Journamalism Watch: Michael Gordon, Max Frankel, Fred Hiatt

A while ago, Reihan at http://theamericanscene.com flamed me in the process of sucking up to New York Times reporter Michael Gordon:

The American Scene: Michael Gordon is a terrific, universally respected reporter (outside of Harper's and Democracy NOW!) who deserves at least some small fraction of a benefit of the doubt when it comes to military matters.... A reporter like Gordon is a very skilled professional.... [DeLong's] "why oh why can't we have a better press corps" often translates into, "why oh why can't we have a press corps that reports facts that are broadly in consonance with my policy preferences"?... I take it DeLong believes we should take reports from the Bush Administration and the Pentagon with a grain of salt.... [T]he American public agrees. This idea that the establishment media is obligated to take on a tutelary function... strikes me as faintly... undemocratic.

Prior to the invasion, serious arguments were made against the invasion, and these arguments were widely reported. In point of fact, public opinion generally opposed an invasion that would lead to significant American casualties or a sustained American military occupation or both. President Bush's judgment was the problem, not the press...

It is hard to know how to reply to Reihan. Yes, Michael Gordon is a skilled professional, but a skilled professional at what?

• Michael Gordon's "aluminum tubes" article of September 8, 2002 was, as Grenn Greenwald says, "one of the most discredited, journalistically irresponsible, and damaging articles of the last decade" that did a remarkably good job at poisoning the stream of information in the rumnup to the Iraq War. Either Gordon (and his sources) were playing his readers, or his sources were playing Gordon--and Gordon let them by taking no steps to hold them accountable for their misinformation.
• Michael Gordon's claim that Iran was the only source of EFPs in his article of February 10, 2007 was a similar piece of journamalism: here I think it is very clear that Gordon and his sources are playing us.
• Consider Michael Gordon's February 6, 2003 article about Colin Powell's U.N speech, the article that begins: "To convince allied nations that Saddam Hussein is trying to deceive United Nations weapon inspectors, the Bush administration today applied a tried- and-true strategy: it invoked the Powell doctrine. When he was the United States' top military man, Gen. Colin L. Powell was best known for his doctrine of using overwhelming force. As the United States top diplomat, Secretary of State Powell today sought to overwhelm the critics with evidence, some new, some less so..." and ends "'I think what he did today was to buttress in great detail the basic argument been making form the beginning, that this is the last chance for Saddam to comply, that he has not taken it and that this is something we need to confront,' a senior administration official said. Even the skeptics had to concede that Mr. Powell's presentation had been an important milestone in the debate. Critics may try to challenge the strength of the administration's case and they will no doubt argue that inspectors be given more time. But it will difficult for the skeptics to argue that Washington's case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information." In retrospect very embarrassing for Gordon, no?

To put it bluntly: when a story by Michael Gordon appears, I can't tell whether it is accurate, whether Michael Gordon's sources are lying to him (and he is letting them do so by not blowing them when they do so), or whether Michael Gordon is lying to us. Gordon would deserve the benefit of the doubt if I were confident that he was trying his best to inform rather than misinform us. I am not. And Reihan shouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt either.

This is, I think, a small part of a very big issue. Let me briefly note two additional examples--besides the work of Michael Gordon--of what is going very wrong with American journalism.

The first is an editorial written by the Washington Post's editorial director, Fred Hiatt, on March 17, 2007. In the editorial Hiatt makes a very small and limited apology for the Washington Post's coverage and evaluation of the George W. Bush administration. "We raised such issues" as to whether the Bush administration had properly thought its proposed adventure in Iraq through, Hiatt writes, "but with insufficient force." It is there--saying the right thing but not loudly enough--that Hiatt finds fault with himself and his organization.

The second is a comment by the former editor of the New York Times, Max Frankel, about how the Washington ecology of leaks is healthy, because "most reporters do not just lazily regurgitate... leaks." Instead, "they use them as wedges to pry out other secrets" and so oversee the government. They system may be "sloppy and breed confusion," but "tolerating abusive leaks by government [that misinform] is the price that society has to pay for the benefit of receiving essential leaks about government."

