NEW YORK — New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said in a revealing interview published Friday that he “absolutely” agreed with Times reporter James Risen that the mainstream media had “failed” after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
“The mainstream press was not aggressive enough after 9/11, was not aggressive enough in asking questions about a decision to go to war in Iraq, was not aggressive enough in asking the hard questions about the War on Terror,” Baquet told German magazine Der Spiegel. “I accept that for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.” (Baquet was previously top editor at the Los Angeles Times.)
Baquet’s admission echoes remarks made by his predecessor Jill Abramson, who said in a July speech that editors gave in too readily to the Bush administration’s demands. “I think, in real time, right after 9/11, none of us had a notion of what the ‘war on terror’ would involve and that there would be so many aspects of civil liberties that would be called into question,” Abramson told HuffPost after the speech. “We were naïve.”
–
When asked why the next Snowden should come to the Times, Baquet said that the paper has “the bodies, the brains, and, I would argue, the guts to publish it.”
Read the full Der Spiegel interview here.
