I don’t even want to think about the state of our banana
nation, so with apologies to Leonard Cohen for borrowing the
title of his first book of poetry, here’s a comparison of three news stories that appeared earlier this
week in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post about a U.S.
judicial decision that went against the U.S. government.
The Journal was the only one with the balls to lay out the most significant fact and what it
means, so that the reader understands, in the very first sentence, the decision’s importance without
having to be a legal expert. Neither the Times nor the Post were as bold or clear.
This was the Journal lede:
The Bush administration failed to comply with a Supreme Court decision
giving Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prisoners the right to challenge their detention, a federal judge in
Washington ruled.
Notice that the regime’s flouting of the court is the focus of sentence. Here’s the Times
lede:
A federal judge ruled against the Bush administration on Monday, declaring
that detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were clearly entitled to have federal courts examine
whether they have been lawfully detained.
Notice that the judge is the focus and the “prisoners” are mere “detainees.” Then contrast the
economy of words: the Journal’s “right to challenge their detention” vs. the Times’s “clearly
entitled to have federal courts examine whether they have been lawfully detained.”
Here’s The Post lede:
A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Bush administration must allow
prisoners at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to contest their detention in U.S.
courts, concluding that special military reviews established by the Pentagon as an alternative are
illegal.
Again, the judge is the focus. The economy of words “to contest their detention” is similar to
the Journal’s, but there’s an unnecessary phrase: “in U.S. courts.” (Where else?) And then in the
attempt to add more information, which is not a bad idea in itself, there’s an error (only
grammatical, admittedly, but committed so often that most wouldn’t notice), i.e., the dangling
clause (a k a the misplaced participle) of “concluding that special military reviews established by
the Pentagon as an alternative are illegal.” (I’m not going to explain why it’s wrong. Go look it
up.)
On to the Journal’s second graf:
District Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled that the system of military hearings the
Defense Department set up after the high court’s ruling in June was unconstitutional because it
denied prisoners access to evidence against them and to legal assistance in making their cases. If
upheld on appeal, Judge Green’s decision renders moot the hearings the Pentagon convened at the
offshore prison after the high court’s ruling. Of 330 cases whose results have been made public, all
but three prisoners were found to be “enemy combatants.”
That tells us a lot, and all in layman’s language. And it gives specific information that 330
cases would be ruled unconstitutional. Here’s the Times’s second graf:
The judge, Joyce Hens Green of Federal District Court in Washington,
rejected the argument that federal courts could not issue writs of habeas corpus for Guantánamo
that would require the government to justify the detentions before a judge.
Boy! What a mess. It doesn’t advance the narrative very much, does it? And it resorts to legal
terminology, as it will throughout the rest of the story — jargon, if you will — as though written
for lawyers instead of a general readership.
The Post does better than the Times. Avoiding jargon, the second graf speaks as clearly as the
Journal and also gives specific information about those whom the ruling may effect.
U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green said that the approximately 550 men
held as “enemy combatants” are entitled to the advice of lawyers and to confront the evidence
against them in those proceedings. But, she found, the Defense Department has largely denied
them these “most basic fundamental rights” during the reviews conducted at Guantanamo Bay, in
the name of protecting the United States from terrorism.
The Journal, however, went further and shows a better grasp of the subject by indicating the
actual number of known hearings and, in only a few more words, gives the telling detail that “all
but three prisoners were found to be ‘enemy combatants’.” Why telling? Because, without actually
making the claim that the military hearings are kangaroo courts, it presents evidence that they
are.
Then in its third graf, the Journal narrative expands by alerting the reader to the broader
context of the judge’s ruling in relation to key events, policies and players that have led up to
it.
The 75-page opinion specifically rejects legal theories advanced by Alberto
Gonzales, the White House counsel whom President Bush nominated for attorney general. On
Mr. Gonzales’s advice, the president in 2002 issued a blanket ruling that no suspected Taliban or
al Qaeda prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions, which normally require that
captives receive prisoner-of-war status unless stripped of it by a “competent tribunal.” POW
status includes certain protections, such as freedom from coercive interrogations and access to
delegations of the International Red Cross.
The Times, in its third graf, goes lame:
Judge Green said that although the Guantánamo base was in Cuba, the
Supreme Court definitively ruled in June that it was not out of the reach of American law as
administration officials have argued.
The Post simply changes direction without developing the thrust of the narrative it led off
with:
Green’s ruling directly conflicts with one issued by another federal court judge
in Washington two weeks ago. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who heard the case of a
smaller group of detainees, wrote that their bid for freedom is supported by “no viable legal
theory.” Green went beyond the question of whether detainees had rights and found the
“combatant status review tribunals” illegal.
That’s an option, of course, and the Post story elaborates on potential appeals and legal
battles in its fourth graf. A 75-page judicial opinion (only the Journal tells us its size) leaves much
to the reporter’s judgment in terms of emphasis and priority of information, of course. But I think
I can hear a Post news editor demanding that the reporter insert so-called balance before the
reader gets the “wrong” idea that the story has just one side. Hell, we’re not even into the fourth
graf.
So again, the Journal is the only one to lay down a narrative that follows a clear line from the
beginning. In its fourth graf, it drives home the point of the lede by quoting a dramatic passage
directly from the written opinion, which addresses precisely why the judge ruled as she did.
“Nothing … authorizes the president of the United States to rule by fiat that an
entire group of fighters covered by the Third Geneva Convention falls outside the treaty’s
definitions of ‘prisoners-of-war,'” Judge Green wrote. Another federal judge in Washington, James
Robertson, reached a similar conclusion in November, when he struck down a system of military
commissions [hearings] the administration established to prosecute a subset of Guantanamo
prisoners for war crimes. The government has appealed that decision.
I could go on, but I won’t. The ultimate point is that both the Times and Post reports read,
under close examination, as unintended apologies for the administration through dullness, jargon
and the obfuscation of a wobbly narrative in the service of so-called balance, while the Journal
gives the facts in plain, strong terms, makes no apologies and does not ignore the required balance
of reporting Leon’s contrary ruling, which is placed lower down in the story, where I’d say it
belongs. (After all, his ruling is in the minority, and it may be more significant that two other
federal judges specifically rejected Gonzales’s theory about the Geneva Conventions, a point
worth making while he’s in the news.)
Judge for yourselves. Here’s the Times’s story and here’s the Post’s. Unfortunately, I can’t
link to the Journal’s. But believe me, it’s sharper and tighter — 540 or so words vs. the Times’s
967 and the Post’s 936 — as well as more enlightening.
