Last modified: Fri May 7 17:09:26 EDT 2004
This is a strange little saga of journalistic judgement. Bear with me, because it takes a few paragraphs to set it up.
The story starts on Wednesday, June 4th, 2003. The Guardian ran an article on its web site with the headline "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil". In the article, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying that the U.S. attacked Iraq "because the country floats on a sea of oil".
In fact, given the full context, he said nothing of the sort. He was discussing why the U.S. had attacked Iraq but had not attacked North Korea, and the full statement (from the U.S. Department of Defense web site) was:
Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.The Guardian soon realized it had committed a blunder and pulled the article; it subsequently posted a fuller retraction notice and explanation.
Meanwhile, though, this phenomenally mediagenic quote had escaped into the Internet. It was siezed upon by John Dean (of Watergate fame), who wrote this article, which appeared on FindLaw.com.
Dean's article, containing the misquote, was then picked up and republished by AlterNet, an online magazine that "provides a mix of news, opinion and investigative journalism on subjects ranging from the environment, the drug war, technology and cultural trends to policy debate, sexual politics and health issues." I am a frequent reader of AlterNet and value its services.
I found the story of the misquote interesting and wrote it up on my own web site's "Quotable Quotes" page, as an example of how quickly the Internet can propogate tasty, if not necessarily true, stories. I included a link to AlterNet's copy of Dean's story, and figured that would be the end of it.
Well, today (August 11th, 2003) I was fixing some minor HTML bugs on my web site and checked the link to the AlterNet story. It still worked, the Dean article was still there, but - the quote was gone.
WTF?!? Did I somehow screw up and concoct this story out of a mixture of web pages, NPR stories and rumor? Where's my cred if I provide links to stories that don't contain the quotes I provide?
I went back to FindLaw to look at Dean's original article; it still contained the misquote. Evidently AlterNet just removed the offensive quote! Here's the relevent paragraph from Dean's original article, with the sentence removed by AlterNet in bold:
Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that "[t]he country swims on a sea of oil."
Wow. We all know that the Internet is mutable; hell, I update my own web pages all the time, but generally to add information, or to completely delete items that are no longer timely. This, on the other hand, smells of Orwell's mutability of the past - "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past."
Well, maybe it's not that extreme. Still, this sort of change damages the usefulness of the Internet and hurts the credibility of innocent linkers, like me.
I've sent a message to AlterNet about this. It will be interesting to see their response.