{"id":66063,"date":"2004-08-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-22T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/08\/22\/message-aux-journalistes-de-reference\/"},"modified":"2004-08-22T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-08-22T00:00:00","slug":"message-aux-journalistes-de-reference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/08\/22\/message-aux-journalistes-de-reference\/","title":{"rendered":"Message aux journalistes de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Message aux journalistes de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t22 ao\u00fbt 2004 Apr\u00e8s le New York Times, le New Republic<\/em>, au tour du Washington Post<\/em> de pr\u00e9senter ses excuses \u00e0 ses lecteurs. Il a mal interpr\u00e9t\u00e9, mal appr\u00e9ci\u00e9, etc. En bref, il a menti et il a travaill\u00e9 comme un cochon pour nous vendre cette salet\u00e9 de guerre, monument de vanit\u00e9 et de b\u00eatise, et de cruaut\u00e9 puisque vanit\u00e9 et b\u00eatise y conduisent \u00e9videmment. Que cela nous vienne de la presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence par excellence n’a rien pour nous consoler. On se dirait m\u00eame qu’au moins le Weekly Standard<\/em> ou le Financial Times<\/em> ont le courage de leurs mensonges et acceptent l’empire de leur vanit\u00e9 en n\u00e9gligeant de pr\u00e9senter des excuses charg\u00e9es de calculs sordides. La presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence, lib\u00e9rale et vertueusement objective, apr\u00e8s s’\u00eatre couch\u00e9e comme une Pravda<\/em> classique devant le pouvoir, r\u00e9clame encore un zeste de vertu, celle qu’il vous reste quand on s’est battu la coulpe (avec un zeste de d\u00e9lice ?) sur trois colonnes et qu’on s’est r\u00e9install\u00e9 dans les fauteuils grand style des opulentes salles de r\u00e9daction.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tLa presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence n’a jamais exist\u00e9. Le Watergate, dont tous les petits journalistes de la presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence parisienne (celle-l\u00e0 ne bat pas sa coulpe, camp\u00e9e sur le cart\u00e9sianisme content de soi des caf\u00e9s germano-pratins) font des gorges chaudes, fut un autre exercice en vanit\u00e9. Cette fois, il se trouve que le salopard, Nixon est, sur l’\u00e9chelle de Richter des pr\u00e9sidents US, un salopard moyen, n’avait pas pris les pr\u00e9cautions qu’il faut ; caresser dans le sens de la vanit\u00e9 et contr\u00f4ler la presse, comme faisait JFK (Kennedy) ; caresser dans le sens des pr\u00e9bendes et contr\u00f4ler le Congr\u00e8s, comme faisait LBJ (Johnson). Nixon \u00e9tait un salopard solitaire, bourr\u00e9 de complexes dont celui de la pers\u00e9cution, avec en plus le d\u00e9faut d’avoir un certain don pour la politique ext\u00e9rieure. Il ne faisait donc pas partie du monde de la presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence. On ne l’a pas rat\u00e9. Faire de son ex\u00e9cution un titre de vertu de cette presse qui a montr\u00e9 ces trois derni\u00e8res ann\u00e9es son vrai visage, c’est prendre des vessies pour des lanternes. C’est le sport national de notre civilisation en attendant l’apocalypse.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tLa presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence le fut d\u00e8s l’origine mais elle l’est aujourd’hui de mani\u00e8re \u00e9clatante : elle est le miroir de notre vanit\u00e9, encore plus que de notre hypocrisie et de notre cynisme. (Hypocrites et cyniques, on regrette que tous ces gens qui nous tiennent des discours de vertu ne le soient pas un peu plus. Au moins, ils mesureraient un peu plus la salade qu’ils nous vendent.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tAussi, ce d\u00e9shabillage des plus grands fleurons intellectuels-chic de la plan\u00e8te, c’est-\u00e0-dire pour l’instant de la plan\u00e8te-USA, appara\u00eet-il \u00e0 la fois comme singuli\u00e8rement vain, singuli\u00e8rement d\u00e9courageant et singuli\u00e8rement jouissif. Cela ne changera rien et ils ne changeront pas. Pour autant, ils n’emp\u00eacheront pas la catastrophe qui menace leur monde.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t Mais singuli\u00e8rement jouissif disions-nous. Parce qu’entre-temps est apparu ce ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne nouveau, qu’il nous est arriv\u00e9 de d\u00e9signer comme Notre Samizdat globalis\u00e9<\/a>, qui est cette floraison de non-journalistes de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence se pr\u00e9cipitant sur le Web pour \u00e9diter, et publier, en toute libert\u00e9, et dire leur fait \u00e0 la presse de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence. C’est une des tr\u00e8s bonnes surprises d’une \u00e9poque exceptionnellement m\u00e9prisable.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tAinsi ne devons-nous pas priver nos lecteurs d’une lecture saine et roborative, d’un de ces non-journalistes de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence du Samizdat<\/em>, descendant le Post<\/em> et ses excuses vertueuses d’une tr\u00e8s belle fa\u00e7on, avec quelques bonnes insultes m\u00e9prisantes ici et l\u00e0. (Il s’agit de Matt Taibbi, de New York Press<\/a>, dans son \u00e9dition du 18-24 ao\u00fbt 2004.) <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sorry, Our Bad<\/h2>\n

The Washington Post still doesn’t get it.<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tBy Matt Taibbi, New York Press, Volume 17, Issue 33, 18-24 ao\u00fbt 2004<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWITH ALL DUE respect to the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, who was polite to me when we spoke on the phone earlier this year, I had to laugh at his 3000-word We Fucked Up on Iraq piece that came out last week. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tKurtz’s Aug. 12 piece, entitled The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story; Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page, was the latest in what is likely to be a long series of tepid media mea culpas about pre-war Iraq reporting. The piece comes on the heels of the New York Times’ infamous The Bitch Set Us Up piece from this past May, in which that paper implicitly blamed hyperambitious hormone-case Judith Miller for its hilarious prewar failures. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Kurtz article was a curious piece of writing. In reading it, I was reminded of a scene I once witnessed at the New England Aquarium in Boston, in the aqua-petting-zoo section on the second floor. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe petting pool contained a sea cucumber. Now, anyone who has ever made it through seventh-grade science class knows what a sea cucumber does when threatened. Unfortunately, some parent unleashed a sixth-grader on the pool unattended. The kid started fucking with the sea cucumber, poking and prodding it like crazy. So the sea cucumber pulled out its only defense mechanism, turning itself inside out and showing its nasty guts to the poor kid, who immediately thought he’d killed the thing and ran away crying. Later, when I made another turn through the same area of the aquarium, the cucumber had reconstituted itself and was sitting in its usual log-like position.