Earlier this month a major controversy erupted, and continues to unfold, over David Samuels’ lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine about Ben Rhodes, U.S. President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser.
In the May 8 print edition, under the title, “The storyteller and the president,” Samuels profiled the 38-year-old Rhodes who, with a background as a fiction writer, worked his way up to become Obama’s principal foreign policy adviser, speechwriter and communications strategist.
“Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal… He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press,” writes Samuels.
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No foreign policy issue has been more central to Obama’s – and hence Rhodes’ – agenda than the Iran nuclear deal, finalized last July after the 2014 interim deal, which were both preceded by (at first secret) talks between Washington and Tehran.
Samuels, who had Rhodes’ co-operation, depicts Rhodes as disdainful of the journalists to whom he was “retailing” the deal. Rhodes’ shockingly open derision, described by Samuels as Rhodes’ “brutal contempt” for the media, has become one of the major controversies of the account.
After describing the immense media shift away from traditional to digital technologies and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Samuels quotes Rhodes: “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.”
Rhodes continues: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
That last line in particular landed Rhodes in hot water with the Washington press corps, who felt insulted by the man responsible for, ostensibly, communicating the administration’s position on key issues.
Even if there is an element of truth in what Rhodes claims, why insult them?
To be sure, some reporters uncritically cite what they’re fed in White House briefings, but others have remained vigilant and skeptical, especially about the terms of the Iran deal and its background.
Yet Samuels agrees with Rhodes and his assistant, Ned Price that, as Samuels puts it, currently “the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.”
So, the argument goes, the new technology, along with cutbacks in mainstream media, is making even “good journalists” dumb.
With respect to selling the Iran deal, Samuels relates that Rhodes deceived the (gullible) media by weaving a narrative according to which Obama began talks in 2013 after the “moderate” Iran president Hassan Rouhani was in charge against the “hardliners.”
Nonetheless, as Samuels notes, negotiations actually began in secret in 2012 when the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still in power. Yet this is something numerous journalists knew and reported, disproving claims they’d been “spun” by Rhodes, as Samuels reports.
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Samuels goes further regarding spin, claiming that “handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative.”
Both Goldberg and Rozen have objected vigorously to Samuels’ portrayal of them as administration stooges. In his Atlantic column, Goldberg laid out his objections in an exchange with Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of the Times Magazine. While conceding that Samuels should have contacted Goldberg for comment, Silverstein has stood behind Samuel’s reporting, claiming – redundantly – that everything in Samuel’s story is “true and accurate.”
But just in case he’s wrong, Silverstein assured Goldberg that he’s decided to get a ruling from the Times’ public editor – another development in this fascinating story.
Paul Michaels is CIJA’s research director.
