Journalism, plagued by inexperience and manipulated by the White House, dies by a thousand cuts

May 9, 2016 • 8:30 am

Here’s a tw**t Matthew sent me this morning; it comes from Matt Pearce, national reporter for the Los Angeles Times:

The tw**t suggests the the death of journalism, but the article referred to in the Washington Post, is even more disturbing. The quote is from Ben Rhodes, characterized as “one of Obama’s top national security advisers,” and refers to how Rhodes misled reporters to secure national approval of the nuclear deal with Iran (I was in favor of that, but with severe reservations):

One of President Obama’s top national security advisers led journalists to believe a misleading timeline of U.S. negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement and relied on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to seal the deal, according to a lengthy magazine profile.

Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told the New York Times magazine that he helped promote a “narrative” that the administration started negotiations with Iran after the supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013. In fact, the administration’s negotiations actually began earlier, with the country’s powerful Islamic faction, and the framework for an agreement was hammered out before Rouhani’s election.

The quote refers to how easy Rhodes found it to dupe reporters about the timeline, as they had no experience or independent way to confirm his narrative. The reason Rhodes’s duplicity (for that’s what it was) is important is this: the deal was characterized as being struck with relatively liberal Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, but in reality the early negotiations were with Iran’s conservative theocracy. Rhodes was aided by social media, as both the White House tw**ter feed and reporters themselves echoed that narrative:

The White House, of course, stands by its narrative. The New York Times, in a long piece on Rhodes by David Samuels, “The aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign policy guru,” does imply that Rhodes’s aspirations as a novelist may have led him to try to create a novelistic narrative, but the facts are still disturbing:

As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. . .

The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making.

The Times’ investigations generally support what Rhodes says: digital media has completely altered the way the press interacts with POTUS, and narratives can simply be confected out of thin air. An inexperienced press can simply swallow them whole.

Now maybe this doesn’t matter, as Rouhani supports the deal and, as far as I know, Iran has kept its part of that deal. (Rhodes, by the way, retains his job, but even if he’s not fired he’ll be gone by next January). But if Obama and his minions promulgated a false narrative, it’s not so reassuring. That’s politics, folks.

As I said, when the deal went though, I was wary. I still think that, down the road, Iran will have nuclear weapons. We may have put off that day a bit, but not prevented it. I hope I’m wrong.

40 thoughts on “Journalism, plagued by inexperience and manipulated by the White House, dies by a thousand cuts”

  1. Sheesh. A free press is a good thing. But if it doesn’t bother to also be a competent press, it doesn’t make much difference.

    This isn’t something new with the Obama administration, though. Remember how the press was a participant in spreading Bush’s false narrative that led to the Iraq war.

  2. If you are going to bring politics up here, how come Israel can have nuclear weapons but everyone else has to be stopped? The US supports the illegal occupations with billions of dollars.

    1. The issue of Israel’s nuclear arsenal first came up in the Kennedy Administration. At that time, the then PM of Israel, David ben Gurion, agreed that the Government of Israel would not use them unless given permission by the POTUS. In exchange, the US agreed to turn a blind eye. AFAIK, that verbal agreement is still in effect and has not been canceled by any of the PMs of Israel or Presidents of the US who have served subsequently. Of course, the mad mullahs that run Iran have made it clear that their goal is to remove the state of Israel from the map of the world and they would not hesitate to use such weapons against the latter in the event they should acquire them.

    2. For the same reason why US can have them and North Korea cant, because Israel is a representative democracy that doesnt threaten to wipe out its neighbors, nor hangs gays off cranes nor finances global terror groups.

      But leftists love moral equivalence right, we should give matches both to adults and children.

    4. With regard to nuclear weapons, the US has only two allies and treats them like pawns; the rest are essentially belligerents and Israel is included among them.

    5. The UK has nukes and Canada doesn’t have any on our soil, but our planes and subs do.

      1. Oh and France. France was even testing them in the South Pacific for a long time. Ask NZ why they are so anti-nuclear. It sucks to be living where another country decides to test.

