From the outside, the soul-searching debate within America's media about journalism's perceived failures after 9/11 in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq can appear rather lame. But it is a valuable exercise because US journalists must come to terms with their mistakes if they are to have any hope of not repeating them, especially given the Bush administration's sabre-rattling over Iran.
To that end, Gary Kamiya, executive editor at Salon.com, offers a notable contribution to that debate by asking: "Why did the media fail so disastrously in its response to the biggest issue of a generation?" He then sets off on a lengthy analysis to provide an answer, arguing that "the media had serious preexisting weaknesses... and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm."
He takes the specific failures - such as the credulousness about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds and the failure to make clear that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 - as a given. Instead, he probes at the underlying problems that led journalists to suspend their scepticism, identifying three areas of concern.
First, psychological. "Journalists like to think of themselves as autonomous agents who pursue truth without fear or favour. In fact, the media... adheres to a whole set of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit codes that govern what it feels it can say."
Second, institutional. "The decline of newspapers, the rise of infotainment, and media company owners' insistence on delivering high returns to their shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line fixation unconducive to aggressive reporting."
Third, ideological. "The US media works within a tiny ideological spectrum on the Middle East, using the same centre-right and right-wing sources again and again."
But, regardless of that categorisation, what really caught my eye was his understanding of the key part played by patriotism, which I regard as the last refuge of scoundrel journalism. Here's some of what Kamiya has to say on the "pervasive... jingoist, near-Stalinist groupthink" of the post-9/11 era:
"The outburst of media patriotism after the attacks reveals how fragile the barrier is between journalism and propaganda... Fox was the worst, but the rest of the mainstream media was clearly influenced by the perceived need to be 'Americans first and journalists second.' This was manifested less in obviously biased or flawed stories than in subtler ways: the simple failure to investigate Bush administration claims, go outside the magic circle of approved wise men, or in general aggressively question the whole surreal adventure."
He continues: "I'm not saying that there's no place for patriotism, or fellow feeling, in journalism. 9/11 was a special case. Thousands of Americans had just been killed, and a heightened emotional awareness of our shared national identity was both inevitable and unexceptionable... But when it comes to forward-looking analysis and reporting - as opposed to elegiac coverage - patriotism and groupthink are journalistic poison..."
He then refers to the "implicit argument" of the Fox News presenter Brit Hume that it was "un-American" to report extensively on civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Though an "extreme example" Kamiya says that in "newsrooms across the land, thousands of smaller, unnoticed cases of self-censorship or selective reporting were taking place. 9/11 in particular was a sacred taboo that even the most cold-blooded, dispassionate journalists feared to disturb." They were cowed by the response to the handful of people, such as Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, who dared to question the prevailing viewpoint.
"In short", writes Kamiya, the 9/11 attacks "not only killed almost 3,000 Americans, but also killed the mainstream media's ability to challenge the administration - one that was expert at framing all dissent as bordering on treason. When Ari Fleischer [Bush's then press secretary] infamously said that 'all Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do,' the mainstream media obeyed."
There's much more in the Kamiya article to ponder. In Britain we have faced up to the effects of patriotism on journalism for 50 years (Suez, Falklands, Iraq). It has always been sensitive and divisive. But journalists cannot hold up their heads and do their job properly unless they resolve it.
