The Hell of Good Intentions by Stephen M. Walt

Author:Stephen M. Walt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE MEDIA

As discussed in previous chapters, a vigorous marketplace of ideas depends on a vigilant, skeptical, and independent media to ensure that diverse views are heard and to inform the public about how well their government is performing. This mission requires journalists and media organizations to be held accountable as well, so that errors, biases, or questionable journalistic practices do not corrupt public understanding of key issues.

One might think that the explosion of new media outlets produced by the digital revolution would multiply checks on government power and that increased competition among different news outlets might encourage them to adopt higher standards. The reverse seems to be true, alas: instead of an ever-more vigiliant “fourth estate,” the growing role of cable news channels, the Internet, online publishing, the blogosphere, and social media seems to be making the media environment less accountable than ever before. Citizens can choose which version of a nearly infinite number of “realities” to read, listen to, or watch. Anonymous individuals and foreign intelligence agencies disseminate “fake news” that is all too often taken seriously, and such “news” sites as Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and InfoWars compete for viewers not by working harder to ferret out the truth, but by trafficking in rumors, unsupported accusations, and conspiracy theories. Leading politicians—most notoriously, Donald Trump himself—have given these outlets greater credibility by repeating their claims while simultaneously disparaging established media organizations as biased and unreliable.77

The net effect is to discredit any source of information that challenges one’s own version of events. If enough people genuinely believe “The New York Times is fake news,” as former congressman Newt Gingrich said in 2016, then all sources of information become equally valid and a key pillar of democracy is effectively neutered.78 When all news is suspect, the public has no idea what to believe, and some people will accept whatever they are told by the one with the biggest megaphone (or largest number of Twitter followers).

Unfortunately, the commanding heights of American journalism have contributed to this problem by making major errors on some critical foreign policy issues and by failing to hold themselves accountable for these mistakes. These episodes have undermined their own credibility and opened the door for less reliable and more unscrupulous rivals.

The most prominent recent example of mainstream media malfeasance is the role prestigious news organizations played in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times published false stories about Iraq’s alleged WMD programs, based almost entirely on fictitious material provided by sources in the Bush administration. As the Times’ editors later acknowledged, the stories were poorly reported and fact-checked, containing numerous errors, and they undoubtedly facilitated the Bush administration’s efforts to sell the war.79

But the Times and the Post were not alone: the vaunted New Yorker magazine also published a lengthy article by the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg describing supposed links between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, connections that turned out to be wholly imaginary.80

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