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The New York Times today offers what it calls the backstory on its publication of the stolen WikiLeaks documents. It includes the intriguing fact that the White House didn’t try very hard to deter publication, but the report by executive editor Bill Keller mostly reads like house propaganda and a Pulitzer application.
There is a laugh-out-loud moment. It comes when Keller writes that “it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news.”
It’s hard to imagine he believes that. Certainly nobody else does.
The upshot of Keller’s piece, which appears in the magazine section and an e-book, is that you’ll have to look elsewhere if you want truth or honest introspection. For that, I recommend “Gray Lady Down,” a book that gives the backstory of what has gone wrong at the Times itself.
Author William McGowan has compiled a timely indictment of how the paper lost its way. He catalogs well-known mistakes and the cheerleading and other none-too-subtle ways it puts its thumb on the scales of key stories.
He shows how its news coverage of President Obama, gay marriage, immigration, the military, the Duke “rape” case, radicalized Muslims, the Ground Zero mosque, and the war on terror are riddled with omissions, distortions and biases.
McGowan blames “an insular group-think” for turning the paper “into a tattered symbol of liberal orthodoxy,” adding, “How deeply compromised its principles have become are questions inextricably entwined with the Times’ ideological commitments.”
As someone forever grateful that the Times gave me my start, I read “Gray Lady Down” with anger and sadness. Great Times editors, led by the legendary Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, created a model of integrity and fairness for American newspapers.
But the golden age of standards is but a memory in today’s Times. As a friend says, the paper is like a rebel from the 1960s that refuses to grow up.
Witness Keller’s attempt to justify his ties to Julian Assange, the anti-American anarchist behind WikiLeaks. To convince readers he treated Assange (pictured) like any other source, Keller repeats a reporter’s churlish description of the cyber-outlaw: “He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”
But Keller is stuck with the fact that the Times was a partner with Assange and foreign newspapers in recklessly revealing American secrets about Iraq, Afghanistan and our diplomats around the globe. It negotiated both with the Obama administration and Assange. When the White House flagged materials it thought too dangerous to publish, the Times gave that information to WikiLeaks — in effect, flagging it for someone eager to damage America.
Keller also reveals his personal bias. He writes that, at the request of the Obama White House, “we agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed.”
Yet when President George W. Bush had made the same request about key anti-terror programs, Keller writes, “we were unconvinced by his argument and published the story” even though Bush warned the Times would “share the blame for the next terrorist attack.”
Bush was right, and that burden still exists. But it’s not likely Keller loses sleep over it.
As McGowan argues, the liberal group-think shuts out serious consideration of other views. On routine stories, the result is just lousy journalism.
But because Keller sees his options on national security as simplistically binary — either a free press or a government veto — he fails to recognize his duty to exercise voluntary discretion. In a time of war, that is unforgivable.
Pain of double edged sword
As Egypt burns, nervous Americans must resist one thing: certainty. Ignore anybody who is absolutely, positively sure of who will be standing when the smoke clears and what we should do about it.
Take Joe Biden. The veep was certain Hosni Mubarak is not a “dictator.” He is wrong and there is no honor in pretending otherwise.
On the other side, the thugocracy in Iran is gung-ho for the demonstrators. “Iran expects Egyptian officials to listen to the voice of their Muslim people” a spokesman said.
To judge an uprising by its supporters, we don’t want to be on the same side as the Iranian rulers who brutally crushed a democracy movement. They seize on destabilization anywhere, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq, to spread their evil.
Remember the lesson of the Iranian revolution: One person, one vote, one time.
The easy truth is that Mubarak personifies the double-edged sword that bedevils our policy in the Mideast. He is a firewall against Muslim terrorists and a helpful neighbor of Israel’s for 30 years. He is also a ruthless ruler who created the powder keg now exploding.
The hard truth is that there is no obvious path as America faces an agonizing choice between our interests and our values. That’s why the White House’s is hedging its bets, leaning first toward Mubarak and then toward the protestors without breaking with either.
It also realizes that what happens in Egypt won’t stay in Egypt, just as the revolt in Tunisia is awakening Arabs in Yemen and Jordan as well. Saudi Arabia is nervous, as is Europe, because 40 percent of the world’s oil passes through the Suez Canal.
The smart money says Mubarak’s days are numbered. Fair enough, but two questions more:
What or who follows him? And is it good for America?
As of now, nobody really knows.
Riding roughshod
What, you don’t like bike lanes? It couldn’t be that they’re a menace, waste millions of dollars and add to traffic congestion and more parking tickets.
No, it’s just because you don’t understand their virtue. That’s Mayor Bloomberg’s story and he’s sticking to it.
After hundreds of people at a meeting booed new lanes in the Rockaways, the mayor threw the taxpayers a bone. “I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of explaining and planning,” he told the crowd. The implicit message is that he knows best, and you will agree once he explains it all. And if you don’t, tough noogies. You’re still getting bike lanes because he wants them.
One El of an ironic remark
Eliot Spitzer told his bosses he would be “embarrassed” to use poll numbers they wanted to put on the air at CNN. Wait — Spitzer can be embarrassed? Alert the media. That’s news.
A pit-iful politician
The amazing thing about Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s lawsuit against the Capitol cafeteria isn’t his demand for $150,000 for a cracked tooth he claims was caused by a wayward olive pit.
What’s amazing is that the incident happened three years ago. That means the wacky Dem soldiered on through his 2008 presidential campaign despite “significant pain, suffering and loss of enjoyment.”
Why, that olive pit probably cost him the presidency. He should sue for that, too.