Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is Jay Rosen, who is a professor of journalism at New York University, and for quite some time was the chairman of the journalism department there as well. Thanks so much for joining me this morning.

Jay Rosen: Thank you, Glenn.

GG: I wanted to discuss with you the matter of ABC News and Brian Ross's reporting on the anthrax case, and specifically their claims to have discovered the government sources that told them that bentonite had been discovered back in 2001. You wrote a piece earlier this week about what you thought their obligations were and then wrote a follow-up piece in light of some of the responses that Brian Ross gave in an interview a couple of days ago with Media Bistro. So let's begin by having you just summarize what you thought were the important journalistic issues raised by the reporting of the story in the first place that caused you to write about it.

JR: Well, I thought it was very important that they had never corrected what they reported in 2001. I thought it was extremely significant that they said to you that they had corrected it, and I thought it was important that they had never gone back and looked at what went wrong by reporting such an explosive story at such an explosive time. So the issue to me was one of basic accountability and not letting ABC simply get away as if this were all ancient history that nobody cared about. That's why I wrote what I wrote and that's why I responded to your post at Salon with my own.

GG: Now, let's look at, for a moment, what Brian Ross said in the interview that he gave which was somewhat consistent though a little more detailed than what ABC had told me last year - and that I had heard from people who were involved in that story, actually, on background - which was this claim that they had heard from some scientists that there was some brown material detectable by the eye under the microscope in the anthrax, which in turn lead them to believe that that was indicative of bentonite.

That there were no chemical tests that revealed that, that they hadn't even conducted the test yet, but they ran to ABC based on this brown substance, told them there was bentonite and ABC ran with the extraordinarily flamboyant claim that tests had confirmed the presence of bentonite, and that was indicative, or even a smoking gun, of Iraq's involvement in the anthrax attacks. Now, let's suppose everything Brian Ross said about that is true, that that's the way it happened. Let's just suppose that for a minute. Even by their own reckoning, they got the story wrong because there was no bentonite in the anthrax. Even their own sources ultimately concluded that there wasn't. What is a news organization's obligation just in principle, in general, when they get story of that magnitude that wrong?

JR: Well, let me say one thing first. I think Ross and others at ABC would not exactly say they got it wrong. They would say, at the time, we were right because we accurately reported what our sources were saying, and they were credible sources.

Now, when they get a story wrong like that, their obligation is first of all to go on the air and say, we were wrong. And then, internally, they have to look at why they got it wrong and whether they got it wrong because they were simply the victims of bad luck, or of malevolent sources, or shoddy practices, because it could be any of those three. So I would think those are their basic obligations.

GG: Right. Now, one of the things that they claimed last year was that they fulfilled that obligation, because on November 1st 2001, Brian Ross went on the air and Peter Jennings at the end of a long segment, said, oh, what about this whole matter with the bentonite and Brian Ross said, well, actually the White House today told us that despite initial tests that confirmed bentonite or suggested bentonite, subsequent tests have ruled it out.

Now, the way that I look at that is that if you look at what they were saying from the very first time that they ran with the story, back on October 26, in every single instance they talked about it, they pointed out that the White House had denied their reports, that the White House was claiming all along, that there was no bentonite. So saying that the White House denied the report wasn't anything new. It was essentially what they were saying.

And if you look at how people have written about the bentonite story subsequent even to that November 1st discussion that Peter Jennings and Brian Ross had, nobody understood that as a retraction. People continued to point to that story as evidence of Iraqi involvement. No-one has ever called that a retraction or written about how ABC retracted their story, or corrected it or anything else. Do you perceive that to be anywhere near adequate in terms of fulfilling their obligation to account to the public and whether they say they got it right originally or not, it was ultimately a factually false claim, the finding of bentonite. Do you consider that to be a discharge of their responsibilities?

JR: No. Not even close. In fact, it's the most ludicrous part of ABC's defense. You have to go back to October 26, they had this report ready, saying that scientists believe they have found bentonite in the anthrax. And just before air, the White House calls, and says, no bentonite. And we have to look at that because the White House didn't call and say, hold your story or we're not sure, or gee, there's some confusion here. They said: no bentonite. So, instead of pulling back, taking the weekend, looking at this conflict, and deciding what to report, they just went to air.

Then, from October 26 through November 1st, they sort of ritualistically reported the White House denials while promoting, bentonite found in the anthrax, several times. Then on November 1st, they just switched the emphasis, from reporting ritualistic denials to leading with the denials. According to Ross and ABC, that constitutes a correction. That is just pathetically weak and lame. They obviously didn't want to go on the air and say how wrong they were, and they didn't want to look at why they were so wrong either. So that part is actually the weakest part of what they are saying and it doesn't pass any sort of smell test.

GG: Right. Now here's the problem that I have even the claim that they're making, without being privy to who these sources are and what was really being discussed - one can only speculate about how accurate the rendition is that ABC is offering - but the way that this works is, as I understand it from many, many sources, including a couple who were directly involved, is that the first thing you do is do a visual inspection of the anthrax under a microscope.

But then very quickly thereafter, you do a chemical test that reveals whether for example there's aluminum, which is the tell tale sign of bentonite, and that those chemical tests were done almost immediately, and that is how Ari Fleischer and the White House was so sure there was no bentonite, because those tests, which were conducted almost immediately, very quickly revealed there was probably silicon added to the spores, but not bentonite. And so, even if it's true, that at the very first stage of the first couple hours, there was some belief on the part of these sources that there was bentonite because they saw something brown - day after day after day, when Brian Ross is going on the air, what was clear was that those claims were disproven by the actual chemical tests.

