Where in the World?
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BOB GARFIELD: Since the end of the war in Iraq, a followup story that quickly grabbed headlines in the foreign press has only just now taken hold in the U.S. media, and now it is everywhere.
JAMIE McINTYRE: New U.S. search teams heading to Iraq this week will focus on finding people and documents to lead them to the banned weapons, but they say just because they haven't found weapons of mass destruction so far doesn't mean they're not there. After all, some might argue, they haven't found Saddam Hussein either and no one is suggesting that he wasn't really there before the war. Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.
BOB GARFIELD:Suddenly the still-missing weapons of mass destruction are the story of the hour. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report all have featured reports in this week's issues, and the drumbeat continues abroad with reports from London about the grilling of Prime Minister Tony Blair during question time and reports from Washington of congressional aides murmuring about heads rolling if the U.S. government is caught in a big, big lie.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Of course the media always knew it was a loose end, but there was no great eagerness to pull it too quickly, perhaps because it would unravel the main justification for the war. Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week, a compilation of news reports from here and around the world printed in the United States. Bill, welcome back to On the Media.
BILL FALK: Hi, Brooke. Glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And his counterpart in England is Jeremy O'Grady, editor in chief of the British edition of The Week, and he's on the line from London. Welcome to the show.
JEREMY O'GRADY: Thank you, Brooke. Very nice to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So where are the weapons of mass destruction? The story has been rolling along all week, but how soon, how early did the British journalists begin hammering away at this story?
JEREMY O'GRADY: There have been a lot of queries and suspicions, right from the beginning. In September Tony Blair published a intelligence dossier and much of this was discredited even at that time by journalists who pointed out that he had spliced into information received from the intelligence services a, a PhD thesis taken off the internet which was about 10 years out of date.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, Bill, let's contrast this then with American questions about the intelligence received by Colin Powell and used by Colin Powell in his famous United Nations justification for war. We heard this week in U.S. News & World Report that Colin Powell at the time called a lot of the information expletive-deleted. Can you sort of track the path of the press dealing with that information?
BILL FALK: I think before the war a small handful of commentators on the left in publications such as The Nation raised some doubts about the intelligence that was being presented, but 90 percent of the press here accepted those assertions at face value.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So then has the coverage suddenly changed? Do you detect a change of tone in the U.S. press?
BILL FALK:For the last 6 or 7 weeks there have been questions raised and the press has sort of tip-toed around the question, but now in the last week the tone has changed, and it's basically changed because the troops on the ground are saying quite definitively that we can't find any weapons, and we don't think there are any. General James Conway who is the top Marine commander in Iraq said we've basically searched every corner of the country, and that we were-- you know, we were simply wrong is what he said. So at that point-- the tip-toeing stopped and people basically seized on that, that statement. Also Don Rumsfeld said last week for the first time that well, perhaps there are no weapons because Saddam destroyed them before the war, which again, I think signaled you know some strong doubts within the administration itself! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JEREMY O'GRADY: Absolutely. And then we heard Paul Wolfowitz saying that the emphasis on MWDs was for bureaucratic reasons only, cause it was the one thing everyone could agree on. And I think that the real change came from officialdom first, consistent with the absence of evidence, and after the euphoria of victory had passed, suddenly officialdom started to sing a slightly different tune, and the press at least over here in Britain became rather enraged by this -- it's absolutely obsessing the press.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Is there something within the structure of the British press, Jeremy that seems to allow those risks, those loud driving questions to be asked right on the front page, rather than relegated to the op-ed section in the commentaries.
JEREMY O'GRADY: Yes, I think there's at least two things that are interestingly distinctive about the British press. One is the role of comment and commentary within news reporting which is much more overtly evident in the British case. There is that tradition of being much more overtly adversarial about things. The Times, for example, this week had a front page of its second section which just repeated the word "lies" over and over again -- Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies. This from a paper incidentally which was extremely supportive of Blair throughout the campaign. So I think that's one reason. The other is that there is a very traditional ding-dong between left-leaning and right-leaning papers which tends to up the ante quite a lot -- they do look at each other a lot of the time and take account of their arguments and, and throw them back. So there was always opportunity and incentive for people to quarrel over this.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill?
