I caught the host of NPR’s “On the Media” show, Brooke Gladstone, on the Leonard Lopate show yesterday, discussing the ten year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and I was shocked by her toughness when it came to the mainstream reporters who had supported the war. Her own husband Fred Kaplan of Slate was in that category– he has since regretted it– but again and again on Lopate’s show Gladstone gave mainstream reporters a pass. She refused to criticize the Times for its awful coverage, or the New Yorker for its support for the war.

Shockingly, Gladstone began by saying the press shouldn’t have questioned the war because the Congress wasn’t doing so:

Usually the press is able to question the government, if Congress is questioning the government. But if Congress keeps quiet, the media have no protective cover, and they end up being accused of partisanship when they raise those questions.

Lopate questioned this, said the papers have autonomy. But Gladstone was tough, and now valorized the pressure of advertisers:

Again, the fear of being called partisanship at the time that the nation was still in trauma…. they weren’t afraid of the goverment, they were afraid of their own audiences and advertisers. 9/11 was not business as usual. And the timidity came because of one’s own– journalists, it’s hard to believe, are people too. … They felt the anguish of their audience and the sensitivity of their advertisers to criticizing the government directly. They wished they had Congress to do it for them.

Congress to do it for them! Did reporters learn anything from Vietnam? The New Yorker led the opposition to that war. And as Lopate wisely pointed out, the New Yorker “strongly” supported the war, including editor David Remnick.

To which Gladstone responded, it’s not her job to criticize the New Yorker, or Jeffrey Goldberg either.

Well, some did briefly support it in the runup. They believed Colin Powell’s presentation before the UN. It was a persuasive presentation. But I don’t want to speak to the position of the New Yorker writers.

P.S. Remnick gets this immunity widely; I believe because journalists dream of working at The New Yorker and don’t want to criticize him.

Lopate keeps at it: Has there been a public reckoning for any of the journalists? Judy Miller went to jail, but not for misleading the public? What about the other people who advocated so strongly for going to war?

Gladstone notes that the Times apologized for supporting the war:

In terms of the reporters, you know the New York Times apologized for being a little bit too credulous when it came to the information that it was getting from the government.

The information it got from the government? I believe Gladstone is rationalizing the conduct of court journalists. And when Lopate persisted that the Times’ apology was “self-protective,” Gladstone again stood up for those supporting the most obviously disastrous foreign-policy move since Vietnam:

You know, there’s going to be good reporting and there’s going to be bad reporting in every event that ever gets reported. War is particularly subject to all the biases that are baked into the media business, and this one following the greatest attack on American soil, you would expect that the media would go the most awry after an incident like that. I’m certainly not apologizing for it, I’ve spent the last decade chronicling the messes that American media made. But you can understand why.

Wow, that answer is tough! No introspection. And speaking of baked-in biases, Daniel Luban states the obvious in his ten-year post-mortem on the war: that neoconservative visions of defanging Israel’s eastern enemy and putting the peace process on hold were a large factor in the decision to go to war. Andrew Bacevich makes a similar point about Paul Wolfowitz’s motives in Harper’s. And those bad ideas migrated left: Joe Klein has said that the neocons peddled this theory to journalists before the war; which is surely one reason Klein, who cut his teeth opposing Vietnam, signed off on the catastrophe— however “briefly,”to use the Gladstone term of art.

Gladstone gives all those folks a pass. Here she goes, praising George Packer of the New Yorker, who caricatured the February 2003 demonstrations against the war and fell for Paul Berman’s hysterical pro-Israel views of Arab extremism:

Some of the very people who may have initially supported the war and turned against it explained exactly why….[Such as] George Packer who had supported the invasion in its very early days before he saw clearly where it was heading. Those are just journalists who do a really wonderful job of digging in and questioning their assumptions.

Did they explain exactly why? I don’t think so. The Iraq war was a tragedy. It calls for tremendous introspection, including on the part of Jews who abandoned their Vietnam-era opposition to brutal adventures out of concern for Israel. That’s why I started this website.