“We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told NPR in an interview. “I think we were so in love with it that when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn’t listen hard enough.”
That’s it? The NYT was madly in love with ISIS fantasies, so they didn’t bother to check whether their one and only source, Shehroze Chaudhry, had ever been to Syria? Rukmini Callimachi, their terrorism star, gets reassigned and we move on?
This is the problem with the West: their obsession with lurid, Orientalist, violent, but also perversely erotic readings and portrayals of the non-West. It’s a full-time job that requires constant snooping and make-believe, the invention of entire disciplines and colonial projects, the production of art and culture, as well as plentiful funding and prestigious awards. Whether it’s the Nobel or Pulitzer, the Peabody or the Oscars, look at the stories being told. What gets rewarded and what gets left on the dusty pile of rejection.
This reward and punishment scheme is so consistent and normalized, that even people of color with connections to the non-West get it. They know what stories to tell or how far they can go in their criticism of Europe and its stellar intellectual history. The trick is to complicate, to rely on subterfuge, and not make the indictment of the non-West too obvious, racist, or one-note. The formula works well, particularly if the oeuvre is inspired by Plato’s Dialogues or Leopardi’s Canti.
The ‘Caliphate’ fiasco is hardly an anomaly. NYT terrorism expert Judith Miller cheerled the invasion of Iraq, because her source “clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried.”
This is the precarious foundation on which the War on Terror and its attendant propaganda are built, buttressed by stories of magic WMDs and ISIS elves. Failures of American journalism, however spectacular, never make a dent because this is the reflection we want to behold. We can only be good and right, if someone else is bad and wrong. Even if we get caught lying like a rug, we can turn around and say we were so madly in love with the truth, we just didn’t listen hard enough.