  4. Personally I thought American journalism was dead when W announced he was going to war with Iraq and was going to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

    Even as a student my thoughts were, “What?! Do you know how expensive it is to remove and replace a government in another country? What is your exit strategy?”

    Those were the immediate, and to me, obvious questions to ask. Yet the press ignored both of them and went with the “rah rah rah, off to war we go.”

    1. Yeah, journalism died under Bush after 9/11. Shows were put off the air if they wavered from the political line.

    2. If you dig into the 1996-97 edition of Time magazine, you will see that almost every number has a piece about Saddam Hussein and how to remove him.

  5. Through that strange time, the press basically rolled over and let the Bush white house snow everybody about Iraqi WMD. Not seeing through the fog of disinformation during the run-up to the war was the single greatest failing of our press, imo.

  6. The ability to manipulate the press in this way should not come as a surprise to anyone. Journalism has been on the decline for many years and for many reasons so a person would almost have to live in a cave not to know this.

    The internet is just one factor in this decline but more important is the fact that 6 or 7 large corporations own about 90 percent of the media and with it, journalism in the U.S. They more or less control the information and that is a very bad thing. Just a reminder but Bill Moyers has been talking and writing about this for years.

    If a reasonable journalist future is to be had in this country, it will probably take public support. Fat Chance of that.

  7. Given the Republican trope that Obama is hopelessly naive in foreign affairs, this story strikes me as evidence for the acumen of his entire administration.

    I don’t see how recognizing that the Supreme Ayatollah makes the decisions in Iran somehow reflects an attempt to pull the wool over the American people’s eyes. Furthermore, does anyone believe that if Ahmadinejad’s faction had won the elections, there would not have been a shift in the Iranian strategy?

    The conflation of Netanyahu’s politics with the welfare of the worldwide Jewish people is propaganda at its worst, and it appears that PCC has fallen for it, as have many others.

    1. Umm. . . I don’t recall saying that Netaynahu was either behaving well (quite the opposite, in fact), or conflating his politics with “the welfare of the worldwide Jewish people”.

      Your statement is incorrect and insulting.

  8. The plight of news organizations is not particularly of their making. Economics has forced them to give up their foreign bureaus and much else. And Reagan’s abolition of the Fairness Doctrine sped up the process and gave us non-fact-based news organizations – they didn’t need good sources anyway. But in this case the falsity is minor and inconsequential: the West could not have struck a deal with Rouhani without the support and approval of the mullahs. Does anyone think they would have acquiesced in his deal if they hadn’t supported it? So getting them on board was not only the right thing to do, it was essential.

    As to spinning the media, I’m shocked, shocked, to hear that there’s gambling in the casino. In this case it may have been a matter of the mechanics of putting out a story line that allowed people to swallow it more easily, but it doesn’t change the substance one whit.

  9. I’ve long since given up on political journalism. Politics has always been in the business of constructing the narrative to support their policies – which can be good or bad depending on your politics. Modern day journalists don’t have the resources they once had to cut through the narrative and get to some form of core truth about a particular story. The fault lies with the media corporations that treat profit and loss as the most important factor of their news organizations. The fault also lies with consumers of the News who don’t seem to give a damn that they are being fed pablum.

    It takes effort to find reputable news sources these days. There is a lot of noise and the signal is getting lost more often that not.

    I like Vice News currently but sometimes I think that they are just giving me a different flavour of pablum.

    1. “It takes effort to find reputable news sources these days. There is a lot of noise and the signal is getting lost more often that not.”

      And there is a lot more signal. A fragmented media landscape that is reflecting more of reality is a boon, I think. C.f. open access science publishing, keeps you busy with the important works.

      I’m going to adopt a scifi meme.

      If there is now automatic publishing software – that by the way easily drown out the “27 year old know-nothings” – it will soon come automatic reading software agents. They will search out and condense signal according to individual preferences. Problem solved!? Maybe.