Which means he either never went back to his sources and said, why is the White House so definitive here in saying that these chemical tests show there's no bentonite, or he did go back and his sources continued to insist that there was bentonite even by the time it was clear there wasn't.

And that's why to me, it's not just a matter of being convinced that, well the sources were acting in good faith, and believed what they were saying and they just turned out to be wrong. It's seems pretty clear that during a substantial part of the time when they were making this claim, the evidence was definitive that it was wrong, and they either made the claim anyway, knowing it was false, or they just kept making it recklessly, and to me that really raises a more significant question about what ABC's responsibility is, beyond just what would happen normally if their sources in good faith got a story wrong. Do you see that, do you consider that ABC's rendition is convincing?

JR: I think you're on the right track, that they were being reckless during this period, and just to add some detail to that, on October 29th, on an ABC News report that's still online, we find Ross and team reporting this: White House spokesman Ari Fleischer had denied that bentonite was found on the letters but another senior White House official backed off Fleischer's comments, saying, at this point, there does not appear to be bentonite. Think about what he's trying to do there - he's trying to introduce doubt within the White House itself, by counter-posing an on-the-record statement from the White House press secretary, that is definitive - no bentonite - with an off-the-record statement from somebody else in the White House, saying, not that there is bentonite, but at this point there does not appear to be bentonite. So the contrast is between no bentonite, and there does not appear to be bentonite, and Ross is trying to kind of get a wedge in there and create some doubt that obviously, to me, in retrospect, is an attempt to maintain his story.

And the reason is probably - I'm just guessing - but it's probably simply ego and pride and unwillingness to admit an error and the fact that they had rushed their story on October 26 and should have been more cautious. But, the fact that they don't want to go back and look at it now, is really part of something much bigger that I hope we'll talk about, which is the general reluctance to examine what happened in those years within the press.

GG: Let's move to that, because the other part of this story, the Brian Ross story - that I haven't focused on as much because it's really more subjective than is the objective fact that there was no bentonite - is that notion that had there been bentonite, that that would have been some signature of the Iraqi biological weapons program, whereas Peter Jennings called it a smoking gun, that people were likely... When they depicted, when they described the story, they called it a chemical additive known as bentonite, and made it seem it was though it was some super-exotic desert germ that Saddam Hussein's Dr. Germ had concocted in a government lab, and of course as we now know it's a very common clay, it's found throughout the world, it's the clumping agent used in cat litter, and the idea that even had bentonite been there, that would have been some sort of compelling evidence of Iraqi involvement is itself absurd. And yet it was part and parcel of the media's behavior at that time, to sort of feed the hysteria surrounding Iraq and Saddam Hussein that of course persisted for a couple of years and to this day has never really been meaningfully examined.

There's been an editor's note in the New York Times that was extremely narrow in scope about the stories that they got wrong, but very little examination on the part of the media. What is your view of that failure to examine their own role in the events of the last seven years?

JR: Well, this is a subject on which I probably feel the biggest gulf between myself and the professional class of, let's say, national reporters and editors and producers. Because in the minds of most of the people who work in big league journalism in New York and Washington, they have done this to death. And they're way past the point of examining their own performance in the run-up to the war. And from my point of view, they haven't even started.

Now, it's true that the New York Times tried to look at its own performance and there were some good things about that and there were some weak things about that. And Howard Kurtz and the Washington Post did do an investigation of how the Washington Post had performed. But as far as I know there has been nothing even remotely like that at any of the three networks. And clearly they feel that this is long since past and there is going to be no investigation.

And I think that's not only an outrage but it's a mistake from their point of view. I think in the long run their failure to examine this is going to hurt them. Not only because they could learn some important lessons for the next time a national crisis like this comes around, but they really need to get into what sorts of habits and assumptions and culture permitted the collapse of the watchdog press.

In my own view, the watchdog press died under Bush. We may have a watchdog press again some day, it could be reborn. But it died. And really the only way we're going to know that full story is through some kind of, almost like a media truth and reconciliation commission, which I have no hope for. But without that kind of effort like that, we're simply not going to know, and for the government to have gone through the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee examinations, and a number of other things that Congress has done, none of which are totally adequate, but for the government to have that, and for the news media to have done nothing, is a major mistake for the watchdog press.

GG: Absolutely. I mean, what's most discouraging about the prospect of if that will ever happen is if you talk to many establishment journalists, certainly media executives, one could probably say most, they don't even recognize that there's a problem. They think of it as the Judy Miller problem, that if anything is confined to one or two bad apples, and they'll say thing condescendingly like, well of course we could have done things better, we always want to strive for perfection, but on the whole I think we did a good job. So without that recognition that there's a problem even, which is non-existent, that what explains their lack of self-reflection.

JR: That's what I mean. It's like we're on the other side of the Moon from them on this particular issue.

GG: Yeah, both in terms of the premises and the proposed conclusions. Well, Jay, thanks so much for taking the time this morning, I think it was really enlightening and I found it interesting, and I think listeners will as well.

JR: My pleasure and thanks for the work you do.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]