Media Mischief.

• Author: Beebe, George
• Position: The Realist

Aghost is haunting American journalism--the specter of serial misreporting about events of major national import. In one instance after another, the media has over the past several decades not simply gotten it wrong, but presented the reverse of the truth. This dismaying pattern has recurred with metronomic regularity, starting with the leadup to the war in Iraq and culminating recently with Russiagate.

At first glance, the cases of Russiagate and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) might appear to have little in common. The first had its origins in a political operation championed by Hillary Clinton supporters, which turned into one of the most fateful episodes in a rich bipartisan history of American electoral shenanigans, as the American media credulously gobbled up the farrago of preposterous claims contained in a dossier concocted by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Some five years after the fact, the Steele dossier has become a serious embarrassment--"garbage," as Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple put it--and is now unfolding as a story about bad actors, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the quest for political supremacy lurches into a pell-mell battle for victory at any cost. The second was an analytic estimate gone wrong, our nation's biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. It is a narrative about government bureaucrats, working under intense pressure from a Republican White House, who became beguiled by unexamined assumptions and overly confident assertions.

The key to each of these cases is collective rather than individual failure--a widespread inability to determine where truth lay amid sensational claims, information gaps, and willful deception. Put bluntly, the very institutions that once served as bulwarks against error now advertised, amplified, and exploited fraudulent reports. Intelligence community leaders helped to legitimize rather than debunk the invented Steele Dossier. Consider the duplicitous Iraqi defector Curveball, whom German intelligence sources regarded with skepticism but American officials did not. His bogus accounts of Iraq's biological weapons labs were at the heart of Secretary of State Colin Powell's lamentable address to the United Nation's Security Council. Professional standards that normally safeguard the integrity of journalism and intelligence work were cast overboard as so much useless ballast. The result was a Gadarene-like stampede of groupthink impervious--indeed, openly hostile--to skeptical questioning, that was injurious to American national security. Understanding the factors that combined to produce this phenomenon may help to mitigate our institutional susceptibility to a repetition of such errors.

Post-Traumatic Stress. One of the key questions in these episodes is why journalists...