Silence of the Lambs
Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart opened with a monologue about the assassination of a judge in Iraq on Tuesday. Apparently, NBC News’s new anchor, Brian Williams, reported in an “exclusive” that the assassinated judge was the man presiding over the tribunal for Saddam Hussein. Turns out, not so much. The judge who was murdered was actually involved in other war crimes cases, but not Saddam’s. Saddam's judge, a fairly controversial figure in Iraq these days, remains alive. As Stewart said, “an honest mistake – no harm, no foul, right?”
But, as it turns out, and Stewart painfully demonstrated, there was a foul. In its coverage, NBC showed footage of Saddam's judge – presumed dead, of course – that disclosed his identity and appearance, which had been kept hidden even during the public phases of the proceedings. Now, as Stewart pointed out, anyone who was watching the NBC Evening News with Brian Williams last night now knows who is sitting in judgment of Saddam Hussein.
This seems to be a rather significant development. In a year that has seen the resignation of Dan Rather over the inability to verify documents that stated facts everyone already knew about George Bush’s evasion of duty in the Texas Air National Guard 30 years ago, and unprecedented levels of hostility and suspicion against the “mainstream media” (I refuse to use the winger acronym) from both sides of the political spectrum, you might imagine that a blunder that puts at risk the stability of the Iraqi government, the legitimacy of the new Iraqi justice system, American policy, and the lives of the judge and all the American and Iraqi troops who have to guard him, might generate a response bigger than a few minutes at the top of the Daily Show.
You might think.
This morning, thinking that perhaps I had misheard or misunderstood the Daily Show segment in the groggy fog of pre-sleep, I Googled several variations of “NBC Iraq Judge Assassination” and found one – one! – story on this, in the New York Post, of all places. Entertainment section. Here’s the deal, according to the Post:
NBC News blamed American officials for a flubbed report Tuesday night claiming the chief judge overseeing the trial of Saddam Hussein had been assassinated by Iraqi gunmen.
"It's very straightforward," an NBC News spokeswoman says. "We got the information from multiple, high-level sources who confirmed the story's accuracy.
"It was wrong, and we corrected it immediately."
This is the “no harm, no foul” spin. We were mislead, we put the story on before we knew the facts (something that no other news organization did, by the way), we realized we goofed and we corrected it. What’s the problem?
Yes, everyone makes mistakes. Dan Rather and his producers made a mistake of the same sort, rushing onto the air without dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s, and now they're walking the streets in sackcloth and ashes, gleefully administered by the great patriots and guardians of our national discourse over at Powerline.
But Rather’s haste and poor judgment didn’t put anyone’s life at risk – only the precious political career of our Supreme Leader. Rather had also been a longtime target of the Right, the living, breathing, Texas-twanging, homespun embodiment of the lib’rul media. There was means, motive and opportunity behind “Rathergate.”
Brian Williams is another matter. The career pretty-boy newsreader, recently outed in a White House strategy document as a soft target for Administration spin, isn’t half the journalist or weighty presence of a Dan Rather. He even squirms uncomfortably in the chair of his modest predecessor Tom Brokaw. While hardcore wingers could probably trot out a litany of Williams’ sins against doctrine, he has made his career on being innocuous and shallow, substituting a knowing arrogance for the earned authority we expect of our anchormen: basically, a kind of nondenominational embodiment of all that is harmless – and worthless – about the current broadcast news media.
Because NBC’s goof was clearly a matter of failing to do proper legwork and unseemly haste to get the story on the air, there’s no partisan bloodlust at work on either side, despite the potential harm that such a grievous error could have. Unless that Iraqi judge and his entourage of US bodyguards get blown up sometime in the next news cycle and the act traced back to NBC’s error, Williams and his producers will probably keep their jobs.
The American press is an institution in crisis right now, but its most visible critics do it and themselves a disservice by focusing on narrow issues of slant and balance. The problems go far deeper than that. Competition for ratings, the conflicts of interest generated by consolidation and corporate ownership, the systematic ratcheting-down of public discourse (driven as much by problems with the audience as with the media), and declining standards of rigor, ethics and competence among high-profile journalists are all driving down the quality and reliability of news.
Yesterday in Salon, Eric Boehlert wrote a pretty good piece about the damage this does to a democracy the depends on facts to inform the political decisions of citizens. Without reliable facts, political discussions are built on air and fantasy. That, of course, is exactly how some people prefer it, but that’s not the issue here. Whatever deliberate attempts are being made to subvert the legitimacy of the media, the industry itself seems to be doing a pretty good job of delegitimizing itself all on its own.
As the deafening silence surrounding Williams and NBC suggest, there is no constituency for media competence and accountability unless there is also the motivating subtext of partisan advantage. The mere potential of policy disaster and loss of life due to a systemic failure by a major media organ is of no importance.
And that’s the way it is, March 3, 2005
8:53:10 AM 
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