How Misinformation is Spread

In my previous post, I discussed how journalists have a tendency to pick up on stories that seem to fit within their preconceived narratives of a particular issue and then report them as facts, often without bothering to do basic fact-checking. Mark Steyn's column in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times is a perfect case in point. Steyn writes the following with regard to the Rove/Plame affair:

"But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers
inside the Beltway I wouldn't be interested in who
'leaked' the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame
to the press. As her weirdly self-obsesssed husband
Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day,
she wasn't a 'clandestine officer' and, indeed, hadn't
been one for six years. So one can only 'leak' her
name in the sense that one can 'leak' the name of the
checkout clerk at Home Depot."

Steyn is referring to an interview Joseph Wilson did on Friday with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. As a number of Bush Administration apologists have noted, Wilson told Blitzer: "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity." Viewed out of context, it's easy to see why some would take this sentence to mean that Valerie Plame was not a "clandestine officer" at the time Bob Novak wrote his column. But if Steyn had watched the interview or read the full transcript (or even read the sentence more closely), he would have realized that Wilson was not saying this at all. In the interview, Blitzer asked Wilson why it was okay for his wife to pose for Vanity Fair last year if she was a secret agent. Wilson responded by saying: "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity." In other words, his wife ceased to be a clandestine officer the day Novak exposed her. Indeed, upon closer scrutiny, Wilson's meaning is clear even without the context. After all, it would make no sense for him to say that "Novak blew her identity" if she was not clandestine at the time.

So Steyn's entire column revolves around a statement that means the exact opposite of what Steyn alleges. Moreover, this massive error could easily have been caught be simply rereading the statement in question. If Steyn (or his editor!) had bothered to check the CNN footage or read the online transcipt, the error would have been that much more obvious. And it's not as if Steyn didn't have good reason to be skeptical that Wilson's statement meant what it seemed to mean. The allegation that Plame was not a covert agent simply doesn't make sense. After all, Fitzgerald's investigation began only because the CIA asked the Department of Justice to investigate a suspected crime. It's simply inconceivable to me that the CIA would have taken that step, and Fitzgerald would have investigated the issue so aggressively for the past two years if Plame was not a covert agent.

In short, Steyn's column was an example of journalism at its worst. For whatever reason (I suspect empty partisanship) Steyn clearly believes that the Plame affair is not that big a deal and that Rove and others in the White House did nothing particularly wrong. When he read, therefore, that Wilson had apparently admitted that his wife was not a clandestine operative (likely from some other partisan pundit like John Podhoretz), he blindly assumed it to be true (or was cynically indifferent as to its truth). Either way, rather than doing any fact-checking, he simply regurgitated the line into a column, using it as his central justification for why the Plame affair is unimportant. It's a pity, too, because Steyn is a smart guy and an influencial one. It just goes to show that even relatively independent thinkers can become conduits for misinformation when they put on partisan blinders and fail to do their homework. Steyn owes much more to his readers.