The Times’s Glass House The Scrapbook, a longtime connoisseur of the New York Times, can’t begin to compete this week with all the johnny-come-latelies–or, indeed, with the Times itself, which printed in its May 11 edition what may be the longest newspaper correction in history: 14,171 words in three pieces retracting, explaining, and apologizing for the mistakes of the paper’s disgraced national-desk reporter Jayson Blair. (We call that a good start.)
Nor can we summon the Timesian hauteur that commenting on such a world-historical correction would seem to require. Happily, though, we happen to have in our files a copy of the mind-bogglingly pompous April 17, 1981, editorial that the Times ran when its competitors at the Washington Post put their foot in it with a famous, Pulitzer-winning hoax by reporter Janet Cooke. (We hear, but can’t verify, that this editorial was being reread with grim satisfaction over at the Post last week.)
“When a reputable newspaper lies, it poisons the community. Every other newspaper story becomes suspect. Anyone stung by a newspaper story feels emboldened to call it a lie. Facts are not only impugned but made impotent. . . . The lie–the fabricated event, the made-up quote, the fictitious source–is the nightmare of any respected newsroom. It is intolerable not only because it discredits publications but because it debases communication, and democracy.
“We do not know what possessed Janet Cooke to invent an interview with an imaginary 8-year-old drug addict who aspired to grow up to be a heroin pusher in the nation’s capital. . . .We do not know why this contested tale was then pushed for journalism’s highest honor, or why the Pulitzer Prize judges jumped the entry from one category to another to bestow the award.
“We do know that the apologies and embarrassments all around can be only the first steps toward reaffirming a public trust. . . . The Post was right in stating that ‘warning bells of some kind should have sounded, that procedures should exist . . . for smoking out a weird and atypical hoax of this kind.’
“As residents of the same glass house, we are well aware of a newspaper’s vulnerability to error and deception. The Post’s examination of its procedures will instruct us all.
“But it seems clear even now that one critical failure occurred the moment Miss Cooke refused to document her story for her editors. For there was an alarm in this case, a great commotion in fact from a startled police force and City Hall. And they were turned away by the newspaper because the reporter allegedly risked death if she revealed her sources and subject. Other reporters have gone to jail to protect confidential informants, and editors and publishers stand prepared to join them. But society will revoke the privilege of confidentiality if it is casually entrusted to individual reporters.
“Great publications magnify beyond measure the voice of any single writer. Thus, when their editors and publishers want or need to know a source for what they print, they have to know it–and be able to assure the community or the courts that they do. Where this is not now the rule, let this sad affair at least have the good effect of making it the rule.”
No wonder people wish them ill.
WHO’s on First?
Taiwan will not be represented at the World Health Assembly, the annual meeting of the World Health Organization’s 192 members, which begins next week in Geneva, Switzerland–a meeting that will be dominated by talk of the outbreak of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. China, which immeasurably worsened the worldwide health and economic toll from SARS by covering up the outbreak for months, will attend. Meanwhile, in some quarters, Taiwan is being accused of “politicizing” the illness. Apparently, it’s politicization for Taiwan to point out that its exclusion from the WHO–under a dubious and anachronistic One China policy–has negative consequences for global health, not to mention the health of Taiwan’s people. Yet Beijing’s continued insistence that Taiwan not be allowed to join the WHO is supposed to be unremarkable.
Michael M.C. Lai, a USC expert on SARS, last week told reporters for the Washington Post that the failure of the World Health Organization to send help to Taiwan in March worsened the spread of the disease. “Had the WHO sent in experts and resources to help plot the strategy early, the recent outbreak in Taiwan could have been prevented,” Lai said. “It is one thing for WHO not daring to offend China, which I can understand. However, WHO has abdicated its own mission by ignoring Taiwan as if Taiwan’s SARS outbreak did not matter to the world’s overall strategy of containing the disease. It is time for WHO to include Taiwan as part of this strategy.”
Meanwhile, WHO’s David L. Heymann said, “We don’t believe that Taiwan has suffered by not being a member of the World Health Organization.” It is a strange organization whose officials insist that membership brings no benefits. Then again, it’s a strange health care organization that lets its decisions be dictated by Beijing, which thinks denial is the proper response to an epidemic.
A Vast Anti-French Conspiracy?
The French government, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported last week, “believes it is the victim of an ‘organized campaign of disinformation’ from within the Bush administration, designed to discredit it with allegations of complicity with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.”
Jacques Chirac has apparently been keeping his diplomats busy reading the American papers and taking careful note of stories critical of France that also include comments from unnamed administration officials. “We have decided to count the untrue accusations that have appeared in the U.S. press and which have deeply shocked the French,” a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Marie Masdupuy, told Reuters.
We bet that’s one heck of a list they’ve compiled. And we’d venture that a psychiatrist with competence in these matters would diagnose the French with one heck of a case of projection. Since they have a compliant press that can be ordered around and manipulated with ease by the government, they assume things work the same way in Washington.
What the Quai d’Orsay imagines is an “ugly campaign to destroy the image of France,” in the words of one French official, is simply the everyday work of a robust and uncoordinated Washington press corps. Last time we checked, the experts at destroying the image of France were primarily located in Paris.
Kooks “R” Us
A few weeks ago we noted in this space that the Saudi academic who marks the holiday of Purim each year with vile speculations about “Jewish vampires” had found a new home, lecturing at the Arab League think tank, the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-up. Now the indispensable scholars at the Middle East Media Research Institute have published an in-depth study of the Abu Dhabi-based think tank’s activities, from its discussions of whether Americans and Israelis secretly pulled off the 9/11 attacks to its learned discussions of the “factual basis” of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (the report can be read at www.memri.org/release).
The latest scholarly research at the Zayed Center? According to MEMRI, it’s entertaining the possibility that the SARS virus “could constitute a biological war launched against China in an attempt to weaken it economically, or it could be a product of an American war against the world.”
