New York Times Criticizes Own Reporting on Iraq

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Reporters over-relied on Iraqi exiles' claims
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-to.nyt27may27,0,6005136.story?coll=bal-features-headlines
Times admits flawed pre-war coverage
Reporters over-relied on Iraqi exiles' claims
By David Folkenflik, Baltimore Sun Staff
May 27, 2004

The New York Times yesterday acknowledged that serious flaws marred its reporting before the invasion of Iraq last year, saying the newspaper "fell for misinformation" from a now-discredited circle of Iraqi exiles seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

A note to readers, written by Executive Editor Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson, stated that The Times reported that Hussein had intensified his efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction without adequately signaling the deep reservations of some experts. It said The Times also failed to try to verify claims of an Iraqi defector or check his veracity before printing accounts of his charges about links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaida terrorist organization.

"Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper," the note stated.

"Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted," it continued. "Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."

The Times defended much of its overall coverage, however, saying it was accurate given the information available at the time of publication.

"That's a stunning acknowledgement," said former Times reporter Tom Goldstein, a past dean of the journalism schools at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. "Readers should be extremely disappointed. But, on the other hand, people should take comfort that The Times is a self-correcting institution."

A key player

Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, recently disowned by the U.S. government that had once embraced him, was central to many of the suspect articles. Despite widespread belief of their existence, no caches of weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by U.S.-led troops after more than a year. Claims that seemed to provide proof of pre-war links between al-Qaida and Iraq also have been hotly contested.

But both ideas were vital to the case for the invasion. And the reporting of The Times, considered the nation's most prestigious newspaper, was periodically cited by advocates of war. Some other publications, such as The Washington Post, adopted a more skeptical tone toward those claims.

Keller said in an interview yesterday that he decided that he needed to address the issue a month ago, when he found that an "urban mythology" about the influence of The Times' pre-war coverage was hindering reporters trying to examine underlying causes of the war. But he said yesterday he would not assign a team of Times journalists to further examine the issue, as the paper has done in a few other controversial cases.

Jack Shafer, editor-at-large of the online magazine Slate and a frequent critic of Iraq-related articles by Times reporter Judith Miller, called the statement a "good first step." But he said the newspaper needs to be more explicit about its mistakes.

Susan Moeller, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, oversaw a UM study released in March that was critical of The Times for its coverage of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - especially articles by Miller, who long relied on Chalabi as a source. (The Times has used Chalabi as a source since at least 1991.) Yesterday, Moeller said Times editors had failed to address systemic problems.

"They were too close to their sources - whether government sources or defector sources," Moeller said.

By The Times' account, the false claims of the Iraqi defectors resounded in an echo chamber: They were repeatedly confirmed by Bush administration officials who were pushing for war and who had received the same information from the same dissidents. The phenomenon confused reporters who thought they were carefully vetting their articles, Keller said.

"That's a very hard thing to tease out," Keller said. "People do these amazingly complicated feats of reporting in real time."

In an additional comments online yesterday, the Times highlighted 10 questionable articles from October 2001 through May 2003. Miller wrote or shared bylines on seven of these. The Sun published four of the Times articles, which were distributed by The New York Times News Service.

'Vague and incomplete'

Howell Raines, who was Times executive editor during that period, objected to the editors' note, calling it "vague and incomplete" and saying a broader examination was warranted. In a statement on www.poynter.org, the journalism Web site, he wrote that faulty reporting did not result from a desire for scoops: "No editor did this kind of reckless rushing while I was executive editor."

The Times editors' note, remarkable for the period it encompasses, is all the more unusual because Keller had previously resisted making just such a self-examination.

In the interview, Keller said he had felt it would come too soon after the traumatic Jayson Blair scandal last spring, in which the former Times reporter was found to have plagiarized and fabricated elements of dozens of articles. Keller also said he was repelled by a "lynch-mob mentality" gripping Miller's critics. Keller, who was a senior columnist during the time under dispute (he was named executive editor last July), defended Miller, calling her an "extraordinary reporter," and said the newspaper's failings occurred as an institution.

Miller could not be reached for comment.

Raines Returns: With a Vengeance?
Raines Returns: With a Vengeance?
Former 'N.Y. Times' editor weighs in on the current controversy, naming names.
By Greg Mitchell
Editors and Publishers
NEW YORK (May 27, 2004)

This seems to be the week for mea culpas, so I really ought to admit that yesterday, in the rush to post online the first analysis of The New York Times' explosive editors' note, a column by the indefatigable Bill Jackson on the same subject, and two terrific newsroom reaction stories by Joe Strupp, we forgot the obvious: We did not call former New York Times editor Howell Raines.

