07/06/07 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and that was Brutality Inc.
Our next guest today is Greg Mitchell.
He fills an extremely important niche in the market of ideas.
He reports on the reporters.
He's the editor of Editor and Publisher.
Welcome to the show, Greg.
Oh, hi.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm very good.
Oh, that's good to know.
And I have a pet peeve of mine who apparently walks around on two legs.
His name's Michael R. Gordon.
And I have the most trouble reading the New York Times and trying to keep my head from exploding when I read this guy's, what do they call it, reporting?
Is that what they call it?
All right.
Well, I noticed that you picked up on the same theme here, so I thought maybe I'd bring you on to talk about this article that came out, was it the second or the third, I'm sorry, of July by Michael Gordon leveling apparently blind accusations against the state of Iran.
I guess the biggest part of the story, well, there were two major parts of the story, I guess, right, was one that Iran is backing Hezbollah in Iraq and then Iran is behind the kidnapping and murder execution of American soldiers back in February in Karbala.
So I guess let's start with, well, not just the facts, but Gordon's reporting on the facts in terms of Iran using Lebanese Hezbollah to train extremists in Iraq.
Well, this very question was raised with the U.S. spokesman who was, we had the press conference this week, who incidentally had just arrived in Iraq from his most recent post in the White House.
And reporters asked him, well, why would, this is sort of roundabout, getting Hezbollah to train militants in Iraq, why would they do that, why would they go to all that trouble, why did they have a couple of middlemen there, and he had no answer for that.
But there's a lot of context here when you talk about Michael Gordon, and there's a lot of context for when this story appeared.
I'm sure you're aware and many of your listeners are aware that with the faltering U.S. effort in Iraq and the calls for withdrawal or some sort of drastic change of direction, suddenly the last few weeks we have heard increasingly about Al-Qaeda is now the number one foe in Iraq, and two, that Iran is behind the most deadly weapons there and also funding the insurgency.
So now those two things are plausible, but it's awfully suspicious that this has arisen, and they've tried everything else, every other bugaboo, every other effort to drum up support.
And so on the surface, it just seems like a desperation measure for the military to now say, well, we've tried everything else, let's blame everything on Al-Qaeda.
We know that's kind of a winner with a lot of Americans.
And Iran, here's the two biggest, outside of maybe Castro, the two biggest enemies in the public mind.
So let's tie them more closely.
So that's the context where you see the stuff and you sort of say, well, wait a minute here.
Again, it's possible, but it sure seems like it's propaganda that's meant to perk up the last chance for the U.S. effort.
Well, as you point out in your article, the accusation is that here Iran is using Hezbollah to train, quote unquote, Iraqi extremists, which is the very same line that we've heard for the last six months, really, since Bush came out and announced the surge and started threatening Iran in January.
And it's deliberately vague.
I mean, there's no question about why they say Iraqi extremists, because if they say Iran is backing the Sunni insurgency, we'll say, hey, wait a minute.
And if they say, well, Iran is backing the Badr brigades, we'll say, oh, good, they're helping us train and equip the Badr brigades.
And then if they say, well, they're backing Murtad al-Sadr, well, he's the least Iran-tied of all the Shiite factions.
He's the nationalist and he's not at war with the United States.
So it's not plausible.
They're lying and they know they're lying.
Well, yeah, as I said, it's very hard to tell the players without a scorecard.
It gets very complicated because it's who are we helping, who are we helping this week?
But the other bit of context that's important here is Michael Gordon's role in the run-up to the war.
He was with Judy Miller at the New York Times, wrote some of the most egregiously false stories, and was accused then of also the same thing, that he was taking what he was being fed and doing some more reporting, doing additional reporting, but basically came up with a couple of the stories that were most influential and wrongly so in the run-up to the war.
So there's been this suspicion cast on him previously.
It's not sort of a blank slate.
And then the final thing that I would say in regard to that is, in terms of the New York Times itself, is the prominence that they give his stories.
