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There aren’t a lot of people who don’t have a problem with the New York Times these days. Those on the far left dismiss it as a lackey running dog of imperial capitalism, reluctant to ask tough questions of those in power, while those on the far right paint it as a Democratic mouthpiece blind to the moral and cultural concerns of red-state America.
Howard Friel and Richard Falk take a more systematic approach to the Times in their book The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy. Their thesis? That the Times has selectively ignored international law for decades — and in doing so failed in its civic duty to give readers the information they need to make informed decisions about their government.
As evidence, Friel and Falk offer up a detailed analysis of the Times‘ foreign policy coverage from the Gulf of Tonkin to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Regarding the latter, for example, they write: “The leading editorial voice in the United States simply declined to consider in print whether a major U.S. military invasion and occupation of another country violated international law.” Regardless of how important you believe that claim to be, it’s difficult to deny that it’s true — at least once you’ve waded through the mountains of evidence that make up much of the book. We had a chance to talk with Falk, a former Princeton University professor who is now visiting professor of global and international studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, about his book and the performance of the paper of record.
Brian Montopoli: Can you talk a little bit about why you believe the Times has, in certain situations, a bias against reporting about issues of international law? Is this a conscious, political decision by the Times? Or a business decision?
Richard Falk: I think it’s a difficult decision to fully understand. It’s essentially a decision that reflects an editorial philosophy that the way to be an effective newspaper in American society is not to stray too far from what the U.S. government proposes in relation to important and controversial issues in foreign policy. It’s not a rejection of the relevance of the international law, it’s a rejection of the relevance of international law arguments that are critical of foreign policy positions. In those situations when international law is helpful to what the United States is claiming in one of these foreign policy debates, then the Times gives quite a lot of emphasis to the relevance of international law.
BM: Has the increasing pressure on mainstream media outlets exacerbated the problem? There seems to be so much criticism of the Times right now coming from all sides.
RF: I think it has probably slightly exacerbated the problem, though if you go back to the Vietnam era or you follow the coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I think one will see that the essential characteristics of this pattern have persisted for a very long time.
BM: It seems to me that you argue in the book — and correct me if I’m wrong — that the Times has moved rightward with the country, and if the country were to move left, the Times would move left with it. It moves to stay in a particular spot and play a particular role.
RF: That’s generally true, though it’s less the country than the government. And the argument is confined to controversial and contested foreign policy issues.
BM: When I looked through the book, I didn’t see arguments from former and current Times people talking about this problem. Did you and Howard Friel try to find people and they wouldn’t talk about it? Or did you just not focus on that?
RF: Well, perhaps that was an error in judgment. But we believed that we couldn’t get very much that was useful from people with the Times or people formerly with the Times. We felt that the best way to make our argument was to base it on the actual treatment of these important foreign policy debates.
BM: A lot of people have come through the Times during the period you cover in the book, all of whom have different perspectives and politics — Howell Raines, for one, tried to apply his own biases to the paper. Why has the Times’ attitude towards reporting international law stayed largely the same?
RF: I think the journalistic philosophy that underlies the Times and has been a formula for both economic success and enormous prestige is one that seems to rely on this kind of positioning of itself in relation to official policy, especially in the foreign policy area.
BM: Is that something that Times people just understand innately? Or are they conscious of it?
RF: We do try to show, in the book, that this is a fairly conscious policy, particularly by those that speak publicly on behalf of the Times — the principal ownership. But it’s not articulated in relation to the international law dimension that the book focuses on. The reason it focuses on it is really twofold. First of all, it’s a sort of clear guideline that can be made relevant to all of these seemingly quite different sorts of issues. And secondly we believe — and this does reflect the kind of post-9/11 world — that the exclusion of critical international law perspectives interferes with the role of citizens in democratic society in forming an appropriate judgment in relation to these foreign policy issues. The Iraq war, which is emphasized in the book, seemed to us to be a paradigmatic example of the kind of argument we’re trying to make.
BM: I want to get at how you think the Times needs to address the issue. It’s first and foremost an American paper. Its reporters are covering, and have relationships with, politicians for whom international law doesn’t seem to be the number one issue. The American people don’t seem to take international law very seriously. So I don’t think it’s a tremendous surprise that they lack this perspective that they perhaps need. How does the Times address the issue? Does someone need to sit down with the editors and say, hey, you guys are missing the forest for the trees?
RF: Well, I want to restate the argument. The Times doesn’t take the view — which is one possible view, and is maybe more associated with the Wall Street Journal or some other newspapers — that international law is not relevant. It does emphasize international law. If you look at how they treated the hostage crisis — when the American embassy in Iran was seized and the diplomatic community there was held hostage for more than a year — the Times gave great emphasis to the illegality under international law of what the Iranian government was doing there. It has generally used international law as part of the arsenal of a liberal newspaper. The argument isn’t one of saying international law isn’t being taken seriously. It’s that they publish a one-sided account of its relevance. They publish people like Ruth Wedgewood and others close to the government position. The argument is that they distorted the debate by giving only one side. They didn’t give the critical side any kind of opportunity.
BM: Is this fixable, or is the reality of being the New York Times such that it’s always going to put itself in the position it’s put itself in for the past 50 years regarding these issues?
RF: I think it’s hard to say. It really would require a significant adjustment of how the Times regards its role in these foreign policy contexts and it would be based on a sense that there needs to be a more independent assessment of whether contested foreign policy is or isn’t beneficial for the American people. If you look back, the two biggest failures of American foreign policy in the past 50 or so years have been Vietnam and Iraq, both of which could have been avoided had international law been used to shape American foreign policy.
BM: You focus on the Times in the book, but you say your critique applies to the media more generally. Are there exceptions? Is anyone, in your view, really reporting foreign policy correctly?
RF: There are matters of degree. I don’t know media across the board well enough to give you a really good answer. I have been reading the Los Angeles Times while I’ve been out here in California, and I think they’re better about this kind of issue, partly because I think they have a less self-conscious sense of their own role as a paper of record. And the Times seems to have interpreted that to mean — either implicitly or explicitly — that they shouldn’t stray too far from the official views on major foreign policy issues. A telling criticism from the perspective of international law might jeopardize that sense of maintaining the right distance from these foreign policy contexts. Again, our argument is not to say that they should say international law should be ultimate criterion of American foreign policy in every setting. It’s just that the other side of the argument should be heard by the readers of the Times and the citizens of a democratic society.
BM: Last question: Have you heard from anyone at the Times since the book came out? What has been their response?
RF: Not a word. And I think that’s characteristic of the Times’ arrogance, in my view, their feeling that they don’t want to even engage in a discussion of this kind of criticism.
BM: It just seems [that] there’s so much criticism of the Times now, particularly from the right, I feel [as if] perhaps the sort of legitimate criticisms sort of get drowned out in the torrent of criticism that greets them each day.
RF: Yes. But of course that’s a kind of refuge, too, that they can take to deflect the more justifiable criticisms. And as we tried to suggest, this criticism could have been made, perhaps a little less convincingly, at almost any point in the last 75 years. Their coverage of Iraq was something that they acknowledge themselves as having been one-sided. And the international law issue is just one expression of that one-sidedness, and it wasn’t an expression that they gave much weight to, because they emphasized the fact [that] they took too uncritically the views of Iraqi exiles.
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