as we may blog

For the last year or two, the New York Times has had the dubious distinction of being one of the only daily U. S. newspapers in which you could find some of the best journalism right alongside some of the shoddiest. In either instance, the Times‘ ability to affect what stories get what type of coverage is huge. Today they say they’re sorry for such terrible investigative journalism in the leadup to war in Iraq:

On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified.

Oops! Independent verification rears its ugly head again. What a bitch. It’s easy to be flip, but in this case it’s probably not appropriate given the gravity of the situation in Iraq. I don’t think it’s too large of a reach to say that if a handful of prominent newspapers had critically and skeptically analyzed this administration’s claims for war in Iraq, things could be much, much different today. We’ll never know. But admissions like the Times‘ today indicate that things could and should have been done differently. Kos puts it best, I think:

I spoke at a media conference a few months ago, where scandalized Big Media execs and journalism professors expressed outrage that people would read the blogs. "How –" they asked, "Can readers trust what they read in the blogs?" Didn’t the public know they needed media execs to filter out the news from the chaffe?

I launched into one of my tirades –

"How can you claim to be the rightful gatekeepers of news when you have failed the American public so fully? You feed them Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, and every single WMD lie the administration has fed you, with nary an attempt to learn the truth. And we are supposed to trust you? You’ve had your chance. You failed."

Perhaps the scandal-a-minute reporting we’re seeing today is an attempt by Big Media to atone for the journalistic sins of two years ago. Or perhaps this administration just leaks a scandal a minute. Either is a plausible explanation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2004 at 11:04 am and is filed under Iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.