No facts, please -- we're British

Americans are flocking to feisty British papers for news about the war. But there's a reason the U.S. media fails to follow up on the Brits' "scoops" -- they're frequently not true.

By Trevor Butterworth

Nov. 9, 2001 | On Oct. 26, the London Times reported the grim news that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida had "acquired nuclear material for possible use in their terrorism war against the West." Though the unnamed "intelligence sources" who provided the paper with its breathless scoop insisted that bin Laden did not have the "capability to mount a nuclear attack," they feared that "he would do so if he could."

Capitalizing on those fears, a second Times article, headlined "Dirty Bomb Could Wipe Out Thousands," suggested that "bin Laden's bomb, if it exists, consists of nuclear waste wrapped around plastic explosive." A dirty bomb, the paper warned, "would spew lethal radioactivity over a considerable distance, causing many casualties and rendering whole neighborhoods uninhabitable."

Finally -- in the unlikely event that there were any Times readers still unafraid of nuclear winter blowing in from Afghanistan -- a third piece put the "chilling" information into a properly shocking perspective: "This is the leaden shoe delivered by Western intelligence agencies that has long been waiting to drop."

But the shoe hasn't yet dropped for thousands of Americans puzzling over the absence of such sensational stories in their own press. As Rick Karr reported for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," more and more Americans have been turning to news sources outside the United States in search of "information and opinions they can't get from U.S. news organizations." Given the absence of a language barrier, the prime beneficiaries are the Web sites of British newspapers. According to a survey by Jupiter Media Metrix, Guardian Unlimited -- the Guardian's online site -- has attracted 600,000 American readers, while the conservative Daily Telegraph has gained 500,000 since Sept. 11.

"Those of us who want to understand the full ramifications of the U.S. "war on terror" are finding that big chunks of the story are severely underreported -- or missing entirely -- in the U.S. media, wrote Bruce Mirken in the San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 28. "Nearly every time I check the British papers like the Guardian or the Independent, I find at least one significant story that has been ignored or buried by our domestic press."

Maybe for good reason. Consider the London Observer's stunning Sept. 30 scoop: "Devastating attacks on bases controlled by Osama bin Laden are set to be launched in the next 48 hours as part of a tightly focused military operation approved by U.S. President George Bush and backed by Britain," the paper reported. Air and missile strikes would be followed, the paper continued, by "an airborne assault deep into Taliban-held territory -- led by helicopter-carried troops of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division." Exciting, yes; true, no. The clock ticked until Oct. 7 before the air campaign began, and the first reported ground action was an itsy-bitsy raid by Delta Forces and Rangers on Oct. 20.

That's not to say that the British press never beats its U.S. counterparts on a story. It has a distinguished record of covering the world at war, and can claim credit for creating the very first war correspondent, when the Times' William Howard Russell marched off to the Crimea in the 1850s to cover the British and French war against Russia. Russell's reports on the neglect of British wounded roused the British public to press for changes in the military, and turned him into a celebrity.

Britain also gave us novelist and journalist George Orwell, who joined the BBC in 1941 and worked for the Indian section of its World Service, an institution renowned for delivering accurate and unadorned news to millions around the world.

In recent years, Robert Fisk (the Independent) and John Simpson (BBC) have become familiar names to many Americans for their aggressive reporting in the Middle East and Bosnia. Their stories are at times controversial -- Andrew Sullivan rapped Fisk on Thursday as a "terrorist-supporter" -- but their commitment to serious reporting is not in question. Those who watch "The Newshour With Jim Lehrer" will also know that it relies on Britain's Independent Television News (ITN) for much of its foreign footage and reporting. In recent years too, the British press was much quicker than its American counterpart to pronounce Jesse Jackson's peace-making in Sierra Leone a disaster, and to draw attention to the catastrophic flooding in Mozambique.

But the current conflict with bin Laden and Afghanistan has shown the flaws of the British press tradition. Laurence Eyton, the British managing editor of Taiwan's Taipei Times, has been monitoring the wire services since the conflict began, and has been struck by the inverse relationship between British newspaper scoops and the resources they have on the ground. "To someone who knows how news works, and who knows how Asian-style rumor mills work, there has been an attempt to find exciting news that has treated the most unrealistic speculation as being a nugget of pure fact," he said via e-mail.

"I expect a lot of misinformation comes from the Northern Alliance -- every British paper seems to have a man with their forces -- and the difference between the Brits and the Americans is that the Americans have sources in Washington they can tap to ask 'is this true?'"

The problem for British reporters, said Eyton, is that not only do they not have access to the kind of American sources that are actually running the war, they don't, thanks to Britain's long-standing culture of secrecy, enjoy access to their equivalents in the British Ministry of Defense. "They just don't have any way of cross-checking," he said.

But why let scrupulosity about facts and corroboration get in the way, as they say, of a good story? In the tale of bin Laden's nuclear threat, for example, the Times simply took an allegation by unnamed "intelligence sources" and larded it with circumstantial evidence and speculation. There are thousands of words happily filling column inch after column inch, but there is little of the kind of reporting and verification necessary to propel the story into print in the United States. Of course, the charge could turn out to be true, which would mean that President Bush was being economical with the facts when he said in France on Nov. 6 that bin Laden is trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

But even the Times ultimately conceded that -- ahem -- "there is still no published hard evidence" to support their secret sources' claim. If you never have to name a source or verify information, the merely plausible can be news. (It is worth noting that on the day the Times published this story, the rival Guardian and Telegraph did their best to pooh-pooh it by emphasizing official government skepticism about the claims.)

Next page: Remember the scoop about the U.S. intentionally bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade?