Clay Burell's Library tagged medialiteracy →  View Popular

This is how it begins: Proponents of a fringe or non-mainstream scientific viewpoint seek added credibility. They're sick of being taunted for having few (if any) peer reviewed publications in their favor. Fed up, they decide to do something about it.

These “skeptics” find what they consider to be a weak point in the mainstream theory and critique it. Not by conducting original research; they simply review previous work. Then they find a little-known, not particularly influential journal where an editor sympathetic to their viewpoint hangs his hat.

They get their paper through the peer review process and into print. They publicize the hell out of it. Activists get excited by the study, which has considerable political implications.

Before long, mainstream scientists catch on to what’s happening. They shake their heads. Some slam the article and the journal that published it, questioning the review process and the editor’s ideological leanings. In published critiques, they tear the paper to scientific shreds.

Embarrassed, the journal’s publisher backs away from the work. But it’s too late for that. The press has gotten involved, and though the work in question has been discredited in the world of science, partisans who favor its conclusions for ideological reasons will champion it for years to come.

The scientific waters are muddied. The damage is done.

Take the climate science storyline first. The most definitive account of what happened appeared in a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Richard Monastersky; the New York Times and Wall Street Journal also covered the story.

In early 2003, the small journal Climate Research published a paper by climate change “skeptics” Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which challenged the established view that the late twentieth century saw anomalously high temperatures. The paper didn’t present original research; instead, it was a literature review. Soon and Baliunas examined a wide range of “proxy records” for past temperatures, based on studies of ice cores, corals, tree rings, and other sources. They concluded that few of the records showed anything particularly unusual about twentieth century temperatures, especially when compared with the so-called “Medieval Warm Period” a thousand years ago.

Soon and Baliunas had specifically sent their paper to one Chris de Freitas at Climate Research, an editor known for opposing curbs on carbon dioxide emissions. He in turn sent the paper out for review and then accepted it for publication. That’s when the controversy began.

Conservative politicians in the U.S., who oppose forced restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, lionized the study. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe called it literally paradigm shifting. The Bush administration attempted to edit an Environmental Protection Agency report’s discussion of climate change in order to include reference to the Soon and Baliunas work. None of this should come as a surprise: The paper seemed to undermine a key piece of evidence suggesting that we can actually see and measure the consequences of human-induced climate change.

Soon mainstream climate scientists fought back. Thirteen authored a devastating critique of the work in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos. After seeing the critique, Climate Research editor-in-chief Hans von Storch decided he had to make changes in the journal’s editorial process. But when journal colleagues refused to go along, von Storch announced his resignation.

Several other Climate Research editors subsequently resigned over the Soon and Baliunas paper. Even journal publisher Otto Kinne eventually admitted that the paper suffered from serious flaws, basically agreeing with its critics. But by that point in time, Inhofe had already devoted a Senate hearing to trumpeting the new study. However dubious, it made a massive splash.

BILL MOYERS: THAT MEANT ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION THE PRESS AND GOVERNMENT WERE RELYING ON, INCLUDING, NOTABLY, THIS MAN, AHMED CHALABI.
AFTER THE FIRST GULF WAR AMERICANS HAD INSTALLED CCHALABI AS THE LEADER OF IRAQI EXILES SEEKING REGIME CHANGE IN BAGHDAD. NOW HE WAS ALL OVER WASHINGTON, AS THE ADMINISTRATION'S AND THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES' STAR WITNESS AGAINST SADDAM.

AHMED CHALABI: Hello... Yes, very well.

JOHN WALCOTT: Chalabi's motives were always perfectly clear in this and understandable. He was an Iraqi. He didn't want his country run by a thug and a murderer, a mass murderer, and a crook. And everything he said had to be looked at in that light, and scrutinized in that light.
And why anyone would give him a free pass, or anyone else a free pass for that matter, on a matter as important as going to war, is beyond me.

JAMES BAMFORD: Chalabi was a creature of American propaganda to a large degree. It was an American company, the Rendon Group, that - working secretly with the CIA - basically created his organization, the Iraqi National Congress. And put Chalabi in charge basically.

