The New York Times’ John Burns
New York Times London bureau chief John Burns has joined other high-profile reporters (e.g., CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan) in denouncing fellow journalist Michael Hastings. Hastings’ Rolling Stone expose prompted the dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was relieved of his Afghanistan command following Hastings’ revelations that he and some of his aides had used insubordinate language in discussing Obama administration superiors.
Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s conservative national radio program on July 6, the Times‘ former Baghdad bureau chief responded to Hewitt’s question about how the Rolling Stone story had affected relations between journalists and military officials:
I think it’s very unfortunate that it has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations. I think, you know, well, this will be debated down the years, the whole issue as to how it came about that Rolling Stone had that kind of access.
My unease, if I can be completely frank about this, is that from my experience of traveling and talking to generals–McChrystal, Petraeus and many, many others over the past few years–is that the old on-the-record/off-the-record standard doesn’t really meet the case, which is to say that by the very nature of the time you spend with the generals–the same could be said to be true of the time that a reporter spends with anybody in the public eye–there are moments which just don’t fit that formula.
There are long, informal periods traveling on helicopters over hostile territory with the generals chatting over their headset, bunking down for the night side-by-side on a piece of rough-hewn concrete. You build up a kind of trust. It’s not explicit, it’s just there.
And my feeling is that it’s the responsibility of the reporter to judge in those circumstances what is fairly reportable, and what is not, and to go beyond that, what it is necessary to report.
Appearing two days later on PBS‘s NewsHour (7/8/10), Burns reiterated his criticism, and suggested that journalists ought to see to it that the Rolling Stone debacle wasn’t repeated: “I think we in the press have to really look at cases like this and say, to what extent can we change the way we behave in such a way that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again?”
Michael Hastings
By embarrassing the brass, Hastings harmed “military/media relations”–and presumably, in Burns’ view, harmed journalism. But if the ideal of journalism is to serve the public by providing information to help them more fully understand events of the day, and not just to cultivate cozy relations with the powerful, it’s hard to understand exactly what Burns is defending. Indeed, a review of U.S. journalism produced before the Rolling Stone writer mucked things up, when the warmer media/military relations championed by Burns prevailed, does not strike one as a model of public service.
There were the adoring profiles of McChrystal by journalists who wisely refrained from going “beyond what is necessary to report.” As media critic and Hastings supporter Charles Kaiser documents on his website Full Court Press (7/2/10), “virtually every profile of McChrystal had either sharply downplayed the defects in his CV or ignored them altogether, including the general’s central role in the cover-up of the killing of former football star Pat Tillman by friendly fire.” Indeed, a little-noticed aspect of Hastings’ expose was his reporting on unflattering aspects of McChrystal’s career, including the Tillman cover-up and an Abu Ghraib-like torture scandal at another detention facility in Iraq that McChrystal supervised (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/25/10.)
Burns and other Hastings critics talk up the need to build trust between journalists and military officials–a questionable goal in itself, but all the more so when the resulting “trust” really just means journalists will continue to believe military officials who have repeatedly misled them. Take reporting on U.S. strikes that were ultimately determined to have killed and injured Afghan civilians. The rule for reporting such casualties is to take official U.S. denials at face value, to attempt to discredit Afghan sources who disagree, and to portray admissions of wrong-doing as “PR setbacks.” The pattern was described last year in a FAIR Media Advisory (5/11/09):
Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a PR setback for the White House’s war effort.
It’s a pattern that has frequently “fit the formula” at Burns’ own New York Times (FAIR Action Alert, 1/9/02).
The habit of believing Pentagon sources even when they have proven to be unreliable not only stretches the notion of trust beyond the breaking point, it tramples on the infinitely more important relationship between the reporter and the public.
Good relations between journalists and Pentagon officials have also paid off nicely in the way corporate journalism has truncated “debates” about what should be done in Afghanistan, almost entirely excluding from discussion the majority American view in favor of withdrawal. Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria (9/14/09) unwittingly summed up the findings of FAIR’s 2009 study of the Afghanistan debate presented on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, stating in his lead: “It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option.”
The corporate media whose deference to the military has failed the public so often in the course of the Afghan War did so again in reporting on the Rolling Stone article. Media discussions (including Burns’ and Hewitt’s) missed Hastings’ most significant findings. As a FAIR Media Advisory, “Media Missing the McChrystal Point” (6/25/10), pointed out:
The real significance of the piece is in the criticism–voiced by soldiers in Afghanistan and military experts–of the war itself. “Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm,” wrote Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings.
It’s no mystery why Hastings dire reporting on the status of the war failed to make it into the media discussion. But in accurately reporting truths likely to anger the powerful, Hastings’ Rolling Stone expose upheld the best traditions of journalism. By the same token, his detractors, including Burns, have shown themselves as opponents of those traditions and perhaps more than a little confused about who they work for.
I am willing to bet circulation and/or counter sales that month spiked up for “Rolling Stone.”
Folks in an representative democracy need to know what their representatives and agents who act in our name are doing.
Reporters who refuse to report the facts should turn in their credentials and get into fiction or write vanity columns for the dailies in praise of the “shallow, vain and wealthy.” Truly, the power of the First Amendment is wasted on them.
I have always found echo chamber/steno-jounalism to be just this side of treason. If the people are the sovereign in our representative democracy, lying or covering up information needed for the sovereign to decide wisely, violates our social contract at a fundamental and ethical level.
No wonder corporate media is considered a joke!