BILL FALK:I think that the American press feels constrained by the tradition of objectivity --it's an expectation that we have here of, of the mainstream media certainly and that any commentary be labeled as such and segregated from the pure news. Obviously you know the boundary lines of these things are somewhat blurry, and I think you know, you particularly saw this here in the, in the case of WMD where a lot of the reporting was based on suppositions and intelligence sources who themselves had an agenda. You had, you know, extraordinary circumstances where for example the New York Times was very dubious about the war, yet their sort of ace reporter on, on biochemical weapons, Judith Miller, was writing stories right after the, the fall of Baghdad that they were finding WMD and-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, and in fact later it suggested that she was writing them straight from the Pentagon handbook.
BILL FALK:Well it turns out that a memo of hers surfaced where she said her main source was Ahmed Chalabi -- the leader of the Iraqi National Congress who obviously had a huge incentive to convince the United States that it was in our best interest to remove Saddam.
JEREMY O'GRADY: I, I had -- I think I'll pull Bill up there if, if Bill will let me do that--
BILL FALK: Sure.
JEREMY O'GRADY: -- slightly on, on the grounds that I think to stress objectivity as a difference and then to go on to illustrate that by reference to the readiness to take the official line seems to me a bit of a contradiction. I don't think objectivity there really sounds like the right word. I mean--
BILL FALK: I think there's a need to be perceived as objective.
JEREMY O'GRADY: And does that need translate into echoing the official line?
BILL FALK: I think on occasion it does, and it certainly means challenging the official line in a--less assertive way on the news pages.
JEREMY O'GRADY: But I don't think it's objectivity [LAUGHS] versus commentary, though I think that distinction does exist within the press, but I don't think it's the relevant distinction here. I think it's much more reverence versus irreverence, in fact. I think there's a -there's an irreverent tradition here where there is much more likelihood that a journalist will not take the official line.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But let me ask you with regard specifically to weapons of mass destruction -- in the absence of facts, if American journalists want to raise questions it'll generally be the editorial writers. Those remarks will appear in a separate section of the newspaper. In the absence of facts, you're not likely to see in the American mainstream press "Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction?" presented as a front page story.
JEREMY O'GRADY: True enough, but there were quite a lot of facts which could have been uncovered with greater diligence, I suspect. Now what happened I think in the mainstream of reporting over here, and by all accounts your side of the pond as well, was that there wasn't much attempt to highlight the dubious nature of these facts which is not part of commentary but part of the reporting of facts as facts. What I perceive to be the difference is an attitude of mind towards the reporting of facts -- reverence versus irreverence.
BILL FALK: I have to agree with Jeremy on that. I actually do think there is more irreverence in the British press. There's a respect for the institution of the presidency here that is somewhat different than the way the prime minister is viewed in the UK, and that translates into the press coverage as well where I think challenging the president very directly is something the press is, is loathe to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well let's take on this issue of reverence, then, with regard to how the media regards itself. It's sometimes been said that the American press regards itself as a profession and the British press regards itself as a trade. Does that also translate in how their business is conducted? Jeremy?
JEREMY O'GRADY: I-- Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I don't know whether American journalists are routinely referred to as "hacks," but they certainly are here, and there is quite a healthy amount of -- although we can be as vain and anyone else -- I think there is quite a healthy bit of sort of self-loathing going on -- obviously not about one's self, but about one's fellows. [LAUGHTER] What I guess I'm trying to say is that I think we don't have such a tradition of highmindedness as you do, which has its drawbacks as well as its benefits.
BILL FALK: Here when you enter into the New York Times or the Washington Post, it's entering into a cathedral. Journalists -- particularly the commentators and the named journalists are the high priests of the profession, and we worship the truth, and there's this sense that in our country that the truth is a quantifiable, objective deity that you can put borders around and say well this is the truth and that's opinion. I notice that in, in Jeremy's magazine when they first carried a story about the Jayson Blair scandal at the Times, the, the concluding sentence of theirs was: And the New York Times prides itself on its accuracy. And it was said as if there were -- this was--were both remarkable and ridiculous. [LAUGHTER] And, and-- the, the idea in the UK that everything need to be factually correct is just really not taken very seriously.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oop! Jeremy?
JEREMY O'GRADY: Yes -- Bill, we're going to have a little word outside [LAUGHTER] afterwards. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I, I want to thank you both. Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week in the United States. Thank you very much, Bill.
BILL FALK: Thanks Brooke. It's been fun.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Jeremy O'Grady is the editor in chief of The Week in the UK. Thank you also, Jeremy.
