Leslie Gelb, former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, former New York Times correspondent and generally very accomplished man, wrote a media analysis piece for Democracy recently evaluating the elite media’s (and by the press, he means the following five publications Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal) critical writing in the period leading up to the Iraq war and shortly thereafter. His conclusion is that it was a mixed bag; not quite as bad as common knowledge might suggest, but not as good as it ought to have been if we’re going to continue to consider these 5 news outlets the centurions of our democracy. (His terminology, not mine).

More interesting is his analysis is, first, his diagnosis of the problem as structural. Newspapers are supposed to follow the news; that is what makes them good newspapers. For better or for worse, in our democracy, news is what important people do, and so when these important people have meetings where they tell journalists what is newsworthy, journalists typically publish it. This leads to a bias toward information from official sources and often devolves into what Gelb describes as he said/she said reporting. He asserts that this is fine - or at least functional - for day to day affairs, but in cases like the Iraq war is insufficient and constitutes an abdication of responsibility on the part of the fourth estate. Of course, one has to wonder when the administration’s agenda should not be subject to the highest level of scrutiny - is military conflict the only issue worthy of close attention by the press?

Second, he suggest a few different means of shifting newspaper culture to something a bit more conducive to good reporting, most significant among them (to me) the recommendation that journalists be encouragesd to be educated on the things on which they are reporting. Namely, that they should read books. The reason that news analysis reproduces political back-and-forth rhetoric is, in part, because journalists do not understand the policies that they are writing about. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the case. On the other hand, though, one has to wonder which Americans and consumers of these newspapers abroad are interested in reading detailed policy analysis. Just something to consider.