It's one thing to run someone's stories and put them on page 18 or 28 or whatever, but when you put them on the front page, it has a whole different meaning and impact.
And he has a front page story today in the Times.
If your head hasn't exploded today, you should check it out.
It's right near the top of the front page, and it says, a fairly remarkable statement after visiting a town in Iraq, he says, �Many Sunnis, for their part, are now less inclined to see the U.S. soldiers as occupiers now that it is clear that American troop reductions are all but inevitable.
� Now, if that doesn't make your head explode, I don't know what will, but somehow the assertion from his visit to one town here that Sunnis are around Iraq no longer see the U.S. as occupiers is patently absurd.
But there it is on the top of the front page, so again, that's the context.
There could be truth in what he's reporting, but you kind of have to look at the big picture.
And that's what he refuses to do, right?
That's like the signature of his reporting is, here's this little fact and exclude it from all context.
And a lot of times even the fact itself isn't right.
But well, you know, going from what you just said about the story today, like, oh, you found one Sunni who said, ah, the Americans were not worried so much because you're leaving anyway.
And now that anecdote counts for what the Sunni population of Iraq thinks.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, he's out there.
He is on the ground there and no doubt he is embedded, I presume.
So he's being shown around by the military, which, of course, is already a compromising position.
But, you know, I mean, I wouldn't discount everything he writes.
I wouldn't discount every factor or anything like that.
It's just a matter of, you know, when you consistently read things where someone is seeming whatever, you know, whatever the military line appears to be this week, his reporting seems to match that.
Now, maybe, you know, maybe it's true.
Maybe that's reflecting the reality on the ground.
But it's awfully suspicious when, you know, his reporting seems to mirror whatever the, you know, whatever the Pentagon seems to be pushing this month.
Now, for a little bit of that context, you referred back to the run up to the war and the importance of some of the stories that he co-wrote with Judy Miller.
I guess it's David Schuster on NBC's Hardball who put together this great little chart about the White House Iraq group and Judy Miller and Michael R. Gordon and how this is, I guess, the most famous case of the pre-war propaganda where Scooter Libby and the guys in the vice president's office leaked all this information to Gordon and Miller.
They printed it in the New York Times.
And then Cheney, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld all went on different Sunday morning news shows to say, see, it's even right here in the New York Times, aluminum tubes to enrich uranium.
They're going to nuke us.
We can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.
Right.
There was a famous September 8th, 2002 article which was co-authored by Miller and Gordon and then it was Cheney and everyone else went on TV, the Sunday talk shows, and that's exactly what they said.
They said, well, it's not just me saying this, here it is in the New York Times.
And that story was tremendously influential.
And again, that's the point.
The stories were put, and still are put, on the front page.
And what was remarkable in the run-up to the war is that there were occasionally, both in the Washington Post and the New York Times, there were stories that did cast doubt on some of the evidence for WMDs, but usually they were buried in the paper.
And again, that's where placement comes in.
You know, the scare stories are put on page one and then the more moderating stories are on page 28, and so the more veteran reporters have more clout and their work tends to get bumped up and then some other stuff doesn't get as much attention.
So that's a problem.
Well, now, I'm kind of confused about the newspaper industry.
It seems like, well, I don't know, can you tell me when you guys all get together in some ballroom to do awards and ceremonies and whatever, does everybody not hiss at Michael Gordon, is he not the least respected reporter in America?
I mean that seriously.
I mean, this guy's gotten almost a million people killed so far with his lousy reporting convincing Americans to go along with this thing.
We're counting in the high numbers of hundreds of thousands now in Iraq.
Is there no shame in the newspaper industry?
I mean that seriously.
Well, I've never been in a ballroom where he's gotten an award.
I mean we should back up and say editor and publisher is sort of the independent magazine that covers the newspaper industry for 120 years, and we have a very active and popular and influential website, which is editorandpublisher.com, and that's where the story that I wrote that you're referring to and most of our other many stories related to Iraq and coverage of Iraq appears on our website.