Bravo, Socrates!
I second Helen Hanna’s support of socrates, but would add that if ‘we the people’ are the sovereign in this country, the corporate media are the equivalent of Grima Wormtongue – not just this side of treasonous, but far on the other side of it. Their words are poison.
Wow! Burn’s totally unconscious sycophancy and absolute denial of any journalistic sense is breath-taking.
Shame on Burns, and shame on the great mass of American media.
Management of the media by the military and other power blocs is an old story. Nixon set down a marker during the Vietnam years, declaring that the media were the enemy.
During subsequent “wars,” the rehabilitation of the military (â┚¬Ã…“all volunteerâ┚¬Ã‚ etc etc) went together with management of the media. What passed for a war in Grenada was accompanied by strict exclusion of the press during the hot phase. (A boat chartered by some frustrated reporters was met by a naval vessel and turned back, otherwise, they were told, we’ll sink you. American citizens on the high sea!) When the dust settled, reporters were allowed to file past a line of captured Cubans, but had no other access.
Panama was worse (Dec 1989). The American media utterly failed in their duties. A sleeping city, with no declaration of war, was bombed. Whole areas were obliterated, including an orphanage with over 300 people in it. The American media were excluded, and later confined themselves to arguing over the body count. Destruction of a radio station and internment of newspaper editors went unreported–except by a courageous and aging veteran of Vietnam, Martha Gellhorn (Granta, Spring 1990).
Prior to the invasion of Iraq, a media center was set up in Kuwait, set up as a source of truck loads of irrelevant data. Some of those managing its operation, in US uniforms, were veterans of the Gucci riots in Tallahassee and the disruption of the vote count thereâ┚¬”Âit gave the Supreme Court time to set its ruling in acceptable prose. And those guys herded the media? And the media accepted it?
John Burns has been a fine reporter, but has long show symptoms like those of the Stockholm syndrome. He, like so many others, has been co-opted by the military. But the great majority of his fellow “journalists” are bought and paid for by big corporations.
Burns reminds me of the columnists who were indignant at Stephen Colbert’s White House correspondents’ dinner speech. His “unease” at actual journalism shows how much he has internalized the stenographic model of journalism.
Good post by Steve Rendall and great comments by ‘socrates’ and ‘des’. All I would add is that reporters like Burns and media organizations like the NYT — and most of the MSM — just perpetuate this cozy, collegial relationship with the military by agreeing to the military’s restrictive media coverage rules, like the pools and handlers. If the media stood together and refused to pass along (or did so in a very skeptical manner) the military’s reports of military interventions/invasions, I suspect they would soon get more freedom to report accurately, not just be de facto propaganda tools.
Though it sounds simplistic to say, it bears repeating that the reporting of military ventures — ESPECIALLY armed invasions of other countries by ours — is just too important of an activity to let the truth continually be contorted. This is literally a matter of the HIGHEST IMPORTANCE … the life and death of literally millions of people in other countries. It’s not just reporting about what happened to some star/starlet in Hollywood, or even something in last week’s city council meeting, but arguably one of the most profound actions the media has to engage in, so it shouldn’t be cronyistic, nor knee-jerk adversarial, but needs to be a responsible, independent, ethical undertaking.
Freedom of the press means just that.Reporters must report what they believe important.After that let the chips fall where they may.In the last election reporters chose not to report.They became advocates for Obama.Americans were not given the information needed to make so important a choice.And in my humble opinion we elected a very unqualified man at a time of world shaking problems.
In this war we must have good information funneled to the public.Reporters will dig….and there will be those that will evade.That is the game.When reporters worry about relationships with those they write about, we begin the slippery slope.
Some of the remarks of P’s staff sounded Limbaugh-esque, and it’s quite possible they talked that way because they regularly listened to the Pig Man’s invective and that influenced their discourse.
This is not to say their comments were not cause for serious concern. If they talked that way they thought that way. Words are powerful, even if they come from Limbaugh’s porcine lips. Remember that some of the torture techniques used in the American Gulag were inspired by scenes in “24”.
Given that it triggered a check on incipient military insubordination, the bottom line on the Rolling Stones article is that it jerked a knot in the tail of a command that was heading for autonomy. Who knows, it may even have made a military coup a little less likely.
Too bad Burns had to lose access over it, huh?
Na Dean.None of all that- Now jes simma down thar.He(Burns) caught some soldier doing what soldiers of all ranks do.Jaw boning and grumbling.My favorite thing about all this is that the minute Obama gave command to general “BETRAY US”all the lib sights pulled down that little aside to the general and formed a new name.General save us..Within hours they did a 180.And I checked the top ten press animals who attacked the general in the past..Not a word.What a load of jerks..
You seem to haaaaate Rush Limbaugh.Pig man?Because he once was overweight?What dirty little animal -esque name do you call our president?Or how about his wife?Or his children?Certainly you would pull no punches if it came to Sarah Palin or her kids.
You hate Rush because he is effective.Very effective.The pig man with the porcine lips is worth an army of men who would do nothing but drag liberal lies into the sunlight.I remember when he said obama will have to try to change direction and try to keep Bush tax cuts.He said even the dumbest of Dems can see not doing so would amount to another huge tax raise in a year when Jan 1rst all our taxes will skyrocket.I thought him wrong.Yet as I am writing this Fox is reporting he may extend the Bush tax cuts.Right again el Rushbo.God you guys do nash your sharp little teeth at he and Sarah.Love it love it love it!