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May/June 2006 Review
Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11 – Top Journalists Speak Out Edited by Kristin Borjesson Reviewed by Gene Roman When Michael Massing of the New York Review of Books asked Judith Miller of The New York Times why her reporting leading up to the Iraq war did not challenge the Bush administration’s rationale for military action, she responded: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” Within the fraternity of journalism, this kind of lazy reporting is appropriately labeled as stenography. In the modern 24-hour news cycle, dominated by what Bill Kovach calls “the journalism of assertion vs. the journalism of verification,” the lazy reporter at a large news organization will often claim that they lack the time to scrutinize the claims of public officials rallying its citizenry in favor of military action. In this collection of interviews with a variety of experienced foreign and war correspondents completed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Kristin Borjesson gives some of our country’s best reporters the opportunity to reflect back on their own work and that of their colleagues in the lead-up to the Iraq war. “No, I don’t just take their word for it,” says Ted Koppel, formerly of ABC News, explaining the timidity of much of the mainstream media. “But when they tell me why they’re going to war, I certainly have to give proper deference to … if the president says I’m going to war for reasons A, B and C, I can’t very well stand there and say, ‘The president is not telling you the truth, the actual reason that he’s going to war is some reason he hasn’t even mentioned.’ I as a reporter at least have to say, ‘Here’s what the president is saying….” Both Koppel and Judy Miller could take some important lessons from two of the reporters who provided some of the most comprehensive, fair, and critical coverage of the Bush/Cheney campaign for war. Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder did not exclusively rely on high-level sources in any government bureaucracy for the information needed to properly and honestly scrutinize administration claims. “We had a lot of sources in the bowels of government, and they were telling us a different story, and we chose to believe them rather than the administration’s public statements,” Strobel said. “They were … skilled people who either knew the Middle East region, or knew intelligence, or knew WMD issues, and they were saying that the case the administration was making was not true or that they had real problems with the intelligence that they were seeing, and that it didn’t add up to the case for war that the administration was making. They were credible people.”
Borjesson’s focus is not exclusively on what is wrong with much of our national wartime reporting, but celebrates the work of lots of great reporters who are a thorn in the side of this president and heroes to the advocates of an open and honest democracy.
Gene Roman is a journalist and student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
©2006 Fellowship of Reconciliation
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Borjesson’s book also includes her conversations with James Bamford, author of the signature work, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on the NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency, and one of my heroes, Walter Pincus, national security correspondent for the Washington Post.