And so we have a very independent position, and I have to say we have been from before the war five years ago now have been raising alarms, raising questions, and being very critical of the coverage of the war, and often very lonely in this, extremely sort of out on the limb for what would be considered a mainstream publication that has been critical of the coverage in the war itself going back five years ago.
So I can't speak for others within the year.
We're not a newspaper ourselves, so I don't know how it's viewed.
There's been a lot of tremendous coverage from individual reporters in Iraq.
The funny thing is there's been an awful lot of great coverage mixed in with the not so great coverage in Iraq itself, and at the same time there's newspapers, and something I've written about 50 times is amazingly a few newspapers editorially on their editorial page have come out for a change of course in Iraq, so to some extent the reporters on the ground have been providing more critical reporting than what the editors have been willing to do back home on their editorial pages.
Right.
Well, and this is why I like editor and publisher so much.
It's always very critical, and I guess maybe I assume too much about how well you know the rest of these people and that kind of thing, but it just seems to me like here you're writing this article which seems to have as its purpose to shame Michael R. Gordon for his lousy reporting, and I just wonder where's everybody else on this?
I love editor and publisher, but where's everybody else doing a...
I want to see a news story in the LA Times called, Michael Gordon is a corrupt reporter, the things he writes should not be believed by reasonable people.
Well, at least the LA Times editorial came out for a pullout from the war, for a pullout from the war, which was kind of an amazing turnaround there, but you know, there have been, I haven't really seen that appear in the mainstream, there's been of course plenty of blogs that have attacked Michael Gordon and other people, but you know, mainstream reporters generally don't, and you know, he has respect from a lot of people in the mainstream press, he's reported a long time, he did a book that was critical of a lot of the things that went on in the early months of the occupation, but you know, there's a whole, as you know, there's a whole school of thought which many, even the David Brooks of the world, who have endorsed the war, supported the war, waving the flag for years, they then take the position of well, the war was a good idea, it just got screwed up by Rumsfeld, and you know, the occupation didn't go well, etc., etc., so you know, the Michael Gordons I think would fall into that camp where they kind of lament and have documented the screw-ups, but that doesn't mean that they feel that the war was a bad idea, or even that it can still be won, and that's where so many people differ, and just for me, I've just taken, I think there are people, and we're starting to see it on editorial pages more and more, we had a big story yesterday that got a lot of attention, the newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, The Olympian, which is a small city, but it's very near two major air force bases in Fort Lewis, which is one of the main army bases that sends troops to Iraq, and this is a newspaper which came out on July 4th with kind of a very brave editorial calling for a US pullout, and would normally be no big deal, except it's been so rare around the country, so few papers have been willing to do that, and here's a paper that has a very strong military audience, and so they've taken the steps, and we now see more conservative Republicans in Congress at least going halfway to calling for something, and yet editorial pages are behind, we now have so-called liberal newspaper editorial pages, who are actually behind right-wing Republicans in the war, so I think a chew on that one for a while.
Well, the public, according to the polls, I think the last one I saw, if you combine the two different levels with 77% of the American people who are against this thing, do you have any idea why it is that the newspaper editors are so far behind their audiences?
I haven't been able to figure, I've been writing about this for four years, and people, I think it's, you know, they're afraid to be, normally they're afraid to be out front, but in this case, they can't be out front because they're already behind, but it's almost like, I did a lot of coverage of how the Washington Post, for example, explained why it was so wrong, why it was one of the prime examples of a paper that ran 120 stories on the front page about the Iraqi WMDs, and ran 20 stories that raised doubt and put them all on page 20, and one of the reporters, one of the editors there, said, frankly, we were afraid to be wrong, you know, we were afraid to say, we don't think they're a WMD, and then, you know, it turned out that we were wrong.
So I think there's some of that in this, where if you come out, first of all, if you come out against the war, then you have to explain, well, what would you do, what's your strategy?
