Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Massing’s careful analysis of US news reports during the build-up to war with Iraq show how The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time and The New Yorker failed to write about those in the intelligence community in 2002 who disputed the Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Less powerful news organisations – notably Knight Ridder’s news service – did, but they were not setting the public’s agenda.
Now you’ve got Michael Massing’s book, Now They Tell Us. This is Judith Miller again, isn’t it?
Not entirely. The book is about how not only Judith Miller, but the whole American press, The Washington Post and The New York Times were complicit in promulgating the ideas of those policy makers who were making very undereducated guesses about WMDs in Iraq. The book champions the work of Knight Ridder, the media organisation whose reports about the dubiousness of the Bush administration’s claims were effectively buried and ignored, much in the same way as the Holocaust had been years before. At The Washington Post people like Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick were valiantly writing about the questionable aspects of the administration’s viewpoint on WMDs but their articles were buried inside and the front page was reserved for administration reporters who will go unnamed here, but who lost their way. It is not my job to name people but they are named in the book. In a democracy you can’t make a decision to go to war if the populus is informed by leading news outlets in such a shabby way.
Why, when we know we were deceived once, do we let it happen again?
It continues because so far there has been no workable alternative proposed to the way journalism has worked for the last 100 or so years. Though I hope the Internet may be able to change that. News organisations are still run by a group of men who have been penalised in circulation drops but who so far have resisted innovation.
In Britain our press is in a tradition of being read for entertainment. We don’t particularly expect it to be true. But in America the press is an arm of democracy and is assumed to be infallible. We are just reading for fun and edification, but our expectations of truthfulness are pretty low.
I read the British press online sometimes, and that explains some of your news organisations. You also have papers whose ideology is official and proclaimed. This is a left-wing or a right-wing paper and you know who owns which paper and what their views are. In the US we have a cult of objectivity but it would probably be more helpful to say: here’s the liberal view, here’s the conservative view. I’m not sure ideology, however, is the core of the problem. I think the press has been unwilling to lay bare its methods as it writes and reports. The speed of the Internet may force that. Instead of making definitive statements, reporters would be able to make provisional statements and identify them clearly as such. That way news organisations wouldn’t get dug into defending any one particular news account.
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Princeton educated Lorraine Adams was a staff writer for The Washington Post for 11 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She is the author of Harbor, a novel about the experience of young Arab Americans, and more recently The Room and the Chair, a book that deals with US newsrooms, cockpits over Afghanistan, intelligence headquarters and the way the truth about violence can be manipulated, glossed over and forgotten. In a democracy, she says, you can’t go to war when the public has been so unreliably informed by the media and will poll accordingly.