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIt is hard to imagine a better metaphor for these post-invasion auto-crucifixions our papers of record have been giving us lately. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Post piece featured an array of senior and less-senior reporters who let us in on the shocking revelation that stories questioning the Bush administration’s pre-war intelligence claims were often buried deep in the news section, while Bush claims ran on the front. Revelations included the heartwarming Thelma & Louise tale of Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward teaming up to get Pincus’ WMD skepticism piece into the paper just days before the country went over the cliff into Iraq. In fact, the second paragraph of the piece is devoted to this tale of editorial foxhole heroism:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\this piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, helped sell the story,’ Pincus recalled. Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper.’ Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tQuite a lot of Kurtz’s article is devoted to such backdoor compliments, with numerous reminders throughout the text that the Post, relatively speaking, did a better job than most papers on Iraq. Much of the piece was framed in this But on the other hand rhetorical format, in which admissions of poor performance surfed home on waves of somber self-congratulation. Some examples:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tQuoting media critic Michael Massing: In covering the run-up to the war, The Post did better than most other news organizations’ But on the key issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the paper was generally napping along with everyone else.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tGiven The Post’s reputation for helping topple the Nixon administration the paper’s shortcomings did not reflect any reticence about taking on the Bush White House.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tLiz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post’s overall record was strong. I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration’s assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tBob Woodward: We did our job but we didn’t do enough.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWhen the Post wasn’t reassuring readers of its competence, it was offering excuseslots of them. The list is really an extraordinary one. According to Kurtz’s interview subjects, the Post was slow on Iraq because: a) Walter Pincus is a cryptic writer who isn’t storifyable; b) there is limited space on the front page, and executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. likes to have health and education and Orioles coverage and other stuff there; c) the paper got a lot of depressing hate mail questioning its patriotism whenever it questioned the Bush administration; d) their intelligence sources wouldn’t go on the record, while Bush and Powell were up there openly saying all this stuff; e) the paper had to rely on the administration because Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus had no alternative sources of information, and particularly couldn’t go to Iraq without getting killed; f) the paper, including Woodward, was duped by highly seductive intelligence-community groupthink; g) too many of the dissenting sources were retired from government or, even worse, not in government at all; h) stories on intelligence are difficult to edit; g) there was a lot of information to digest; h) the paper is inevitably a mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power; i) a flood of copy about the impending invasion kept skeptical coverage out [Note: This is my favorite. We’re already covering the war, so it’s too late to explain why we shouldn’t go to war.]; and finally, j) none of it matters, because even if the Post had done a more thorough job, there would have been a war anyway.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tHere’s how Downie put that last excuse:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tPeople who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media’s coveragehave the mistaken impression that somehow if the media’s coverage had been different, there wouldn’t have been a war.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tNothing like an editor with a firm grasp of metaphysics. It doesn’t matter what we write, the universe is still going to keep expanding<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe problem with these newsprint confessions is not that they are craven, insufficient and self-serving, which of course they are. The problem is that, on the whole, they do not correct the pre-war mistakes, but actually further them. The Post would have you believe that its \u00a0\u00bbfailure\u00a0\u00bb before the war was its inability\/reluctance to punch holes in Bush’s WMD claims. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tRight. I marched in Washington against the war in February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That’s because we knew what the Post and all of these other papers still refuse to admitthis whole thing was never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five- year-old, much less the literate executive editor of the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were going in anyway. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tFor God’s sake, Bush was up there in the fall of 2002, warning us that unmanned Iraqi drones were going to spray poison gas on the continental United States. The whole thingthe threat of Iraqi attack, the link to terrorism, the dire warnings about Saddam’s intentionsit was all bullshit on its face, as stupid, irrelevant and transparent as a cheating husband’s excuse. And I don’t know a single educated person who didn’t think so at the time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe story shouldn’t have been, Are there WMDs? The story should have been, Why are they pulling this stunt? And why now? That was the real mystery. It still is.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWe didn’t need a named source in the Pentagon to tell us that. And neither did the Washington Post. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit \u00eatre lu avec la mention classique \u00e0 l’esprit, Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only..]<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Message aux journalistes de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence 22 ao\u00fbt 2004 Apr\u00e8s le New York Times, le New Republic, au tour du Washington Post de pr\u00e9senter ses excuses \u00e0 ses lecteurs. Il a mal interpr\u00e9t\u00e9, mal appr\u00e9ci\u00e9, etc. En bref, il a menti et il a travaill\u00e9 comme un cochon pour nous vendre cette salet\u00e9 de guerre, monument… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3430,3248],"class_list":["post-66063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-post","tag-washington"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}