Some of you will recall that roughly a month ago I had a long post that centered on an email from a reader who, now a lawyer, was in touch with his old CO, now a Colonel in Iraq. The Times had played up the claims of Iraqi witnesses that US soldiers had fired into a car, killing several civilians, but hadn't come back to find out that there had been an investigation launched by an outside officer and that that report had been absolute and definitive: no shots fired, no culpability, no guilt.
My reader (and several others that I know of) contacted the Times' public editor, Mr. Okrent, who responded that he was launching an investigation. He has now responded.
While he does not discuss the issue of the reporter ignoring the fact that there was a subsequent investigation that completely cleared the unit in question, I think that, in the end, the issue that Mr. Okrent chooses to address is one that is far, far more important, for it reaches far beyond this story. In fact it is a pattern that I have been complaining about, not only in this blog, but back before I was blogging to my classes, as early as the start of the air war in Afghanistan. But, with my reader's permission, I will first let Mr. Okrent speak for himself. He writes:
Dear Col. Mansoor and Mr.
Schwinghammer,
First let me extend my apologies for the lateness of this response to Mr.
Schwinghammers e-mail message of January 25. The issue raised needed
examination in Iraq as well as here in New York, and other, ongoing inquiries
further slowed me down. I also wanted to be sure of my
details.
Edward Wong, the reporter who wrote the January 13 story, has recounted for his
editors (and thereby for me) the unfolding of his reporting on the night of the
Palestine Street bombing. He and The Timess Iraqi bureau manager asked
questions of people at the scene. They were not allowed near the car
itself. They then went to the hospital, where they encountered the Iraqi
policeman quoted in the piece. As Mr. Wong reasonably points out, there was no
way of knowing, and no reason for suspecting, that Lieutenant Ali was lying
both about the incident and his own identity. He also says the other Iraqi
policemen with Ali agreed with his version of
events.
After that, Wong attempted to speak with the survivors, but was not allowed to.
The victims family members told Wong, as had the policemen, that American
soldiers had fired on the car. The attending physicians, citing regulations,
would not speak to him either. After checking in with the American public
affairs officer for the 1st AD, who had no report on the incident, he
filed his story. In it, Mr. Wong points out, he included the assertion of an
American soldier at the scene that the bomb had killed the cars
occupants.
The next day, Wong received a telephone call from Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the
deputy chief of operations in Baghdad, who told him that a fresh report of the
incident indicated that the victims were in fact killed by shrapnel. Mr. Wong
immediately called The Timess website to update his story. One day after the
initial story appeared in The Times, another carrying Mr. Wongs byline was
published, under the general heading The Iraq Struggle: Violence, and the
specific headline, Army Copter Downed West of Baghdad in Hotbed of Anti-U.S.
Sentiment. In that story Mr. Wong included the following paragraphs:
Contributing to the tense security situation are claims from
Iraqi civilians and police officers that American soldiers have killed innocent
civilians. On Monday night, a policeman and victims' relatives said soldiers in
Humvees had shot at a family in a station wagon at the site of a roadside bomb
explosion in Baghdad, killing two people and wounding four. But General
Kimmitt said in an interview on Tuesday that initial reports based on
photographs of the scene showed that bomb shrapnel was responsible for the
deaths and injuries. The military is still investigating, he said.
I believe this is an accurate summary of the journalism involved in this episode,
and it underscores a matter of great concern to me, which I will address later
in this letter, that has nothing to do with Mr. Wongs reporting. I do think he
acted honorably, and that wartime conditions are a reasonable explanation for
the apparent inaccuracy in the first article. My only quarrel with the piece,
under the circumstances, is the citation of the American soldier on the scene:
A soldier at the scene of the Palestine Street violence in Baghdad said that
the bomb had killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded two others and that all had
been in the blue station wagon. This sentence would have been a more powerful
counterweight to the assertions of the Iraqi policeman and the family members
had it more clearly indicated that the soldier was specifically asserting that
bullets, from American personnel or others, were not involved. And the following
days story would have served as a far more effective corrective had Gen.
Kimmitts comments not appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth paragraphs of a
story whose headline was about a downed helicopter outside of
Baghdad.
And this where I come to what is, to me, the more serious matter. I believe that the
likelihood of readers who read through the first days story actually
encountering the pertinent paragraphs of the second story is very slight.
Further, a search on nytimes.com for a story about the incident can lead one
directly to the first day story, with no indication there even was a second-day
story. This is also true in The Timess own internal database. Whereas formal
corrections are attached to articles in electronic archives, second-day stories
that correct or otherwise clarify an earlier article are not.
Additionally, as Col. Mansoor points out, many other American news outlets pick up stories
from The Times; I find it highly likely that many of them did not see the
clarifying paragraphs in the second article.
I may be looking into how other media treated this story for a column I intend to write
about what you might call non-correcting corrections. In the meantime, I thank
you for writing to me about this, and you should feel free to pass along my
comments to the many people on your cc lists. I am myself forwarding this letter
to newsroom management.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Okrent, Public Editor
N.B. Any opinions expressed here, unless otherwise
attributed, are solely my own.
I believe he is dead on the money here. The Times, like many outlets, publishes on many days, a "roundup" article that is basically a list of all events, good and bad, that happened the day before in Iraq. But he headline never indicates that it's a roundup piece; instead the headline cites only the most sensational of all the events listed. And my complaint has often been that if there is some kind of accusation against the military it will often be given a stand-alone piece one day, with the military's answer being folded into the roundup piece the next day, where no one would think to look for it. This is especially problemmatic if the headline of the roundup piece matches, as is often the case, an event that has gotten extensive broadcast coverage, in which case people are even less likely to read it and find the military's answer to the prior day's accusation.
It is still the case that, for this story, Wong leaves the unit in a "he said, they said" situation, rather than reporting on a definitive investigation that cleared them, and which was easily available (available enough for Nightline to find, recall.) But if Okrent really drills down and gets on this pattern of reporting he will have done far more good in terms of fair reporting on military issues. He is certainly correct that this pattern profoundly influences what other outlets pick up and what they do not. After all, I read the Times like a hawk, as you know, and I never found this item. And he is also correct that it would be awfully difficult to develop a way to search for this kind of material.
All things considered, if Mr. Okrent pursues this aggressively, it could lead to a real, substantive improvement in the reporting of military activities in a time of war in the most influential paper in the country. My reader, by getting this ball rolling and not leaving it lie when it was suggested that this unit was behaving against the laws, values, and traditions, that he knew this commander would have imbued his troops with, has done all of us who want accurate reporting a real service.
