Gitmo and Shoddy Journalism

Eric Umansky in the Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece on the unwillingness of the American news media to challenge Bush Administration claims that those detained in Gitmo are, as Rumself said in 2002, "the worst of the worst." Although the evidence suggests that most of those being held are non-combatants who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Administration persists in claiming that the detainees are simply too dangerous to be released. From the Administration's perspective, it makes sense to persist in arguing against the facts. After all, Gitmo isn't just a civil liberties nightmare, it's also yet another example of Bush incompetence. Rather than, in Rumsfeld's words, "the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth," the Gitmo prisoners are generally poor Afghans caught off the battlefield in Pakistan and sold into detention for a bounty. Not exactly crack intelligence at work.

More puzzling, however, is the failure of elite journalists to challenge these Administration assertions or to do the basic work needed to uncover the truth. As Umansky writes, "Such skepticism about the government’s claims would prove to be well-founded -- and quite rare. Until recently, reporters have seldom sought to test the Bush administration’s contention[s]." The lack of such skepticism speaks to the precipitous decline of actual investigative journalism, and the simple fact that most of the reporters with access don't have the background or knowledge to challenge Administration officials. As a result, while Gitmo is in the news virtually every day, few journalists seem to be asking the really obvious questions: like just who exactly are the detainees. Partly, this failure has to do with existing ideas about what constitutes 'investigation'. Since Watergate, journalists have confused exposing any personal scandal pertaining to a politician, no matter how small or private, with investigative journalism. The desperate quest for the 'scoop' that will make sensational, tabloid-sque headlines stands in for intelligent research into the facts. Yet, the larger reason continues to be the consolidation of corporate media and the resulting cutback on staffing at most newspapers. Where once a reporter at a bureau would file an independent news story, now due to budget constraints and far greater news centralization, a paper is more likely merely to run an article from the AP. The lack of real investigation also indicates what happens to the press when three-fifths of news sourcing comes from government officials. Under such circumstances, even facts in plain sight have a way of disappearing. For the rest of Umansky article, read on. . .