Journalistic Intelligence Failure

In the middle 1980’s I headed the policy shop at a tiny federal agency dealing with pension law. Our activities were of interest to a few trade publications, one of which carried what I called a “gossip column”, in which it related tidbits, picked up from unidentified persons, about what pension regulators were going to do next. Every month, on the average, one or two items concerned matters about which I had direct, personal knowledge: what positions my agency had formulated on controversial issues, how far work had progressed on particular regulations or what new guidance would appear in the near future. In every single instance, the column’s “inside information” was wrong. I don’t know whether its writers were misled by their sources, misunderstood them or turned their own guesses into “news”, but this experience left me with a skeptical attitude toward press reports based on statements by nameless individuals.

Most consumers of news obviously don’t share my incredulity. If they did, there would be no market for the anonymously told tales that make up a large share of each day’s coverage of important national events. Everyone realizes, in a vague way, that people who make statements off the record could be lying or misinformed, or that the reporters who filter their words might misconstrue them, yet there remains an inclination to believe the written word. For instance,

In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information [of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal] was unequivocally wrong and that the documents [purporting to show such a deal] had been forged.

That passage appeared in Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column on May 6, 2003. Its unsourced assertions are no more spectacular than many others that one sees in newspapers or hears on television every day. It is only because the source soon afterward went public and turned the matter into a cause célèbre that we now know that “someone present at the meetings” and the “envoy” were the same individual, ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, and that his statements to Mr. Kristof were bold-faced lies: His report to the CIA and the State Department did not show “that the information was unequivocally wrong”; it confirmed that Iraq had, at the very least, sought a deal. Nor did it demonstrate “that the documents had been forged”; neither the envoy nor anyone else in the U.S. government had at that time seen the documents.

This kerfuffle is now very familiar to the blogosphere, but I recommend Matthew Continetti’s “‘A Little Literary Flair’” as further reading, for it analyzes the uncritical way in which Ambassador Wilson’s deceptions were accepted by the media. The whole affair is, in fact, more instructive as a case study in journalists’ credulity than for its bearing on one of the tertiary questions in the controversy about whether it was a good idea to rid the world of Saddam Hussein.

If Joe Wilson, a rather comical figure whose State Department career progressed from supervising the logistics of diplomatic receptions to heading embassies in Third World backwaters to early retirement, could successfully deceive A-list scribes like Nicholas Kristof and Walter Pincus, how much confidence ought readers to have in any report founded on the assertions of unknown parties? Yet, curiously, the general, unconscious tendency is to treat those accounts as more reliable than on-the-record testimony.

This nearly universal credulity – now that I pause to think, I realize that I suffer from it myself – has strange feedback effects. To take another aspect of the Wilson affair: Robert Novak cited unnamed sources for his report that Wilson’s wife, a CIA employee, had recommended that he be sent to Niger to investigate Iraq’s alleged uranium-buying efforts. Why didn’t he tell us which “Administration officials” told him that? At the time he did not know that disclosing the wife’s employment might be illegal. (He isn’t a lawyer, and the CIA had itself both confirmed that she worked for it and failed to warn about possible legal risks in saying so.) The reason for keeping the officials’ names secret was, pretty clearly, to make their claim more believable. Were their identities known, readers would consider whether they really had access to internal CIA deliberations or had political motives for shading the facts. The lack of names somehow leads most of us to bypass that level of critical judgement.

As it happens, Novak’s sources were truthful and accurate, as some anonymous tattletales are bound to be. (My personal experience is surely atypical.) But if reporters simply pulled “facts” out of their heads, some would inevitably correspond to reality. Would we then base our view of the world on such fictions?

Large elements of what most of us believe about a variety of urgent public questions, from the origins of the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the extent of terrorist recruitment, rests ultimately on sources that may be no more honest than Joe Wilson. That is a “journalistic intelligence failure” of major dimensions with potentially dire consequences. I have no idea how to grapple with it, but continuing to minimize or ignore it endangers us all.