In a Slate article last week, author Diane McWhorter attempted to reclaim a taboo word that had never really been taken away from her or anyone else in these days of tempestuous political rhetoric: the ability to make Nazi analogies, or, as she put it, to “drop the N-bomb.” Not on the left or the right has there been any real reservation about drawing these mostly absurd parallels, not for quite some time now. Between neocons who debate just whether we are living in 1938 or 1939, and the loopy left painting Hitler moustaches onto President Bush’s face, nobody seems to be reticent about the N-bomb.
The argument McWhorter wants to make, however — that we should hear in the Bush administration’s voiding of habeas corpus for “enemy combatants” and attempt to legitimize torture echoes of how the Nazis consolidated power in their totalitarian state — is a bit more subtle than her over-the-top assertion at the outset. As part of this argument, she does make an interesting point about the press and the ways in which its ability to hold government accountable has been undermined in recent years.
“The Bush-era fourth estate has come up short not only against the Big Lie of ‘fair and balanced’ news,” McWhorter writes, “but also against its equally cunning cousin: the Small Inaccuracy used to repudiate the damaging larger truth. CBS crumbled under the administration’s mau-mauers over Memogate, while Newsweek managed to withstand the hazing it took for its Koran-in-the-toilet item — which, like the substance of Dan Rather’s offending report on Bush’s National Guard career, was not only accurate; it was old news…. Mistakes will be made in the proverbial first draft of history, and holding reporters to a standard of perfection would inhibit them from performing the vigilance crucial to our democratic system.”
We don’t take lightly the “Small Inaccuracy.” Credibility in journalism comes from getting those small things right. But McWhorter still has a point when she says that flogging journalists and news organizations with these small mistakes have helped make it difficult for them to be able to declare larger truths. It is also true that this politically motivated nitpicking has become a particularly favorite sport of the right side of the blogosphere.
A case in point is the recent flap over an AP article late last month that reported that Shiite militiamen in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah had “grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.”
Almost immediately, conservative bloggers like Flopping Aces and Michelle Malkin started questioning the existence of the story’s source, an Iraqi policeman named Captain Jamil Hussein. The U.S.-led force in Iraq then got on the case, denied the incident happened, and demanded a response from the AP. But the wire service issued a statement, saying that “The attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.”
The AP followed up on Wednesday with an article that rolled out multiple sources in the Baghdad neighborhood where it supposedly took place, offering further witness to the events. The story continued to percolate over the weekend and looks to continue on to this week, with the New York Times‘ Tom Zeller weighing in this morning, reprinting an email from Baghdad reporter Ed Wong, who said that “We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here…Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident.”
It is important to get to the truth here. But the point is that the bloggers and the U.S. Army, who reflexively denied the initial account, did so not because they were concerned with accuracy. They picked on it because they saw a chance to use a potentially false story — though it seems clear now that it might be true after all — as a way of throwing into question all the reporting from Iraq and, more specifically, undermining the characterization of the situation in the country as abysmal.
This is far from a Nazi tactic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of note. Journalism, like any human endeavor, is inherently flawed. Getting a story wrong — in a big way or a little way — is unacceptable and reporters should (and do) strive to get everything right. When they fail in this effort, it is not a sign of a conspiracy or an indication that the effort was in bad faith. It is just a mistake.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.