American journalism has beat its collective breast a good deal in the past three years, most seriously over its self-perceived failure to be sufficiently sceptical of claims made by the US administration, the secret services and the better-connected Iraqi exiles about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. I’m not wholly convinced: the two main reporters on the case for The New York Times, Michael Gordon and Judith Miller (the latter now in jail for refusing to divulge a source in a story not related to Iraq), had a reputation, not easily won, for hard work and accuracy. Gordon was a colleague of mine in Moscow in the 1990s. A deeply reserved man, he was also a dedicated one, with a number of exclusives to his credit in a country he came to cold. If these two got it so wrong, how do you get it right? Or, put differently, did they screw up or were they reporting information and beliefs held in good faith by professionals and victims of Saddam, which appeared to be right because the counter arguments appeared weaker or mendacious? And how does journalism avoid that?
One way of doing so is by being aware of the underlying biases that frame journalism, sometimes without the individual being aware of them. I would think - especially in Miller’s case - that the underlying bias was at least in part composed of a detestation of Saddam’s regime, deepened by the stories of mass murder, torture and discrimination that they heard. Not a bad bias to have, but it may have blinkered the coverage.
WMD in Iraq has been the most evident case of mea culpa by journalists. Another, less focused, example is the sense that the big news organisations have for decades overlooked the large group of Americans who are devout believers and/or cultural conservatives - implicitly relegating their beliefs to open or covert mockery, or simply disregarding them. The editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, confessed in an interview this year that he felt his paper had lacked a depth of understanding of the faithful, and of those who didn’t share the liberal stance of his paper. Michael Parks, who edited the Los Angeles Times in the late 1990s, told me he had spent some time after his appointment asking all sorts of people what was important to them: in response he increased the numbers of reporters covering religion from one to six. The bias, Parks said, was towards a liberal-rationalist view of the world, which viewed faith, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, as a product of a backward age. It was a view that assumed tolerance of all other views was embedded within it, but it could not recognise the worlds constructed by the faithful.
I hadn’t heard Europeans doing the same, but I did earlier this month, at the Sanssouci Colloquium, a gathering held in one of the palaces in the former imperial park of Sanssouci in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. It could have been another in a long chain of meetings to talk about - presently, to moan about - the state of Europe. But for a while it turned into something else. The journalists present, many of them editors of large newspapers, turned upon themselves, and found their practice wanting. They had been primed for the exercise by a speech from Gunter Verheugen, the German social democrat and vice-president of the European Commission, and who confessed, candidly, that the hammer blows of the French and Dutch refusals to endorse the European constitution had left the union in a deeper crisis than any caused by rifts between member states or politicians. That was followed by a response from one of Britain’s least forgiving Eurosceptic commentators. Melanie Phillips, of the Daily Mail, ripped into Verheugen and the union as agents of a conspiracy against democracy, liberty and the nation state. The Eurosceptic had come into her own, and in the pleasure garden of Frederick the Great, to boot.
For the British participants, the Phillips speech, though vigorous, was unremarkable; it is part of the British debate. For the others, the debate was like a charge of electricity. Their response was not, as it might have been until this year, to dismiss it as the ravings of a chauvinistic Brit. It was to regard it, if not with agreement, with a kind of half-guilty admiration.
The editor of an Austrian newspaper summed up a view expressed in a more fragmented way by several - including Italian, German and Estonian - participants. He said that European journalists (with the exception of the British) had failed to hold the European Commission, and the entire European project, to proper account. This was, he said, because the journalists - especially those born soon after the war - had assumed the project to be a good one, good beyond all doubt. Though they held their own governments to (different sorts of) account, the commission and the project got off lightly. The fundamental questions weren’t asked: they were tacitly, unconsciously, assumed not to apply. Thus it was not just the Eurocrats and the Europols who had been found wanting by the earthquake of the French and Dutch votes: it was also the journalists. They had not seen - or had ignored, or scorned as extremist - popular disaffection with the union. By buying in, the journalists had tuned out.
There is, at least in theory, a form of journalism that is so comprehensively and transparently inquiring that it will allow no bias and question every world view, including what might be its own. But it’s hard to do. The devil is in the bias you don’t know you have, or think you’ve overcome. We don’t cure what we can’t see.