BILL MOYERS: JAMES BAMFORD IS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST WHOSE SPECIALTY IS THE INTELLIGENCE WORLD.

JAMES BAMFORD: From the very beginning Chalabi was paid a lot of money from the US taxpayers. The CIA paid him originally about 350,000 dollars a month, to Chalabi and his organization. The CIA finally caught on in the mid-90s that Chalabi was a conman basically. And, they dropped him.

BILL MOYERS: CHALABI'S HANDLERS IN WASHINGTON WERE NOT DETERRED BY THAT STAIN ON HIS CREDIBILITY. HE CHARMED CONGRESS OUT OF MILLIONS MORE DOLLARS FOR HIS CAUSE, AND HAD THE PRESS EATING OUT OF HIS HAND.

JAMES BAMFORD: He made a lot of friends in the media. And, he convinced a lot of people that he was legitimate even though the CIA had dropped him.

BILL MOYERS: WHEN CHALABI MADE SELECTED IRAQI DEFECTORS AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS IT WAS A WIN-WIN GAME: THE DEFECTORS GOT A PLATFORM. JOURNALISTS GOT BIG SCOOPS.

MICHAEL MASSING: There was a big effort, in fact, to find people who seemed to have credible evidence about what was going on inside Iraq. Because, in fact, if you could find somebody who was credible talking about a nuclear program in Iraq or chemical weapons, that would be a big story.

BILL MOYERS: AND IT WORKED. THE NEW YORKER. USA TODAY. THE WASHINGTON POST. THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. THE NEW YORK TIMES. AND ON PBS JUST TWO MONTHS AFTER 9/11, FRONTLINE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES TEAMED UP FOR A DOCUMENTARY ON THE DEFECTORS.

FRONTLINE NARRATOR (FRONTLINE, PBS, 11/8/01): Captain Sabah Khodada is a former army officer who defected from Iraq. He made a crude drawing of what he says is a terrorist training camp on the outskirts of Baghdad.

BILL MOYERS: THERE WERE CAVEATS...

FRONTLINE NARRATOR: And a further caution: these defectors have been brought to FRONTLINE's attention by one group of Iraqi dissidents, the INC, The Iraqi National Congress.

BILL MOYERS: BUT THE CAVEATS COULDN'T COMPETE WITH THE SPECTACULAR TALES TOLD BY DEFECTORS.
BEFORE THE INVASION THE NEW YORK TIME'S JUDITH MILLER WOULD WRITE SIX PROMINENT STORIES BASED ON THEIR TESTIMONY.
JUDITH MILLER: Ahmed Chalabi is a controversial leader of the Iraqi opposition...

BILL MOYERS: AND STILL ON THE WEB, A REPORT ABOUT THE DEFECTORS, NARRATED BY JUDITH MILLER AND PRODUCED BY NEW YORK TIMES TELEVISION FOR THE NEWSHOUR ON PBS...

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Judy Miller had been an old friend of Chalabi. Did a lot of the stories on Chalabi. Was very favorable to Chalabi.

BILL MOYERS: JAMES BAMFORD FOUND OUT THAT IN 2001 CHALABI HAD ARRANGED FOR MILLER TO MEET IN THAILAND WITH A DEFECTOR FROM IRAQ NAMED AL-HAIDERI.

JAMES BAMFORD: So, Al-Haideri was in Bangkok. Judy Miller flew there to interview him.

JAMES BAMFORD: The NEW YORK TIMES ran a front page story basically confirming everything the administration had been saying about Iraq.

MICHAEL MASSING: THE NEW YORK TIMES remains immensely influential. People in the TV world read it every morning, and it's amazing how often you'll see a story go from the front page of the day's paper in the morning to the evening news cast at night. People in government, of course, read it, think tanks, and so on.

JONATHAN LANDAY: There were some red flags that the NEW YORK TIMES story threw out immediately, which caught our eye, immediately. The first was the idea that a Kurd - the enemy of Saddam - had been allowed into his most top secret military facilities. I don't think so. That was, for me, the biggest red flag. And there were others, like the idea that Saddam Hussein would put a biological weapons facility under his residence. I mean, would you put a biological weapons lab under your living room? I don't think so.

