Dear Susan,
As you noted late yesterday, it certainly has been a terrible period for the media: Stephen Glass at the New Republic, Patricia Smith at the Boston Globe, Peter Arnett at CNN, Steven Brill of Himself all find themselves disgraced, and now Jim Fallows of U.S. News finds himself up to his neck in ouster rumors and leaked tape controversies.
So far, the two small fish in the pond–Glass and Smith–have lost their jobs. But what’s going to happen to the big celebs? If there is anybody who deserves a one-way ticket to Pierre Salinger-land, it is Peter Arnett. I love the way he’s now offering to go to Vietnam to dig up evidence that the U.S. really did use nerve gas there. This is revolutionary. Usually reporters report the story first then publish it. Arnett runs it first then offers to report later.
We have a long piece on the CNN story in the Weekly Standard by Eric Felten. He reinterviewed many of Arnett’s sources, who are now outraged about what they say were deceptions and distortions, especially on the part of CNN producer April Oliver. She apparently told Eugene McCarley, who led the ground operation in question, that she was doing a piece on the brave men of the operation, then she arrived and ambushed him with six hours of questions, mostly about gas. Then she edited a snippet out of that time to suggest McCarley supported the allegations. Felten also analyzed the story of Robert Van Buskirk, the key source. He’s the one who said their was nerve gas and American defectors were killed. Felten looked at a book Van Buskirk wrote in 1983 exhaustively detailing the operation. But there was no poison gas and no defectors in that account. (For an early warning about this see Chatterbox of 6/10/98.) The image you get is of a group of politically-motivated reporters–Arnett and Oliver–trying desperately to get a story of American villainy and willing to distort the truth and overlook counter-evidence to get it.
The scuttlebutt around town is that the editors at Time were horrified when they saw the sourcing on the piece. In the current issue, Walter Isaacson writes a brave but humiliating climbdown. The CNN Washington bureau is also said to be abashed. Somebody should go back and look at the previous reports by Arnett and Oliver for signs of earlier flim-flammery.
These marriages between print and TV may never work. Dow Jones went into TV in a big way a few years ago. Suddenly there was a culture clash in the building between the Wall Street Journal/Barrons print types and the growing number of TV people. When Dow Jones dumped their TV stations there was celebration among the print crowd. Come to think of it, this could be an indicator of the widening gulf between the two cultures nationwide: those who live in a written word world and those who live in a TV world. I feel an essay coming on.
Steven Brill has crossed over from print to TV over the past week. He’s an effective TV performer because he is super-aggressive. He doesn’t try to defend his terrible piece, but simply attacks his interviewer. The conventional view is that he even got the best of Tim Russert during their Meet the Press confrontation. But he probably should be drummed out of polite society too. When he was caught misrepresenting an interview with WSJ reporter Glenn Simpson, (Simpson had it on tape) he acknowledged that their conversation was not on the record, as he had claimed, but off. But then Brill claimed that there was a second on-the-record interview. Simpson denies the second interview took place. If a normal reporter lied about an interview that never took place, he’d be fired. Yet Brill, who has manifold other errors to his credit, still gets treated like a real journalist. MSNBC, which is slammed by Brill, humiliates itself and invites him on the air.
All around me I see change and decay.
rgds,
David
