The New Yorker Doesn’t Factcheck What ‘Everyone Knows’ Is True

[Judi Lynn]

Nov 03 2015

The New Yorker Doesn’t Factcheck What ‘Everyone Knows’ Is True

By Gareth Porter

Dexter Filkins has been one of the top journalists covering America’s wars since 9/11—first for the New York Times, and since 2011 for the New Yorker—often uncovering stories that were not welcomed by the US national security structure. But when Filkins, in a long-form New Yorker article last summer (7/20/15), took on the subject of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s untimely death and its relation to his role in indicting senior Iranian officials for a 1994 Buenos Aires terror bombing, it tested how far Filkins would go in questioning conventional wisdom.

The July 18, 1994, bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires (known by the Spanish initials AMIA), which killed 85 people and wounded nearly 300, is almost always blamed on Iran in media references to the attack. Other than my own investigation of the case in 2008 (The Nation, 1/19/08), I’m aware of no journalist who has gone beyond that frame in covering it.

Filkins apparently intended to write a journalistic portrait of Nisman and the disputed circumstances in which he died of a gunshot wound last January, rather than to explore the case itself. But in order to write such a portrait, Filkins had to deal with the evidence Nisman used in his AMIA indictment, and Filkins stumbled badly in writing about those issues.

Filkins’ failure goes to the root of a systemic problem of news media coverage of Iran and many other issues. Certain narratives about episodes and issues in recent history have become so unanimously accepted among political and media elites as to be virtually unchallengeable in media reporting. Such narratives have been repeated in one form or another for so many years that reporters simply would not think to question them for a moment, much less actually investigate their truth.

More:
http://fair.org/home/the-new-yorker-doesnt-factcheck-what-everyone-knows-is-true/

[Peace Patriot]

1. Confirms my opinion that the New Yorker has really deteriorated...

...over the last half decade or so, especially on foreign policy, and most especially on the Middle East. The New Yorker has gone the way of the BBC in cowering before, and catering to, our military overlords. It's tragedy--the last in a series of such tragedies--for western democracy and the notion of a free press, free discourse and reliable information for the general public.