Increasingly, journalists seek to be the arbiters of truth and justice. They “fact-check” but often conflate their own opinions for fact. Likewise, on the front pages of leading newspapers, many foreign affairs reporters will substitute hard news for “news analysis,” basically glorified op-eds, a practice that both erodes trust in the news and exposes false assumptions and political opinions that can pollute reporting.
While some journalists seek to force facts to conform to popular political narratives, others are consummate professionals. Everyone gets things wrong, however. One academic friend, for example, often quips that as a historian, he gets paid to predict the past, and he still only gets that right 50% of the time. Still, just as academics and think-tankers — certainly, myself included — often get things wrong, it is important to recognize just how destructive foreign affairs journalism can be, especially when well-meaning or ideological journalists get dictators wrong.
The most oft-cited case of a journalist whitewashing dictatorship was the New York Times’s Walter Duranty. Highly regarded by his peers at the time, Duranty wrote a series of 13 dispatches from the Soviet Union in 1931 for which he won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. He took Soviet propaganda at face value and ignored the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians. Even after some other reporters began raising questions about Duranty’s work, he continued working for the New York Times, where he remained until 1941. To this day, his Pulitzer remains a mark of shame for a man who prioritized ideology above reality and an embarrassment for an outlet which claims to be the newspaper of record.
There was also the case of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution shocked the international system. It was unprecedented in its scale. In an age before the internet and Twitter, Khomeini mobilized fully 10% of the population. No one at the time denied the shah was an autocrat, but diplomats and analysts largely saw him as a progressive one. Iran had pulled itself out of the economic and political morass of the early 20th century and was on a trajectory to the first world, at least within its own discourse at the time. No one predicted that a religious, clerical revolution could bring down Iran’s ruler, let alone fundamentally change the nature of Iran’s regime.
One of the reasons Khomeini succeeded is that he always focused on what he was against without clarifying for what he stood. Instead, he would tell both Iranian intellectuals and Western journalists what they wanted to hear. Iranian literature professor Jalal Matini, for example, listed a number of interviews in which journalists were too credulous in the face of Khomeini’s promises and propaganda. “Personal desire, age, and my health do not allow me to personally have a role in running the country after the fall of the current system,” Khomeini told the Associated Press just three months before leading the Islamic Revolution. Likewise, on Nov. 16, 1978, he told Britain’s the Guardian that “I don’t want to have the power or the government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power.”
Perhaps those reporters could be forgiven: They were just reporting what Khomeini said during an interview. The problem came when reporters moved from reporting to analysis. Steven Erlanger, a young foreign affairs reporter who would eventually rise to become the New York Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent, reported from Tehran one day before an Iran mob sacked the U.S. Embassy that while the Iranian revolution was not over, “the religious phase is drawing to a close even as it is becoming formalized.” The question remains whether he was simply opining based on too little time spent in Tehran, or whether he was simply too credulous about what his colleagues had and were saying.
In the course of doing research recently for another article, I came across this 1981 piece about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from John Yemma, a young writer who would rise to become the Christian Science Monitor’s editor from 2008 to 2014. The whole piece must be read to be believed: “’[Saddam] is an incredible politician. You should see him work a crowd,’ a diplomat stationed in Baghdad says. Are the ubiquitous posters a means of stroking a mighty ego? ‘No, he has a genuine following. It is the way Iraqis treat their leader. And to most of them, Saddam comes across like a charismatic older brother who happens to be President.’”
Yemma makes some acknowledgment of the terror Saddam imposed. “True, the Hussein posters remain unmolested and the newspapers totally supportive because dissidents and would-be opponents of the regime are quickly dealt with by the formidable Iraqi secret police.” However, he explained, “State brutality has existed in Iraq since well before the Baathist revolution in 1968,” and it may even be decreasing under Saddam. Not only that, but he also suggests that the brutality has been to the benefit of most Iraqis. “Baathist regimes have used brutality in an effort to centralize government control and to eliminate corruption. Iraqi officials do seem scrupulously honest; most are also afraid of making decisions, according to foreign businessmen, because they fear the consequences of a mistake.” He continues to laud Saddam’s economic stewardship.
Of course, the rest is history. It was logic such as was outlined here that greased the way for Donald Rumsfeld to go to Baghdad and meet Saddam as President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy. Perhaps it is unfair to criticize with 20/20 hindsight, but Yemma’s article came after Saddam was instrumental in crushing, in a particularly bloody manner, protests in 1977 and 1979, but he either was unaware of these despite their being in the public record, or he simply chose to ignore the bloody trail which marked Saddam’s rise and even the early period of his rule. Likewise, he fails to address Saddam’s role in launching a war of aggression against Iran — a conflict directly responsible for the deaths of up to 1 million Iranians and Iraqis — and only cursorily mentions the Iran-Iraq War when describing how critics suggested its pursuit led to a distraction which allowed Israel to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor.
This is not to castigate all journalists. Many journalists put themselves in harm’s way, and their role is invaluable. It is also a credit to journalists that so much of what they write is consumed by government policymakers who may not have the same access. But, these three cases — Duranty, Erlanger, and Yemma — do highlight what happens when correspondents eschew a basic responsibility to report who, what, where, and why and instead either parachute into foreign locations uninformed about local culture and history and either mirror image or rely only on a narrow cross section of contacts or, alternately, seek to “contextualize” events through an ideological lens. Either way, when considering the aftermath of Stalin, Khomeini, and Saddam’s rule, it is obvious that the cost of whitewashing dictatorship and promoting goodwill where none exists can be very costly indeed — not only in terms of truth but also human life.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