Hiatt sees a press corps that was a little too cowardly about overseeing the George W. Bush administration. Frankel sees a press corps where a sloppy and confusing process is nevertheless doing a reasonable job of overseeing the George W. Bush administration. I see a very different picture.

It was the summer of 2000 when I began asking Republicans I know--by and large people who might be natural candidates for short lists for various subcabinet policy positions in a Republican administration--how worried they were that the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, was clearly not up to the job: underbriefed and incurious. They were not worried, they told me. One of President Clinton's problems, they said, was that the ceremonial portions of the job bored him--and thus he got himself into big trouble. Look at how George W. Bush had operate at the Texas Rangers, they said. Bush let the managers manage the team and the financial guys run the business, and spent his time making sure the political coalition to support the Texas Rangers in the style to which it wanted to be accustomed remained stable. Bush knows his strengths and weaknesses, they told me. He will focus on being America's Queen Elizabeth II, and will let people like Colin Powell and Paul O'Neill be America's Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

By the summer of 2001 it had become clear to me that something had gone very wrong. Rather than following Paul O'Neill and Christine Todd Whitman's advice on environmental policy, George W. Bush had rejected it. Rather than following Alan Greenspan and Paul O'Neill'S advice on fiscal policy, George W. Bush had rejected it. Rather than following Colin Powell and Condi Rice's advice on the importance of pushing forward on negotiations between Israel and Palestine, George W. Bush had rejected it. And--we were all to learn later--rather than following George Tenet and Richard Clarke's advice about the importance of counterterrorism, George W. Bush had rejected it. A strange picture of George W. Bush emerged from conversations with subcabinet Bush Administration appointees and their friends and their friends of friends. He was not just underbriefed but lazy: he insisted on remaining underbriefed. He was not just incurious but arrogant: he insisted on making decisions about things he did not know, and hence made decisions that were essentially random. And he was stubborn: once he had made a decision--even or rather especially if it was a howlingly wrong and stupid one--he would never revisit it.

By the summer of 2001 the pattern was set that would lead British observer Daniel Davies to ask if there was anything that was (a) a Bush administration policy (b) that was moderately important (c) which had not been completely bollixed up.

This was the reality of the George W. Bush administration from the summer of 2001 onward. Yet if you relied on either Fred Hiatt's Washington Post or Max Frankel's New York Times, you would have had a very hard time learning about this reality until the last year or so. Today it is an accepted fact that the kindest thing you can say about the George W. Bush administration is that it is completely incompetent--that is even the party line in the hardest of right-wing Bush-supporting publications, National Review, and by the hardest of right-wing commentators, Robert Novak.

Why wouldn't the American press corps in Washington cover the Bush administration properly for its first five years? I really do not know. I do know that the world cannot afford to rely on America's Washington press corps again: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. American journalism has fallen down, and is unlikely to be able to get up until it can look honestly enough at itself to figure out what has gone wrong.

Comments

[Andrew]

There's a structural issue which explains a lot of the American media's inability to properly communicate the reality of the Bush administration.

In nearly every adult transaction, one makes a presumption of good faith about the people one deals with. This is the glue that holds a complex society together. We have to deal all the time with people we don't know. We have to assume that they are, most of the time, at least trying to behave fairly, even if their interests aren't aligned with ours.

Over and over again, the Administration, and the President himself, have demonstrated that this concept just does not register with them. The most revealing part of the eMail trail in the recent attorneys scandal was Sampson's "clever" plan to run out the clock on home state Senators' pushback "all in "good faith," of course."

For over six years, apologists an objective journalists alike have reported the Administration's words as if they were meant to be taken in good faith. They were nothing of the kind.

Couple this with the Convention Of Objectivity - "Shape Of The Earth - Opinions Differ" - and you have a moment in history where the most senior members in the government will say any damn thing they please, reverse direction 180 degrees, just make shit up - because there is no constraint to act in good faith.

