The latest winners of my semi-regular “Says who?” prize are Evan Thomas and Eve Conant of Newsweek, who give us their opinions about the Iraq War in an article disguised as news coverage:
How do you manage the process of losing a war? Americans don’t like the word “defeat”; certainly, President George W. Bush won’t be caught using it. He continues to talk of victory in Iraq, to insist that anything less is unacceptable. But his circle of true believers seems to be getting ever smaller. It may be limited to Vice President Dick Cheney, maybe a military commander or two and a few diehard senators. For everyone else in a position of authority over the war effort, there seems to be a grim recognition that Iraq is a lost cause, or very nearly so. The real question is not whether America can win, but rather how to get out.
It is a dilemma without a right answer. Pull out now and abandon
thousands of Iraqis to their deaths. Stay in and doom a smaller but
still-significant number of American troops, while probably just
postponing the day of reckoning, the seemingly inevitable bloodbath as
Iraq collapses into full-scale civil war. And what, exactly, would
withdrawal look like? Americans still remember the desperate images of
the fall of Saigon?the iconic helicopter on the roof. Would Iraqis who
cast their lot with the American “liberators” be seen clinging to tanks
as they pull out of Baghdad?
Since Thomas and Conant decided not to quote anyone in these passages, I wonder why they even bothered to use qualifiers. Why not just say Bush’s “circle of true believers” (no editorial comment there) is getting smaller? Why does there just “seem” to be a “grim recognition”? Why do Thomas and Conant insert “probably” in their assessment of the postponed “day of reckoning,” or “seemingly” in their prediction of the “inevitable bloodbath”?
Do they believe these qualifiers excuse them from the journalistic obligation to provide attribution for opinions? If so, they’re wrong. Those paragraphs belong in an opinion column, not a news story.