Last week, Slate media critic (and occasional Campaign Desk sparring partner) Jack Shafer penned an excellent piece describing how “60 Minutes” gritted its teeth and worked up the nerve to do what The New York Times and Vanity Fair have not: Namely, admit that it got spun, and spun badly, by bogus information concocted by Iraqi defectors in the run-up to the U.S. invasion.
On March 7, a chastened “60 Minutes” reinterviewed Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, and asked if he and another source had “spun” the program in a March 3, 2002 segment, prompting a weak denial from Chalabi. The show’s Leslie Stahl then flat-out confessed to viewers that she and her editors had been had by Chalabi and Co.
Shafer also points out that the same fictions and fantasies were also presented as truth in an March 2002 article in Vanity Fair, and that, in hindsight, it’s painfully clear that The New York Times (among many others) treated the same information far too credulously at the time. Yet to this day, neither publication has ever corrected the record as “60 Minutes” has.
But it was Shafer’s update, posted Tuesday night, that piqued our interest and sent our hats a-tipping. Shafer points out this astonishing mea culpa from an “Editor’s Letter” by Graydon Carter in the current issue of Vanity Fair, fresh off the presses:
…Chalabi, it turns out, had basically duped the White House, the Pentagon, The New York Times and Vanity Fair with his Scheherazade-like tales of Baghdad’s nuclear program and biological-weapons factories. It should be pointed out, however, that unlike the White House and the Pentagon, the Times and Vanity Fair did not use Chalabi’s information to take the American people into an unwanted and unnecessary invasion of Iraq, a decision that has cost more than 550 U.S. lives and $100 billion as of early 2004, not to mention our country’s good reputation with the rest of the world.
On a scale ranging from one for lame to 100 for convincing, Campaign Desk gives that apology, oh, maybe a two.
The New York Times Company and Conde Nast might not have cruise missiles, but that’s hardly an excuse (as Shafer rightly points out) for swallowing bum information hook, line and sinker, and then failing to correct yourself or, worse, giving yourself a free pass because at least you didn’t start a war.
–Bryan Keefer
Update, 4/16, 3:30 pm.m.: An alert reader points out that Shafer was beaten to the punch on Vanity Fair‘s comments by Elizabeth Spiers on her New York Magazine weblog (Shafer does cite Spiers in his piece).
Bryan Keefer was CJR Daily’s deputy managing editor.