Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: Now cast your mind back to Monday - the New York Times page one below the fold - arguably one of the most important stories of the war. Veteran Times reporter Judith Miller breaks the story that the U.S. military unit with which she is embedded, the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, is talking to one of Saddam's chemical weapons scientists. According to Miller, he says that many of Iraq's chemical weapons were destroyed just before the war; that some were moved to Syria and that some were hidden so as to be virtually undetectable.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Who is this scientist? What types of chemicals were destroyed? Miller can't say because-- quote "under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha this reporters was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials." The journalistic community was stunned. How could the paper of record run a story with uncertain sources and content possibly censored? Joining me now is Jack Shafer who writes the pressbox column for slate.com. Jack, welcome back to the show.
JACK SHAFER: Happy to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So when you read that paragraph about all of the constraints on her reporting, what did you think?
JACK SHAFER: I thought that it was perhaps the most unusual reporting to come out of the war. Judith Miller made an unprecedented and, and completely off-the-reservation deal with the military to report her story, but when you poke her story and look at it, you find that it's gas, it's air. There's no way to judge the value of her information, because it comes from an unnamed source that won't let her verify any aspect of it. And if you dig into the story and read the story closely, you'll find out that the only thing that Miller has independently observed is a man that the military says is the scientist, wearing a baseball cap, pointing at mounds in the dirt.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Wouldn't you say, though, that a lot of stories are reported on faith that the sources are accurate -- I mean Watergate is often cited as a case where the sources were never known.
JACK SHAFER: But at the same time Woodward and Bernstein are triangulating the findings. Very rarely are they going with just one person's account of what happened. Most publications prefer to have two sources of information to verify that the facts that they're being given by their confidential source are true. And what's unusual about this story is that Miller's only source seems to be a military group and then her story was reviewed and essentially censored by the military. What's very peculiar about that is that the embedded program -- add up the pluses or minuses on, on another segment of On the Media -- one thing that you can say strongly for the embedded system is that it doesn't require pre-publication review of any copy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.
JACK SHAFER: How and why Miller and the New York Times agreed to allow the military to censor their report is very, very curious to me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Frequently newspapers have had to consult with national security apparatuses of the U.S. government before it prints things to make sure that they aren't compromising national security. This is a process that takes place. Do you think that Judy Miller's process was any different?
JACK SHAFER: Yes, that process is very different. Ben Bradlee wrote about this in 1986. He was the executive editor of the Washington Post at the time, and he says that newspapers frequently consult with the government about sensitive stories and withhold information for national security reasons. But it's up to them to decide whether they are going to go with a story or not go with a story. It's very different with Miller. We don't know the full terms of her agreements with the military. I don't know whether they were elective or not, whether she could say you don't want me to run this particular bit of business about the story; I do - I'm going to run it anyway, which would be the Ben Bradlee position -- or whether she agreed to allow the military to say what could and could not be in her story.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now in all fairness, Miller did disclose the limitations of her sources and, and the way that she could work, so the reader was duly warned. Is there something really wrong with cutting a deal to get a story if you reveal the terms of that deal to the readers?
JACK SHAFER: Let's give her credit for revealing her pact with Satan, [LAUGHTER] but at the same time let's, let's acknowledge now that she had created a sort of precedent. Other government sources will say "Well, Judith Miller in the New York Times allowed me to review my very sensitive findings that I'm sharing with you. We want that same deal." You know the, the New York Times is considered the, the paper of record and-- one that reports without fear or favor. This isn't exactly fear or favor, but it, it seems to be -- I don't know -- weak-kneed behavior to allow this kind of sourcing to get into their newspaper.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Frequently we've noticed that when stories are sourced so sketchily, they've been leaked for a reason. They're serving a purpose. It just occurs to me that -- given that everybody is waiting for these weapons of mass destruction to be found -- if there were some credible reason why they couldn't be -- because they had been either moved to Syria or the component parts divided in such a way that they aren't detectable as chemical weapons or the actual weapons themselves were destroyed just before the war -- any of those would help preserve one of the major motivations for fighting this war--
JACK SHAFER: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- even though there's no credible evidence to support it.
JACK SHAFER: What we see in Miller's reporting is a reflection of the government position. I sort of think that she's carrying the government's message. At the beginning, the United States was in a search for weapons of mass destruction. Unable so far to find weapons of mass destruction, Miller is writing about how they're sort of down-sizing the mission to finding the precursor elements -- the equipment, the chemical precursor elements to making these compounds. In her story on Wednesday, she's down-sizing it even more, saying well we probably won't find the weapons. Our sources tell us we won't find the precursors. Now what we're searching for are people. I think it raises a red flag when a reporter's findings completely parallel the message that the government is trying to advance, and that's another reason to be suspicious about the Miller stories.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Thanks a lot!
JACK SHAFER: Any time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer writes the pressbox column for slate.com.