In an earlier post , I suggested it was startling to find that the Daily Mirror has more stringent standards of personal responsibility than the Blair government in relation to the dissemination of falsehoods about the war in Iraq Looking at parallel cases in the US[1], Jack Shafer at Slate is surprised but in the opposite way, saying that until NYT editor Bill Keller publishes an apology for the bogus WMD reports published by Judith Miller
Pardon my naive idealism, but isn’t the government in a democratic society supposed to more accountable than any newspaper. Still, it does seem rather alternate-universe that the Daily Mirror should be the only actor in this whole drama to uphold traditional standards of responsibility.we’ll be occupying a bizarro world in which the secretary of state is more accountable than the New York Times.
Finally, although it’s been pointed out before, I can’t resist asking how it is that Glenn Reynolds and his legion of NYT “fact-checkers” have missed this story.
fn1. To recap, the editor of the Mirror, Piers Morgan, was sacked for publishing photos of torture in Iraq that turned out to be fake. Powell, alone among senior government figures in the Coalition of the Willing, has apologized for the false claims made about Iraqi weapons programs before the war. (He is in a better position than most to do so, having been the only one to apply some sort of scepticism to the intelligence info he was given, though not nearly enough. ) The NYT has made no apology over Miller, even though she violated all the rules of good journalism and produced a string of spurious stories as a result.
{ 7 comments }
Giles 05.20.04 at 11:07 pm
I think that you’re attributing values where there are none – Piers Morgan did not go willingly, he was sacked. Instrumental in his sacking was Sly Bailey who’s never liked him. So this wasn’t really a case of The Mirror Taking responsibility, just using a slip up as an excuse to get rid of someone they’d already decided they don’t want to keep.
Similarly Blair will “take responsibility†as soon as the Labor Party decides it no longer needs/wants him.
Giles 05.20.04 at 11:09 pm
Since September 11, 2001, he sought to position the Mirror as a hard-hitting, serious-minded tabloid and became increasingly critical of the Labour party, which the Mirror has always traditionally supported.
When Sly Bailey became Trinity Mirror’s chief executive early last year, Morgan had to rein back his agenda, but created waves again when the paper came out fiercely against the Iraq war, a stance that alienated many Mirror readers.
Morgan’s departure will delight some of his enemies, but is likely to sadden many in the newspaper industry, who respected his editorial skills and enjoyed his larger-than-life persona, which has seen him carve out a niche as a TV personality and hosting the celebrity documentary series Tabloid Tales.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1217195,00.html
q 05.21.04 at 6:27 am
Please clarify the moral standards that apply. Is a fair definition of “accountability”: to resign if you published a lie if either you knew it was a lie, or didn’t bother checking the fact? Or is there a missing element here? Piers Morgan published because he believed the pictures were true.
Jack 05.21.04 at 12:18 pm
Giles, it’s all the better if it doesn’t require strong personal values. We’re talking about accountability, not morality.
megapotamus 05.21.04 at 5:14 pm
The administrations accountability is owed directly to the people as expressed in the polls (That’s not the Rasmussen polls.) We’ll be having an election here shortly and we will see. We will see.
Giles 05.21.04 at 6:00 pm
Well as far as accountablitity goes, Morgan, like any executive was accountable to his shareholders.
They sacked him because they thought his Brown for PM crusade was damaging the sales and prestige of the paper.
As for professional ethics, I think that an editor of a braodsheet should resign if he knew or should reasonably have know that a story was false.
And Morgan was clearly gulity here of wilful negligence since the photos looked pretty fishy to everyone who first saw them.
But I think that q’s lower standard above should apply to tabloid editors i.e. only resign for known deciet or possibly gross negligence
Michael 05.21.04 at 9:48 pm
Not exactly on your point, but related: You might be interested in a post on my blog, Reading A1, on the latest turn in the story of Judith Miller’s pre-war reporting. (Shafer noted it too on Tuesday in Slate, but there was a crucial dot he didn’t manage to connect.) As far as the question of Miller’s own possible bad faith goes, it’s probably the single most damning episode so far.
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