BAD JOURNALISM KILLS PEOPLE

Second Amendment enthusiasts often deploy a slogan to battle the Sarah Brady gun grabbers of the world: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. The slogan is obviously right, since guns are unthinking inanimate objects while people can have the will and motive to take almost any unthinking inanimate object, whether it’s a gun or a rope or a wad of silly putty, and think of ways to use that object in the service of murder. The slogan says as much about guns as it says about the people who use guns and whatever else is at hand to kill other people.

I’m going to steal that slogan and use it for a new campaign against bad journalism. The new slogan is simple: Bad journalism kills people. Like the pro-gun version, this new twist has the benefit of being undeniably true.

Let’s start with relatively ancient history and work our way forward to the present. A little over 70 years ago the New York Times sent a reporter by the name of Walter Duranty to the Soviet Union. This was in the 1930s during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Stalin was at the time working on one of his first major crimes against humanity, intentionally and systematically starving the people of the Ukraine. The year before, Duranty had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor, for his reporting on the Soviets’ execution of their Five Year Plan. In 1933, Duranty failed to report on the Soviets’ execution of somewhere between four and ten million Ukranians by starving them to death.

It’s not like Duranty didn’t know about it, either. He was there, and had traveled to the Ukraine twice during Stalin’s intentional famine. He had even appeared at the British Embassy where he told of the deaths of ten million. Yet to his faithful Times readers, Duranty never hinted that he had witnessed a genocide. In his Times dispatches he had called descriptions of such a genocide “sheer absurdity.” But in person he said that the Ukraine “had been bled white.” His readers wouldn’t know of Stalin’s brutality for many years, and his fabulism undoubtedly shaped political opinion of Stalin and the USSR back in the United States.

Fast forward a few decades and we land in Hanoi, North Vietnam, 1965. Another Times man, Harrison Salisbury, was on the scene. During the spring of 1965 the United States was trying to find a way to end the escalating war that had by that time already been underway for several bloody years. So on March 5 President Johnson authorized the Air Force and Navy to cripple the North Vietnamese economy and war machine through a massive bombing campaign cheerily dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder. A couple of related campaigns were aimed at cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, North Vietnam’s main supply route to its allies in the South via Laos. So Rolling Thunder rolled into action, systematically striking at military and industrial targets concentrated around Hanoi and elsewhere in the North. Rolling Thunder’s targets were military and industrial, but mostly military, in nature.

Civilians always die in war. Rolling Thunder took place in the days before smart weapons and Special Forces painting targets with lasers. Bombs back then were very, very dumb, but Rolling Thunder wasn’t. And it was working; the British charge d’affairs in Hanoi at the time later reported that the campaign halted just as North Vietnam’s economy was on the verge of total collapse by 1967, the same year the Johnson administration halted it. Had Rolling Thunder continued much longer, the United States probably would have won the war.

So why did LBJ pull his best punch just when it was about to bring victory? Because in the summer of 1966 Salisbury had written dispatches accusing the US of targeting and killing civilians intentionally. Mr. Salisbury, also a decorated veteran journalist like Duranty, reported from Hanoi scenes of nearly unspeakable devastation. He described the bodies of children killed by American bombs. He described buses obliterated by American aircraft. He described an American war against civilians, killing civilians intentionally. LBJ had not sent in the Air Force to kill Vietnamese children, but Salisbury reported that to be the case. The adverse publicity made Johnson gun shy, and he began orchestrating missions in ways not to win the war but to avoid Salisbury’s poison pen. Result: Johnson pulled back on Rolling Thunder, the war dragged on, and thousands more Americans died in what turned out to be a losing effort. After the fall of Saigon eight years later, a million South Vietnamese either died, were imprisoned by the Communists who took over, or tried to escape to the United States on whatever rickety craft they could find. Many of those “boat people” never made it across the Pacific.

Fast forward again, and we find ourselves in Iraq after the Gulf War. Practically alone among western news agencies, CNN maintained a full working bureau in Baghdad. CNN News Executive Eason Jordan would admit in 2003 what his network had denied for about a dozen years, that CNN traded its objectivity for the sake of access. It routinely turned a blind eye to the many heinous crimes of Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein so that it could keep its bureaus open in his country. The cache of being able to say “Reporting live from Baghdad, this is Peter Arnett, CNN” was more important than fairly reporting all the many terrible things Saddam was constantly up to.