And this is one case where the fish most definitely does rot at the head.

[esbisworried]

The big lesson from the "Rove era" will be that if you frighten the MSM with the threat of denying them "access" the MSM will willingly and immediately convert itself into a de facto ministry of propaganda.

He ran the experiment and found the pleasant result.

Wow, he could use this as the basis for a doctorl thesis in political science.

[howard]

3 adds to the prof's excellent remarks:

1. it's nice of reihan to notice that today's low support for the war is merely a restatement of the low polling in favor of a war with significant casualties and limited allies prior to 4/03, but this fact was never spelled out in front-page newspaper articles. it took being a polling junkie to note;

2. i have no idea why reihan thinks that the legitimate anti-war articles were festooned across the pages of america's newspapers, but they weren't;

3. if the media aren't responsible for reporting truth, then why do they get first ammendment priviliges? what function does reiham think they fulfill?

[Fred]

The press will not get better. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence...

The anti-war folks got it as wrong as the Bushies. Note in particular the reference to the idea '...that inspectors be given more time.' No amount of time would have allowed the inspectors to find the nukes, and the same war would have eventually started, just at a later date.

If the pro-war and anti-war folks both got it wrong, we can hardly expect the press to know what was in Iraq.

[anne]

Actually, Brad DeLong has read Michael Gordon with superb accuracy and criticism which have helped me read properly in turn. Gordon always writes from a militarist's stance, and can even be usefully read knowing just this stance.

[Paul G. Brown]

Tasty secular sermon for a religious holiday!

I would amend and bend the lesson, though. The media didn't just flop and flail about for the Bushies. They've been flopping and flailing since at least the early 1990s. To this list of grievious bodily harms on their reputation, I would add the NYT / New Republic's original Whitewater reporting, Wen Ho Lee, basically most of the front pages since about 1992.

And perhaps the greater error has been the words relegated to Pages C.2-3. Newspapers are to be read backwards, apparently, to be understood forward.

Whatever the origins of their decline, the fall has been in progress for far longer than the administration of George Walker Bush.

[Tom Marney]

I wish you'd made a video of this.

[John Emerson]

I always say this: I think that media owners have a political agenda, which is mostly low taxes and partly militarism.

Murdoch and Moon are famous. Disney is bad. The WSJ editorial page is bad. Jack Welch was bad. Graham at Wapo is bad (it's not just Hiatt.) Sulzberger at the NYT is not quite as bad as Graham.

The direction of movement is rightward: CNN and ABC have moved toward Fox in the last couple of years. NPR has been neutered.

One of the few media groups with no black marks was Knight-Ridder, and they went bankrupt.

Finance runs the show, and they wanted Bush. We won Congress without the media, and in 2008 we'll have to fight against them again.

And you can unelect politicians and their factions, but the media are forever.

[John Emerson]

"Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence..."

This cliche should be retired with extreme prejudice. It's just something that stupid people say when they're trying to seem smart.

There's lots of malice in the world, nowhere more so than in politics and related activities.

[marcel]

"whether Michael Gordon's sources are lying to him (and he is letting them do so by not blowing them when they do so)"

Wow. Before reading this, I had thought BdL was above the kind of vulgarity that one goes to Atrios or the Poorman to find.

It's also a weird incentive: Reporter fellates source when source lies. OTOH, perhaps a lying source is the MSM equivalent of a bedroom fantasy:

Anon. source: The Iraqis have WMDs.
M. Gordon: Oh wow, that's so hot. Can I unzip you?
AS: Those aluminum tubes are clear evidence of bio-labs.
MG: Omigod. I can't hlpmlf, slurp, slurp...

[Mike Schilling]

fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me

I thought that went "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

[Kate G.]

