The right vs. the Times

This summer we saw the New York Times do some superb reporting on the growing debate over whether the U.S. should pre-emptively attack Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. While Bush and his administration tried to pretend that there was no debate and told the nation to “move along, move along, nothing happening here,” the Times accurately reported, in a series of front-page stories, that there were real divisions both among Bush’s close advisers and among the Republican old guard of foreign policy poobahs who’d advised his father.

Because of this reporting, the Times has come under fire from the right. Conservatives have argued that the Times is wearing an anti-war bias on its sleeve, and twisted the facts to support their case (see Josh Marshall’s careful debunking of the complaint that the Times inaccurately reported a Henry Kissinger position).

I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea, entrenched in the old Times culture, that reporters can become impersonal conduits for the news and completely screen their own biases from their coverage. Reporters are human beings; objectivity is a myth. For all I know the conservatives are right and Times executive editor Howell Raines really does feel that war with Iraq is a bad idea and has let that view shape his paper’s coverage. The Wall Street Journal wears its pro-markets philosophy on its sleeve; Fox News is the most biased major news organization in history; so what? Every news outfit has a tilt that’s shaped by the people who run it and the people who work at it.

The media form a vast ecosystem of information and ideas, and even an institution as powerful as the Times is only one stream. The value of any stream doesn’t lie in its putative freedom from bias but in whether it is contributing something important to the flow — some key piece of information, some perspective or some idea that would otherwise not surface.

What people are missing as they argue pointlessly over the “Is the Times biased?” trope is that the Times has played precisely the role it should — morally and constitutionally — in exposing the rift among Washington’s insiders. It ought to have been the Bush administration’s job, as it contemplates a new war, to spark a public debate, but Bush and his gang dropped the ball. Enter the free press. The echo here is of the Times’ publishing of the Pentagon Papers, its proudest moment, and another time when the right accused it of bias and of betraying the nation. Raines acknowledged this in a recent PBS interview: “As the Iraq debate plays out of a war, I’m hearing a lot of echoes of the early ’60s, when people were saying it was unpatriotic to report the debate over Vietnam… In this kind of reporting, one of the lessons of Vietnam is that it’s important to ask the questions at the front end of the war, not afterwards.”

War is grave business. In a democracy, we don’t and shouldn’t go to war without the people understanding why we’re doing it and what our goals are. If the government fails to set the stage for war, the press has not only a right but a stern duty to step in and ask difficult questions. It’s no surprise that those questions arouse consternation among the “invade first, ask questions later” crowd.