      1. Re automatic publishing software, I just read that one package can author > 1000 news stories/day. It would be interesting to have statistics on how much press coverage is still human based. It is a dying art, to be sure.

      2. I think you are right that automated news gathering agents that can analyze news sources and filter out biased reports would be useful but I worry that they could easily fall into the trap of reporting only information that confirms to your existing biases. If you could create these agents to provide a balanced perspective which can challenge your preconceptions that would be for the better. I don’t think we are anywhere near having that ability with current technology.

        I would love to be shown to be wrong.

        1. Bots are only going to get better and increasingly without superior. Like Torbjörn says, there a lot of signal…too much.

          No human can make qualitatively important statements about defense funding strategies and simultaneously tie fire protection standards to malaria cures and energy safety and security concerns in Pakistan and show a connection to a Wall Street mark up of a Hollywood production takeover.

          The capacity of journalists, like economists and politicians, to predict the future is vanishing.

          I can go to Wikipedia to tell me what happened yesterday. Only electrons will be able to have a chance to predict what will happen tomorrow.

          1. It has always been true that humans are poor at making decisions where complex systems are concerned. Today we finally know enough to know that we don’t know enough (Rumsfeldeian quip) and so we utilize technology to assist (mostly through repetitive simulations).

            I still think that we are a long way away from trusting these bots in making decisions for us on matters of politics. Its more than just throwing more computing power to a problem, its more than just running a big data cluster in your data centre. Humans have to understand and design these complex algorithms which requires a better understanding of human nature in the first place.

            It is a fascinating space to watch though.

        2. It’s so ironic that information is so much easier to come by through ubiquitous technology, yet that information is so much more tainted than in once was because the information providers are unskilled. It’s like a Philip K Dick novel and one more piece of evidence that we’re living the futures his dystopian stories predicted.

  10. The government lies every day and gullible people fall for it every day.

    Some of those who were around when the government lied in order to drop bombs on Vietnam were also around when the government lied in order to drop bombs in Iraq.

    Some only fell for it once.

    2. Slate too has an article that casts some doubt on the the article too. I found it moderately convincing, especially when it’s so easy to find links to Obama openly saying things that Samuels claims he never said:

      Obama aid played by NYT writer with agenda

      David Samuels, “The aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign policy guru,” does imply that Rhodes’s aspirations as a novelist may have led him to try to create a novelistic narrative

      Given Samuels background as a writer and the fact that he is an outspoken opponent of the Iran nuke deal (a relevant fact he does not disclose in his article), it is not unfair to wonder which of these writers is creating a novelistic narrative.

    3. Aha, I searched for Jeffrey Goldberg in the comments and assumed nobody had posted this yet.

      I’d need a lot of persuading to think that Goldberg can be in the wrong here.

  12. The Web 2.0, which began about a decado ago has changed more than we are aware of, and I count myself in. You think it’s just a few people writing blogs or making videos and sharing cat memes around, but really, information-sharing has sped up to such a degree that something is old news within the day and big stories do not proportionally outshine smaller clickbait. Quality is defacto not rewarded, but frequent “okay” output. You also see this with blogs and youtube channels — “slow v/blogging” is almost dead. Blog five times are day or you can almost forget about it.

    Journalists need to have some commentary out quickly, and will want to tread on secure ground — where the “official story” makes it exceptionally easy to serve their needs.

    They get quotations, copypaste material and can refer to it as “official” and have it out. Doing research and critical commentary is risky, takes time and you cannot know in which direction the wind blows (readers are now “empowered” and can read elsewhere when the reporting doesn’t confirm their biases adequately).

  13. The blog-culture that is becoming journalism is no substitute for real field experience. And Journalism might be dying for it or at least transforming, but a 27 year not knowing anything??

    Our species has never had anyone learn a thing before age 27. Oh wait, maybe most physicists, mathematicians, composers and musicians. And Kant knew nothing since he obviously never traveled.

    I guess if you are a journalist, get used to having the respect of a bag of doo doo until you can wean yourself off mommy’s jubblies.