To prove that we believe in naming names, let me amend that to say: I should have thought of it myself.

At least I am in good company. According to Raines, his old paper never called him either, when putting together the editors' note, even though he was the editor back in Miller Time, when poor sourcing on Iraq was running wild.

Well, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times apparently did contact Raines, because Raines wrote him a lengthy reply late yesterday, copied to Poynter, where it, inevitably, now resides at the Romensko site.

It's fascinating reading, of course, and one can take it pretty much at face value, recognizing that Howell just wants to provide a little context and defend himself, particularly from one comment in the editors' note which accused someone of rushing scoops into the paper. Other readers of the Raines letter, on the other hand, might feel he also wants to settle scores with some of his in-house critics. Let's consider the latter, for a moment.

In its editors' note on Wednesday, the Times criticized editors for not being "rigorous" enough in keeping highly dubious (okay, bogus) reports out of the paper, or at least off the front page, but refused to name any of them. It also failed to name the chief culprit among its reporters. Raines, just trying to be helpful, fills in a few blanks, identifying (no surprise) Judith Miller as chief propagandist, and naming as her editors Stephen Engelberg, former managing editor Bill Keller (ouch), Doug Frantz (who, like Engelberg, has fled the paper), and most provocatively, Jill Abramson.

You'll remember that Abramson, now managing editor, was chief of the paper's Washington bureau under Raines -- the same bureau that, by most accounts, led the revolt against Raines following the Jayson Blair mess. I may be imagining it, but isn't there a trace of payback in the following from Raines' letter to Rutten: "During my editorship, Ms. Miller also worked often in the Times's Washington Bureau. The bureau chief at that time, Jill Abramson, told me that she had a good rapport with Ms. Miller, who had a conflicted relationship with some colleagues. Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor, supervised a significant amount of Ms. Miller's reporting and personally edited the resulting stories before they went into the paper. It seems to me unfair to single out Judy Miller, even in a blind reference, or to cite individual stories by other reporters without drawing aside the veil of anonymity around un-bylined editors who worked with them."

Raines also seems to tweak Keller for running a piddling editors' note on Page 10A when Howell, after discovering the lies of Jayson Blair, "authorized an exhaustive front-page news story written by an independent team of reporters and editors. Even though the ensuing uproar led to my dismissal, I would do the same thing today based on my belief that newspapers must tell as much as they can about their mistakes. To achieve full disclosure of the sort I advocated as editor, detailed news stories are needed in addition to editors' notes to inform readers fully about how the paper operates."

Keller, in an interview with sister paper Boston Globe today, said the note was not an "apology" but an "explanation." Apparently Raines believes it was neither.

Finally, near the very end of his letter, comes this comment from Raines: "I believe the Times remains an indispensable paper because of the values it stands for. I continue to believe that the paper also needs to be sharper competitively. The performance of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times on the Iraq stories shows that this need continues ..."

And folks, the intrigue is only beginning, with the report by public editor Dan Okrent less than three days away. Perhaps Bill Keller will discover that some of those he now denounces as "bloodthirsty" critics of the Times on this issue are in-house.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell ([email protected]) is editor of E&P.

NY Times Ombudsman Criticizes Paper Over Iraq
It is clear by now that the New York Times has had a massive failure of Editorial leadership and control. Other major print press have also failed to protect the interests of the citizens of the U.S. by their laziness in fact checking and skeptism of government propaganda. I hope the admissions of the errors of their ways will cause an improvement in their publishing. ---BBB

NY Times Ombudsman Criticizes Paper Over Iraq
May 29, 10:22 PM (ET)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Institutional failures at The New York Times led to it being used in a "cunning campaign" by those who wanted the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the paper's ombudsman said on Sunday.

Daniel Okrent, who has the title "public editor," wrote in a scathing review of the paper's coverage of the weapons issue ahead of the Iraq invasion last year that The Times had been guilty of flawed journalism.

"Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines," said Okrent.

The newspaper's editors on Wednesday acknowledged they had failed to challenge adequately information from Iraqi exiles who were determined to show Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and overthrow him.

