Okrent: Times' WMD coverage "very, very bad journalism" (Miller alert)

[warrens]

In Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction? you wrote: "To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of WMD seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken." Do you think that the Times' prewar reporting on WMD could prove to be a longer-term embarrassment to the paper than the Jayson Blair scandal?

"I don't know if I could speak to comparative sins. It certainly was a very serious case of bad journalism. It was not, to the best of my ability to determine, a case of 'I know we're lying as I write this,' which Jayson Blair was. Here was a guy consciously plagiarising. Here was a guy who meant to break the rules. The Times did a lousy job on WMD, but I can't imagine there was anybody in the office saying: 'Let's make up some things.'

But an argument can be made that the paper's WMD reporting helped lead the country into war.

"I'm not saying it's not a significant issue. I'm saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism."

In that column, you raised questions about Judith Miller, who wrote the controversial WMD stories, and other reporters, noting that they relied on unnamed sources, which can amount to "a license granted to liars". You continued: "The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source - the offer of information in return for anonymity - is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed." Do you think the Times made a mistake in not disciplining Miller?

"I don't know that one can say she wasn't disciplined. They don't reveal personnel matters to me. For all I know, she was disciplined. For all anyone knows, she was disciplined. Only Judith Miller and Times management know for sure."

SNIP

http://www.guardian.co.uk/salon/story/0,14752,1482395,00.html

[hadrons]

1. New York Times = corporate rag

May 8 New York Times news article asserted that "critics who accused the Bush administration of improperly using political influence to shape intelligence assessments have, for the most part, failed to make the charge stick."

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2511

meanwhile Iraq memo goes mostly unreported in US media ... NY Times, of course the charge failed to stick, its because the editors are still ignoring any evidence that would support the charge

[PATRICK]

2. That last "Yes, Virginia

there is media accountability" line is a hoot. Not consciously evil, but the results and the shoddiness of the job are the same. Personal collusion with evil is up to God. It is the professional performance of the medium that can keep the people CONSCIOUS and informed that demands objective and impersonal accountability of the highest order.

The paper is partner to a war crime by it simply not doing its job. Like looking the other way the individual can sleep better at night, but his bedsheets in the dark are red with the blood of innocents.

How feeble is the self-justification, the irrelevance of playing one diminished capacity or limited responsibility off against the other until the consequences are almost diminished to insignificance.

Who is supposed who be impressed with this reassuring argumentation? God?
If there was civic justice active in the land or world I would rather let the courts chew up this failed public, privately owned, servant and all his organization.