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Wishful thinking in reporting

Thursday, May 6, 2010

THE WORLD'S CROSS-ROAD here in my hometown has rapidly reverted to business as usual, just as you’d expect of this customarily nonchalant city.

But the hectic business of reporting on Faisal Shahzad, the American of Pakistani origin who is charged with attempting to set off the Times Square car-bomb, continues along its lurching, zig-zagging way.

 

I’ve been struck by two oddities, one minor (though perhaps indicative of a certain parochialism in US journalism) and the other rather more serious.

First - did you notice the legions of live broadcasters having such terrible trouble as they struggled, unsuccessfully and embarrasingly, to pronounce the accused man’s name when it came over the wires? It's foreign, yes. But what’s so hard about a first and a last name of only two simple syllables each? It’s no more difficult than, say, “Robert Thompson”.

Second - and more troubling - I saw in the early reports starting last Saturday night a kind of mirror-image of coverage from a previous American terror attack – one which was bigger and much worse because it so appallingly succeeded in its aim, killing 168 people, and injuring, sometimes permanently, about 700 more.
 
The truck-bomb that destroyed the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City fifteen years ago - for which the anti-government militant Timothy McVeigh, born in upstate New York, was later tried and executed - was first described in supposedly analytical assessments as probably the work of “Arab terrorists”. Dead wrong, of course.

I happened to be working at the time in a center of Middle East “spookdom”, so to speak – that is, on the island of Cyprus, which functions in essence as a listening post for western intelligence agencies. Among this well-informed community of specialists, jaws were dropping as we all watched American TV coverage by satellite of that Mid-West bombing … not least at the rampant speculation that Muslim terrorists would be found to blame. It spoke of an attitude that was perhaps understandable in light of the World Trade Center truck-bombing of 1993, an attitude perhaps preferred by the media to the unpalatable notion that some of our own extremist Americans would be capable of such an atrocity.

We heard CNN quote “FBI and CIA sources, current and retired” saying that the attack had “all the hallmarks of Middle Eastern terror”. Not just cable news teams, but also the news divisions of network broadcasters, including especially ABC, re-packaged an earlier PBS Frontline episode called “Jihad in America” in support of that same contention, and the documentary’s producer, the somewhat erratic Steven Emerson, went on air as a pundit promoting the likely guilt of jihadists organized from abroad. At the time I was especially disturbed by the strident confidence, entirely misplaced, of a columnist syndicated internationally by Tribune Newspapers (whose stable I would later join) claiming that the Oklahoma outrage “has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East”.
 

 

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EXPECTATIONS AND HOPES seem to have swung entirely the other way since 1995, and with the September 11 carnage intervening nine years ago, of course. These days it’s almost as if the media have wanted such a crime to be totally indigenous, or at least not directed by an organized enemy overseas.

Along with the Times Square car-bomb being quickly and presumptively dismissed in many news outlets as “amateurish”, there came a rush of now clearly wrong-headed assumptions about the ethnicity and motivations of the perpetrator. The surveillance video showing a furtive-looking man leaving the scene and removing his shirt was accompanied by journalists’ announcements that police were looking for “a white man” - though from watching the murky footage (screen-capture, above left) I’d say only a viewer with remarkably analytical eyesight or an absolute predisposition to spot Caucasians would have thought so.

The Pakistani Taliban's claims of responsibility were widely dismissed by the media early on (the normally circumspect Christian Science Monitor, for example, cited “experts” who were “dismissing out of hand the group's claims of responsibility”) even though the New York Police Department’s reaction was studiedly careful, saying only that it had “no evidence to support” such a claim. Newsday, tipping over into literally unbelievable idiocy, even decided to advance a theory that the attack came from “an anarchist group inspired by May Day” – ignoring the fact that May 1st is traditionally a day for socialists, not anarchists.

CBS News, evidently trying to stay within a more credible range of sources, made much of New York’s senior US Senator Charles Schumer's firm statement (though again, who knows why he’d be so confident) that "signs point to the fact that this was a lone wolf or a small little group rather than connections to worldwide terrorism”.

In the light of the accused man’s documented cellphone calls to Pakistan … an apparent escape dash to Dubai (foiled despite a gap in the FBI’s close pursuit and appalling security at JFK airport) … the arrest in Pakistan of Shahzad’s traveling companion to the militant wilds of Waziristan … plus Shahzad’s own admission (according to the charges) of having undergone training there … all this early speculation now seems downright foolish, doesn’t it? I grant, of course, that most speculation can look stupid with 20/20 hindsight – but in this case we should beware of how much wishful thinking may have been going on in newsrooms, as well as in political and other official circles.



WISHFUL THINKING IS ENDEMIC in political reporting, especially during close-run elections. Citizens of my home-country went to their polling stations under gray British skies this morning (above right) with their notoriously partisan national newspapers giving predictions that pretty well match their own political biases.

Over here, writing in the “Comment” area of this week’s New Yorker, our leading British historian Simon Schama (a regular writer for that magazine, as well as author of A History of Britain) suggested that the electorate might summarily dismiss both of the major parties, Labour and Conservative, with enough support going to the smaller third party, the Liberal Democrats, that conventional one-party government would at last be rendered impossible. “Goodbye. And good riddance”, voters will be saying, claimed Schama.

Hopes are one thing – actual outcomes another. Schama emailed me some later thoughts after his column appeared. Now, right on the eve of voting, he said he has a “gut feeling” (not something we normally associate with high-minded historians) that the British public is torn between “daring” on one hand, and familiar politics like “comfy slippers” on the other, and in the end “will slide back into latter”. By which he meant specifically that voters will hand victory to the Conservatives, with a “very small working majority”.

Then Schama wrote, a little forlornly: “Hope not”.

 

I hope not, too – but wishing won’t make it so, I’m afraid.

 

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