JEREMY O'GRADY: Terrific. Thank you, Brooke. [THEME MUSIC] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan and Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe and Rob Christiansen, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Blake Carlton. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
JAMIE McINTYRE: New U.S. search teams heading to Iraq this week will focus on finding people and documents to lead them to the banned weapons, but they say just because they haven't found weapons of mass destruction so far doesn't mean they're not there. After all, some might argue, they haven't found Saddam Hussein either and no one is suggesting that he wasn't really there before the war. Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.
BOB GARFIELD:Suddenly the still-missing weapons of mass destruction are the story of the hour. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report all have featured reports in this week's issues, and the drumbeat continues abroad with reports from London about the grilling of Prime Minister Tony Blair during question time and reports from Washington of congressional aides murmuring about heads rolling if the U.S. government is caught in a big, big lie.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Of course the media always knew it was a loose end, but there was no great eagerness to pull it too quickly, perhaps because it would unravel the main justification for the war. Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week, a compilation of news reports from here and around the world printed in the United States. Bill, welcome back to On the Media.
BILL FALK: Hi, Brooke. Glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And his counterpart in England is Jeremy O'Grady, editor in chief of the British edition of The Week, and he's on the line from London. Welcome to the show.
JEREMY O'GRADY: Thank you, Brooke. Very nice to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So where are the weapons of mass destruction? The story has been rolling along all week, but how soon, how early did the British journalists begin hammering away at this story?
JEREMY O'GRADY: There have been a lot of queries and suspicions, right from the beginning. In September Tony Blair published a intelligence dossier and much of this was discredited even at that time by journalists who pointed out that he had spliced into information received from the intelligence services a, a PhD thesis taken off the internet which was about 10 years out of date.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, Bill, let's contrast this then with American questions about the intelligence received by Colin Powell and used by Colin Powell in his famous United Nations justification for war. We heard this week in U.S. News & World Report that Colin Powell at the time called a lot of the information expletive-deleted. Can you sort of track the path of the press dealing with that information?
BILL FALK: I think before the war a small handful of commentators on the left in publications such as The Nation raised some doubts about the intelligence that was being presented, but 90 percent of the press here accepted those assertions at face value.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So then has the coverage suddenly changed? Do you detect a change of tone in the U.S. press?
BILL FALK:For the last 6 or 7 weeks there have been questions raised and the press has sort of tip-toed around the question, but now in the last week the tone has changed, and it's basically changed because the troops on the ground are saying quite definitively that we can't find any weapons, and we don't think there are any. General James Conway who is the top Marine commander in Iraq said we've basically searched every corner of the country, and that we were-- you know, we were simply wrong is what he said. So at that point-- the tip-toeing stopped and people basically seized on that, that statement. Also Don Rumsfeld said last week for the first time that well, perhaps there are no weapons because Saddam destroyed them before the war, which again, I think signaled you know some strong doubts within the administration itself! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JEREMY O'GRADY: Absolutely. And then we heard Paul Wolfowitz saying that the emphasis on MWDs was for bureaucratic reasons only, cause it was the one thing everyone could agree on. And I think that the real change came from officialdom first, consistent with the absence of evidence, and after the euphoria of victory had passed, suddenly officialdom started to sing a slightly different tune, and the press at least over here in Britain became rather enraged by this -- it's absolutely obsessing the press.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Is there something within the structure of the British press, Jeremy that seems to allow those risks, those loud driving questions to be asked right on the front page, rather than relegated to the op-ed section in the commentaries.
JEREMY O'GRADY: Yes, I think there's at least two things that are interestingly distinctive about the British press. One is the role of comment and commentary within news reporting which is much more overtly evident in the British case. There is that tradition of being much more overtly adversarial about things. The Times, for example, this week had a front page of its second section which just repeated the word "lies" over and over again -- Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies. This from a paper incidentally which was extremely supportive of Blair throughout the campaign. So I think that's one reason. The other is that there is a very traditional ding-dong between left-leaning and right-leaning papers which tends to up the ante quite a lot -- they do look at each other a lot of the time and take account of their arguments and, and throw them back. So there was always opportunity and incentive for people to quarrel over this.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill?
