N.Y. Times’ latest misstep is also greatest

The controversy now surrounding the New York Times’ prewar coverage of Iraq is the most serious of the credibility crises that have afflicted America’s mainstream news media over the past two years.

In substance and implication, the Times’ admission this week that -- in the months leading up to the war -- it repeatedly published false and exaggerated stories concerning Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction far outstrips the significance of the Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley scandals.

After all, Blair’s exhaustively documented fraud and plagiarism spree for the New York Times -- though long and appalling -- ultimately came to little more than phony descriptions of rural landscapes and patio furniture. Even the stories he wrote while covering the Washington, D.C., sniper case were of no consequence. Kelley’s years of fraudulent self-aggrandizement, though prominent on the pages of USA Today, were too absurd ever to have been taken seriously by anyone outside the paper’s masthead. At the end of the day, both men were marginal journalistic figures whose misconduct resulted from editors’ failure to detect their personal pathologies.

The reports published in the Times between October 2001 and April 2003 are far more disturbing: Not only do they involve false information circulated as the country struggled to make up its mind about the war, but they involve highly regarded reporters and editors of unquestioned accomplishment operating by the rules at the very heart of the journalistic establishment. Moreover, many of those most deeply enmeshed in this failure -- particularly reporter Judith Miller and then-Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, now one of the Times’ two managing editors -- remain deeply involved in covering national security issues.

Miller, a distinguished and experienced Middle East hand who shared a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, wrote or cowrote four of the six dubious stories cited by the Times in an extraordinary editors’ note published Wednesday. The note of more than 1,000 words, which appeared on the bottom of Page 10, was novel in that it declined to name a single one of the reporters or editors who worked on the stories.

“In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.... The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature,” the note read in part. “They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq.” It went on to name Ahmad Chalabi as the source of Times articles going back to 1991 and admitted that he “has introduced Times reporters to other exiles.” As the editors also noted, Chalabi and his associates were “paid brokers” of information regarding weapons of mass destruction to the Bush administration whose officials, in turn, provided official confirmation to the Times reporters concerning the exiles’ stories.

The adjective “circular” somehow seems inadequate to describe this arrangement. “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources,” the Times’ editors wrote. “So did many news organizations -- in particular this one.

“Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”

When it comes to questions of timing, newspaper decisions sometimes are complex. For example, Bill Keller -- the New York Times’ executive editor, who, along with others at the paper, declined to be interviewed for this column -- told the Wall Street Journal that the editors’ note had been planned since April. This Sunday, the paper’s public editor, Daniel Okrent, will use his column to examine the affair, focusing -- Times sources say -- at least in part on Miller’s and Abramson’s performance.

Meanwhile, next week’s edition of New York magazine will contain a critical profile of Miller, while a piece on Chalabi in the New Yorker -- according to sources there -- will touch on the Iraqi’s relationship with the Times, which at one point employed his daughter. Meanwhile, the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books will contain another appraisal of the Times’ coverage by Michael Massing, former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, who has been the most formidable of the Times’ critics in this affair. In fact, the paper’s note singled him out by name.

Viewed in this context, the Times’ explanation looks like a leaky lifeboat launched in the teeth of a gathering storm.

Keller, for his part, isn’t tossing anybody over the side. In his interview with the Journal, he defended Miller as “a smart, relentless and unbelievably well-sourced and fearless reporter.” Her critics, he said, are purveyors of a “misinformed, venomous mythology that had grown up focused on the personality of one reporter.”

Strangely, while the Times was preparing its editors’ note, it failed to contact former executive editor Howell Raines, who was asked to resign in the wake of the Blair scandal. The note’s allusion to “rushing” stories into the paper was widely interpreted as a swipe at Raines, whose push to make the Times more competitive is blamed by the current management for an alleged breakdown in standards.

In an exchange of e-mails with this columnist Wednesday, Raines disparaged the editors’ note because it did “not give readers the facts, analysis and context they need about disputed stories.” He compared it unfavorably with the exhaustive and detailed report he pushed into print after Blair’s misconduct was discovered. Raines also wrote that “no editor did this kind of reckless rushing while I was executive editor. Any of the 30 or so people who sat in our front-page meetings during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and the first phase of the war can attest to the seriousness with which we took this story.”

Like Keller, Raines singled Miller’s reportage out for praise and went on to describe how the stories now in question were handled: “During my editorship, Ms. Miller also worked often in the Times’ Washington bureau. The bureau chief at that time, Jill Abramson, told me that she had a good rapport with Ms. Miller, who had a conflicted relationship with some colleagues. Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor, supervised a significant amount of Ms. Miller’s reporting and personally edited the resulting stories before they went into the paper. It seems to me unfair to single out Judy Miller, even in a blind reference, or to cite individual stories by other reporters without drawing aside the veil of anonymity around un-bylined editors who worked with them.”

Massing describes the Times’ note as “less than forthright” in his forthcoming New York Review piece, a copy of which the journal’s editor, Robert Silvers, provided the Los Angeles Times. The article is also critical of Iraqi coverage that has appeared elsewhere in the American press, including this newspaper.

In an interview this week, Massing said it is hard to know exactly what role the New York Times’ misleading reports on Hussein’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction may have had on public opinion leading up to the war. “It’s important to keep in mind,” he said, “the diminished power of the news media in America at that moment, when you had a popular president using every device at his disposal to take the country to war. In that environment, the media could only have a limited influence. But, in this instance, the New York Times became the president’s handmaiden. But not only did they fail to weigh the credibility of what they were reporting, but they amplified the administration’s position. They became cheerleaders and helped the administration.

“If you look at Judy Miller’s pieces,” Massing added, “she was actually promoting the defectors and claiming that the administration was not paying enough attention to the value of their information, thereby putting pressure on the administration. If the Times had been as skeptical as it should have been, we would have had a fuller and more vigorous debate.”