First up, Bill Keller:
Has anyone actually seen James O’Keefe and Julian Assange together? Are we quite sure that the right-wing prankster who brought down the leadership of National Public Radio and the anarchic leaker aren’t split personalities of the same guy — sent by fate to mess with the heads of mainstream journalists?
Sure, one shoots from the left, the other from the right. One deals in genuine (albeit purloined) secrets; the other in “Candid Camera” stunts, most recently posing as a potential donor and entrapping a foolish NPR executive into disclosing his scorn for Republicans and the Tea Party. Assange aims to enlist the media; O’Keefe aims to discredit us. But each, in his own guerrilla way, has sown his share of public doubt about whether the press can be trusted as an impartial bearer of news.
Good grief! Number one, James O'Keefe edited all his videos to take remarks out of context and provide misleading narratives. In spite of having done this with ACORN and with Shirley Sherrod, when he did it again with NPR, the corporate media uncritically passed it along. James O'Keefe is a fraud, but you've repeatedly picked the up the gun he set on the table and shot yourselves in the feet with it.
Number two, you're going to play the victim here and use the term "purloined" to disparage Wikileaks? Think way back. Back into time! Way back when the New York Times had some credibility and didn't uncritically pass along government press releases as the 'news'. Remember the Pentagon Papers?
The "purloined" Pentagon Papers?
Some years ago, a colleague tried to sum up the essentials that set us apart from agenda-driven journalists of the right and the left.
The first is that we believe in verification rather than assertion. We put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny. We put our faith in the expensive and sometimes perilous business of witness.
One side of our political spectrum has engaged in class warfare for three decades, and we're buried in debt, entangled in overseas quagmires, and have a society that's reaching levels of income inequality typical of a banana republic as a direct result. Yet the N.Y. Times is going to bring pretend that each side's statements have equal veracity as if every day is a blank slate, and present this as a virtue. Thanks for nothing, Bill. I'm sure it's a coincidence that the owner of the New York Times is a billionaire who inherited his empire, and thus is also a direct beneficiary of this class warfare. (The same is true for the Washington Post, which if anything has shed its reputation even faster than the Times.)
So there is a corollary to this first precept: when we get it wrong, we correct ourselves as quickly and forthrightly as possible. Connoisseurs of penitence find The Times a bottomless source of amusement. (An actual correction: “An article in The Times Magazine last Sunday about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each.”)
At the other end of the culpability scale, I’ve had a few occasions to write mea culpas after we let down our readers in more important ways — including for some reporting before the war in Iraq that should have dug deeper and been more skeptical about the supposed weapons of mass destruction
.
Oh, so cute. Sure the NYT eventually canned Judy Miller, but her partner in crime, Michael Gordon, is still there drawing paychecks. As
Glenn Greenwald has
documented extensively, you are still passing along government spin as God's truth. You have yet to explain why waterboarding is torture when other governments do it, but not when our own does.
This is why you've lost your credibility. You've squandered it yourselves.
Second, I see that Bob Herbert is leaving the New York Times. Why don't you
read his column, Bill, and think to yourself, "This is what we should be doing." Your job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. You've gotten it all backwards.
The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
P.S.
H/T to BDR for the Bill Keller link...I've grown accustomed to reading Pauk Krugman and Bob Herbert and nothing else there.
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