Whitewashing "The Plan"

To the surprise of many, ABC’s Nightline aired a segment on the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) last week. I caught the show, and figured I’d weigh in here with my impressions. (Thanks to Ray Sweatman for motivating me to post this, which is adapted from an email I sent him.)

In general, I thought the show was a whitewash. Nightline presented no new information with their report; outside of journalistic ineptitude, there’s no reason why this story could not have aired months ago, when it might have had a chance to influence public discourse. Instead, it airs when war is pretty much a foregone conclusion, and after most people have made up their mind about whether Dubya should unleash the dogs of hell.

What particularly annoyed me was the way Nightline framed the story. Ted Koppel opened things up by quoting Neil MacKay’s piece from the Sunday Herald (which broke the PNAC story last September, at least in journalistic circles) and Chris Floyd’s follow up article on it for the Moscow Times. Koppel basically called both authors conspiracy theorists, which was entirely unfair. Nightline didn’t break this story – other folks had to – and now along comes Teddy K. to put the facts straight. That’s the way this was outlined.

Koppel then played off the conspiracy theme to introduce a taped segment by one of the Nightline journalists (Jackie Judd). The rest of the show tears at the conspiracy notion until the audience is left with the impression that Bill Kristol and the boys really have American interests at heart and aren’t the imperialists they so plainly are (and readily admit, albeit in different words).

Nightline essentially allowed the PNACers to make their case without any significant challenge to their worldview. Ian Lustick, a UPenn professor, was presented as a foil, but he popped up very briefly in the taped segment and his contribution was marginal. In contrast, Bill Kristol was allowed to make his sales pitch, and given the opportunity to elaborate at length about his theory on foreign policy.

The fact that Kristol was interviewed extensively in the taped segment and then allowed to go one-on-one with Koppel in studio is unacceptable. Nightline could have just as easily aired the pre-taped journalistic piece, and then put Kristol on with someone else, someone who was not a PNAC flack. Take your pick: the previously mentioned MacKay, Jay Bookman (who wrote the first major American op-ed piece on PNAC for AJC), Nick Lemann (he wrote about PNAC even prior to MacKay, for the New Yorker), or Jim Lobe (the IPS reporter who has written extensively on PNAC, frequently for Foreign Policy in Focus), to name the obvious options.

Overall, yes, it's good that the PNAC story made its way onto television. I suppose the more people know about the plan, the better. Hopefully, it will encourage viewers to investigate this further.

I do, however, feel like the program served more as political inoculation than anything else. It connected few dots, and led the viewer to believe that a bunch of smart folks were simply contributing ideas to the foreign policy debate, and not actually exploiting historical circumstance and their close proximity to the corridors of power to drive through an ideological agenda that has, for the most part, been hidden from public scrutiny.

Rather than taking a deep, probing look at the PNAC, Nightline can now put it on its list of stories covered. This is not something that deserves 20 minutes at 11:35pm. It’s the story that needs to be placed at the center of the debate on Iraq, precisely because you cannot understand what’s been going on for the past few months (years?) without knowing about PNAC. More or less, this Nightline report left the viewer with the notion that “there’s nothing to see here, folks.”

And, as anyone who has been following this story all along knows, that’s hardly the case.

[NB: A transcript of the Nightline program is available here.]