BOOK REVIEW: ‘Journalistic Fraud’: Prescient Look at Problems Afflicting The New York Times
Reviewed By David M. KinchenHuntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – I don’t usually review two-year-old books, but I’m making an exception for a book I picked up at the recent Summers County Library book sale, “Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted” (WND Books, Nashville, TN: 2003; 336 pages, $25.99).
The author is entertainment attorney Bob Kohn, who says he grew up in Queens, New York City, reading The Times from his days in elementary school. He wrote the book in the wake of the implosion of the newspaper in 2003 that resulted in the departure of editor Howell Raines, managing editor Gerald Boyd and, of course, Jayson Blair. Showing that lightning can strike more than once, the Grey Lady of W. 43rd Street is now in a state of turmoil under the reign of Bill Keller.
Keller, who replaced Raines, has attacked veteran reporter Judith Miller in the pages of their newspaper and Miller is apparently negotiating an exit package for Miller after her 28 years at the newspaper, according to a story by Joe Hagan of the Wall Street Journal that I read on Romenesko, the best source of news and gossip about the news biz. If this wasn’t enough, he also sicced attack columnist Maureen Dowd on the now hapless Miller. As everybody knows, Judy Miller went to jail for 85 days because she wouldn’t give up her sources on the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame imbroglio. She was released from the Graybar Hotel after Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby said he was the source.
All this is a big comedown from 2002 when Judith Miller was among a team of 10 Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Middle East after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She has since come under fire (see below) for her prewar reporting on Iraq's nuclear capabilities, which bolstered the Bush administration's case for an invasion. Hagan of the Wall Street Journal writes: “Many of those reports, which relied in part on anonymous administration officials, turned out to be incorrect. The Times has since acknowledged flaws in the reporting and published a series of articles correcting the mistakes. Ms. Miller has said she may write a book about her recent experiences.’
For a lawyer – he and his dad Al Kohn literally wrote the book on music licensing law – Bob Kohn is a great analyzer of journalism and its misdeeds, something the late, great A.J. Liebling did with aplomb in his New Yorker columns on “The Wayward Press.” I take no pleasure in writing about the violations of journalism principles that I’ve learned in my 40 years in the field, including working at metro dailies like The Milwaukee Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times, but we journalists must clean house with a vengeance.
Kohn and other critics of journalism as practiced by baby boomers – I blame that self-indulgent generation for much of the problems – are on target when they analyze the slanting of the news that too many so-called prestigious dailies are doing. Why blame the baby boomer generation? I think many of them – Keller and Miller are both boomers – have a sense of entitlement that isn’t deserved. My generation – people born from 1935 to 1944 or so – didn’t have the Time magazine covers, but we did everything the boomers did – except distort the news.
Kohn says he relied on The Times until about 1970, when the vision of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the paper in 1896, was hijacked. Ochs came to New York from Tennessee and said: “It will be the aim of the Times…to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.”
Today, Kohn says, instead of straight news reporting, Times readers are presented with very thinly disguised opinion pieces in the form of news stories.
Kohn shows point by point how the editors of The Times – and many newspapers that follow the lead of the “newspaper of record” – use language, placement, labels, headlines, polls and other techniques to convey views, not news. As a person who has worked in the copy editing trenches, I recognized his examples. Often, a headline is all that a casual reader sees of a news story. Very few people read the lengthy stories in The Times and other papers that emulate the Grey Lady.
The book is available from Amazon.com at bargain prices, less than $10; I recommend it, more in sorrow than in glee, to see how a once great newspaper has been hijacked by an entire generation of pseudo-journalists. I grieve for the dedicated reporters at the newspaper, including a former colleague of mine from the L.A. Times, David Cay Johnston, an outstanding reporter who may be tarred with the brush that will soon be applied to Bill Keller.
In addition to being inspired by reading the book, I was prompted to write this review by an Oct. 25, 2005 story in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, detailing how the currently anti-Iraq War New York Times began sounding the alarm over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the Clinton Administration.
He says: “Many critics outside the Times suggest that Miller's eagerness to publish the Bush administration's line was the primary reason Americans went to war. The Times itself is edging closer to this version of events. “There is a big problem with this simple narrative. It is that the Times, along with The [Washington] Post and other news organizations, ran many alarming stories about Iraq's weapons programs before the election of George W. Bush. A quick search through the Times archives before 2001 produces such headlines as "Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say"(November 1998), "U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan"(August 1998), "Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort" (February 2000), "Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration" (February 2000), "Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program" (July 2000). (A somewhat shorter list can be compiled from The Post's archives, including a September 1998 headline: "Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported.") The Times stories were written by Barbara Crossette, Tim Weiner and Steven Lee Myers; Miller shared a byline on one.”
Publisher’s web site: www.WNDBooks.com
Romenesko web site: www.poynter.org