Paul Moore, the Public Editor of the Baltimore Sun, has a column on that paper’s coverage of the Downing Street Memo:
Last Sunday, the newspaper published an Associated Press article based on material from additional Downing Street documents, which further detailed British officials’ doubts about the basis for the war and noted their concerns about postwar instability in Iraq.
Best decided the AP story was solid enough for placement inside the newspaper (it ran on Page 10A), but she did not consider it for the front page because of the amount of anonymous sourcing used.
Some editors are seeking articles that can present the 2002 memos in a broader context that makes sense to readers. The memos do suggest that the United States manipulated facts to fit its policy, but that interpretation hinges on the one intelligence officer’s words, the actual meaning of which is open to debate.
Additional reporting is required to provide readers with background needed to weigh questions raised by the Downing Street documents. This will not be an easy task.
“Finding the right balance of how – and how much – to cover the memos is greatly complicated by the politics surrounding it,” Best said.
link
Reaction on the flip:
First, Moore is totally out of line in his characerization of Sir Richard Dearlove’s analysis as merely ‘one intelligence officer’s words’. Dearlove was the head of MI6. He had just met with George Tenet and Condi Rice. He was not engaged in speculation, like any number of his underlings might have been willing to undertake. He was a giving a first hand account of what he had learned about American intentions. He said war was inevitable, that we had no plan for the aftermath, and that the intelligence was being fixed around the policy.
It is the authority of Dearlove’s account that separates the minutes from ‘old-news’. By calling him ‘one intelligence officer’, Moore dramatically diminishes the significance of the leak. I don’t recall one American newspaper saying we fixed the intelligence before this memo was released. I recall a serious of investigations and reports that concluded that the intelligence had been wrong, that we had no good sources, that we made faulty assumptions. Where is the reporting on the fact that the intelligence was not wrong, but fixed?
Then we have the editor, Kathleen Best. She is clearly intimidated by the recent attacks on anonymous sources. She was willing to print an Associated Press story in her paper, but because it contained anonymous sources she buried it on page A10. She could solve this problem by putting some of her own reporters on the case so that she could feel confident in the sources. All she can say is that they have ‘failed so far’ to find an opportunity to ‘get a substantive story on the front page’. Sorry, that’s not good enough.
And she explains the real reason that she is failing in her job:
What politics? You mean angry emails from wingnuts that don’t have an interest in the truth?
Or do you mean something far more sinister? Which is it, Ms. Best? Do your fucking job.
That is so fucking lame.
Ms. Best, you’re tip-toeing around the news like Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning from the aliens storming into Tim Robbins’ cellar. At least they had a real reason to be scared. You’re just gutless.
and clueless. She comes right and admits that the politics of the story, i.e., the implication that the President and Vice-President have committed high crimes, is cause for her NOT to cover the story?
Jesus.
Amen to Booman. Ms. Worst: Do your fucking job.
Since when does “politics” determine the degree of accuracy and diligence in news reporting in a free press? Certainly we all know political intimidation plays a role in compromisingthe integrity of corporate editorial boards, but they’re not supposed to admit such things.
Now that we have an editor of a major newspaper making such an admission, actually acknowledging trepidation in the face of political pressure, the so-called free press is really falling down on the job.
This kind of thing is a precursor to the destruction of democracy and the rise of tyranny. In short, we are in big trouble.
Odd article. All of a sudden they’re concerned about getting everything 100% right? Perhaps they should have thought about that before the war. No – instead they bought every Bush lie hook, line and sinker.
They need to get their collective heads out of their butts and actually be journalists for a change. So they get e-mails from the right-wing denialists. Big deal. This isn’t about politics – it’s about reality.
What I think is .. this is what happens when corporate interests run the press. It’s a “have our cake and eat it too” situation. People have felt that it’s possible to have the press ran as a business.
The problem with that line of thinking is in when their sponsors start calling in their markers. If the Baltimore Sun is being lobbied by their sponsors NOT to run with any particular pieces (if the sponsors are wingnuts say) then they either do what the sponsors tel lthem or they lose all that lovely funding.
What happens when the “free press” has a dependency on ad revenue, etc?
Well, things like the DSM don’t get fully covered for one.
Then they’re sponsors should be boycotted so they get the message.
Absolutely, although, I think in our corporate world money talks a great deal.In fact, it’s law that corporations have a duty to make a profit above all else. if they weren’t corporatists then they would think of the public first and have the courage to report the news anyway. However, that they aren’t reporting the news is, to me anyway, proof that they think like a business first and not as journalists.
The whole pack of them should be fired and replaced imho.
My apologies, but this is a soapbox issue for me and my own belief is that business and Truth don’t mix. If we want honest news we wont get it.