WARREN STROBEL: The first rule of being an intelligence agent, or a journalist, and they're really not that different, is you're skeptical of defectors, because they have a reason to exaggerate. They want to increase their value to you. They probably want something from you. Doesn't mean they're lying, but you should be -- journalists are supposed to be skeptical, right? And I'm afraid the NEW YORK TIMES reporter in that case and a lot of other reporters were just not skeptical of what these defectors were saying. Nor was the Administration...

FOX NEWS ANCHOR (8/1/02): A former top Iraqi nuclear scientists tells congress Iraq could build three nuclear bombs by 2005.

CNN NEWS ANCHOR (12/21/01): Well, now another defector. A senior Iraqi intelligence official tells VANITY FAIR in an exclusive interview that Saddam Hussein has trained an elite fighting force in sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking and murder. David Rose wrote the story; he joins us now from London.

BILL MOYERS: IN VANITY FAIR'S DAVID ROSE, DEFECTORS FOUND ANOTHER EAGER BEAVER FOR THEIR CLAIMS. THE GLOSSY MAGAZINE, A FAVORITE OF MEDIA ELITES, GAVE HIM FOUR BIG SPREADS TO TELL DEFECTOR STORIES.
THE TALK SHOWS LAPPED IT UP.

DAVID ROSE: (MSNBC 12/21/01) What the defector Al-Qurairy, a former brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, told me is that these guys, there are twelve hundred in all and they've been trained to hijack trains, buses, ships and so forth...

JONATHAN LANDAY: As you track their stories, they become ever more fantastic, and they're the same people who are telling these stories, until you get to the most fantastic tales of all, which appeared in VANITY FAIR Magazine.

DAVID ROSE: The last training exercise was to blow up a full size mock up of a US destroyer in a lake in central Iraq.

JONATHAN LANDAY: Or, jumping into pits of fouled water and having to kill a dog with your bare teeth. I mean, and this was coming from people, who are appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank would change.

LESLIE STAHL (60 MINUTES, CBS 3/3/02): Musawi told us that he has verified that this man was an officer in Iraq's ruthless intelligence service the Mukhabarat .

JONATHAN LANDAY: And, you're saying, "Wait a minute. There's something wrong here, because in this story he was a major, but in this story the guy's a colonel. And, in this story this was his function, but now he says in this story he was doing something else.

Indeed, search engines, news aggregation, live-blogging, and "miracles of technology" such as Twitter, Facebook, and real-time video delivered via camera phones, played an indispensable part in allowing millions of people around the world to "bear witness" to what was happening in Iran.

The truth is, you don't have to "be there" to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness.

Obviously, there is tremendous value in being an eyewitness. But we have to always keep in mind that the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing.

Malcolm Muggeridge famously called this "the eyewitness fallacy" -- the tendency of people to see, in eyewitness accounts, what they want to see.

As a longtime writer and editor for the New York Times, Cohen should be particularly aware of the limitations of eyewitness accounts.

It's true -- the way that the U.S. is portrayed on Al Jazeera matters, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We followed up the initial piece by sending the reporter to get reaction from African-American Obama supporters. We gave the last word in this saga to the owner of a PR firm in Atlanta:

"They are not America. They don't reflect America, they don't represent the America that I live in and am a part of, and they don't reflect the majority of Americans."

We will have to wait until November 4 -- or the early hours of November 5 -- to know who Americans will choose to be their next President. But there are certain things we do know now.

After the dark and gloomy years of recent times, this race has electrified the world. It's a U.S. election that has more international resonance that perhaps any in our lifetime.

And all of these issues have been debated and explored in hundreds of hours of coverage on Al Jazeera English, an award-winning channel that is broadcast in more than 100 countries.

Except for most of the United States. Political and financial interests have pressured American cable companies from carrying Al Jazeera English.

In a country that regards itself as the world's leading democracy, that is regrettable because Al Jazeera's coverage has been fair, comprehensive and respectful of different points of view. And a window on the world.

As the world welcomes this new and exciting U.S. era, isn't it time for Americans -- when it comes to being able to see Al Jazeera - to actually be allowed to make their own judgment?