February 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Independent" - The exposure of fake or
exaggerated tales of journalistic derring-do
by
Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC
Nightly News now suspended without pay,
will ignite a small glow of satisfaction in
the breasts of many foreign correspondents.
The arrival of anchors, editors or
“celebrity” correspondents in the middle of
a crisis, war, or at any other time, has
always been the bane of reporters on the
ground. I remember a friend on Time
magazine, in the days when it was a power in
the land 40 years ago, vainly trying to
explain to his bosses why he was having
difficulty arranging their fact-finding tour
of Kuwait in the middle of Ramadan.
Williams’s credibility first began to
disintegrate when he was challenged on his
claim that he had been in a Chinook
helicopter that was hit by a
rocket-propelled grenade in the Iraq War of
2003. In fact, the missile hit a Chinook
flying half an hour ahead of his own. But he
wasn’t the only journalist to be carried
away by the idea that his life was in
imminent danger at that time. I was then in
Irbil, the Kurdish capital, and used to
enjoy visiting a hotel called, so far as I
recall, the Irbil Tower. Fox News was based
on an upper floor of the hotel, the entrance
to which, opposite the lift, was protected
by a sandbag emplacement though not a shot
was fired in Irbil during the conflict. In
fact, the Fox team really was in some danger
– a nervous receptionist at the front desk
told me – because the weight of the sandbags
was such that it might lead to the collapse
of the shoddily built hotel.
Journalists very seldom lie about their
war exploits, because, among other reasons,
they are likely to be exposed by their
colleagues. Usually, there is no reason to
lie because almost any story can be given an
appearance of truthfulness by judicious
selection of the facts. My father, Claud
Cockburn, an author and journalist, got into
trouble for attacking what he called “the
heresy of the facts”, making the point that
there are not a finite number of facts lying
around like nuggets of gold ore in the Yukon
until they are picked up by some
journalistic prospector. He argued that, on
the contrary, there are an infinite number
of facts and it is the judgement of the
journalist that decides which are
significant or insignificant. He explained
that, in a sense, all stories are written
backwards, beginning with the writer’s
“take” on what matters and only then
proceeding to a search for facts that he or
she judges to be important. All this seemed
to my father to be a matter of common sense,
and he was taken aback to be criticised for
confusing decent truth-loving reporters with
black-hearted propagandists who make up
stories.
Of course, some stories are faked, such
as the one in 1990 about babies in a Kuwait
hospital being tipped out of incubators by
invading Iraqi soldiers and left to die on
the floor. But a good propagandist or even a
journalist looking for a good story does not
have to fabricate; a selective approach to
the facts is all that is needed. I remember
going to Libya in the early 1990s when there
was some prospect of a US invasion.
Absolutely nothing was happening and the
scores of journalists who had arrived on the
same mission as myself waited impatiently
until they could go home.
Instead, we all got irritated calls from
our offices one morning saying that a
well-known paper had an article reporting,
to the effect that, “Libya girds itself for
war”. The author cited sandbags outside
government ministries and diplomats
reporting tank traps being dug at the top of
beaches. Editors asked why we had missed the
story reported by our intrepid colleague.
True enough, there were sandbags but they
had been there for months. I went with a
friend from the LA Times to the
Justice Ministry and a couple of dozy guards
waved us through. Inside, we found nobody
apart from a gardener who said the minister
was asleep at home and offered us his
address.
The “tank trap” element of the story was
more difficult to deflate. The Libyan coast
is 1,100 miles long. We went to see a senior
Italian diplomat with a reputation for being
highly informed who poured scorn on the idea
of Libya preparing for war. But he then
admitted, with some embarrassment, that he
himself might have been the source of the
tale about beach-top fortifications being
under construction. He explained that the
journalist, whose article had caused the
fuss, had come to see him and asked about
Libyan fortifications. The diplomat had
responded that he had just been to the beach
with his children and they had seen some
bulldozers working there. “Perhaps they were
digging tank traps,” he had joked.
What is striking about the Brian Williams
debacle, and the exposure of other
self-regarding tales for which the media
occasionally berate themselves, is their
triviality. Television, newspapers and radio
seldom indulge in truly damaging
self-criticism over false stories that
precipitated unjust wars or get a lot of
people killed. The New York Times
published numerous pieces before and after
the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 falsely
claiming proof that Saddam Hussein possessed
or was building weapons of mass destruction.
The New Yorker ran a false but highly
influential story based on the evidence of a
gunman who was prisoner of the Kurds
claiming that Iraqi officials were working
with al-Qaeda militants.
The reasons why media confessions of
culpability tend to focus on minor sins is
obvious. Persistent self-laceration over
serious crimes of misreporting would cause
real damage to a publication’s or television
channel’s credibility while a deftly handled
apology may enhance it. Thus The New
York Times devoted two pages to a blow
by blow account of plagiarism and
misreporting by Jayson Blair in 2003 that
damaged nobody, but it was May 2004 before
The New York Times’ editors’ critique of
their paper’s WMD coverage appeared – and
was buried on page 10. It is worth
re-reading The New York Times’s
public editor’s acerbic comment on the
affair saying that some “stories pushed
Pentagon assertions so aggressively you
could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the
shoulders of the editors”. Glad that doesn’t
happen any more.
The same public editor rightly typifies
anonymous sources as “a licence granted to
liars” but does not explain why there is
such uncritical reliance on such sources: it
is simply that journalists are not very well
equipped to find out the truth. In movies
bad people blub and confess their sins or
admit to crimes that might land them in
jail. In reality, wrongdoers have too much
sense to do anything of the sort. Successful
investigation without legal powers is
extraordinarily difficult. Hence the
reliance on officially inspired “leaks”.
Brian Williams’s vainglorious boasting looks
likes destroying his career, but those who
purvey the most destructive lies in the
media will seldom be identified or punished.