Transparency in News

The New York Times article talking up torture, cited here earlier, seems to be an example of the media's collusion with the interests of the administration. The mechanism for the coordination of news stories beneficial to the White House is completely opaque to the public, but is doubtless more subtle than a press release marked "Confidential" with instructions on what to say. The publication of Judith Miller's stories about Saddam's purported weapons of mess destruction helped sell the war in Iraq, but later turned out to be devoid of truth. Relying on anonymous sources of dubious merit, the public was misled, throwing the editorial judgment of the Times into question.

The appearance of the "everybody's thinking about torture" article(s), followed by the awful and momentous decision by the administration to redefine the meaning of "humane treatment" in the Geneva Conventions does not prove there is a connection between the two. However, I feel Occam himself would think it more probable that there was a connection than not, given that the appearance of such an article in the Times would certainly be noticed by administration players that had something to do with setting up torture on a "business-as-usual" basis. This is not a bolt-out-of-blue conspiracy theory; given the degree that administration officials had been able to cloud the Times' judgment with Judith Miller's handiwork it is as likely to have acceded to informal suggestions or pressure to talk up torture.

I have no proof of a back channel between the Times and the administration, so must be careful not to declare that this was so. I think, however, that since news coverage so mysteriously helped the war effort along and that this was a dreadful disservice to everyone involved, suspicions of any sort of collusion should be vigorously investigated.

Yet, who is to do this? Perhaps it is the job of a credible institution connected with news, such as the Columbia School of Journalism. Or, perhaps there should be a Fourth Estate Ethical Board, funded by members of the media, to act as a clearinghouse for the meta-information about news that is now utterly missing.

For instance, about six weeks ago, the Times had a few headlines about "Al Quaeda (in Iraq)" that raised a big question in my mind, namely: Where these stories simply rewritten press releases from the White House? The reason I thought so was that one of the most pernicious and false pieces of disinformation leading up to the war was that Al Quaeda was somehow allied with Saddam Hussain, an assertion based more on wishful thinking than evidence. So, why was the Times willing to sully it's "objective" stance and start plugging the administration line? My guess was that it was simply laziness or editorial inattention, and rewrites of press releases.

Although the Times fields questions of this sort through its Ombudsman, his arrangement is not very satisfactory, because there is no assurance that the Ombudsman will find your issue as pressing as someone else's, so many issues go unanswered. Rather, as I mentioned in the piece about quality assurance, the best way of assuring quality is to document every stage of a process in a form that can be reviewed. In retrospect, the correlation of stories that were gung-ho about going to war and "unnamed administration sources" might flag such stories as being just a form of propaganda.

At first thought, subjecting news outlets to an ISO 9000 regime might seem completely undoable and a violation of the independence of the press. Secondly, it might seem impossible to have a system for disclosing how the news was gathered in an environment of commercial entities in competition. I don't think that either of these objections would be insuperable: The real question is whether news sources can continue to work with self-defined checks on their own objectivity ("editorial judgment"). The egregious failure (or cooption?) of the press leading up to the Iraq war, when lies were repackaged as truths by a compliant media, means that news outlets should be held to task to document their news gathering efforts to help verify the truth of what is reported.