John Emerson,
You have hit the nail on the head with your comment about the phrase "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence..." I've heard it most often, however, not from stupid people but from technogeeks and I daresay it might be true in their field. But it is not true of politics or, frankly, of any social interaction above the level of grunting and pointing. The incompetence dodge, as it has been relabled after Bush's olympic marathon of incompetence, has to be seen as the disguise for malice not an alternate explanation. The bloggosphere has persuasively argued that incompetence is actually a tool of the anti government, pro wealthy policies of bush and co--see e.g. e.g. fiddling while Katrina drowns and the "failure" to repeal the AMT.

And Brad, I might have known that a g*&^%ned elitist like you would insist on a "tutelary" function for the press instead of mere stenography. Reihan is right: educating the people as to the significance of the random facts we call political news would be *anti-democratic* because everyone knows that democracies, to be democracies, must be filled with uninformed voters. Anything else leads to an uncomfortable condition known as class warfare and informed voting.

Kate G.

[MikeJ]

I have no doubt that the Washington press corps will soon return to being ever vigilant watchdogs, who will never take the word of anybody in the administration for anything. Reporters will soon be poring over statements by the assistant undersecretary of whatever to see if she said "good morning" when, in fact, it was raining.

All of this oversight will start promptly at noon, Jan. 20, 2009.

[anne]

Nicely, fiercely done, John and Kate.

[BlueStater]

Brad, this is the best piece I've seen from you on this blog.

I wonder if there isn't a good book (or two or three) to be written on what happened to the soul of what used to be the profession of journalism. I kept myself in beer money in graduate school 40-odd years ago by working for a very good daily newspaper in the city where I was in school (okay, it was the Providence Journal, and I wound up not making a career of journalism).

My managing editor, a man of unimpeachable integrity and deep smarts, would have had apoplexy if any of us reporters had palled around with local and state politicians (his view was that our job was to put the many among them who deserved it in jail if we could). I'm sure he would have sacked forthwith anyone who took into his head to go on one of the local teevee stations as a talking head. Our job wasn't to be famous; our job was to be right.

What happened to that culture? It's an obvious conflict of interest for a newspaper reporter to become a Public Figure or a Sabbath gasbag. The New York Times should not allow Anne Kornblut (sp?) to go on Hardball. The Washington Post shouldn't let E. J. Dionne go on NPR. A competent newspaper reporter has to be prepared to make enemies if need be -- and it usually does need be -- to get the truth. Sometimes the desire for fame can get in the way of that. "Access" is a chimera. Izzy Stone didn't give a rat's ass about access, and he was a hell of a reporter.

The corporatization of the press contributes to this problem, I'm sure, but the fame/access issue goes beyond that. Reporters need to stick to their knitting.

[Paul G. Brown]

Marcel -

actually, I completely missed the oral sex idiom. I read it as 'blow the cover', or 'blow the dam', or 'blow the check'.

Guess I have a deficient imagination.

Pb

[Bloix]

Marcel- the word "blow" means to expose. The sexual meaning here wouldn't make any sense in context - it would be the opposite of what Brad intends to say.

[andres]

Hmm. Reluctantly, and because I've disagreed with Brad many times before, I have to agree with BlueStater's first sentence.

Still, Brad needs stress more that part of the problem is that the mainstream media, unlike the left-of-center blogsphere has still not shaken off the incompetence dodge. Bush was nominated for logical reasons even with general knowledge of his dimness among the Republican and financial elite. And this elite, spearheaded by Cheney, manipulated both Bush and a subservient Congress into looting both the Federal government finances and Iraq.

Which leads to two conclusions: (1) the Republicans that Brad talked to (sub-cabinet level) were not high up enough on the political pecking ladder, and (2) in spite of Hiatt's and Frankel's late misgivings, the mainstream media is still fundamentally misrepresenting the situation, which is understandable given that impeachment would be the logical conclusion of describing the current situation in the White House as it truly is right now.

[trevelyan]

@Fred -- no-one was claiming that Iraq had nuclear weapons. The pro-war camp cannot excuse itself here.

