No Questions Asked

From AJR, April/May 2007 issue

Bungling the WMD Story

No Questions Asked:
News Coverage Since 9/11

by Carl Sessions Stepp

Carl Sessions Stepp (cstepp@jmail.umd.edu), AJR’s senior editor, teaches at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Here’s an idea: Turn a psychologist loose on journalists. Lisa Finnegan is a former newspaper and magazine writer who earned a psychology degree and now studies “the psychology of terrorism and its impact on the media.” Here, she analyzes why the U.S. press became so meek after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Many others have documented the press’ letdown in fulfilling its adversarial role after 9/11. Seeing the problem is easy. Explaining it is harder (see Books, August/September). So Finnegan’s rather studious approach, drawing on individual and group psychology, holds promise for not only understanding the failures but pointing toward reforms.

Obviously, whatever went wrong has potentially staggering costs: the top terrorist still on the loose, a war spun out of control and a civil liberties crisis at home. Finnegan criticizes Congress and the public itself, among others, but she firmly casts central blame onto the media.

Why did journalists, who at least in their own imaginations form a fearless and independent Fourth Estate of relentless truth seekers, buckle so easily? How did an administration that couldn’t seem to accomplish much else tame these watchdogs into marginalized yappers?

Finnegan’s most provocative proposition is that press docility stemmed from a calculation of self-interest. “American journalists determined that in the highly charged environment that followed the 9/11 attacks, believing the administration’s claims and keeping their questions in check best served their interests,” she says. “To do otherwise could have led to ostracism by the administration and the general public, and possible harm to their careers.”

Their motives? Profit and prizes, Finnegan says. In the run-up to the war, for instance, she charges that the media “highlighted alarmist viewpoints, minimized alternative perspectives, convinced the American public that the need to go to war in Iraq was urgent, and then gathered their Pulitzers and justified their work.”

Unfortunately, Finnegan doesn’t back this with evidence. She does show examples of media failure, and quotes journalists who felt intimidated. But she makes no substantial case that their submissiveness was intentional, and none that it was driven by a Pulitzer quest.

If her look at material motives rings false, however, her psychological analysis seems more convincing. It starts with the simple power of patriotism. After 9/11, she writes, “journalists were shaken..they were focused on the fact that the United States was vulnerable, and deemed everything else unimportant.” So they didn’t probe the breakdowns that let the attacks take place, scrutinize the administration’s response or effectively resist its moves to control information and divert attention. Some even wore lapel flag pins.

The press hardly squeaked when the government tried to turn the debate into what President Bush called “a black-and-white choice with no grays.” Or when his spokesman Ari Fleischer warned, “All Americans..need to watch what they say.” Or when Attorney General John Ashcroft complained, about those who questioned the Patriot Act, “Your tactics only aid terrorists.”

Finnegan also believes many reporters were personally “traumatized.” She quotes a New York photographer as saying that “the most jarring thing was seeing myself and my colleagues just fall apart on the job.”

Intimidated and fearful, some journalists turned to government for safety and reassurance. Finnegan says this may have been especially true among the more than 600 journalists embedded with troops. That led, she says, to becoming overprotective of authorities and slow to chase bombing errors, torture and policy failures.

More darkly, she suggests a U.S. policy of “targeting journalists,” especially those who tried to operate outside the official embedding system. After several international journalists were killed by U.S. forces, a Pentagon spokesperson warned against independent reporting. “We are saying it is not a safe place; you should not be there.” (See “Close to the Action,” May 2003.)

Overall, Finnegan believes, the press lapsed obediently into innocuous “groupthink.” “During times of uncertainty,” she contends, “reporters tend to be more subservient than objective.”

This part of Finnegan’s analysis rings truer: a press at first respectful in the face of tragedy, then unduly passive under the pounding of hardball politics and propaganda.

If this is human nature, as Finnegan suggests, then is there a cure? At least, she says, you can “minimize your vulnerability to such manipulation.” Her suggestions boil down to detachment and determination: Ask hard questions, pursue documentation, seek comments outside the party line and follow up on loose ends and claims. It seems like pretty good psychology: Just use your head.

Another excellent piece by John Pilger:

Iran May Be The Greatest Crisis Of Modern Times

In a cover piece for the New Statesman, John Pilger evokes the memory of Germans ‘looking from the side’ at Bergen-Belsen to describe the challenge facing us in the West as the Bush/Blair ‘long war’ becomes ‘perhaps the greatest crisis of modern times’.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. “They were sick and some were dying,” she says. “Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”

It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair “long war” edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation’s independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with tales of their “ordeal” almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defence – until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years preparing for “Operation Iranian Freedom”. Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia’s leading strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: “Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets… at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond.”

And yet there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of “news” in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush’s man at the United Nations, recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is an agenda to maintain division and instability. In other words, bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant Iran.

One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair get out of their homeland – that is the real news: not our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political danse macabre of the pretenders to Blair’s Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair’s plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute “warning”. They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next “enemy”.

Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: “The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.” In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that British governments have borne “significant responsibility” for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims “unpeople”. Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the difference.

Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation
of the Middle East to “our interests” – and Israel’s, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran’s democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture” that was “beyond belief” (Amnesty).

Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive “royal prerogative” to overturn a high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.

Yesterday we learned that the Washington Post eliminated an uncomfortable truth (for the administration) that the EFPs purportedly made only in Iran were being produced in Iraq. Today we there is this uncomfortable coincidence:

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters that Iran was deeply involved in training terrorists in Iraq and were supplying them with EFPs:

Iranian intelligence operatives have been training Iraqi fighters inside Iran on how to use and assemble deadly roadside bombs known as EFPs, the U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.

Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shiite Mahdi Army militia have told The Associated Press that there are as many as 4,000 members of their organization that were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, a weapon that causes great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell would not say how many militia fighters had been trained in Iran but said that questioning of fighters captured as recently as this month confirmed many had been in Iranian training camps.

“We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees debriefs,” Caldwell said at a weekly briefing.

EFP stands for explosively formed penetrator, deadly roadside bombs that hurl a fist-size lump of molten copper capable of piercing armor.

In January, U.S. officials said at least 170 U.S. soldiers had been killed by EFPs.

Caldwell also said the U.S. military had evidence that Iranian intelligence agents were active in Iraq in funding, training and arming Shiite militia fighters.

“We also know that training still is being conducted in Iran for insurgent elements from Iraq. We know that as recent as last week from debriefing personnel,” he said.

In case you missed it, yesterday it was revealed that the US “troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory [IN IRAQ!] that produced ‘explosively formed penetrators’ (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.”

This was later deleted from the Washington Post article which stated instead: