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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
"The Gray Lady ... has become a tramp." Readers vent their frustration with the New York Times, wonder about the state of journalism, and discuss Howell Raines' disdain for Bill Clinton.
Dec 30, 2004 | [Read "The Worst of Times," by Andrew O'Hehir.]
I would like to point out that there would have never been the problems of reporting on weapons of mass destruction had the Times in 1992, in articles written by Jeff Gerth, not gotten the alleged Whitewater scandal totally wrong and started this country down the slippery slope of kowtowing to the right wing's political agenda. What should never have been a story was in part given credibility because it appeared in the Times. Had Howell Raines been on the ball back then, the problems with WMD reporting probably would not have occurred. Unfortunately, the authors of these two books decided not to write about that case.
-- Alan Snipes
If anything, O'Hehir is far too kind to Howell Raines. Judith Miller is not the only bad reporter that Raines protected. Jeff Gerth, whose bogus Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee scandal-mongerings were dissected brilliantly by other journalists, is still employed by the Gray Lady. Why? Because his bogus stories were directed against Bill Clinton, whom Raines hated with what other Timesmen considered a bizarre and unfathomable passion.
Raines gave the NYT's noble imprimatur to the worst reporting imaginable -- and in doing so paved the way for Fox News by making such vile and badly sourced "reportage" seem respectable. Jayson Blair's mistake was that he attacked the wrong people and he had the wrong skin tone. If he'd only had the foresight to claim that Hillary Clinton led that mythical gang of hackers, he'd probably be an assistant editor at the Times by now.
-- Tamara Baker
Andrew O'Hehir writes: "Raines was right, at least personally, about the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war (although the paper editorially waffled on both). My personal, heretical view is that Raines was also right in his low opinion of Bill Clinton, but let's leave that argument for another time."
No, let's not. The Times' pushing of Judith Miller's atrocious reporting on WMD finds a direct corollary in its relentless pursuit of alleged Clinton malfeasance. This reached a crescendo with Jeff Gerth's disgraceful "Whitewater" investigation. In that case the shamelessly self-promoting Gerth relied on sources just as obviously biased and as unreliable as Miller's Chalabi stooges. In Gerth's case, Richard Mellon Scaife played the Chalabi role; where Chalabi wanted the ouster of Saddam, Scaife wanted the head of the president of the United States, our own country in case anyone's forgotten. Gerth and the editorial board of the Times (the same folks who would later bring us the Wen Ho Lee debacle) did as much as anybody to provoke and incite the media into giving credence to the rantings of folks with less credibility than the Swift Boat loonies. When "Whitewater" was revealed to be nothing more than a real estate deal gone bad, the Times continued to hector Clinton on the grounds of "the appearance of wrongdoing." Clinton may have been an ass, but hey, next to Ken Starr and his $70 million witch hunt he looks positively saintly.
The Times offered no mea culpa for its disgraceful "Whitewater" reportage and almost certainly never will. But just as almost half of the American public still seems to believe that Saddam had WMD, thanks in no small part to the Times, so too I'm sure that the same half of Americans believe that Clinton (and his wife) were "guilty of something" in the Whitewater affair. While it is true that the lies given credence by the Times in the latter case did not lead to war and untold suffering in Iraq, it must be said that the Times' willful tarring of the Clintons damaged this country materially and, more importantly, psychologically.
It seemed obvious at the time and seems even more so now that while "Raines seized on Miller's WMD stories as a way to establish that his liberal views weren't driving his editorship," the same can just as accurately be said of Lelyveld and Gerth's less-than-distinguished coverage of the Clinton years and Wen Ho Lee. It is this pattern of distorted coverage in an effort to counteract the right's mantra of "liberal media bias" that, more than individual failures, should give us all pause when coming from the "paper of record."
-- Peter Gates