I think what’s going on is that editors have both political pressures (politicians on the line yelling in their ears) on one hand and sponsers on the other threatening to pull the financial plug in they don’t play along. I will admit that it’s hard for me to prove this but im just puttign the pieces together.
I just do not think we can trust corporations or any large privately owned business to honestly report the news.
Anyway, thanks for lettign me rant ^_^
is determined to tame or destroy all public media.
to know how much the sponsors have to do with this.
But I think it goes more like this:
Negroponte: Hello, Ms. Best?
Best: yes, sir?
Negroponte: this is John Negroponte. Now, on this little matter of the DSM, this is all pure speculation on Dearlove’s part, all taken out of context. You run with this fixed intelligence thing and it just aids the enemies of the United States. We’re at war you know, and we can’t afford to fail.
Best: yes, sir
Negroponte: we can harp on the fact that we didn’t find any WMD. We’ve got a job to do, and this memo is demoralizing the troops that have to do that job. You understand?
Best: I think so, sir.
Negroponte: Okay. How’s the husband?
Best: he’s doing well Sir, thank you.
Negroponte: glad to hear it. My wife and I hope to see both at the Kennedy Center thing next month.
Best: that’s very kind of you sir, but we don’t have tickets to that.
Negroponte: don’t you worry about that. I’ll make sure get some, that is if you’d like to go.
Best: oh, that would be wonderful, sir.
etc.
Nice. But would she really call him ‘sir’? *Shudder*
There’s no word for ‘sir’ in my language. At times that feels like a good thing.
laughs exaaactly, Booman
I don’t see why we couldn’t just add that to the dynamic. We know that people are yelling in their ears..we know that they have sponsors that try to manipulate the outcome (Ive read all to many pieces on just that) and im positive there’s a bit of action going on just as you;ve described it as well
The ol’ intimidation/buddyup routine. Of course no editor with the slightest claim to journalistic skills or ethics would fall for it. The “war” cry is still effective, no matter how criminal the war, how corrupt its managers, how bogus its “purpose”. As long as liberals and others continue to describe this imperialist invasion as anything but that, the profiteers and psychos will have leverage to bully dissent out of the mainstream.
The ironically named Best manages to kick up the shock of her creepy submissiveness by her total lack of shame or guilt over a complete failure to do her job with even minimal integrity. She reports this as if she spilled her coffee or forgot somebody’s name, when she should be begging forgiveness for total disregard of journalistic ethics.
Has the Sun been a decent paper in recent decades, or is it just the pile of crap this editorial statement reveals it to be now?
What we’re seeing with the press and the DSMs is certainly infuriating to no end. But the sorts of comments I see on this diary don’t encourage me in terms of developing a focus that can break through. I can’t say for certain what will break through, but I think we need to get a lot better with our understanding of media subcultures.
As I see it, the media really has boughten into identifying with Bush. I interviewed a couple of USA Today reporters who worked on the Sept 11, 2002 story that reported that Bush had decided to go to war within a few weeks of 9/11. Obviously, they were not drinking the kool aid then, wrt taking his protestations of going to war “only as a last resort.” But they were drinking the kool aid wrt WMDs–“We all thought Saddam had WMDs” one of them told me [from memory, may not be exact]. And when I talked to them, the fact that everyone believed in WMDs somehow seemed to act like a hypnotizing spell. It’s like, “Well, we all got fooled. So I guess we just move on.”
I really don’t know how to argue with that, since I don’t understand the logic. In fact, I don’t think there is any “logic” in the formal sense. Rather, I think that there’s an identification going on. Even though they are relatively critical (compared to the NYT or WP, USA Today [Gannet] and Knight-Ridder have had consistently more critical coverage) they are still identifying with Bush in some fairly fundamental, subrational ways. And so, I’m working on a theoretical piece where I’m trying to work out an explanation of the press behavior in general, where I’ll try to fit this in.
But, I don’t think we have to gain deep understanding to become more effective. Look at the Michael Smith piece in the LA Times on June 23. He certainly added perspective, and it was based on reporting he had already done in England. I think we can point writers and editors to that piece, and say, “look, here’s some new angles to pursue.”
Smith shows that there were two different plans to try to provoke a war. The bombing plan didn’t work out at first, so they pumped it up by a factor of about 5, and it still didn’t work. You can take that–good, solid, basic figures to work with–and then go through your rolodex and ask different people what they think of it. You do it right–get the right people to address the question, including whether the bombing was a violation of International Law–and that right there is a page one story.
If you want it to be. That’s the kicker. Nothing’s a page one story unless you want it to be.
But we should make it harder and harder for them to avoid page one. And to do that, we’ve can’t get too carried away with the unfocused anger. We’ve got to focus.