WASHINGTON is full of guys (and yes, the type is more male than female) who are an important part of the media food chain, yet who themselves are rarely written about. These are the obsessive single-issue experts, usually allying encyclopedic knowledge of a narrow issue with some kind of advocacy. These guys are the desperate reporter’s best friend. When the reporter is unfortunate enough to be assigned a story on, say, the Law of the Sea Treaty, there will be a guy who knows everything the reporter will need to do the story. Better still, he will be delighted to provide the reporter with his home phone number, e-mail, fax, cell number, and a beeper in case you need to interrupt him during dinner or the symphony so he can do what he loves best: discourse on the flaws of the treaty for as long as the reporter will listen.
If you’re an editor like me, the relationship is slightly more complicated. You’re more likely to be on the receiving end of calls from the expert, who will try to persuade you that the perfect complement to the story you did yesterday quoting him on the Law of the Sea Treaty would be another story tomorrow on aspects of the treaty that were neglected in the first article. Your idea of the optimum frequency of coverage of his subject is likelier to be on the order of once every other year.
The best of the breed, though, understand that while their own fascination with a topic endures, others are less enthralled. Nonetheless, they persist, and very, very occasionally it turns out that they were right and the rest of us were wrong about the relative importance of the subject they had mastered.
This last category pretty well describes the situation of reporter-turned-investigator Steven Emerson, who spent the last decade tirelessly tracking the manifestations of Islamic terrorist organizations–their sympathizers, front groups, contributors, and members–in America, and warning us to pay more attention to the threat. For most of that time, his work was under-appreciated. He was unfairly pilloried for fingering Hamas and other Arab terrorist groups as likely suspects in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (a suspicion that was widely shared, including by the FBI, for the first couple of days following the explosion). Still, he stuck to his knitting, chronicling the inroads of international terror on American soil. Now that work looks prophetic. And if you weren’t following it all along, you’ll find it ably summarized in his new book, “American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.”
I’m linking to Amazon, not because I want to play favorites with online booksellers, but because you can also get a useful taste of the hysterical hostility Emerson’s work provokes by scrolling down to the bottom of that page and checking out the customer reviews. There you’ll see what looks like either an organized smear, or one crackpot’s anti-Emerson campaign. The most hilariously inept of the accusations–repeated in three “different” reviews–is that Emerson has been “sued by many newspapers for fabricating information and facts about terrorism in the United States.”
Richard Starr is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
P.S. This sort of venom would be amusing if it were just coming from the lunatic fringe. Alas, as Jeff Jacoby has pointed out more than once, NPR seems to be holding hands with the Emerson-haters.
