Yes, I watched the Moyers special and I’m not sure how much I have to add. It’s a depressing spectacle, but nothing about it was was especially surprising. The two darkest moments had to be Walter Isaacson telling Moyers that CNN’s coverage was monitored — and apparently influenced by — advertisers and the administration and poor little Peter Beinart, sputtering that he didn’t really, you know, research any of the opinions he wrote about so forcefully.
In holding the media to account for its complicity in the selling of the war, however, I think Moyers painted with a fairly broad brush, tarring White House correspondents, pundits, editors, producers and reporters with the same accusations without breaking down the Washington media food chain to see where actual individual responsibility lies. Because while there is a Washington media culture with its own pathologies and trends, it’s hard to change a culture, you start with getting individual people to examine their own actions.
I’d be interested to see if anyone’s done the kind of story-by-story, journalist-by-journalist analysis of who fell for what. Journalists should probably take a cue from Karen (and, I suppose, the NYT) and do this themselves. But we also need to think about what the responsibilities of individual journalists were — did everyone on the White House beat fail, or is it their job to do military reporting in addition to daily accounting of the president’s actions? Commenter (and WH correspondent, really, I checked) WH’ho makes a good point:
I think Moyers doesn’t focus enough on the overreliance on political reporters and White House reporters.
McClatchy’s coverage is instructive not because they talked to mid-level people (Pincus and Ricks and Aldinger and many others were doing that) but because they did not turn around and undermine their own efforts by then relying on their (very able) White House guy or (very able) State Dept guy for the key stories.
This was part of the reason that the Administration Line was so potent. As important as the WH position on something may be, we too often shirk the technical, policy side of a story. And readers suffer when we can tell them that Something polls well in Market X but don’t tell them that Something also happens to be based on discredited research. And that can happen more easily when we hand the story to the political person (that’s *not* a dig at Karen).
[snip]
I’m not sure that there is an obvious remedy to the pre-war problems. But could we at least try to return to a time when we put the technical stories in the hands of the “trained observers” (which is really what we are) who are the most expert, or have the clearest perspective? We seem to be going in exactly the opposite direction, closing down foreign bureaus, spreading talented reporters intolerably thin, etc. I’m not sure how to fix this, but I should point out that blogs do a decent job of referring readers to primary sources and experts and we should be able to do that too.
I’m sure you all have further thoughts and suggestions and I’m equally sure you’ll leave them in the comments. Have at it.
UPDATE: A commenter mentions the article that went down a list of pro-pundits and sorted out if their ultimately invalidated predictions on the war had an impact on their careers. It did. They prospered (and some of them now work at Time). That was on Radar (and we linked to it), and it’s here.
UPDATE: Another commenter asks about “a most thoughtful essay [in which] The author indicated that long ago, most journalists came from working- class families and so could easily identify with the struggles that working-class families have to go through to make it day-to-day,” and now they come white-collar families and identify with them. I think the commenter is referring to a line of argument made by Jim Fallows in his book “Breaking the News,” I couldn’t find an excerpt online, but this piece does talk about some related issues.
