THE CNN MELTDOWN

CNN producers April Oliver and Jack Smith were both fired after their humiliated network was forced to admit (as was reported in these pages three weeks ago in “CNN and Time’s Poisonous Smear”) that there is no evidence that the U.S. military used nerve gas in Vietnam; nor is there evidence of a mission to assassinate American defectors in Laos. But Oliver and Smith and their colleague in the smear — CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, who was reprimanded but not fired — are unrepentant.

Oliver and Smith have appeared on any TV interview show that will have them to proclaim that their story is true. According to Oliver and Smith, CNN didn’t retract the sensational charges because they were demonstrably false. No, the network caved in to pressure from the military-retiree complex. This isn’t some screwy strategy for Oliver and Smith to salvage their careers: They seem actually to believe it. After appearing on Special Edition with Brit Hume on the Fox News Network, Oliver turned to Hume as she was leaving the set and offered him this conspiratorialist nugget: “Colin Powell did it.” And Henry Kissinger was in on it, too, according to Smith. Arnett, who does seem to have a strategy for salvaging his career, claims now that he basically lent his famous name and face to the story for “marketing” purposes. And in his own slippery way, Arnett backs his fired colleagues’ conspiracy theory, saying, “I don’t know whether [the story] was true or not. Laos was a black hole during the war.”

But it doesn’t take a conspiracy to explain why CNN and Time retracted and apologized for their nerve-gas “scoop” as fast as they could. Articles in the Baltimore Sun, Newsweek, Slate, the Washington Times, the New York Times, and this magazine left the sarin-gas story in tatters. The noted libel defense attorney Floyd Abrams, hired by CNN to investigate how its producers put the sarin story together, catalogued a devastating assortment of journalistic sins: Credible sources denying the story were ignored. Repeated, explicit denials by key sources such as retired Adm. Thomas Moorer were edited out. A smudged, photocopied document was used to fool a variety of sources into thinking CNN had proof of the use of nerve gas. Robert Van Buskirk, the central source, had written a book about the mission in Laos, an account that flatly contradicted his spiel on CNN; his new account was based on a “recovered memory”; he had been kicked out of the Army after being arrested for gun-running. NewsStand: CNN & Time, the newsmagazine show that aired the Oliver/Arnett story on June 7, never gave any of these relevant facts to its viewers.

If Abrams presented a comprehensive anatomy of how CNN and Time botched the story, his report was laughably misleading about why the story made it on the air, and much of the coverage of the retractions has echoed Abrams’s spin.

Abrams called April Oliver’s eight-month investigation “journalistic overkill” and suggested that CNN’s reporters had made the mistake of falling in love with their story: “The degree of confidence approaching certainty of the CNN journalists who prepared the broadcast of the conclusions offered in it contributed greatly to the journalistic flaws identified in the report,” he wrote.

But “journalistic” is hardly the right adjective to describe this enterprise: eight months of dogged effort to prove a horrifying tale of American war crimes that the reporters are “certain” is true, even when the evidence contradicts them. This is a description not of journalists in action but of ideological true believers seeking to put a journalistic gloss on a version of events that has become, for them, an article of faith. This is why April Oliver and Jack Smith are sticking to their guns: They still believe the story.

The CNN-Time nerve-gas story, in short, was riddled with bias — left-wing, anti-American ideological bias, to be precise. Remember the original charge: American GIs and CIA operatives, presumably on orders from Richard Nixon, bombed women and children with lethal nerve gas while on a mission to assassinate American defectors. And lest anyone doubt the lessons that were to be drawn from this use of nerve gas, CNN anchor Jeff Greenfield spelled them out: “Earlier this year,” he said “the United States nearly went to war with Iraq over chemical and biological weapons.” Yet the “United States military used lethal nerve gas during the Vietnam War.”

In the rush to give CNN credit for its apology, commentators have for the most part strenuously averted their gaze from the obvious role of political bias in the reporting and airing of the story, preferring to attribute CNN and Time’s embarrassing lapse to anything but ideology. In the New York Times, Walter Goodman stressed the pressures of getting a blockbuster. Columnist Frank Rich also dismissed leftism out of hand; he blamed the new culture of infotainment. Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism told Reuters that CNN may have “succumbed to the growing pressure on all news organizations to have a big score that attracts attention” — as if accusations of American war crimes were just the ticket to rescue CNN’s ratings. (Then again, perhaps they do believe this in Ted Turner’s boardroom; CNN’s glory days during the Gulf War did include Peter Arnett’s credulous reports from Baghdad of a U.S. bombing attack on a “baby milk factory.”)