[Barry]

Andrew, as pointed out by MikeJ, the 'structural problem' only occurs with Republican administrations. It didn't occur with the Clinton administration, nor with the Carter administration.

[RKKA]

"

I have no doubt that the Washington press corps will soon return to being ever vigilant watchdogs, who will never take the word of anybody in the administration for anything. Reporters will soon be poring over statements by the assistant undersecretary of whatever to see if she said "good morning" when, in fact, it was raining.

All of this oversight will start promptly at noon, Jan. 20, 2009."

Only if a Democrat wins the Electoral College vote.

If a rethuglican wins, you may rely on the media here in America to relate the new President's virtues with eloquence and at great length.

[Jon Fernquest]

"Michael Gordon is a skilled professional, but a skilled professional at what?"

Being a personal assistant to a real specialist on the topic.

Running around, generating leads, answering the telephone, making a pot of coffee, lightening dense meaningful prose for the non-specialist reader and general public, there are a lot of things that people like him will be able to do in the future, after journalism is handed over to the real specialists, the scholars in universities who have devoted their lives to studying a topic in its full generality...

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/04/paul_krugman_sw.html

April 9, 2007

Paul Krugman: Sweet Little Lies
Edited by Mark Thoma

Paul Krugman explains the power of the "Little Lie":

NY Times: Four years into a war fought to eliminate a nonexistent threat, we all have renewed appreciation for the power of the Big Lie: people tend to believe false official claims about big issues, because they can't picture their leaders being dishonest about such things.

But there's another political lesson I don't think has sunk in: the power of the Little Lie — the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren't meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person ... must have done something wrong. ...

Before 9/11, ... the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots.

The Clinton years were a parade of fake scandals: Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card-gate..., there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out.

Each pseudoscandal got headlines, air time and finger-wagging from the talking heads. The eventual discovery in each case that there was no there there ... received far less attention. The effect was to make an administration that was, in fact, pretty honest and well run ... seem mired in scandal.

Even in the post-9/11 environment, little lies never went away. In particular, promoting little lies seems to have been one of the main things U.S. attorneys, as loyal Bushies, were expected to do. For example, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, appears to have been fired because he wouldn't bring unwarranted charges of voter fraud.

...[I]n Wisconsin, ... the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney prosecuted the state's purchasing supervisor over charges that a court recently dismissed after just 26 minutes of oral testimony, with one judge calling the evidence "beyond thin." But by then the accusations had done their job: the unjustly accused official had served almost four months in prison, and the case figured prominently in attack ads alleging corruption in the Democratic governor's administration.

This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi.

First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her "arrogance of extravagance" — then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence.

Now there's Ms. Pelosi's fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as "bad behavior" — unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich's trip to China when he was speaker. ...

[T]he hysterical reaction to her trip is part of a political strategy, aided and abetted by news organizations that give little lies their time in the sun.

Fox News, which is a partisan operation in all but name, plays a crucial role in the Little Lie strategy... But Fox has had plenty of help... For example, CNN ran a segment about Ms. Pelosi's trip titled "Talking to Terrorists."

The G.O.P.'s reversion to the Little Lie technique is a symptom of political weakness, of a party reduced to trivial smears because it has nothing else to offer. But the technique will remain effective — and the U.S. political scene will remain ugly — as long as many people in the news media keep playing along.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/opinion/09mon1.html

April 9, 2007

Another Layer of Scandal

As Congress investigates the politicization of the United States attorney offices by the Bush administration, it should review the extraordinary events the other day in a federal courtroom in Wisconsin. The case involved Georgia Thompson, a state employee sent to prison on the flimsiest of corruption charges just as her boss, a Democrat, was fighting off a Republican challenger. It just might shed some light on a question that lurks behind the firing of eight top federal prosecutors: what did the surviving attorneys do to escape the axe?

