Gray Ladies Down

The British government is now thinking the unthinkable, according to news reports: It is considering proposals to break up the BBC and revoke its hallowed independent status. This possible assault on one of the world’s leading news organizations is arising in the wake of an independent judicial inquiry’s condemnation of the Beeb’s shoddy news practices. Needless to say, such an independent analysis and investigation of a news organization is highly unusual; they, of course, are the ones who like to do the investigating. The startling conclusions of the judge, Lord Hutton, a retired lord of appeal (equivalent to a U.S. Supreme Court justice), also raise broader questions about the now widespread left-wing journalism that should be of interest to consumers of the leftist New York Times, as well as of other establishment news organs. For the events that precipitated the BBC investigation roughly coincided last spring with the Jayson Blair affair at the Times.

The Hutton inquiry’s publication three weeks ago plunged the BBC, perhaps the most prestigious news organization in the world, into the greatest crisis in its eighty-year history. The judge’s inquiry was requested by the Blair government last year amidst an uproar that began with a BBC report in May 2003 which challenged the government’s integrity over its justification for the Iraq war. The news story, broadcast by reporter Michael Gilligan on May 29, charged that the British government, in an intelligence dossier that was publicized to justify the war, had used information on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which it most likely knew to be false; the Gilligan radio broadcast also stated that the government had ordered the Joint Intelligence Committee to “sex up” the dossier to strengthen the case for war. An alleged source for the story, Dr. David Kelly, a top civil service expert on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, subsequently was found dead after his name was disclosed by government officials as the source of the story.

Much to the amazement of the chattering classes—and to the relief of Prime Minister Blair—Lord Hutton exonerated the government. Furthermore, he sharply condemned the BBC’s reporting methods and concluded its very serious allegations of government misconduct were “unfounded.” He further criticized the BBC’s “defective” editorial system that permitted a runaway reporter to make such wild allegations. And he concluded that poor Dr. Kelly most likely committed suicide. In response to the Hutton report, the BBC’s chairman of governors, as well as its director-general and the miscreant reporter, all resigned.

The false sexed-up dossier story represented the culmination of a long history of extreme bias at the BBC: anti-Tory Party bias, anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian prejudice, and more. Indeed, during the Iraq war, the crew of the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Ark Royal, steaming in the Persian Gulf, successfully demanded that the BBC reporter accompanying them be removed from the warship because of his anti-British “reporting.”

Both the BBC travesty and the Jayson Blair fiasco at the New York Times illustrated how the two leading news organizations are infected with the same self-righteous, arrogant attitudes that are endemic to extreme left-wingers. After all, they are so compassionate for the oppressed of the world and they do “care” so much for peace and justice, so why should they be constricted by traditional standards of accuracy, balance, and the hard work of seeking out the facts? Years ago, in 1980, I was enrolled in the basic first semester course at our country’s leading journalism school at Columbia University, many of whose graduates today fill high positions in their field. Even then, I was amazed by the same attitudes amongst the students that we witness today at the BBC, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, the three television networks, CNN, and many more. And when the self-righteousness and arrogance are combined with the superficiality and ignorance of substantive issues that is so characteristic of journalists, the effect on public debate is lethal. (I remember well when, after Ronald Reagan’s election that November, Anna Quindlen, then an adjunct faculty member, opined that his landslide was a reaction against the social progress of the Carter years!)

Unfortunately, the Jayson Blair affair is now largely forgotten and most readers of the Times still take seriously the proud proclamation that appears daily on the masthead of the august Gray Lady: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” If they read the Internet widely, they would not be so naïve, however. Jayson Blair was not an isolated problem but one that is endemic to the paper; this, and the other disgraceful practices and conduct listed below, are a product of the same traits that have ruined the BBC’s once proud reputation. Consider:

• On May 14, 2003, columnist Maureen Dowd took a quote from President Bush wildly out of context to make it appear he was a fool about al Qaeda. Following the bombings that had just taken place in Riyadh, she accused the President of “lulling triumphalism” based on his alleged statement on May 5, as she quotes him: “‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated . . . They’re not a problem anymore.’” In truth, what the President actually said, without Dowd’s ellipses, was: “Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore. And we’ll stay on the hunt. To make sure America is a secure country, the al Qaeda terrorists have got to understand it doesn’t matter how long it’s going to take, they will be brought to justice.” Dowd’s blatant misrepresentation hardly needs elaboration. Following a few stories that noted her misrepresentation, Dowd inserted the full quotation (minus the last two sentences) in her May 28 column, but without explanation. To this day, despite complaints to the Times by various parties, including newspapers that have stopped publishing her column, neither Dowd nor her editors have published an explicit correction. (Of course, the mere fact of publishing a regular column on weighty news events by a jejune gossip writer like Dowd itself demonstrates the precipitate decline of the Times and illustrates that dumbing down is not limited to the schools or popular culture.)