The editors said they "should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism." Among other things, they said the paper had relied on "misinformation" from Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, once considered Washington's top Iraq ally.

No chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were found in Iraq after the invasion.

Okrent wrote that a series of articles on the search for weapons of mass destruction by a Times reporter who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq "constituted an ongoing minuet of startling assertion followed by understated contradiction."

But he said it would be unfair to pin the blame on specific reporters. "The failure was not individual, but institutional," he said.

Okrent blamed "the hunger for scoops," saying Times readers "encountered some rather breathless stories built on unsubstantiated 'revelations' that, in many instances, were the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests."

He said some stories pushed the Pentagon line so aggressively "you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors."

Okrent, who was appointed in December as part of efforts to restore the paper's image following the Jayson Blair scandal, said editors needed to launch a series of "aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe (Saddam) had WMD at his disposal."

"The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the WMD stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign."

The editor of the Times at the time of the Iraq invasion was Howell Raines, who resigned amid recriminations over the discovery that Blair had invented some stories and plagiarized others over a lengthy period.

Details Emerge on Stint by Chalabi Niece at 'NY Times'
Details Emerge on Stint by Chalabi Niece at 'NY Times'
By Editors & Publishers Staff
Published: June 01, 2004 - NEW YORK

During the five months that Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, worked for The New York Times in 2003, the reporter who hired her, Patrick Tyler, published nine pieces that mentioned her now-disgraced uncle, according to an article published today by The New Yorker. During this time, she also personally helped Chalabi get across the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq.

The Times fired Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached New York.

According to the article by Jane Mayer, "two months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper's war coverage, hired Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper's office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi's daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father's efforts while she was working for the Times.

"In early April 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the border into Iraq."

Tyler told Mayer he didn't know about Khalil helping her uncle get into southern Iraq. He said that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that Chalabi hadn't been a factor in the war when he hired her -- something of a stretch, given that fellow reporter Judith Miller has identified him as the prime source for her biggest scoops.

"We were covering a war, not Chalabi," Tyler told Mayer. When asked by Mayer about Khalil's rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing editor of the Times, said, "The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether it happened. If so, it was out of bounds."

The Times' Absolutism No Longer So Absolute
The Judy File: The Times' Absolutism No Longer So Absolute
Arianna Huffington
09.15.2005

Further confirming a shift in the New York Times' official thinking on the Judy Miller case, Exec Editor Bill Keller has let it be known that he is no longer "an absolutist" when it comes to revealing the name of confidential sources.

Alert the media.

Taking part Wednesday at CUNY's Graduate J-School in a panel discussion that included Time's Norm Pearlstine and Judy Miller lawyer Floyd Abrams (and helpfully live-blogged by BuzzMachine's always insightful Jeff Jarvis), Keller said that he could imagine revealing a confidential source if the source had willingly released him from his obligation. "I'm not an absolutist

on the morality of this," he said.

That's a far cry from the line Keller and the Times have been peddling for months, like when he told CNN soon after Miller was jailed: "The law presented Judy Miller with a choice. She could betray her trust, or she could go to jail. And she took what I believe is the brave and honorable choice. She went to jail…. it just came down to principle."

The Times' new absolutist-lite strategy affords Miller the wiggle-room she needs as she tries to cut a deal with Fitzgerald. The question becomes, will the neocon sources she threw her lot in with give her the fig leaf waiver she is looking for? So far it looks like they'd rather hang her out to dry -- leaving Fitzgerald to proceed without her testimony and Judy facing a potential indictment for criminal contempt.

During the conference, Keller also said that reporters don't have an obligation to protect a source that misled or used them for political reasons. Which is exactly what it says in the Times' ethical guidelines -- and exactly what everyone assumes happened in this case. So why have Keller and the Times been so vociferous in their defense of Miller, who, even if she were not a source, continues to give cover to a source who clearly used reporters to launch a partisan attack?

Pearlstine was even more specific. Asked if he would have done anything differently at the time, he replied: "I would have been more rigorous in questioning at the time we at first received the subpoena whether Karl Rove in fact deserved confidential source status" -- a status Pearlstine said should be reserved for whistle-blowers and people providing information for the public good and not for "a 90-second conversation with the president's spin doctor".

Fleshing out his non-absolutist stance, Keller also said that if it came down to protecting a confidential source or saving lives, he would opt for saving lives.

Okay, but how about saving your paper from destroying its already tarnished reputation?