Remnick calls for aggressive reporting
Andreea Nedelcu
Issue date: 11/9/06 Section: News
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The celebrated journalist, author, historian and editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, addressed the question when he delivered a lecture on "Investigative Journalism and the Free Press" last week in Wilson Auditorium.
"Freedom of the press used to belong to the man who owned one," said Remnick. "However, that is no longer precisely true. Now it is yours as long as you have an Internet connection, the greatest boom in communication since the fifteenth century."
According to Remnick, what started as a means of scientific and military communication has revolutionized people's access to news since the Internet allows them to cross both national and international borders. "The catalog of the Internet's benefits is limitless. It is vast, fluid and has the power to inform and persuade people. It holds out the attraction of free speech to those who are denied it; it challenges power where it is corrupt and it fosters dialogue where it is suppressed," stated Remnick. However, the editor emphasized the importance of the accuracy of what is being transmitted and questioned the state of investigative journalism today.
"We need to recognize the necessity of this kind of reporting and support it not by shutting down news bureaus. Investigative journalism is expensive, but the cost of its diminishment will affect the business of the press," said Remnick.
The 48-year-old editor cited the war in Iraq as an example, and said the invasion had been "pencilled in" by the Bush White House. "The administration was committed to go to war against Iraq before the public was told about it, their rationale being Sadam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Before the start of the war, there were doubters about the (existence of) WMDs, but the placement of these stories was obscure - they were deep inside the newspaper and the follow-up was negligible," Remnick said. "It remains a great failure of the press not to have found out about Hussein's arsenal leading to the war. But there were factors that made the story difficult or even impossible to get," he said.
Remnick maintained that, while investigative reporting failed to uncover in real time the administration's "willed distorted narrative," delusion, spin and manipulation, independent reporting still managed to inform citizens about the use of torture, the existence of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, eavesdropping and "the trampling" of the Constitution.
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