Rick Jones, whose blog is a constant source of information, provocation and thoughtfulness, generously contributes his analysis to the botched Hiroshima apology story in this Comment of the Day.  To summarize: here and elsewhere, a Wikileaks-released diplomatic cable from 2009  prompted a stampede of mostly conservative news sources to report that President Obama had suggested the possibility of apologizing for the atom bombing of Hiroshima in World War II.  I encountered the story, tracked it in several sources that have proven reliable in the past, and commented on it, critically. About 24 hours later, a friend with impeccable diplomatic credentials and inside information properly chastised me for taking the bait, and offered conclusive evidence that the cable had been misinterpreted. You might want to read my post of last night apologizing to readers and the President that also raises the issues that Rick addresses in his Comment of the Day. I have a follow-up comment at the end:

“While I admire your acceptance of responsibility for what appears to have been a misinterpretation, your commentary raises other issues.

“There are legitimate legal, ethical and pragmatic reasons to object to WikiLeaks; I don’t see this as one of them. The press in general was characteristically lazy and didn’t do its collective job; someone took a phrase out of context, leading to defamatory statements about the POTUS, and (for a while, at least) no one bothered to correct the record. In other words: what has happened every day of at least the last three administrations.

“Whether the first reporter to suggest that Obama was contemplating an apology is merely incompetent or motivated by politics really doesn’t matter, because both ineptness and bias were certainly both at play very early. But I don’t see how WikiLeaks is any more responsible in this case than President Obama himself was: both had things which were not true attributed to them by a lazy journalistic corps. How is that their fault? (The fact that they may have committed manifold transgressions in other ways doesn’t mean they did this time.)

“I find it difficult, moreover, to blame the “left-end media” for failing to “clarify” the situation. The usual suspects on the right were the ones who really ran with the story, and they’re not about to let a little thing like accuracy stand in their way (cf. “death panels,” birtherism, non-existent cuts to military spending, etc.). If the mainstream press worried about correcting every fact-impaired proclamation from the likes of IBD, they’d have time for little else. I hadn’t seen anything about the cable until I read your post: maybe that was because the left-leaning press was “suppressing” the story, but a more plausible explanation would be simply that they didn’t see a story there. After reading the cable, I agree: as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, there is no there there.

“Read with the intention of finding something to complain about with respect to the Obama administration, the cable admits of the interpretation provided by much of the media. Viewed more objectively, the cable is ambiguous, but my tentative reading (in my comment on your earlier post) seems to have been fairly accurate. There is much to criticize about the more progressive media, but to blame them for diffidence or lethargy more than criticizing the conservative press for recklessly (not to say intentionally, although that of course is possible) spewing information that turns out to be false seems a bit much.

“Moreover, it is all too true that biased media outlets find a way to spin their message into ostensibly objective reporting by covering the controversy itself rather than the event which supposedly created the controversy. In other words, you can proclaim pretty much whatever crackpot idea the bosses want propagated if you start your discussion with “Some people are saying…”. Fox News is the acknowledged master of this tactic, but they certainly have plenty of company on both sides of the political divide.

“What is a lesson to be learned, however, is something that I struggle with all the time: go to the source. I learned at a conference last year that a famous event in theatre history which I’ve been describing to my classes for a generation in fact never happened, or at least never happened on anything like the scale I’d been taught and had therefore passed on to others. The scholar who made that point quoted from the actual contemporary documents, and also pointed to the source of the misinformation: a book published over a half a century after the events described. But a generally well-written book (in other ways) gets a lot more circulation that journal entries and newspaper clippings in a foreign language do, so the event has been mischaracterized ever since.

“I try, in my own writing—both academic and on my blog—to find my way back to the original documents. But it doesn’t always happen, either because of the difficulty of doing so, or of time pressures (a.k.a., laziness), or of confirmation bias. Sooner or later, you have to trust someone to have accurately reported events. Sometimes that trust is misplaced. We learn, and we go on.”

A few reactions to Rick’s comments:

• I do see this as part of what is objectionable about Wikileaks. Official communications that are written to be understood by one individual are, of course, not written for general consumption. It is natural for reporters, bloggers, activists, political opponents and others to interpret such communications according to their knowledge rather than the knowledge of the original sender and recipient. Certainly the real meaning can (sometimes) be deciphered if the original source or others are willing to risk even more intrusive inquiries about matters never intended for public airing. But I think anyone applying objective thought to this issue will reach the conclusion that efficient communication and action in delicate matters requires secrecy and the assurance of secrecy, and the ideal that everything said or written in the conduct of government should be made public is impractical, dangerous and logically flawed. As in cases like this one, it can erode trust rather than build it, and also as in this case, unfairly so.

• If I believed that the mainstream media ignored this story because its reporters, unlike the so-called conservative media’s reporters, were both unbiased and more expert at reading diplomatic cables, I might agree with Rick’s argument that the press breached no obligation by not clarifying it. The record of the press regarding potentially embarrassing stories implicating the competence or ideological leanings of the Obama administration suggests otherwise, however. From ACORN to Van Jones to Anita Dunn to the New Black Panther controversy to Eric Holder’s apparent perjury before Congress, the mainstream media’s MO has been to delay coverage as long as possible, allowing such stories to become discredited as “conservative” news, that is, trumped-up fantasies designed to harm the President. I believe that based on the media’s past performance, that is exactly what happened here.  In this case, the story was wrong, if not necessarily trumped up, and the resources of the media should have been put to proper use by proving it so. Instead, it did not because it was afraid, as in many of the other stories it chose to bury, that the facts would support the critics. That’s no way to operate a nation’s journalism, but that’s how it has been functioning, or rather not functioning, lately.

• Bias is at play in all aspects of this story. Nobody starts from a blank slate. My lifetime passion and study has been American leadership and leadership models; it was a hobby for me as early as the fifth grade (yes, I know how weird that sounds).  I majored in it in college, wrote my honors thesis on the topic (“The Great Man Theory and the American Presidents”), and eventually it led to my current profession as an ethicist. In almost three years, President Obama has convinced me that he has few of the skills, instincts and character traits that characterize great or even good leaders through history, and has a flat learning curve in this area. It is not a partisan or ideological verdict, though some would like to cast it as such. It is, however, a mindset for me at this point, and therefore acts as a bias. The incorrect interpretation of the cable seemed plausible to me because of my firm conclusions about Obama as a leader. What I forgot, and violated, is one of my rules regarding the evaluation of leaders generally and U.S. Presidents especially: always extend the benefit of the doubt. 

• Rick is right: going to the source is the answer, but it is often an answer that is unavailable to those who are not reporters, but only commentators on what is reported. It is true that readers often learn about events here, but I am cheered at how often you check the sources and read the full story as well. In the end, we are dependent upon journalists, and given the fact that I don’t trust their objectivity, acumen or accuracy, this is a problem that does not have an obvious solution.