W. Thomas Smith And Journalistic Practice

There has been significant "coverage" of the problems in the National Review blog entries from Lebanon of W. Thomas Smith. And, to be fair, I'll note that Tom is a friend of mine. However, when I look at all the charges and counter-charges, I find a number of highly disturbing things floating to the top.

First, there is no doubt that Tom Smith screwed up in some big ways - and I've said that to him personally. Blog entries must be just as seriously pursued as something for a print magazine, and you need to take all precautions because the haste can push you into making errors. So saying that something was "just" a blog entry was a poor approach. Normally, you'd have an editor at least, and possibly multiple editors and fact checkers helping to prevent mistakes from occurring. While a writer must take total responsibility for his or her work to approach it professionally, the publication also must take responsibility. Instead, the National Review web editor has apparently written everything off as being the mistake of trusting a "freelancer." But what does that mean? Do staff people gain a measure of infallibility the moment they take staff positions? Didn't the editor have a responsibility to ask about the sources of information? Has she tried pushing all responsibility off on Tom because she didn't want to raise the question of what her position in all of this was? Why didn't she ask about the sources as the posts were going up? Wasn't she acting as an editor at all?

Certainly when you have sources that are likely to be biased and that probably aren't authoritative, you cannot put together a collection of observations and state them as fact. Tom should have stated what sources he used - or even if one had to be unnamed (and I don't know if that would have been true), mention that there was such a source. But let's be realistic about the state of journalism, which is one of my concerns about all this. Many, many stories state information as "fact," even if the reporter did not see them first hand. The more grounded reporting might use terms such as alleged or supposed or claimed. But there are many stories where reporters will check with multiple sources and then use the information as though it were fact. I'd be greatly surprised if some of the Middle East-based journalists who are pointing fingers at Tom didn't do the same. In fact, by effectively saying, "I check with my sources and they said it was nonsense, so he must have made it up," they are treating what sources tell them as indisputable revealed truth. This is a disaster in the making. Is the only difference whether someone's sources are for or against Hezbollah?

Look at the chain of logic: a reporter says, "I never heard this, and neither did my sources, so it cannot be true." So how could tens of thousands have been killed in Rwanda over the three weeks before there was any media coverage? Weren't there journalists in Africa who had Rwanda as part of their beats, and shouldn't their sources have known? Or, using the same logic, did the massacres never happen for those three weeks because the journalists didn't hear about them? It's the semantic equivalent to the philosophical question of whether a tree falling in a forest, far away from everyone, actually makes a sound. Why didn't business journalists see the dot com crash coming? (I know of some that did, by the way, but most business publications at the time didn't want to hear anything negative because, well, all those experts, with their own motivations, said everything was ducky.)

More pointedly, why didn't the Middle East correspondents report that Hezbollah forces were massing near the Israeli-Lebanese border last year, before the war broke out last year? Logic tells us either a) they did know and said nothing, in which case their motives are highly suspect, or b) they didn't know and yet such a massing could happen anyway. Either the assumption that they would have to know is wrong, or their integrity is questionable, but in either case, journalists' not knowing about something is hardly proof that it couldn't have happened, no matter how "obvious" you'd think it would be. (Frankly, troops massing at a border should be a whole lot more obvious than a few thousand armed militia wandering around a city of between 1 and 2 million people, depending on the source you use.)

Finally, the mainstream press seemed to jump onto this story and make sweeping statements without having the information to back it up. I saw pieces on The Atlantic's web site, CJR's web site, and elsewhere say that Tom had been fabricating. At face value, the worst someone could accuse Tom of is being highly sloppy. But fabrication? That has carries the implicit meaning of knowingly making something up. I saw a column that Howard Kurtz wrote for the Post where apparently he used some quotes from things Tom wrote but never even stated that he has tried unsuccessfully to reach Tom for a direct comment. Is this how journalism is supposed to work?

Again, I know Tom and like him. Yet, I don't mean this as a defense of what he did, or didn't, do. Instead, I'm questioning the approach that the mainstream press has used in this story as a case in point of how much of what we read should be strongly questioned. The results were at least as sloppy as Tom's worst mistakes, and, in my opinion, far surpassed them in recklessness.