My wife’s in a bad mood tonight. She says part of the reason is she heard Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, and his named successor, Jill Abramson, talking about the Iraq war today on NPR’s “On the Media.”
Set the scene. My wife had just been driving around our small town. She ran into people who aren’t doing well. A yoga instructor about to declare bankruptcy. A friend out of work for a year, another friend about to lose her house. Then back into the NPRmobile yes of course a Subaru and she heard the Times’s two top editors talking about Iraq. Brooke Gladstone of “On the Media” asked Bill Keller about the May 2004 editor’s letter apologizing, but oh so properly, for the Times coverage that had paved the way for the war in Iraq.
Keller [solemnus voce]: I think both Jill and I would probably put that at the top of our list of things we wish we’d done differently, that is to say, things that we wish we’d done sooner. I think it would have been wiser and healthier for the paper and its credibility if I’d taken that bull by the horns first thing and said, you know what, we screwed up here, and the way we screwed up was we fell too hard for the conventional wisdom about Saddam Hussein and we let some of the reporting run a little wild.
Abramson: I completely agree.
My wife was enraged. She said, We’re in three wars right now, and no one knows what they’re about, and This is all the Times editors give us by way of apology.
They supported the war, I said. Keller did. Should they step down? Nick Lemann (dean of the Columbia School of Journalism) spoke at Columbia a couple of years ago and said that of all the people writing at the New Yorker in 2003, he was the only one to oppose the Iraq war
Yes. So it’s institutionalized, she said.
Makes me want to hurl. Makes you want to hurl, right? And it’s the moral hazard: when the elite are so removed from the actual consequences of a decision to go to war, that it’s an idle decision to them whether an Arab society is destroyed and millions displaced and 100,000 or more killed. What are the actual consequences to them? Well if there was a draft, if their kids were actually at some risk of going– no, no chance of that.
Just a chance that: Our correction of our fucked-up Judy Miller coverage came a little too late. Sorry about that.
(Yes and why did she produce that coverage? Where did it come from?)
P.S. After Larry Eagleburger died the other day, they had Leslie Gelb formerly of the Times now of the Council on Foreign Relations eulogizing him on NPR, and Gelb said that Eagleburger had been brave to oppose the Iraq war in the face of all the establishment pressure to support it. But this is precisely why Gelb supported the war, out of careerist instinct. And that is why I support the draft. So the decision-makers have something at risk.