• Yet another misrepresentation occurred just before the start of the Iraq war, when the Times published a front-page story claiming that Dr. Henry Kissinger opposed the war, when anyone who had read his contemporaneous op-ed article in the Washington Post knew he supported the Bush policy. The Times front page in fact joined its editorial page as the cheerleader for the anti-war side: many readers will recall R. W. Apple’s news “analysis” article in the early days of the campaign predicting a “quagmire.”

• The paper’s vicious tendentiousness is not limited to Dowd. The economics columnist Paul Krugman has become so notorious for his problems with facts that he has spawned a Krugman Truth Squad column at National Review Online, which has accused him of lying. Krugman’s extreme one-sidedness is matched on cultural affairs by Frank Rich’s essays, which have fallen into true hysteria—for example, his defense of Janet Jackson as the victim of the depraved American public.

• Vigorous debate should be the rule on a newspaper’s opinion page and tendentiousness is not limited to the left—the Wall Street Journal editorials under the late Robert Bartley, for example, were quite one-sided, but they used facts honestly to support their conclusions and they did not evince the actual hatred that has infected these Times writers and is tolerated by the editors. Nor do Times editorials use facts honestly. A few months back, one editorial noted that the leading teachers’ union, the National Education Association, was lobbying in Congress to weaken the landmark 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. But this was the fault of the Bush administration, the editorial cried, because it was under-funding the new law (even though funding is much higher than under the previous administration). Facts as well as logic seem to fly out the window regularly from the editorial offices of the Gray Lady.

• One of the most absurd manifestations of the paper’s arrogant self-righteousness occurred a few years ago, when a Times story on the Midwood neighborhood in Brooklyn suggested that high crime levels were legitimate expressions of the local culture.

• Recently, in a story about a gang rape, the Times omitted the fact that the alleged rapists were illegal aliens. (Another illegal alien criminal was Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenage Beltway killer; we know this thanks to the usual hard work of columnist Michelle Malkin; her column, needless to say, is not published in the Times.)

• Last September, in a review of a new play based on letters of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Times critic Bruce Weber wrote that Trumbo was “a leading member of the Hollywood 10, a group of writers, producers, and directors who, after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington in 1947, were branded as Communist sympathizers and blacklisted by the studios.” He ended his notice: “The theater makes you hungry for the whole truth, no matter how eloquent one side of the story is.” Yet he failed to inform his readers that Trumbo and eight of the other “Ten” in “truth” were or had been card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA. And of course the Times did not bother to tell its readers about the recent scholarship of John E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr and others, based on declassified archives, including some from the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, that clearly demonstrate the U.S. party served as an agent of the Kremlin to destroy our government.

• The Times has waged a vitriolic attack on Mel Gibson and his new film, The Passion of the Christ. Thus, A. O. Scott’s review began contemptuously by referring to The Simpsons. The ever juvenile Ms. Dowd, in a column entitled “Stations of the Crass,” compared Gibson’s film to a Sergio Leone Italian Western, calling it “a spaghetti crucifixion” and “A Fistful of Nails.” An article by TV critic Alessandra Stanley began: “Anyone who cannot bear to wait one more day to hear Aramaic in a movie theater should be assuaged” by a new documentary about the film which she then predictably went on to dismiss. (In her preview of new TV shows last autumn, she could not hide her revulsion at the number of new shows that presented a positive view of religious faith.) Among the Times’s many, many critical articles, three by the paper’s culture guru Mr. Rich became increasingly hysterical in their denunciations, and a “news” article, by Sharon Waxman, apparently went out seeking Hollywood gossip for a story entitled “New Film May Harm Gibson’s Career.” The wish is father to the thought, as Jayson Blair “journalism” still thrives at what has become an anti-Christian, belligerently secular newspaper.

It is necessary to recite some of these details because journalists have an advantage over their readers: due to the daily nature of their writing, few readers remember what they have written the day before, much less the week, month, or year before. While the Times has lost some circulation in recent years, most readers, I believe, including some mainstream Republicans I know, don’t even think about the recent Jayson Blair fiasco and just lap up the paper every day, almost as a prayerful ritual. Just as many in Britain are dismissing the Hutton report as a pro-government whitewash. The ruthless “end justifies the means” mentality that has destroyed the honesty and credibility of the Times and the BBC, and which can be found throughout the establishment press, serves a far-left agenda that is hostile to the future of our country, Britain, and Western civilization itself. The Times and its brethren remain very influential among the mostly “non-ideological” voting public, and they should be discredited at every turn. Thank Heaven for the internet, cable, and talk radio.

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.