DID YOU HEAR the news? The Silver Cos. has bought the 900 block of Caroline St. in downtown Fredericksburg and is planning to "modernize" the strip to better meet the needs of today's tourists.
That section of Caroline is going to look pretty different after it's been given the Silver touch. Gone will be Goolrick's drugstore; in its place will be a CVS. A Hooters will move into the space now occupied by Spanky's, and rumor has it that Starbucks will make an incursion into downtown, too.
The deal, completed at the beginning of last month, was reported in a hard-hitting story in The Free Lance-Star on Wednesday. It appeared on page B6 or B7, I think.
In retrospect, some editors at the paper wish that they had given the story a little better "play." Many people here in the newsroom have been grumbling that the story probably should have been on the front page, but say that the general sentiment among editors was that the Silver purchase was a done deal anyway, so there was no point in devoting a bunch of space to it on the front page.
The paper's top editor, Ed Jones, says he understands why some readers might be disappointed in coverage of the blockbuster deal, but adds that some of the paper's critics will probably go too far. "You've got all these anti-developer types around here who want us to crusade against the Silvers--as if we had the power to stop them," he said.
OK, settle down and breathe. Everything you've just read is a bad dream. It didn't really happen. The Silvers have not (yet) invaded downtown.
But imagine that they had, and imagine that The Free Lance-Star had blown the story in the manner I described, then tried to explain its incompetence the way the editors did in my little hypothetical situation. Would you ever trust this paper again? Would you run the editors out of town?
So what are we to think of our other local paper, The Washington Post? By its own admission, the Post botched the biggest story it has had since Sept. 11--namely, the buildup to the war in Iraq. In an Aug. 12 front-page article by Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, the paper's editors and reporters acknowledged that prewar articles that parroted the Bush administration usually made the front page, while those that questioned White House claims generally were relegated to the inside pages.
"The paper was not front-paging stuff," Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks was quoted as saying. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"
Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. admitted that "we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war." At the same time, Downie chided those who believe that "the media should have crusaded against the war," belittling them for having "the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war."
Downie is right. People are silly to think that good journalism--especially from a paper such as The Washington Post, which has a track record of bringing down corrupt administrations--could possibly make any difference in a democratic society.
But what requires further examination is not what some Post readers believe about the power of the press. It's whether the Post's reporters and editors--including its executive editor--are content to operate under a set of assumptions that, left unexamined, will ensure future flawed coverage of other important issues.
Reviewing Kurtz's Aug. 12 article--and a follow-up piece he wrote for his paper's Outlook section on Aug. 22 ("Ultimately, newspapers can't move the Earth")--I've discerned four troubling assumptions embedded in the Post's justifications for its awful prewar coverage.
What I learned from the PostA paper is always going to serve as a megaphone for the White House.
"We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power," Post reporter Karen DeYoung told Kurtz. "If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said." Opposing arguments, she continued, may wind up "in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page."
It is certainly true that one of the biggest problems with the Washington press corps is that they tend to act as White House stenographers rather than as fully functioning journalists. But that doesn't let the Post--or anyone else--off the hook. Despite what DeYoung claims, it's not inevitable that White House coverage be as simplistic and one-sided as it often is.
Opinions that contradict the White House position could be higher up in stories, and main stories describing what an administration says could be packaged with news analysis pieces that scrutinize the White House position and include a broad range of critical assessments.
What our leaders say in times of crisis is automatically credible and needs no independent confirmation. (The corollary, of course, is that those who are critical of our leaders in times of crisis are automatically suspect and what they say must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny--or it can simply be dismissed. Even when critical comments and analysis are included in reporting, they can be downplayed while our leaders' comments are given priority [see first assumption].)
I guffawed when I read Kurtz say in his Outlook piece: "We're supposed to write what we can confirm and what credible sources are saying."
He's right--journalists are supposed to do that. But of course, the Post couldn't confirm the accusations leveled against Iraq by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his U.N. presentation (indeed, the Post had contradicted some of Powell's claims in earlier articles). That didn't stop the Post from reporting on those accusations as if they were ironclad facts, however.
A free press is supposed to question what a government is trying to spoonfeed it, not simply assume that leaders are credible and that their claims about the designated enemy are beyond scrutiny. Yet the Post often seemed to have forgotten this elementary journalistic rule in the runup to the war.
The Post and other outlets also made the catastrophic mistake of conferring credibility on Ahmad Chalabi and his network of self-interested Iraqi defectors. It's hard to understand why these guys enjoyed so much trust among the media when it was well known that the CIA and State Department had little confidence in anything they said. Why was Chalabi considered credible and someone such as former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter considered not credible? Was it because the former was saying things that conformed to what was being said in the administration's echo chamber while the latter wasn't?
Kurtz provides no help with these questions. He patronizes readers with platitudes about the basic tenets of journalism, but leaves them wondering how in the world the Post arrived at its conclusions about whom it could trust as authoritative sources on Iraq's alleged weapons programs.
A paper must not burden readers with complexity and ambiguity.
Kurtz wrote in his Outlook piece that Downie liked "definitive" stories on the front page. This meant that if the administration made a bombastic assertion about Iraq, it was reported on the front page, no matter how suspect the assertion might have been.
In contrast, investigative reporting that offered competing views, nuances, and incremental advances in an ongoing story line tended to go inside. Sometimes writers had to fight to get these stories in the paper, even though they raised fundamental questions about the Bush administration's case for war.
The Downie doctrine of newsworthiness raises an obvious question in this context: When a president makes "definitive" statements that clearly are setting the nation on a path to war, why aren't evidence and analysis that challenge the president's certitude also deserving of front-page treatment?
Neither Downie nor Kurtz supplies a satisfactory answer. One is left to conclude that the first two assumptions I've cited drove the Post's shoddy prewar coverage.
Coverage of war preparations and of attendant political and diplomatic machinations is a higher priority than reporting that calls into question the case for war.
DeYoung told Kurtz that "the caution and the questioning was buried underneath the drumbeat. The hugeness of the war preparation story tended to drown out a lot of that stuff."
Liz Spayd, the Post's assistant managing editor for national news, said: "People forget how many facets of this story we were chasingthe political ramificationsmilitary readinessissues around postwar Iraq and how prepared the administration wasdiplomacy anglesand we were pursuing WMD.All those stories were competing for prominence."
I understand that the Post had a lot on its plate during the administration's rush to war. But whenever there's a lot do, it's important to set priorities, right? And in this case, shouldn't the top priority have been trying to determine whether there was really a good reason to go to war?
Do we expect too much of the Post?Put these assumptions together, and what you get is a foundation for lousy journalism. Trouble is, I'm not sure the folks at the Post understand this. Kurtz offers readers bromides about how journalists are only human, but gives no indication that the paper has conducted the kind of thoroughgoing self-critique that involves identifying the faulty assumptions that drive bad news coverage.
Mind you, I'm not saying that better prewar coverage necessarily could have prevented the Iraq debacle. But, speaking as a journalist and as a citizen, I believe it makes a difference whether journalists do their jobs, especially when their jobs entail examining the government's reasons for wanting to go to war.
That doesn't mean newspapers have to crusade against war, only that they approach our leaders' pro-war arguments with the kind of healthy skepticism that is supposed to be second nature to reporters and editors.
Is that too much to ask?
RICK MERCIER is a writer and editor for The Free Lance-Star.