For next week, I?ve been working on a piece that summarizes the latest information on the case for the Iraq campaign ? the WMD report, the al Qaeda links, the UN scandal, and so on. It will probably show up as a Daily Journal column. I?m doing this in part because I?m interested in it and in part because of its political significance here in North Carolina.
But for the purposes of the John Locke Foundation, I?m doing it because the controversy is instructive for those of us who deal with government documents and officials routinely on other, more locally oriented issues. The instruction is as follows: don?t uncritically believe what you read. Don?t accept the version of events offered up by a single reporter or set of reporters and editors at a single news source. To a frightening degree, the spin that purportedly ?objective? news organizations put on public events and reports is entirely dissimilar from the picture you get when you consume them directly.
A good example is the way various news organizations wrote up the Duelfer report that came out this week. For The New York Times it read as a repudiation of the case for war. For The Washington Post, things were not so clear cut but the major import was that Saddam Hussein was no threat to the U.S. For The Washington Times, the reading was entirely different, as its reporter read past the executive summary to show how Hussein had evaded the sanctions regime, preserved his WMD research and scientists, and scammed the oil-for-food program to build up production capacity that could be turned quickly to biochems once sanctions were lifted.
One implication, which JLF had internalized a long time ago, is that while we do seek to communicate our ideas and findings to as many people as possible through the medium of print and broadcast news interviews and apperances, there is no substitute for building our own means of unmediated mass communication. That is why we created Carolina Journal about 14 years ago, and why we have more recently built our suite of web sites and blogs (including Carolina Journal Online, Carolina Journal Online, the JLF main page, sites for the NC Education Alliance and Center for Local Innovation, and this blog). In the future, our special JLF-Charlotte site will be joined by other regionally oriented portals that will, yes, include lots of links to external news stories but also our own original research, reporting, and commentary.
