Fact Checking at the NYT

Posted by Chris

I've been suffering a bit of blogger burnout lately, and haven't really had the stomach for some of the more repulsive pundits lately. But Laura Rozen pretty clearly isn't burned out, and she has an interesting post up on William Safire's latest:

Bill Safire didn't do his research. And misspeaks, numerous times:

. . .State Department intelligence also was dubious, reports the Senate, more so in October when an Italian journalist brought in a bunch of phony documents somebody was trying to sell him about a Niger uranium transaction. This outweighed the report of a top security official in the French Foreign Ministry, who told U.S. diplomats in November 2002 that "France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger."

Two months later, with no objection from C.I.A., the famous 16 words went into Bush's 2003 State of the Union.

But when word leaked about the fake documents — which were not the basis of the previous reporting by our allies — Wilson launched his publicity campaign, acting as if he had known earlier about the forgeries.

What did Safire get wrong here?

-- The Italian journalist was not a "he."

-- The forged Niger docs were indeed the chief basis for Italy's reporting to the US on the Niger uranium claims.

-- The French report was based on the forged Niger uranium docs.

-- Reports from the fake documents were the chief source of the previous reporting to the US by the Italians, and partly by the British as well, on the Niger uranium issue.

Now, as I say, I haven't had the stomach for this stuff lately, so I'm not keeping track of the details as well as I used to. What interests me here is that Safire can't even get the gender of the Italian journalist right. I suppose it could be a typo. And for all I know, Safire might have written it correctly, and then had it botched by a copy editor. Still, this error - along with the others in this column, and many other columns - is good circumstantial evidence that Safire won't let a fact-checker within 100 yards of his column. After all, outside of advanced graduate seminars on gender theory, few think that gender is simply a matter of opinion.

Either one of two things must have happened at the NYT for things to get this silly. Either Safire has had a confrontation with his editors, and they lost, or they have not found it prudent or desirable to have that confrontation. In either case, I imagine the rationale, or the consolation, is that no one with any sense is paying attention to Safire any more anyway (for any kind of insight, that is), and that is better to just wait for him to retire than to turn him into a martyr by firing or antagonizing him.

If I believed in sinister liberal plots, I would suspect the NYT of keeping around a token conservative of such poor quality in order to blunt the appeal of conservatism. There is also the thought that the fact checkers are mutinying and letting errors like this one slip through in order to embarrass Safire - the only problem with this hypothesis being that Safire is apparently incapable of embarrassment. But it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that people have just decided to grit their teeth and let crazy Bill do whatever he likes, on the assumption that he won't be around much longer anyway.

Posted by Chris at July 19, 2004 09:59 AM