OxBlog

Monday, January 19, 2004

# Posted 10:54 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WAPO PILE-ON: The same WaPo article I criticized last night has come in for quite a thrashing by other bloggers as well.

First, Glenn took the WaPo to task for its casual insistence that Bush described the Iraqi threat as imminent. (By extension, Glenn might have criticized me for writing that nothing in the WaPo article was "necessarily wrong".) While there is no question that Bush et al. were careful not to describe the Iraqi threat as "imminent", they did overplay it in a way that made the threat seem to be, well, imminent. Thus, while the WaPo has no business getting its facts wrong, it's hard for me to get indignant about this one.

Next up, Steven Den Beste provides a lengthy fisking of the article in question. Den Beste does a very good job of showing just how formulaic the WaPo article is by showing how it recites each tenet of the media's conventional wisdom about the war in Iraq.

While the Post's Glenn Kessler gets almost all of his facts right, he could just have easily written an article that presents a very different perspective on the war as objective truth. For example, instead of fretting about American disrespect for the United Nations, Kessler could have described how the UN has come through the war with its influence intact, thus invalidating the multilateralists' predictions that Bush would destory the "postwar international order". Or, ideally, Kessler could have provided both perspectives and fulfilled his journalistic obligation to provide balanced reporting.

At the same time, one ought to note that Den Beste's apoplectic criticism of the WaPo is pretty much paranoid. Den Beste writes:
They say, "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity", but we seem to have gone beyond any possible stupidity now. Have we reached the point where we can assume there's a conspiracy to spread a big lie? And where we can safely dismiss the opinions of anyone who repeats it?...

All the signs are there: this is a straight leftist propaganda piece disguised as straight news reporting.
Leaving aside its bombast, the main conceptual problem with Den Beste's criticism is its (slightly sarcastic?) attribution of a definite motive to Glenn Kessler and the WaPo. First of all, anyone familiar with the Post's pro-war/pro-reconstruction editorial line knows that the paper isn't committed to a leftist policy line. Second, it is improbable in the extreme that a reporter committed to manipulating the public would last very long at a top-flight newspaper.

The real explanation here -- one that is far more complex than either stupidity or conspiracy -- has to do with journalists' professional norms. As numerous studies (many of them by Stephen Hess) have shown, journalists operate according to fairly specific rules of which they are vaguely aware but almost wholly unable to articulate.

One of those rules is the confusion of bipartisanship with objectivity. Notice, for example, how much stress Kessler puts on the fact that Republicans are offering many of the same criticisms one is accustomed to hearing from Democrats. As a result of moderate criticism from Ken Adelman and Richard Haass, Kessler grants himself license to deconstruct speeches by Bush, Cheney and Powell in a manner that reflects their alleged loss of credibility both at home and abroad.

In all likelihood, Kessler agrees with the criticisms that he describes as part of a bipartisan consensus. If he didn't, he probably would've done more to demonstrate that opposing perspectives exist. Yet Kessler does make sure to quote Richard Perle, who makes the reasonable point that intelligence is about guesswork, not certainty. Of course, by the time you get to Perle's quote, Kessler's anti-administration spin makes it seem that Perle is an ostrich-headed defender of the White House party line.

In the final analysis, it is best to approach mainstream journalism as the product of an unspoken yet fairly precise code of conduct that places strict limits on correspondents while enabling them to advance subtle opinions through the process of selecting what to write about. Some articles, such as Kessler's, obey the letter of the law more than the spirit. Some newspapers, such as the NYT, show less deference to the spirit of the law than others. Yet in order to maintain one's status as a professional, one must respect the letter of law, a framework that gives the reader a certain basic confidence in what he reads, regardless of its spin.
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