Instead, it remained common practice for the U.S. news media to continue citing the Mehlis report and referring to "Syrian officials implicated in Mr. Hariri's killing" – as the New York Times did – without providing more context.
Freeing the ‘Suspects’
Now, more than four years after the Hariri assassination, the U.N. tribunal handling his murder and other terrorist acts in Lebanon finally has acknowledged that it lacks evidence to indict the four security officials who have been held without formal charges since 2005.
That shift was foreshadowed in a Dec. 2, 2008, interim report to the U.N. Security Council, which lamented the complexity of the case.
“For every inch of progress there is a mile of effort,” the report said. “Those responsible for the attacks were professional and took extensive measures to cover their tracks and hide their identity. Much of the Commission’s activity at this point in the investigation focuses on piercing this smokescreen to get at the truth.”
On Wednesday, Judge Daniel Fransen of a special international tribunal ordered the four imprisoned security officials released.
In a similar situation – say, one that involved a U.S. ally – the release would have been viewed as proof of innocence or at least the absence of significant evidence of guilt.
In this case, however, the New York Times refused to acknowledge the obvious fact that the case against Syrian complicity remains weak. Instead, the Times framed the development as underscoring “the legal pitfalls of a divisive international trial.” [NYT, April 30, 2009]
The stubbornly one-sided approach can be explained by the fact that U.S. journalists fear that balanced reporting about a case involving an unpopular regime like Syria can have negative career consequences. That risk would rise dramatically if it were to turn out that the Syrian security officials were guilty after all, which remains a distinct possibility.
So slanting the story in an anti-Syrian direction makes all the career sense in the world, much as it did to buy into Bush’s WMD claims about Iraq before the invasion. What do you think would have happened to a U.S. reporter’s career if he or she had raised a lot of questions about the WMD and it turned out that Saddam Hussein was hiding secret stockpiles?
Career-minded reporters and editors judged that the smart strategy was to play up the anti-Iraq WMD claims – even though they came from dubious and self-interested sources – and to play down or ignore the counter-evidence.
Though the world has now seen the extraordinary cost in blood and treasure because of the failure of the U.S. news media to act professionally in the run-up to the Iraq War, there is little indication that the national press corps has learned lasting lessons from that catastrophe, as the Hariri case shows.
Another casualty of this behavior has been the discrediting of “objective journalism,” which after all rests on the courage of reporters and editors to insist on fairness even when the pressure is intense to go with the flow. Objectivity means applying a single standard to friends – and to foes.
So, while the mainstream U.S. press can legitimately criticize news outlets that let ideology contaminate a commitment to the truth, is it really any better to let misguided patriotism – or fear of career retribution – distort the facts?
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