PRESS AND PRESSURE

By now, enough has been written about Newsweek and its retraction of the story regarding alleged abuse of the Quran by US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. I admit that the worst, most cynical parts of me want to believe that Newsweek published this story with the full knowledge that it was a humbug which they would have to retract, much as a lawyer might ask a blatantly foul question while cross-examining a witness, knowing that the other lawyer will object, the judge will sustain the objection, and the jurors won’t be able to put the whole incident out of their minds. I really don’t want to believe that Newsweek would be so stupid as to publish such an inflammatory article simply to embarrass the administration, but CBS bought the bogus “Bush is AWOL” memos, so who knows?

I am not a journalist, nor am I one who regards bloggers as “citizen journalists,” so I don’t feel overly qualified to address the question of whether Newsweek had enough evidence to justify publishing the story. I think we’d all have felt more comfortable if Newsweek could point to a second corroborating source, but I am not an expert on these matters.

What I am an expert on is the marketplace of ideas, since I represent a faith which has survived in it for two thousand years. And what intrigues me at present is the degree to which post-Watergate American journalism is now being tested in that marketplace.

All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They exposed Nixon’s low hustles and helped usher in a new era of semi-accountability in American politics. So I’m not willing to make them solely responsible for the new era of “gotcha” journalism. It is well for journalists to want to reveal what others want to keep hidden, particularly when those things are being done in the name of a people or a government. But there’s a right way to do that, and a wrong way.

We all saw, in the CBS Air Guard memo story (or, if you prefer, in Fox News’ perpetual “WMDs found in Iraq!”claim from the early days of the current war), the willingness of a news organization to report a particular point of view. (Most thinking persons have been aware of this sort of partisan journalism for a long time, but let’s face it; without media bias, there wouldn’t even be a blogosphere.) CBS’s shameful episode produced the mother of all unintended consequences: Now, when derogatory information about the administration comes to light, it’s reasonable to assume that the information is either (a) spun like a Pedro Martinez fastball, or (b) completely made up. To many people, the large media now serve a function like Baghdad Bob did in Hussein’s Iraq: They’re who you turn to find out what’s not actually happening in the world.

In recent days, there have been polls showing that Americans are beginning to support the idea that maybe freedom of the press goes too far. When we see the rage that these reports of Quran desecration have caused among those who already don’t like us anyway, it’s natural to wish that it had never happened. It’s even more natural to wish that after finding out that the report was quite flimsy in the first place. But I reject the idea that the solution to situations such as these is to implement some form of prior restraint on the press. Anybody with enough experience in the marketplace of ideas can tell you that it’s the most ruthlessly capitalist market on Earth–and it’s a buyer’s market, because there are far more people seeking your urgent attention than you can ever hope to pay any attention to. In this marketplace, there are no second-place trophies; the rewards go only to the person who can get their idea to market first. So it was somewhat natural for Newsweek to try to get its idea to market as fast as possible, without fully considering the implications of being wrong–or even the possibility that they might, in fact, be wrong. What if Time got the story right and beat them to it? Who, then, would read Newsweek?

The danger, of course, is the same as the danger of bringing an untested, unsafe product to market: the product’s failure might result in harm to the consumer, or even to innocent bystanders. There’s a plethora of such products in the physical marketplace; names like “Pinto” spring to mind. And that’s what happened here. Whether Newsweek failed to verify this story adequately, or whether they poisoned the well on purpose, the point is, they willingly put a sketchy product out there in the marketplace of ideas. And anybody who knows the basics about free markets knows that consumers can punish the sellers of bad products much more harshly and efficiently than the government ever can dream of.

So the solution to Toiletgate is not found in weakening the Constitutional protection of the press. The solution is found in all of us remembering that the right to publish doesn’t include the right to an audience, and we all do well to shun the purveyors of gooshy journalism such as that practiced by those who would be Woodward and/or Bernstein. You’ll recall that they investigated what Deep Throat told them; they didn’t just publish his information without checking it first.