Debate and dialectic: What didn’t happen at the NYT
Gail Collins, of The New York Times, regrets not questioning the Times’ WMD reporting as editor of the editorial page:
Her biggest regret as opinion leader was not questioning the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the war. While the editorial page has long opposed the invasion, due mostly to the lack of a U.N. authorization, it had supported the contention that WMD’s existed early on.
“If I had to do it over again, I would have paid a lot more attention to the people on the board who had doubts,” Collins said. “I thought there were weapons of mass destruction and most of the board members did. Frankly, we did not spend enough time debating the issue.” She said that led to early editorials that proclaimed the existence as a matter of fact rather than a questionable assertion. “We should have argued among ourselves more,” she stressed. “Given our readers some of a sense that there was an argument about it, we tended to take it for granted.”
Debate and dialectic–the Platonic (and Hegelian) path to (something like) the truth. But, then, as a culture–a discourse community–the truth of WMDs was common sense to the editorial board of the Times. No need for dialectic. Common sense of this kind–the kind that creates and clings to commonplaces–is the enemy of good journalism.
One can hope that Collins’ regret might spark some self-reflection in American journalism and a desire to develop and follow a discipline of verification. I say “develop” because, in fact, no such discipline actually exists. It’s an idea without agreed-upon or codified procedures and without a clearly stated, theoretically sound ethic.
But, really, Collins is only marginally responsible simply because she, like Times’ readers, relied in part on the Times’ reporting to be accurate (i.e. operational or potential WMDs of certain kinds either existed in some number or they did not).
The ones who should have been asking the hard questions and demanding adequate verification were Judy Miller’s editors.
