teasing with Chalabi peekabo



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February 6, 2005
THE PUBLIC EDITOR
Talking on the Air and Out of Turn: The Trouble With TV
By DANIEL OKRENT

AST Sunday, Times reporter Judith Miller appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball With Chris Matthews" to discuss the Iraqi elections. In the course of the conversation Miller said sources had told her the Bush administration "has been reaching out" to the Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi "to offer him expressions of cooperation." She continued, "According to one report, he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government." This led Matthews to interrupt Miller, exclaim "Wait a minute!" and press her to elaborate.

Now, Matthews is the sort of television host who will interrupt a guest about as often as he blinks, and his reliance on exclamation is roughly equal to his reliance on breathing. But to anyone who has tried to follow the jagged contours of Ahmed Chalabi's connections to the Bush administration, Miller's statement was a shocker. This piece of news hadn't appeared in The Times that morning; it didn't appear in The Times the next morning; as I write this column, on Friday, it still hasn't appeared. A lengthy analysis of the election aftermath by reporter Dexter Filkins, published Tuesday, didn't even hint of any current contact between Chalabi and the Bush administration.

But if you watched "Hardball" on Sunday night, and saw Judith Miller identified as a reporter for The New York Times, you would have every reason to think she was speaking with the authority of the paper. That, presumably, is why television news and talk producers ask Times reporters to appear on their programs; that, presumably, is why The Times's publicity apparatus books broadcast appearances for as many as 12 different reporters in a typical week. Yet Miller's revelation - Jack Shafer of slate.com called it "the second biggest Iraq story of the day (after the successful election)" - was fit to be broadcast on television, even if not fit to print. Why the difference?

Let me make a few things clear before going forward. First, I don't believe Miller's appearance on Matthews's show has anything to do with the current contempt citation hanging over her, the one resulting from her refusal to reveal sources to a federal grand jury. I believe she is right to resist the subpoena; that her apparent willingness to go to jail to protect her sources is admirable; and that The Times is right to defend her unflinchingly.

Second, hers isn't the only byline from The Times to appear on the bottom of the screen when you're watching "Hardball"; I've been on the show myself, sneezing through my makeup. I also appear regularly on a local Times-produced show here in New York, and occasionally on various other broadcast outlets whose producers are looking for a talking head to take a shot at The Times, defend The Times or bloviate about the state of American journalism. I disclose all this unexceptional and uninteresting information as a preface to my argument that reporters - not columnists or critics, only reporters - should appear on television news programs rarely, on talk shows even less often, and on programs dominated by interrogators as insistent and adept as Matthews not at all.

There are many, many reasons why newspaper people would want to appear on television. There's vanity, of course, and the ensuing cheap thrill of having someone stare at you on the subway, trying to figure out who you are. There's the admirable desire to help promote the paper you work for, and the less admirable one to promote your own career. There's the-well, I can't actually think of any others. But I can give you several reasons why it's bad for reporters, and bad for The Times.

Judging by their absence from the paper, one must conclude that either Miller's Chalabi revelations were wrong or unsubstantiated or that The Times is suppressing an important piece of news. If the first, the paper has suffered a blow to its credibility: Matthews introduced Miller as "an investigative reporter for The New York Times." The ID on the screen said "Judith Miller, 'The New York Times'." At five separate points in the show Matthews invoked her connection to The Times, as any host would.

If there's an act of suppression going on, the price is of course incalculable. But I don't remotely think that is the case. I've been able to determine with a very high degree of confidence that editors in the two departments most likely to have an interest in Miller's Chalabi assertions were unaware of them. (Miller was away from New York this week, and did not respond to messages I left on her office phone, her cellphone, and on e-mail. Executive editor Bill Keller declined to discuss the matter. "I'm sorry to be unhelpful on this one, but Judy faces a serious danger of being sent to jail for protecting a confidential source," Keller told me in an e-mail message. "I think this is not the time to be drawn into unrelated public discussions of Judy.")

Newspapers are different from talk shows. In the best circumstances, what appears in the newspaper is the collaborative product of reporter, editor, copy editor, desk or department head, and sometimes, the anointing ministrations of a masthead editor. What emerges from most television talk programs - in fact, what makes them interesting - is unedited, at times lightly considered, often impulsive. Yet those letters at the bottom of the screen ("Reporter, The New York Times") weld everything that's said to the paper's credibility.

Miller dodged the second danger lurking in the television studio, when she wouldn't take Matthews's bait and tell him whether she thought the elections, as he put it, "prove President Bush right, yes or no, about Iraq." But in the real-time, high-speed badminton match of a television interview or debate, opinions (or at least characterizations) that would never appear in the paper emerge. At several points during last year's presidential campaign, readers complained that one or another of The Times's political writers, appearing on TV, had said something that indicated they were biased for or against (in fact, almost always against) one of the candidates, and should therefore be disqualified from further coverage. This is not what you want your readers to think.

In the privacy of a one-on-one, off-camera interview, some print reporters will extract the information they're looking for with smiles and flattery; others will try pounding and intimidation. I know one magazine reporter who can switch between the two modes (and various others) so fluently you'd swear you were watching one of those one-man shows where a single actor plays a dozen roles. But both cajolery and aggression (not to mention their less glamorous teammates, patience, determination and shoe leather) are tactics informed, and justified, by a noble strategy: gathering the information that will enable readers to understand the events, personalities and issues of the day. So long as legal and ethical lines aren't breached, what matters is not the method of reporting but the results.

On television, dogged questioning can appear to be oppositional, even harassing. When White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller served as a panelist in a televised debate during last winter's primary season, some readers were convinced that her aggressive questioning of John Kerry and a head-to-head scrap with Al Sharpton demonstrated hostility. The same questions and the same attitudes deployed in a private interview could have produced answers that, in the paper, would have seemed absolutely proper and appropriate. But television can transform and distort reality; thinking you know a reporter from what you see on TV can be like thinking you know an actor from the way he behaves on stage.

I don't think any of my cavils pertain to columnists or critics, who make their livings peddling opinion. They are their own brand names. When David Brooks appears on one show and Maureen Dowd on another, their diverging viewpoints do not demonstrate contradictions at The Times; they demonstrate the views of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd. (I'll leave it to you to determine whether a public editor falls into this category.)

But reporters represent the standards of the entire paper's news gathering effort. It would be overkill for The Times to keep its reporters off television in all circumstances, but surely the top editors understand how publicity that can undermine reader trust is the worst kind of publicity a newspaper can get. They need to enforce a policy ensuring that no staff member will "say anything on radio, television or the Internet that could not appear under his or her byline in The Times."

Should be easy: those words are directly from the paper's "Ethical Journalism" handbook. But mild admonition is no insurance against reporters' getting ambushed, flattered or flustered into saying something an editor would strike in an instant. The only way the Times is going solve this problem is by making it a practice to regulate its reporters' appearances, and letting the paper - the reason everyone's here - speak for itself.


The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.



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