Journamalism from Max Frankel (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

Max Frankel writes that it was New York Times reporter Judy Miller's laziness that kept Scooter Libby's leaks from the National Intelligence Estimate from being a good thing for the country:

I. Lewis Libby Trial - The Washington Back Channel - Max Frankel - New York Times: On Tuesday, July 8, in what his normally detailed calendar listed only as a "private meeting," Libby... brought [Judy Miller] selected excerpts from a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.).... The editor in me cringed at [Miller's] justification for her not writing anything.... She could have been the first to recognize... [the] bitter feud... [between] Cheney... [and] Tenet.... By following the trail of Libby's leak back to C.I.A. informants, she could have produced a pretty good yarn...

Most reporters do not just lazily regurgitate such leaks [as Libby gave to Miller]; they use them as wedges to pry out other secrets.... A few more questions following Libby's leak from the N.I.E. would have exposed it as... deeply flawed... thrown together in three weeks... because Senate Democrats refused to authorize the Iraq war without evidence of W.M.D.[s].... By mid-2003, intelligence experts were available to denounce the document as wrong on every important count, the worst N.I.E. ever produced and one obviously tailored to support a policy decision already made...

But most reporters to whom people like Scooter Libby leak do lazily regurgitate such leaks, and they certainly do not use them to pry out other secrets. If Scooter Libby had thought there was any chance that Judy Miller would have used his leak of the N.I.E. to expose it as deeply flawed, Scooter Libby would have kept his mouth shut. Only confidence that the reporter will be a complaisant tool of the source's purposes induces the leak in the first place.

Reportorial laziness on the part of Judy Miller has nothing to do with it. Reportorial ethics has everything to do with it. Do reporters view their primary task as helping their sources to misinform the public? Or do reporters view their primary task as informing citizens? That's the question that Max Frankel has to pretend to be a naive simpleton in order not to ask. Yet that's the question he should be asking.

How did the New York Times come to employ somebody in whom Scooter Libby could have such confidence? And Scooter Libby did have enormous confidence in Judy Miller, enough confidence to attempt to suborn perjury by telling her that the two of them would stand or fall together:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them...

It is only Max Frankel's pretense that he is a naive simpleton that allows him to steer his way to his desired conclusion:

The system is sloppy and breeds confusion.... there are and always have been both good and bad leaks, true and illuminating betrayals of secrets as well as false and conniving ones.... Is there a reliable way to distinguish among the many varieties of that genus peculiarly indigenous to Washington, the leaker? The answer, of course, is that there are no neat lines of distinction....

So was Libby’s prosecution worth a four-year judicial and journalistic circus?... The damage to newsgathering, I believe, has been significant.... [R]eporters and less-wealthy media outlets will surrender to the subpoenas and jail threats.... It may sound cynical to conclude that tolerating abusive leaks by government is the price that society has to pay for the benefit of receiving essential leaks about government....

Prosecutors of the realm, let this back-alley market flourish. Attorneys general and others armed with subpoena power, please leave well enough alone. Back off. Butt out.

A more honest commentator than Frankel would have written differently: would have written that the long-run survival of journalistic legal privileges depends on the existence of a community of journalists that policies itself, and that rewards journalists who inform the public and punishes those who kneel to their political masters. Frankel had a chance to engage in this task of self-policing this morning. He failed to do it.

Coward.

Comments

[Kate G.]

I couldn't bear to read the Frankel piece of self serve but I did want to point out that historically it hasn't been the little guy, underfunded journalist or newspaper who has succumbed to subpoenas or threats. Currently the people who are actually serving time fighting for journalistic privilige are *bloggers* or people who are independent journalists. The "real" journalists with money to fight the subpoenas in, say, the Libby case were Russert and Novak both of whom squealed immiediatly even though they pretended they hadn't.

Kate G.

[anne]

There was a certain dear Izzy Stone, as I was told and remember :) There was a journalist.

[howard]

Kent, what are you talking about? Libby committed perjury.

as for frankel, i read part I and through the magazine section across the room in disgust because it was clear that Frankel had asked himself no hard questions. (it was also clear that he doesn't understand that fitzgerald broke no new legal ground in seeking testimony.)

to be fair, frankel must be around 80, and while there are certainly plenty of 80-year-olds who are capable of thinking new thoughts about the system they worked in all their lives, it is probably the exception and not the rule. The old system worked fine for Frankel; how could he doubt that it's a good system?

[Bloix]

Frankel was engaged in damage control. Someone at the Times decided that they had to acknowledge the shellacking the press had taken at the Libby trial while continuing to defend business as usual. This is an article that is written for people who were paying attention and can't be fobbed off with utter lies but whose views can be shaped by telling some of the truth with the proper spin. By attributing Miller's failings to laziness rather than mendacity he can reach his eventual conclusion, which is that the entire trial was an unwarranted invasion of press freedom by an over-zealous prosecutor. "[T]olerating abusive leaks by government is the price that society has to pay for the benefit of essential leaks about government," he tells us - pretending that the sinners here are the conniving government leakers, not the complicitous journalists like Miller, Russert, Novak, and Woodward.

[Bloix]

PS- Marcy Wheeler ("emptywheel") nails this at firedoglake, http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/03/25/max-frankels-ghost/#more-8050

[Santa Monica Jeremy]

I found Frenkel incredibly mendacious.

“On the path to war in Iraq, high officials of the Bush administration leaked classified but far from reliable information about W.M.D.’s, then pointed to its publication as “evidence” of its truth. When no W.M.D.’s were found, they used the same flawed secrets to justify their misrepresentations. But reporters could not expose this skullduggery until they obtained contradictory leaks from disheartened intelligence officials.”

Indeed? Funny thing, that… the war happened in March of 2003, and those leaks WERE happening in the previous fall. From wikipedia:

On September 20, 2002, The United Press International reported that the there were:

… doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on September 8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence.

But of course, the NYT shilled Judy’s crap story on page one, while shunting the “other viewpoint” stories off to page 23, when it published them at all.

Poor Frenkel claims The Times was duped, but that's bull- The Times was an active participant in Bush's march to war.

[Kate G.]

My god the troll level is high out today if "the clenis" is being brought in to a discussion of Max Frankel's point of view on the Libby trial. Oh Kent, Kent, Kent, try to contain your absurdity. If Clinton's "perjury" almost led to his impeachment what is your beef with Libby's perjury trial? Surely you'd argue that a miscarriage of justice in one case doesn't mean that we have to suspend justice for the rest of our country's time? And if Clinton's situation was different from Libby's why bring it up?

Kate G.

[Steve LaBonne]

Way back when Frankel took over the editorial page at the Times from the sainted John Oakes (which may be the best available date for the beginning of the paper's decline, by the way), a New York friend of mine used to refer to him as "Max 'Attila the Hun' Frankel." He has not imporved with age.

[Ron]

Dan Froomkin covered Brad's take on Frankel today, but offered no real commentary.

I am so glad that Brad has taken this on. Frankel and Woodward are simply stenographers to power, enjoying martinis with the powerful.

I wrote about Frankel's article in my blog, too:

http://revolttoday.blogspot.com/2007/03/max-frankel-justifying-stenography-to.html