, Americans still hadn't gotten the memo.

In fairness, the Times' coverage of the Iraq conflict has turned sharply critical since it became clear how badly Miller and her editors got played on the WMD story. And herein lies the difference between the Blair and Miller cases. Jayson Blair was essentially a lone sociopath whose supervision was so lax that he broke every accepted code of journalism and got away with it, at least for a while. Judith Miller played by the rules, at least as they were understood at the Times in that moment. She presumably believed that the supposed Iraqi defectors supplied to her by Ahmed Chalabi -- head of the Iraqi National Congress and one-time neocon fave-rave -- were genuine, and in their eagerness for front-page scoops, Raines and other editors accepted the stories on blind faith.

When the Times ultimately disavowed Miller's WMD reporting -- which did not happen until May 26, 2004, more than a year after the last of her controversial pieces -- it did so in restrained, rather technical language, in an unsigned editorial on page A10 that was reportedly written by Bill Keller, who had himself been a pro-war "liberal hawk." No reporters or editors were named, although the pieces discussed were mostly Miller's. Perhaps it was dignified not to cast aspersions directly on the departed Raines, but the piece, unsurprisingly, also did not discuss the notion that the Times was overly eager to balance its liberal reputation by uncritically embracing whatever the government said was true.

Keller's editorial made clear that the Times had been hoodwinked by Chalabi (who had recently been removed from the U.S. payroll and even accused of spying for Iran). It did not say that the whole enterprise resulting in Miller's breathless exclusives might have been a dark propaganda operation, planned by Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon and funded by American taxpayers. As Friel and Falk detail, Chalabi and the INC had received funding from the Defense Department, under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, to supply Iraqi defectors to U.S. intelligence agencies and then to Western reporters.

A subsequent assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, as has been widely reported, found the information supplied by Chalabi's defectors to be "of little or no use." This introduces the hair-raising possibility that the Pentagon spread Chalabi's WMD disinformation to journalists while knowing it wasn't true -- or simply not caring whether it was or not. "It seems that Chalabi may have been paid by the U.S. government," Friel and Falk write, "to give what was known to be false or suspect information to the Times about Iraqi WMD at critical moments that supported the work of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans," the Wolfowitz unit that coordinated strategy for the Iraq invasion.

Looking too closely into the Miller affair, then, would raise the question of how America's leading newspaper, which prides itself on its impartiality and its "non-crusading" character, was so readily hypnotized by a mendacious administration that it splashed that government's most spectacular untruths across the front page, over and over again. This question goes well beyond Judith Miller or Howell Raines or Bill Keller, all of whom have to look in the mirror every day and wonder to what extent they are responsible for a misguided war that has cost thousands of human lives and now feels like a bottomless disaster. Jayson Blair was just a weird kid who told some fibs.

It's easy for a book reviewer to sit here and second-guess the Times' reporting on Iraq long after the fact. The individual who bears ultimate responsibility for the Iraq war is George W. Bush, and he might well have gone ahead with his long-desired invasion if the Times had never swallowed any of Chalabi and Wolfowitz's bunkum (and, for that matter, if 9/11 had never happened). Of course, you or I didn't know that when Colin Powell gave his fateful audiovisual presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, he was pretty much pulling it out of his butt. Almost every reporter has been hoodwinked by a source and, if he or she is honest, can imagine being swept up in scoop-fever to the point of making Miller's mistakes, egregious as they were.

No, the fundamental question about the future of the New York Times, in the Keller era and beyond, is whether it can recover a sense of true impartiality and independence, or whether its editors and managers have become so snuggly with power, so seduced by the corroded political discourse of our time, that they define "impartiality" as a point of perpetual, semi-neutral waffledom, halfway across the infinitesimal distance between Joe Lieberman and John McCain.

Friel and Falk quote from the legendary opinion of late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, when the court ruled that the Times could publish the leaked documents in defiance of the Nixon White House: "In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy," Black wrote. "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

Seen in this light, the Jayson Blair case was an embarrassing sideshow, nothing more. With the bogus WMD stories reported by Miller and approved by various editors, the Times -- which, for all its flaws, remains the last, best hope for American journalism -- disgraced itself and betrayed its essential role in what remains of our democracy. We have to hope that Bill Keller, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and about 1,200 other people who work on 43rd Street understand that.

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