  14. I like most of your articles but am baffled how you can support the Islamophile leftist Obama. History will regard him as one of the worst presidents ever allowing Islam a foothold in its determination to dominate the West. Forget global warming. Islam is the real killer.

    1. + 1, though I fear that Prof. Coyne considers such opinions trolling. I’ll add to Obama’s poor record the complete failure to oppose the aggression of Putin’s Russia. It is curious that when I criticize Obama, my opponents not only resort to verbal abuse but defend him mainly by the argument that “Bush started this before Obama” or “Bush was worse”. I am not a supporter of Bush – in fact, I thought from day 1 that it is unsuitable for a democracy to elect heads of state from the same clan. However, in many respect, I see Obama not as alternative to Bush but as his continuation and a next, more advanced developmental stage.

  15. A non-nuclear Iran. Good job, Obama!
    I just watched a report on CNN International featuring videos of street scenes in downtown Damascus with people relaxing at ice-cream stands and closeups of women wearing hijabs going about their lives. However, in the backgrounds of all the videos women with uncovered heads in western dress were equally or more prevalent. The point of the report was that with a new ceasefire now in effect, people could safely walk about the streets in downtown Damacus. I do not remember ever seeing CNN report that Damascus was unsafe. What was left out is that before the ceasefire walking outside was unsafe because rebels (the ‘moderate’ ones the US supports who also signed onto the ceasefire) were lobbing artillery, mortar and rocket fire into the city’s civilian neighborhoods.

    1. Assad bombed people queuing for bread. His barrel-bombing of civilians was so relentless that they sometimes reportedly did a thing never before done in a war, that is, migrated closer to the front lines (because Assad’s air force avoided bombing there, fearing that the bombs would hit its own infantry). Peace matters little in a brutal dictatorship which tortures even children to death. However, in our search of excuses not to accept the Syrian refugees we say that as soon as the war ends, all refugees must be shipped back; hence, the efforts to present Assad’s regime better than it is.

  18. I was skeptical of this article just from reading the excerpts posted here: particularly the charge that the outreach to Rouhani was a convenient fiction mendaciously cooked up and promulgated by an overimaginative foreign policy guru in Washington. But Samuels is wrong: there WAS a significant split in Iran’s regime over the nuclear deal. The Obama administration didn’t just make that up (also, contra Samuels, it’s my understanding that most of the difficult and contentious points of the deal were worked out after Rouhani’s election, including sanctions relief). For example, here is how the Economist described opposition to the deal:

    Who is hoping the deal falls apart? What are the odds they get their wish?

    The deal has many strenuous critics. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has described it in almost apocalyptic terms (although much of Israel’s security establishment is more sanguine about it); Republican hawks in Congress (and even some Democrats) hate the idea of any deal with Iran that does nothing to address its behaviour as a troublemaker in the Middle East and as a sponsor of designated terrorist outfits, such as Hizbullah in Lebanon. The deal is also opposed by hardliners in Tehran who may still be hoping to win over the enigmatic but ailing supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to their point of view. Elements of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), who control military sites which the IAEA will have to gain access to if it is to address the vital PMD issues, may be quite happy to find a way of sabotaging the deal. The IRG may even wish to see sanctions remain in place, as they have provided money-making opportunities for many of its leaders.

    http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/04/economist-explains-3

    In addition, many other journalists have pointed out huge problems with the Samuels article. Here are just two of them:

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/10-problems-with-nyt-mags-ben-rhodes-profile.html

    http://www.vox.com/2016/5/12/11655668/ben-rhodes

    Among the many things Samuels gets wrong: He suggests that Jeffrey Goldberg, of all people, helped “retail” the administration’s narrative. Anyone who is familiar with Goldberg should know why this is wrong. Samuels basically smears another journalist. He also manages to smear the arms control experts who actually support the deal, which, as I understand it, includes most of them. And of course there’s the very relevant fact that Samuels never discloses his own vehement opposition to the nuclear deal.

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