NPR's Inskeep Cowers before Feith?

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Thursday April 19, 2007 · 2:04 PM PDT

2007/04/19 · 14:04

Steve Inskeep did a story on Doug Feith today on NPR's Morning Edition that really rubbed me the wrong way, and I wanted to see if anyone else reacted this way as well. The main hook was about how nicely Feith seems to have settled in to his new teaching gig at Georgetown. The story did include various references to Feith's controversial role in the Iraq war. But when Inskeep actually interviewed Feith, he did not press him on the particulars of how Feith's entire operation at the Pentagon distorted intelligence, and also how angry people even in the administration are to this day with him for simply bailing on Iraq once the going got tough ("Feith should be drawn, quartered, and hung" is how Reid's book Fiasco quotes one such official. Inskeep seemed cowed by Feith's aggressive defense of the overall basis for war, which I found especially irritating in light of how agressive Inskeep has been himself in the past when interviewing folks like Howard Dean and Rahm Emmanuel. more on flip.

In fairness, the piece was not all puff, and certainly there were references to ctiticisms of Feith. But for me, there is simply no reason to interview someone like Feith, who played such a huge role in our entry into this war, if you're not going to really ask tough questions. And that just did not happen. At the end of the story, Feith did accept some measure of resonsibility, not for a failed and pointless war, but for failing to make the case better to the public. But then there was no follow-up, either to confront the ramifications of that failure in Feith's own terms, or to get him to really confront his justifications of the war in light of the immense debacle of Iraq today.

In some amorphous objective journalistic sense, it's hard to say Inskeep's piece was that horrible, because it did include other information critical of Feith and the war. But something about this piece seemed to me unprepared and cowardly, and in the end left me furious. Feith was rather bullying in part of the interview ("that's just false" was one line), in the same way the administration has tried to bully the truth all along in this war, and Inskeep did not challenge him. He didn't confront him with any number of things, from how wrong all the intelligence he helped develop turned out to be, to the way his operation led to a distorted NIE and to poor planning, to his apparent disengagement from the war when it began to unravel, to, ultimately, the present chaotic, violent, unstable Iraq, four years after we "won" the war. That kind of timidity on network TV is par for the course, but for NPR, I think it represents real journalistic failure. Inskeep and NPR have shown they can do better, and I expect them to do better.

Other thoughts?

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