Key Post: ‘Shock and Awe’

 Key Post: ‘Shock and Awe’ 

Rob Reiner's 2017 film depicts two worlds of American journalism operating simultaneously in the months before the United States invaded Iraq.

In one world, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major TV networks worked as relay stations receiving official signals from The Bush Administration and transmitting them to the public. In the other, four journalists at Knight Ridder Newspapers Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, Joe Galloway, and bureau chief John Walcott were doing something which many considered old-fashioned. 

They were actually reporting.

While Judith Miller of the New York Times ran front-page stories sourced to administration insiders and Iraqi defectors with obvious agendas, the Knight Ridder team was working its way through the intelligence community, talking to analysts alarmed by what they were being asked to certify. The administration then used the New York Times’ coverage as a laundry machine. They planted claims with Miller, waiting for them to appear in America's most trusted newspaper, then citing The New York Times as independent confirmation of its own assertions.

The Stenographers and the Skeptics

 "If every other news organization wants to be stenographers for the Bush administration, let them."

 - Bureau chief Walcott

 The Knight Ridder team that the aluminum tubes cited as nuclear evidence could not be used for uranium enrichment and correctly reported deep skepticism within the intelligence community. Their reward was professional marginalization. Even some Knight Ridder editors buried or declined to run their stories as one critic noted, "their voices didn't pierce the compliant noise from their peers." 

The mainstream press's failure was not always crude dishonesty. Some of it was competitive pressure, some the seductive effect of the embedded journalism program, some simple careerism. But much of it was a collective disinclination to be the organization standing against a march to war asking inconvenient questions, especially when the New York Times was on the front page every week with new WMD (weapons of mass destruction) revelations that were, in Miller's own eventual admission, wrong.

Why It Matters Who We Call Heroes

The Knight Ridder journalists are the heroes of this story, and their heroism is instructive precisely because it is undramatic. 

They did not have a secret source. they simply did their jobs. They asked whether the official case held up, sought out people with the ability to know, and followed the evidence. 

The lesson for journalists is clear.

Ask whether a claim is true, not decide in advance that it probably is because the people making it are powerful or credentialed.

The parallels of Government

The parallels between the Bush administration to today's government are undeniable. The current administration does not need the press to amplify its message it has its own media infrastructure. Instead, it has launched a barrage of attacks on the press, both in the United States and abroad, with journalists harassed, laid off, detained, deported, investigated, sued, and assaulted. The Associated Press was barred from the White House press pool after publishing reports that contradicted the administration's public narrative. The FCC has opened investigations into CBS, ABC, and NBC, leading free speech groups to characterize some of the actions as politically motivated.

During 2002 the press was completely flattered into complicity in exchange for credulity. The threat today is cruder. Intimidation, exclusion, delegitimization. Different methods with the same goal. A press too compromised, too frightened, or too distracted to ask the one question that has always mattered. 

Is it true?

Landay and Strobel got it right not because they were braver than their peers, but because they refused to outsource their judgment to officials with an interest in the outcome. They were ignored, marginalized, and vindicated. 

The bodies, the debt, and the chaos they predicted came anyway because the press that could have slowed the march to war had decided, mostly, to lead it.