Ron Suskind and the Washington Post
Recently I have been noting the absence of the name "Ron Suskind" from places in the Washington Post where I would have expected to see it.
Here's one example: Joel Achenbach laments that the Outlook editors took his references to Ron Suskind and left them on the cutting room floor:
Outlook Sausage - Achenblog: [T]he New Guy at dot.com wants me to blog about the upcoming Outlook section. I can't imagine that this is a good idea.... I worry that readers will be dismayed if they discover the haphazard, dangerously small-d democratic nature of our business.... I am not really privy to the inner operations at Outlook.... I still sit downstairs in the Style section.... When I walk into Outlook I'm conscious of being an intruder. [Sort of how I feel on planet Earth.]...
I have a piece on Doubt. Ron Suskind helped me a lot, by phone and email, but I am pained to report that in the editing process Suskind got axed. Thus as a reader service I am going to paste into this blog item a big fat chunk of the story that got removed on account of it being perhaps a bit redundant and tedious:
I'd add a few items to the "critical thinking" list. Starting with, Beware the Argument From Authority. Anyone can be wrong about anything: Just because someone is a professor or an author or has a fancy credential does not make said person immune to error. Journalists in particular rely too heavily on the Argument from Authority, starting with the ritual incantation of "police said," on up through the chain of command to the anonymous "knowledge insiders."
We should also beware the opposite of the Argument From Authority, which might be called the Disqualifier By Identity. That's when you assume someone is wrong even before you've heard the argument. You say: I've never liked that guy, so whatever he says must be the opposite of the truth.
And more generally: It's probably not wise to start with a conclusion and then start working through your argument. Do it the other way around.
It appears that the Bush Administration circa 2002 started with the conclusion "We must invade Iraq" and searched for evidence to support the decision. Doubters were considered disloyal to the boss. The journalist and author Ron Suskind, who has chronicled the travails of such Bush administration contrarians as Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell, told me there's been a clear pattern in the Bush White House: "You are stamped as a doubter and then you're shown the door. There's no time for doubters in the new world of action."
Whitman once told Suskind, ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!" Suskind's book "The One Percent Doctrine" shows how Dick Cheney argued that even a 1 percent chance of a terrorist attack had to be treated as the equivalent of a certainty. Doubt, in effect, was eliminated from the conversation -- not as a matter of reason, but as a matter of public policy...
Here's another example: David Broder also leaving his reference to Ron Suskind on the cutting room floor:
David S. Broder - Cheney Unbound: Cheney shaped all of [Bush's] decisions with his recommendations... in ways... unknown to the other players and unseen by Congress and the public. Secrecy was one of his tools and weapons.... It is easy to see why former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who had been recommended for the job by Cheney, complained afterward that "there is no policy process," because the decision-making was often short-circuited by the vice president's private access to the Oval Office. O'Neill was not alone... The secretary of state, the national security adviser and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board....
What [Washington Post reporters] Gellman and Becker have described is a decision-making process in which Bush has allowed Cheney to play a bureaucratic role inside the White House that Cheney never permitted... when he was... Ford's chief of staff.... [U]ltimately the president is responsible for what has become, in very large respect, the resulting wreckage of foreign policy, national security policy, budget policy, energy policy and environmental policy under Cheney's direction and on Cheney's watch.... Thanks to Gellman and Becker, some of that secrecy has been removed.
The problem is that Broder's "Paul O'Neill... complained... 'there is no policy process'" should be "As Ron Suskind reported, Paul O'Neill... complained... 'there is no policy process'." But if Broder admits that Ron Suskind reported this back in 2003, Broder's claims that Cheney's role was "unseen by... the public" until right now, when "thanks to [Washington Post reporters] Gellman and Becker, some of [Cheney's] secrecy has been removed" look simply silly.
