When News Doesn’t Fit
This report from Rory O’Connor at Alternet offers a profoundly disturbing “what if” scenario. Judy Miller and Bill Keller—who have already made their mark on American media history—manage to dig an even deeper hole for themselves with the revelation that they missed the story of the century… and it it’s just one of those things.
… Keller, now executive editor of the paper, was managing editor in July 2001. But he was kept in the dark when Miller’s “impeccable” source first revealed details of highly classified signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an impending Al Qaeda attack, perhaps to be visited on the continental United States. The NSA had been listening in on a conversation between two members of Osama bin Laden’s terror network. One was overheard saying to the other, “Don’t worry, we’re planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.”
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Keller went on to note, “Obviously it would have been satisfying to have ‘predicted’ the 9/11 attacks — just as it was satisfying that we identified Al Qaeda as an important threat before 9/11, in the Pulitzer-winning series Judy heavily reported and Steve edited.”
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There were other complications as well. At the time Miller and Engelberg also had had a book coming out. “So we were working flat out on that book trying to meet our deadline,” she told us. “There was a lot going on. I was also doing biological weapons stories and homeland security stories. And in Washington, if you don’t have a sense of immediacy about something, and if you sense that there is bureaucratic resistance to a story, you tend to focus on areas of less resistance.”
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Then there’s the issue of leaks, when ‘papers of record’ like the Times are used as ammunition in Washington’s endless bureaucratic “turf wars” that seem endemic to its peculiar nexus of media, politics and power. Miller’s interview reveals much about how the game is played at the highest levels: “I got the sense that part of the reason that I was being told of what was going on was that the people in counter-terrorism were trying to get the word to the president or the senior officials through the press, because they were not able to get listened to themselves,” she explained. “Sometimes, you wonder about why people tell you things and why people … we always wonder why people leak things, but that’s a very common motivation in Washington.” …
This is one tiny facet of a massive, systemic security failure. But it catches the light and stands out among others. In the same way that the administration so assiduously put its attention on areas other than national security (Cheney on secret “energy” meetings, Rumsfeld on Star Wars, Rice on Russia, Bush on vacation), the newspaper of record was unable to take fairly straightforward language and prioritize it accurately.
Can every reporter, every editor and every paper catch ever urgent lead and translate it into a story? Of course not. But there was a far-reaching attitude among the highest levels of government and the media that their own interests trumped the (authentic) national interest. If 9/11 had really “changed everything,” it would have changed that first.
June 13, 2006 at 10:57 pm
“I got the sense that part of the reason that I was being told of what was going on was that the people in counter-terrorism were trying to get the word to the president or the senior officials through the press, because they were not able to get listened to themselves,”
Of course, a real journalist might have REPORTED that the president’s top counterterrorism officials were desperately trying to get him to pay attention to credible reports of a major threat — if not at the time she was doing those interviews, then after 9/11, or in the spring of 2003, when Richard Clarke’s credibility became a big issue.
But then, nobody with a brain ever confused Judy Miller with a real journalist.