The notion that an honest overenthusiasm was to blame for the phony nerve-gas story is the central argument of the Abrams report. But why the Abrams report should be seen as the last word on the participants’ motivations isn’t evident. Floyd Abrams is one of the nation’s premier defense attorneys; if he was not lawyering while he was investigating, then he wasn’t doing his job. If Abrams had concluded the reporters’ motives were ideological, that their story was a smear of the American soldiers in Laos and their commanders, then it would be easy for those defamed to make the case that the harm done to them was intentional. Hello, nine-figure damages.

Is it any wonder, then, that from his first day working for CNN, Abrams was making the case that any errors were unintentional? After CNN News Group chairman Tom Johnson hired Abrams, Johnson called retired general Perry Smith to ask him to cooperate with the investigation. Smith, the long-time military analyst for CNN, had resigned a week before in protest over the nerve-gas story, which he knew to be false. As a former Air Force pilot, Smith knew there would be records of the exact munitions loaded onto the planes flown in Operation Tailwind; in one day he had been able to obtain those records; it was tear gas.

Some of the soldiers and pilots on the mission in Laos told Smith they were worried that Abrams was only looking for a way to block the lawsuits they were already contemplating. The day after Abrams began his investigation, Smith expressed that concern to him. Abrams assured Smith that libel-defense was not his job, because there were no grounds for a defamation lawsuit in the first place. According to Smith, Abrams went on to explain in detail why the CNN-Time story didn’t meet the stringent standards of libel. But Abrams was just being a good defense lawyer here. He couldn’t have known this when he was just beginning his probe.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the story was driven by ideology. As CNN was preparing to retract it, April Oliver wrote a breathless defense of her work for CNN’s programming honcho, Rick Kaplan. The memo is a blueprint for her later talk-show appearances: She blames CNN for succumbing to pressure from “high rollers such as Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger.” She stands blindly by her story: “I continue to be unaware of any factual error in the script.” And she has a paranoid explanation for why the broadcast’s allegations unraveled: “an orchestrated group of veterans, military and conservative ideologues set out to savage the report.” Oliver sees her fight in ideological terms. And why wouldn’t she? In addition to her work for television, Oliver has written a couple of dozen articles for print publications, all of them left of center. Most of her work was for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter; she also wrote for the Nation and the hard-left In These Times. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that she acted on a political agenda, as opposed to being the victim of her own journalistic enthusiasm.

Nor is Oliver the only one involved to see the struggle in ideological terms. Peter Arnett does so as well. Arnett succeeded in evading responsibility for the calumny because CNN didn’t want to fire its veteran, Pulitzer Prize-winning celebrity. This, even though he conducted several of the most important on-air interviews; even though he was bylined as the co-author of the Time magazine article; even though he went on other CNN broadcasts, unscripted, to make even more outrageous claims than were contained in the original story. The day after the nerve-gas broadcast, Arnett told CNN Early Edition host Donna Kelley that dropping poison gas was commonplace: “It was sometimes used to hit the — to use on the ground as American pilots, surrounded by [North Vietnamese], used the gas to bring the pilots back into the planes and give them the antidote, hopefully in time.”

To the Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz, Arnett even cast himself as a victim: “I was being trashed on a daily basis in the right-wing media,” he told Kurtz. “I felt my reputation going down the tubes.” In other words, like Oliver, Arnett views his troubles in ideological terms. And there is no doubt that a reporting career whose high points have all involved allegations of American war crimes has made Arnett an ideological target. As well it should. When Arnett tells the Associated Press that his reaction to the sarin-gas story was that he “had no real reason to doubt” it, he confirms the right-wing assumption about his own career: a man who is always prepared to parachute in and believe the worst of American soldiers.

Arnett didn’t question Oliver’s opus because it was the sort of accusation he was predisposed to believe and happy to put his name on. The same can be said of CNN-America president Rick Kaplan, the creator of the NewsStand series that was kicked off with the nerve-gas fiasco. Kaplan escaped the train wreck with not even a reprimand. He said he considered resigning, but decided against it after determining that his role in the broadcast had been minimal. Of course, NewsStand was Kaplan’s first major contribution to the CNN lineup since his arrival from ABC last year, the cornerstone of his programming initiatives. And yet, if we believe his account, he had little involvement in the first blockbuster story of the first broadcast. That’s another assertion that only true-believers will want to credit.

When journalists cease thinking skeptically, it is usually because they’ve got hold of a story they want to believe. When the organizations those journalists work for uncritically promote their work, it is usually because of a shared culture and shared political assumptions. Internal alarms were raised at Time and CNN about the nerve-gas story, but the alarms were weak and were overridden. Is this surprising? Critics on the right have long charged CNN with a knee-jerk anti-Americanism that more than occasionally manifests itself in the network’s news judgment. Corporate apologies notwithstanding, April Oliver, Jack Smith, Peter Arnett, and their executive enablers have just provided such critics with stunning evidence that the charge is true.

Eric Felten’s most recent article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD was “CNN and Times’s Poisonous Smear” (June 29).