Now that the US and its Coalition partners have evicted Saddam from his bloody throne, researchers have found an estimated 300,000 bodies buried in mass graves scattered all around that benighted country, Shias, Sunnis and Kurds alike killed like animals. CNN failed to report any of this as it was going on, as it also failed to report the persecution of the marsh Arabs, the ubiquity of the “rape rooms,” the existence of the prison for children or any of the regime’s other terrible crimes.

Note that in the three stories above we have a theme: Reporter knows the facts but doesn’t report them accurately, resulting directly or indirectly in the deaths of many, many people. This next one is a little different and its death toll is much smaller, but it’s still playing out. It could still catch up to its predecessors.

Now, we fast forward to May 9, 2005. Writing for Newsweek, reporters Michael Isikoff and John Barry report that an American interrogator flushed a Koran down a toilet in the presence of a suspect Muslim terrorist incarcerated at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The idea was supposedly to intimidate him or sear his conscience and make him cooperative.

Desecrating the Koran is a capital offense in several Islamic countries; for an infidel nation supposedly “already at war with Islam,” it’s a crime too severe to bear. Radical clerics in the Islamic world quickly seized on the Isikoff story and read it to their faithful, sparking riots across the region. Particularly incensed were crowds in US allies Afghanistan and Pakistan. The unrest has so far claimed 17 lives and injured scores more, but perhaps more dangerously has given possibly millions of Muslims enough of a reason to hate the US to step up or join in calls for jihad.

Newsweek retracted the story after letting it float for a week, because they never confirmed it and their single source now can’t trust his or her own memory on the matter. The whole incident may have never happened, though there has long been a story about a suspected terrorist clogging his toilet at Gitmo to protest something or other. As that story goes, he clogged his toilet with pages from the Koran. That story is probably the genesis of this latest one, though Newsweek never put two and two together, apparently, or if they did it added up to American misbehavior, which has been a running theme among the media nearly since the war began. Mazir-I-Sharif? Abu Ghraib? Meet Flushgate.

So a story that was flimsy to begin with, sourced anonymously to a single person who may not have even had the right kind of access to even know whether such a thing as a US interrogator’s abuse of the Koran had ever taken place, has nevertheless finally brought the dreaded Arab street into the war. Surprising no one, the Arab street hates America now. Newsweek should never have run a story it couldn’t confirm, and it should have anticipated the reaction it was likely to spark in a culture that usually works on a kind of opposite to Occam’s Razor in which whatever is the craziest, most outlandish conspiracy theory is the one most likely to be true, especially if it casts Americans in a negative light. If it can serve as an excuse to burn an American flag or toss a few rocks around, it’s a bonus.

Bad journalism in Stalinist USSR misinformed Americans and helped prop up a mad and brutal tyrant for years to come. Bad journalism from North Vietnam helped cow LBJ into losing a war the United States was poised to win, resulting in humiliation for the US and death for millions. Bad journalism in Iraq helped Saddam cover up his life of crimes against humanity. And now bad journalism is helping to turn critical allies against the US as we wage a fight for our survival. And seventeen people so far have been killed in the riots that this retracted story spawned as it spread across the globe.

So remember the new slogan and treat the mainstream media accordingly. Guns don’t kill people. But bad journalism kills people. Sometimes by the dozen, and sometimes by the millions.

MORE: Jack Birnbaum says Newsweek should shut itself down. I agree. But I think the article's title--"In the Grand Tradition of Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose"--is flawed. Isikoff and Barry don't actually work for enemy governments (that we know of...) whereas Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose were part of the enemy's actual war effort. Further, their broadcasts were aimed mostly at undermining the morale of our troops. The Isikoff story shares much more in common with the stories I cite above, which are examples of journalistic sins of either omission or comission that led to death and prolonged war. They weren't aimed at our troops per se, but the damage done was far greater than anything Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose could brag about.