And then if you say, well, we want to start pulling people out, and then a year from now, the situation gets even worse there, if that's possible.
And then people would say, well, you favor to pull out, look what happened, you know.
So I think, in that sense, there's more danger in doing nothing.
Now, my view would be that they've lost so much credibility, and they've lost so many readers, and I'm not saying that the big decline in circulation is all attributed to, you know, their stand on the war.
But here's an industry that's hemorrhaging readers and badly needed credibility, and yet here on something that's so important to the readers, and so clear to the readers, and they're afraid to do anything, it's quite striking and lamentable, at least in my view.
Tell me a little bit about the New York Times, in the larger sense, as the agenda setter, I guess, critics on the conservative and liberal end, kind of say, they are the agenda setting media, they put their headline out at four o'clock in the afternoon for what's going to be the lead in the next day's paper, and basically the rest of the papers in America are presumed to, that they're supposed to follow suit, and report what the Times is reporting.
Well, I mean, that's not strictly true, but certainly they have a disproportionate influence, if you looked at their circulation and so forth.
There's no logical reason why they would have that much, except their history, the things they've done in the past, the quality of much of their reporting, so they still have this aura.
It's a question that they still have more influence than just about any other media outlet, which makes all the more important how careful they are with what they put on the front page.
Yeah, it's really interesting to see liberals, conservatives, and I know I do it too all the time, is, ah, the New York Times, they're such liars, look at what they're saying, this and that.
We can all, all of us can turn it right around and say, see, even the New York Times admits it.
Well, I mean, look, they, I mean, I look at, read the Times every day carefully, I know there are a lot of people who just see, you know, they'll see one story, and they'll say, oh, look, this is terrible, and so forth.
You know, so I see the good and the bad, you know, I read it carefully every day, and I, you know, so I see they have a lot of terrific reporters, they have a lot of terrific stories, but they, you know, and as you said, there's the same blogs that they denounce the Times one day will then, you know, link to it the story they have and say, you know, this proves whatever, this proves Libya or this, you know, the domestic spying or whatever, and so they trumpet the Times when it serves their purposes, and then they denounce the Times, so, which I think is okay, I think you can pick and choose articles, but you can on one day say the New York Times, you know, is awful, and it's all lies, and then the next day use them as a source, so I think it's better to, you know, pick and choose and, you know, criticize things that you think are bogus and, you know, and praise them when they do good work, which they often do.
Yeah, my best example of that recently is, well, myself quoting David Sanger, who has so many times, I'll go ahead and say it, outright lied to the American people in terms of accusing North Korea of having a secret uranium enrichment program, when we know that that's not true at all, that all they ever got from A.Q.
Khan was a bunch of junk from his garage sale that was good for nothing, that they made their nuclear bombs that they made out of plutonium that they harvested from old Russian reactors, not enriched uranium, as pure lies, and he just acted as though this was absolute fact for, I don't know, years in a row, and has also acted as though it's an absolute fact that somewhere in Iran there's a secret uranium enrichment program which is meant to enrich to above 90% and make nuclear weapons, and yet in both cases, David Sanger has come out never admitting that he was wrong or indicating in any way that this is contrary to anything he ever reported, but even David Sanger now will admit that, no, there is no uranium enrichment program in North Korea, and there wasn't one, and there's no evidence whatsoever that there's a secret nuclear program in Iran.
If Iran was to make a bomb, the IAEA would have to leave first, and they have not done so, and even David Sanger in the New York Times finally gets it right.
Well, give him a pat on the back, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, they sure do work hard, whichever agenda it is they're pushing.
Right.
Well, look, good talking to you.
I have to get running here.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate your time on the show today.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
Greg Mitchell from Editor and Publisher.
And, you know, one thing I didn't get to bring up here, and I guess I should have told them how long I expected him to stay on the phone here, but it was a short notice kind of interview.
One thing noted in Greg Mitchell's article today on Editor and Publisher is that Michael R. Gordon recently told Charlie Rose on PBS he's in favor of the surge.