THE MEDIA AND THE SNIPERS
Lots of whining last week about the sniper case and the excesses of 24-hour media coverage. Sure. Fine. Okay. No doubt Columbia’s journalism school will host 50 panel discussions featuring news directors in orgies of self-flagellation. Bad media! Bad media!
One thing that won’t be covered–THE SCRAPBOOK is taking bets–is bias. Specifically, why did journalists focus more on the military background of John Allen Muhammad than on his conversion to Islam?
The Washington Post on Thursday carried this headline–“Police Looking for Former Soldier for Questioning in Sniper Case.” NPR that same morning used only Muhammad’s previous name, John Allen Williams. On Thursday afternoon, websites for each of the major news networks prominently reported Muhammad’s status as an Army veteran while ignoring or burying his conversion to radical Islam. MSNBC was typical: “A former soldier and a teenager arrested in connection with the sniper hunt were expected to be arraigned Thursday, as sources told NBC News the evidence against them included a rifle of the same caliber as the gun used in the killings and a car modified to make for easy shooting.”
Is the “former soldier” part of Muhammad’s personal history relevant? Possibly. More relevant than his conversion to Islam, his reported defense of the September 11 attacks, and his sympathies with al Qaeda? Please.
Perhaps the most egregious example, first noted by weblogger Diane Moon, comes from the New York Times. In their October 24 article, Times reporters Francis X. Clines and David Johnston claimed that federal officials were interested in talking to the two men about possible involvement in “skinhead militia” groups. (Although it appeared in the “Washington Final” edition of the paper, that report has been dropped from the version of the piece on the Times website. It’s not in the Nexis version, either.)
While the New York Times and the networks were desperately seeking Muhammad’s ties to neonazis, in Washington state, the Bellingham Herald pursued a different angle. Reporters John Stark, Aubrey Cohen, and Mary Lane Gallagher found the Rev. Al Archer, who directs the Lighthouse Mission, a homeless shelter where Muhammad occasionally stayed. According to the Herald, Archer was concerned that Muhammad was a terrorist and called the FBI in October 2001 to alert them. Archer was suspicious in part because Muhammad flew around the country while staying at the homeless shelter. Said Archer: “I felt like he was part of an organization. I felt like he had some connection with terrorists.” Archer says he told the FBI that Muhammad has “connections somewhere with somebody who’s got money.”
Harjeep Singh, who knew Muhammad from the local YMCA, worried about “anti-American statements” and said Muhammad spoke of vague plans for violence. Other people who knew Muhammad say he passed out “pro-Islamic fliers” in Bellingham and seemed more interested in politics and religion after September 11.
Maybe Stark, Cohen, and Gallagher will get invited to the journalism-school discussions, but don’t bet on it.
TOUJOURS VIETNAM
Anthony Lewis, former liberal stalwart of the New York Times op-ed page, has gazed into his crystal ball for the New York Review of Books, in a cover piece entitled “Bush and Iraq.” As it has been for the last quarter century, Lewis’s crystal ball is tuned to the all-Vietnam, all-the-time station.
“As I read [a Times profile of Paul Wolfowitz], I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam. Here, as in Vietnam, the advocates are sure that American power can prevail–and sure that the result will be a happy one. But here, as in Vietnam, so many things could go wrong. Iraq is a large, modern, heavily urbanized country. If we bomb it apart, are we going to be wise enough to put it back together? Have Mr. Wolfowitz and his fellow sunshine warriors calculated the effects of an American war on feelings among Arabs and other Muslims?”
Another Vietnam? The tender feelings of the Arabs? Where have we heard these sorts of things before? Oh yeah, from the pen of Anthony Lewis:
“If all this means what it says–war [with Iraq]–then George Bush is taking his country and the world into a tragedy of appalling dimensions. It would be a war with enormous casualties and with destabilizing effects beyond calculation” (November 23, 1990, New York Times).
And again: “A ground attack on Iraqi forces in or around Kuwait could produce ghastly American casualties. The Iraqis are well dug in, and they are experienced in defense tactics. A land assault against their positions could be like Flanders Fields. . . . If U.S. planes attack, there is every reason to fear that Saddam Hussein would strike at Israel, trying to rally Arabs to his cause. . . . Then Israel would retaliate, inevitably and unnecessarily. And the whole political complexion of the gulf crisis would change. Would it be possible to keep the Saudis, the Syrians, and other Arabs in the anti-Saddam coalition? To see such dangers is to begin to understand the possible political consequences of war” (December 14, 1990, New York Times).
When Anthony Lewis repeats himself, it’s farce both times.
READY, AIM, FIRED
Last Friday afternoon, Emory University announced it was accepting the resignation of history professor Michael Bellesiles, the author of the anti-gun history “Arming America,” which won the prestigious 2001 Bancroft prize. The school also released a 40-page report, composed by a committee of three outside scholars who had reviewed Bellesiles’s use of evidence in his award-winning book.
The verdict? Bellesiles was at best an incompetent researcher and at worst a dishonest hack. Further proof of this was not needed, but the report ably supplies it anyway.
The committee focused on the personal property records from 1765 to 1860 that Bellesiles used to argue for a much lower incidence of gun ownership than previously believed. They found that Bellesiles had presented “seemingly randomly gathered information” in Vermont as a complete account of all the guns owned there and that he was guilty of imprecision and “exaggeration” with respect to Providence, Rhode Island, records. But that was just for starters.
Although the committee could not actually prove that Bellesiles “invented” nonexistent records from San Francisco, as some critics have suggested, they found that his account of when and where he examined those records does not hold up at all.
As damning as anything, the report includes an admission by Bellesiles that he had intentionally excluded evidence that would have increased the number of guns he found for the years 1774-1776. “Every aspect of the work in the probate records is deeply flawed,” the committee reports.
No clearer, more mainstream, more respectable proof could be required for the conclusion that Bellesiles deserved all the exposés his work provoked.
Not that Bellesiles is willing to admit defeat. In his letter of resignation (also posted on Emory University’s website), the historian calls the controversy just “a scholarly disagreement.” He says he’ll continue his “research” into guns while he works on his next book, though he “cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment.”
THE SCRAPBOOK wonders who else will remain defiant with the release of this report. Bellesiles’s friendly New York Times reviewer Garry Wills? How about Columbia University, which gave Bellesiles the once-prestigious Bancroft prize? And then there’s the Nation, which showed up late to the party only a couple of weeks ago to circulate pro-Bellesiles spin in a completely credulous article by Jon Wiener, a historian from the University of California at Irvine. Oops.