Ms. Thompson, a purchasing official in the state's Department of Administration, was accused by the United States attorney in Milwaukee, Steven Biskupic, of awarding a travel contract to a company whose chief executive contributed to the campaign of Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. Ms. Thompson said the decision was made on the merits, but she was convicted and sent to prison before she could appeal.

The prosecution was a boon to Mr. Doyle's opponent. Republicans ran a barrage of attack ads that purported to tie Ms. Thompson's "corruption" to Mr. Doyle. Ms. Thompson was sentenced shortly before the election, which Governor Doyle won.

The Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit seemed shocked by the injustice of her conviction. It took the extraordinary step of releasing Ms. Thompson from prison immediately after hearing arguments, without waiting to issue a ruling. One of the judges hinted that Ms. Thompson may have been railroaded. "It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," Judge Diane Wood told the lawyer from Mr. Biskupic's office.

Ms. Thompson's case is not the only one raising questions about whether prosecutors tried last year to tilt close elections toward the Republicans. New Jersey's federal prosecutor conducted an investigation of weak-looking allegations against Senator Robert Menendez that was used in Republican ads.

Congress should look into both cases to determine whether partisan politics played a role — and whether they were coordinated with anyone at the Justice Department or the White House.

The list of things to investigate keeps growing. A federal agency that protects the rights of military employees is now investigating the firing of David Iglesias, the New Mexico United States attorney. Justice Department officials said he was fired in part because he was out of the office due to his commitments as a Navy military reservist. If so, the firing may have been illegal.

There is also trouble in the Minnesota United States attorney's office....

[marcel]

Paul Brown & Bloix:

My apologies for bringing down the tone of the discussion. Those meanings did not occur to me. Apparently my experience is too limited (& my view of MSM journalists is too jaundiced).

[centrist]

Any assertion by Mr. Hiatt that the media did anything other that a pr flack role for the admin in the run up to war is debunked by the fact that most americans thought Saddam was behind 911!

How could the media fail so badly in its role to explain the facts of the biggest issue of the day?

[Janet]

Journalism is dead. They might as well remove the word from the dictionary. Reading from a teleprompter that someone else wrote is not jounalism. Typing GOP talking points and printing them out is not journalism.

[Monte Davis]

Anne: to say that "Gordon always writes from a militarist's stance" is cutting him too much slack.

In the period between the Sept. 8 Gordon/Miller article and the p. 13 follow-up five days later that grudgingly acknowledged "some debate," G&M were offered considerable detailed information from military technology experts with DoE and DoD backgrounds who knew that

1) the infamous aluminum tubes were unsuitable for use in the kind of centrifuge ascribed to Iraq, and

2) the i.a.t. (ordered on the open market) were virtually identical to tens of thousands already ordered by Iraq (on the open market) to make artillery rockets.

G&M ***CHOSE*** to minimize that input, trusting in the take they'd gotten from Cheney's tiger team and the highest -- most politicized -- layer of the CIA.

So in fact, the stance G&M took was not that of "militarists" knowledgeable in the facts at issue, but that of (it's the only word that fits the case) the warmongers.

[Matt]

Keep after the lying SOBs

[tontocal]

"Prior to the invasion, serious arguments were made against the invasion, and these arguments were widely reported. In point of fact, public opinion generally opposed an invasion that would lead to significant American casualties or a sustained American military occupation or both. President Bush's judgment was the problem, not the press..."

Is Reihan frickin' kidding me with this!!?? serious arguments?? widely reported??

I was so sickened by the lack serious reporting against this war that I almost put my foot through my new big screen tv and had to resort to tuning into to Canada's national network to get some sort of perspective. And never mind (of course) that MSNBC's top rated show at the time, Phil Donahue's, was swiftly cancelled, as he was the only main stream talking head asking the pertinent questions.

Not a problem with the press, my ass.

[burritoboy]

Brad doesn't want to talk about why this is so extremely puzzling in economic terms.

It's pretty clear that American journalism is putting out a mediocre product at best. That is, the product has clear quality defects.