BILL FALK:I think that the American press feels constrained by the tradition of objectivity --it's an expectation that we have here of, of the mainstream media certainly and that any commentary be labeled as such and segregated from the pure news. Obviously you know the boundary lines of these things are somewhat blurry, and I think you know, you particularly saw this here in the, in the case of WMD where a lot of the reporting was based on suppositions and intelligence sources who themselves had an agenda. You had, you know, extraordinary circumstances where for example the New York Times was very dubious about the war, yet their sort of ace reporter on, on biochemical weapons, Judith Miller, was writing stories right after the, the fall of Baghdad that they were finding WMD and-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, and in fact later it suggested that she was writing them straight from the Pentagon handbook.
BILL FALK:Well it turns out that a memo of hers surfaced where she said her main source was Ahmed Chalabi -- the leader of the Iraqi National Congress who obviously had a huge incentive to convince the United States that it was in our best interest to remove Saddam.
JEREMY O'GRADY: I, I had -- I think I'll pull Bill up there if, if Bill will let me do that--
BILL FALK: Sure.
JEREMY O'GRADY: -- slightly on, on the grounds that I think to stress objectivity as a difference and then to go on to illustrate that by reference to the readiness to take the official line seems to me a bit of a contradiction. I don't think objectivity there really sounds like the right word. I mean--
BILL FALK: I think there's a need to be perceived as objective.
JEREMY O'GRADY: And does that need translate into echoing the official line?
BILL FALK: I think on occasion it does, and it certainly means challenging the official line in a--less assertive way on the news pages.
JEREMY O'GRADY: But I don't think it's objectivity [LAUGHS] versus commentary, though I think that distinction does exist within the press, but I don't think it's the relevant distinction here. I think it's much more reverence versus irreverence, in fact. I think there's a -there's an irreverent tradition here where there is much more likelihood that a journalist will not take the official line.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But let me ask you with regard specifically to weapons of mass destruction -- in the absence of facts, if American journalists want to raise questions it'll generally be the editorial writers. Those remarks will appear in a separate section of the newspaper. In the absence of facts, you're not likely to see in the American mainstream press "Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction?" presented as a front page story.
JEREMY O'GRADY: True enough, but there were quite a lot of facts which could have been uncovered with greater diligence, I suspect. Now what happened I think in the mainstream of reporting over here, and by all accounts your side of the pond as well, was that there wasn't much attempt to highlight the dubious nature of these facts which is not part of commentary but part of the reporting of facts as facts. What I perceive to be the difference is an attitude of mind towards the reporting of facts -- reverence versus irreverence.
BILL FALK: I have to agree with Jeremy on that. I actually do think there is more irreverence in the British press. There's a respect for the institution of the presidency here that is somewhat different than the way the prime minister is viewed in the UK, and that translates into the press coverage as well where I think challenging the president very directly is something the press is, is loathe to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well let's take on this issue of reverence, then, with regard to how the media regards itself. It's sometimes been said that the American press regards itself as a profession and the British press regards itself as a trade. Does that also translate in how their business is conducted? Jeremy?
JEREMY O'GRADY: I-- Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I don't know whether American journalists are routinely referred to as "hacks," but they certainly are here, and there is quite a healthy amount of -- although we can be as vain and anyone else -- I think there is quite a healthy bit of sort of self-loathing going on -- obviously not about one's self, but about one's fellows. [LAUGHTER] What I guess I'm trying to say is that I think we don't have such a tradition of highmindedness as you do, which has its drawbacks as well as its benefits.
BILL FALK: Here when you enter into the New York Times or the Washington Post, it's entering into a cathedral. Journalists -- particularly the commentators and the named journalists are the high priests of the profession, and we worship the truth, and there's this sense that in our country that the truth is a quantifiable, objective deity that you can put borders around and say well this is the truth and that's opinion. I notice that in, in Jeremy's magazine when they first carried a story about the Jayson Blair scandal at the Times, the, the concluding sentence of theirs was: And the New York Times prides itself on its accuracy. And it was said as if there were -- this was--were both remarkable and ridiculous. [LAUGHTER] And, and-- the, the idea in the UK that everything need to be factually correct is just really not taken very seriously.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oop! Jeremy?
JEREMY O'GRADY: Yes -- Bill, we're going to have a little word outside [LAUGHTER] afterwards. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I, I want to thank you both. Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week in the United States. Thank you very much, Bill.
BILL FALK: Thanks Brooke. It's been fun.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Jeremy O'Grady is the editor in chief of The Week in the UK. Thank you also, Jeremy.
JEREMY O'GRADY: Terrific. Thank you, Brooke. [THEME MUSIC] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan and Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe and Rob Christiansen, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Blake Carlton. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
Produced by WNYC Studios