|
|
VOICES
Parallel Universe at the Times
WMDs
in Iraq? It depends on whose story you read
By
Liza Featherstone
For much of the spring,
The New York Times seemed to inhabit parallel universes on the
matter of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, possibly the most
important factual question of the year. In nearly a dozen stories
by the senior writer Judith Miller, such weapons were just about
to be found or had recently been destroyed. Yet Times editorials
and stories on the subject by other reporters were careful not
to suggest any such thing. Reached by e-mail as she was on deadline
— writing another story about weapons of mass destruction
— Miller indignantly disputed such a description of her work.
“Have you bothered to read what I filed?” she asked.
Well, yes. The file shows that every few days from late April
through May, any Times reader interested in the WMD issue might
be puzzled. For example:
-
On April 21, Miller wrote a page-one piece about
an “Iraqi scientist” who, according to her military
sources, said that Saddam Hussein’s government had destroyed
biological and chemical weapons days before the war began. She
had not been allowed to speak to him but was “permitted
to see him from a distance,” she wrote, as he pointed to
spots in the sand where he said “chemical precursors and
other weapons” material were buried. The story said that
the American team claimed to have dug up such precursors based
on the scientist’s information, which members described
as “the most important discovery to date” in the hunt
for WMDs. Two days later, the Times editorial page, with no
mention of Miller’s findings, declared it “no small
matter” that no weapons had “yet been found.”
-
On May 8, Miller quoted anonymous Bush administration
officials as suggesting strongly that a tractor-trailer truck
in Iraq had to be a biological weapons lab: “If it walks
like a duck and quacks like a duck, it has to be a duck,”
one said. The thrust of the story was that the lab was indeed
a duck — a weapons lab. Three days later, William J. Broad,
a science writer for the Times, reported that WMDs had not “yet
come to light.” No mention of the Miller scoop.
-
Miller reported, on May 11, trailer is a mobile
lab capable of turning out bioweapons, a team says, with one
source calling the finding a “smoking gun” in the
weapons search. Two days later, a Times editorial acknowledged
the government claim and thus, implicitly, Miller’s reporting,
but concluded that “the search for the large stocks of
chemical and biological weapons . . . has yet to turn up anything
significant.” The implication: Miller’s scoop was
not “significant.”
It became difficult for a reader to avoid concluding that the
WMDs-in-Iraq issue had divided not only the United Nations but
the Times. Indeed, a Times reporter who has worked in the region
and who has asked not to be identified confirmed that people in
the Iraq bureau were frustrated with Miller’s stories because
she seemed to keep coming to “the same conclusions”
even when there seemed to be “no evidence for them.”
Miller, the reporter explained, reported not to the bureau, but
to editors in New York. Meanwhile, according to a network TV journalist
who covered the recent storm inside the Times, reporters who met
with publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. specifically complained
to him about Miller’s WMD coverage. And the Washington Post’s
media reporter, Howard Kurtz, revealed — via a leaked e-mail
exchange between Miller and the Times’s Baghdad bureau chief,
John Burns — that Miller, by her own admission, relied on
Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial former exile, for “most of
the front-page exclusives on WMD.” Burns declined to comment
for this story.
Assistant managing editor Andrew Rosenthal argues that “there
is no contradiction” between Miller’s reporting and
the rest of the paper. Miller had been “embedded” with
a U.S. weapons inspection team, he says, and was reporting on
what members of that team were saying, not presenting their claims
as fact. “When she was no longer embedded, she was able to
develop different sources,” says Rosenthal. (By late May,
two stories that were more skeptical about WMDs in Iraq appeared
under Miller’s byline, along with that of Broad.) Embedding,
Rosenthal says, is a tradeoff.
Indeed. On May 20, Miller gave the commencement speech at Barnard
College, her alma mater. She urged the graduates to be skeptical
about the given reasons for the war on Iraq, and particularly
of government claims about WMDs. About embedding, she said that
journalists “need to draw conclusions about whether journalistic
objectivity was compromised . . . whether the country’s interests
were best served by this arrangement.”
|
|
|