In a competitive marketplace, we would therefore see competitors who try to remedy the quality defects. And it's reasonable to argue that newspapers at least do not have massively high barriers to entry (TV and radio are very different, of course). You need a printing press and trucks to run around and dump your papers in various places. Neither of those things are very difficult barriers - both printing presses and trucks are readily available from many suppliers.

But we see very little actual new competition, at least from for-profit meatworld competitors. Why? It's effectively inexplicable from within Brad's version of economics. The barriers to entry just aren't that high in this case.

So, to understand this problem's economic aspect (why fairly clear defects and large amounts of unhappy customers DON'T create any new competition), we need to go beyond Brad's version of economics. Media seems to be behaving economically irrationally and Brad keeps failing to explain it.

[James Killus]

burritoboy,

You are assuming that when people purchase "news" that they desire "facts." The evidence strongly suggests that what they want is "comforting fables that tell them what they wish to hear."

This is not at all surprising c.f. the phrase "shooting the messenger."

In the broader scene, the market for "fiction" is down, while the market for "non-fiction" is up. However, a close examination supplies evidence that the "non-fiction" is, in fact, "fiction."

[anne]

Thank you, Monte Davis. When possible, please try to set down a reference link; here, for the follwing article on the meaning of the aluminum tubes. I understand though, for the damage was being continually done.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html?ex=1176264000&en=8b3cec05931e01e9&ei=5070

Five days later, The Times reporters learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of debate among intelligence agencies. The misgivings appeared deep in an article on Page A13, under a headline that gave no inkling that we were revising our earlier view ("White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons"). The Times gave voice to skeptics of the tubes on Jan. 9, when the key piece of evidence was challenged by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That challenge was reported on Page A10; it might well have belonged on Page A1.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html?ex=1176264000&en=8b3cec05931e01e9&ei=5070

May 26, 2004

The Times and Iraq

On Sept. 8, 2002, the lead article of the paper was headlined "U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That report concerned the aluminum tubes that the administration advertised insistently as components for the manufacture of nuclear weapons fuel. The claim came not from defectors but from the best American intelligence sources available at the time. Still, it should have been presented more cautiously. There were hints that the usefulness of the tubes in making nuclear fuel was not a sure thing, but the hints were buried deep, 1,700 words into a 3,600-word article. Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length on why this evidence of Iraq's nuclear intentions demanded that Saddam Hussein be dislodged from power: "The first sign of a `smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."

[Rick]

Why is the MSM so vulnerable to deliberate liars like the Bushies? 1. Corporate America is largely right-wing. 2. Journalism schools don't teach ethics in a manner that matters. 3. Publishers and reporters seek celebrity status and admire anything that achieves it, regardless of method, validity or merit. 4. There aren't enough legitimate critics of the media getting heard by the media. 5. Steven Colbert was disinvited to this year's Washington Press Corps bash, in favor of Karl Rove. And guess who was more popular with that crowd? 6. We, the opposition, are too passive toward our local press, TV and radio when they ignore the truth in favor of favorites.

[Monte Davis]

Anne: One odf the best wrapups is

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/IraqAluminumTubes12-5-03.pdf

but the essentials were available in Sept. 2002 in

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/aluminumtubes.html

The Times had been alerted to some of the experts and documents behind the latter while G&M were preparing (I won't say "researching") the 9/8/02 and 9/13/02 articles.

[Robert]

Burritoboy you are unfair to Brad. 20 years ago he made a pioneering and influential effort in the endless struggle to convince economists to take irrationality seriously.

Good point James Killus (talk about a risky name for a messenger). It is well understood by everyone except maybe professional economists in their professional capacity. The idea of introducing it to economic theory thus seems brilliant to economists ("hey I didn't know we were *allowed* to admit that). See "The Market for News" Mullainathan S. and Shleifer A. American Economic Review September 2005

Some economists have made a very good career by explaining things that everyone (including economists when not at work) knows to economists in their professional capacity (economics must have a problem with adverse selection if you get my drift)