The Great Fabricator

Philly Daily News reporter and blogger Will Bunch has been all over the story of Alexis Debat, the ABC News terrorist consultant and Nixon Center employee, who fabricated a number of high profile interviews in the French magazine Politique Internationale. He notes in The disgraced ABC consultant and the push for war in Iran:

There's a huge new media scandal breaking this morning, and the headline so far -- that a much-used consultant to ABC News published a phony interview with Barak Obama -- may well be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The news about now ex-ABC consultant Alexis Debat (left) is just dribbling out, but I'm surprised people haven't been connecting the dots. This post will seek to connect a couple of them.

Simply put, Debat -- a former French defense official who now works at the (no, you can't make these things up) Nixon Center -- has also been a leading source in pounding the drumbeat for war in Iran, and directly linked to some bizarre stories -- reported on ABC's widely watched news shows, and nowhere else -- that either ratcheted up fears of terrorism or that could have stoked new tensions between Washington and Tehran.

It has been discovered that this "foreign affairs expert" has faked interviews with a number of other prominent individuals. According to NYTimes blog The Lede, World Leaders Say Interviews Were Faked:

Now, a slew of other leaders — former President Bill Clinton; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York; Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft; and former Secretary-General Kofi Annan of the United Nations — also told ABC News that Mr. Debat never talked to them for interviews published in the same French publication, Politique Internationale.

“This guy is just sick,” Patrick Wajsman, the editor of Politique Internationale, told ABC News.

Mr. Debat submitted the interviews between working at the conservative Nixon Center and ABC News, where he was a consultant focusing on the terrorism beat after Sept. 11, 2001. Previously, he served as a defense official in the French government.

* * * *

Now there are more concerns being raised about his work for ABC News, which cut its ties with him in June for falsely claiming a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. When his reliability came into question, ABC News said, it performed a review of his work and found no problems.

Will Bunch, who covers the media for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was not satisfied. Citing Mr. Debat’s role at ABC News as “a leading source in pounding the drumbeat for war in Iran” who is “directly linked to some bizarre stories,” Mr. Bunch asks whether his motivation is fame or a political agenda.

As noted by The Lede, Bunch (who's own credibility is now open to question since he's misidentified as being with the Inky) notes that Debat has been in the forefront of the effort to stir up anti-Iran sentiments:

Most recently, since ending his role with ABC, Debat helped raise a big international stir by pounding the drums for a U.S. attack on Iran.

The report came in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, right after rumors swept through Washington that aides to Vice President Dick Cheney were planning to use friendly news outlets -- including several others owned by Murdoch -- to whip up popular opinion for attacking Iran.

This story appeared in Murdoch's Times on Sept. 2, 2007:

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

Needless to say, the new information about Debat calls this story into question -- big-time, as Cheney himself might say. But what is really going on? Is Debat pulling sensational stories from thin air, as was the case with Obama, to make a name for himself? Or in his role at the Nixon Center -- which still has close ties to Henry Kissinger and others in the conservatve foreign policy establishment like former Secretary of State James Baker, who spoke there recently-- is he serving a higher agenda of spin?

* * * *

As noted at the top, there are two radically different ways to look at this scandal. Either Debat is a lone wolf, a deluded self-aggrandizer whose main agenda is promoting himself. Or he is acting in his role at the Nixon Center as a conduit, spreading information and occasional disinformation at the behest of others.

Either way, this is unarguably yet another huge black eye for the American media. But if the latter is true, it could also raise major questions about American foreign policy, and about the future of war and peace in the Persian Gulf.

Obviously, the true impact of these revelations is just beginning to be known. He has now admitted that his other interviews also never occurred. See, Ex-ABC Adviser Faces New Allegations. Yet, as the Washington Post notes, it is claims about Iran that raise more serious concerns:

Debat was prominently quoted last week by London's Sunday Times as saying the Pentagon had drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran.

Laura Rozen has put together a piece at Mother Jones on the scope of the story, Subject to Debat: What did ABC Know and When Did It Know It?:

Though Debat, often described in the American media as “a former French defense official,” insisted he would clear his name and sue Riché and his online magazine Rue89 for slander, the alleged fabricated interviews soon became a problem not just for Debat but for ABC. Since 2002, the network has employed Debat as a counterterrorism consultant and sometimes reporter, sending him to far-flung locations to report on Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. (For the past year and a half, Debat has also served as the director of the terrorism and national security program at the Nixon Center; he resigned "for personal reasons" this week.)

* * * *

Following Riché's report, ABC publicly announced that it had demanded Debat’s resignation in June, after learning from French government sources that he did not have the doctorate he’d claimed. ABC said it had investigated his reports then, and was undertaking a more extensive investigation upon learning of the fabricated interviews at Politique Internationale, but that to date, it was confident that all of Debat’s reports for ABC had been vetted and multiply sourced and were standing up to scrutiny.

Interviews with journalists, producers, think tank associates, executives, and former government officials, indicate that there were warning signs about Debat for years—even within the network itself. Two journalists familiar with Debat’s work point to ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross not as the victim of Debat’s alleged deceptions, but as an enabler, who has promoted sensational stories—including some that Debat brought the network—at the expense at times of rigorous journalism standards. (Ross did not return Mother Jones’ phone call by press time, although an ABC executive has been in touch by phone and email.) They also say that they do not believe ABC has properly investigated Debat’s reporting at all.

* * * *

Network officials strongly deny that ABC has tried to sweep the Debat matter under the rug, and say they are taking the matter of investigating his stories very seriously. “We acted expeditiously to sever ties with Debat when we could not establish his credentials and we did immediately investigate his work,” ABC senior vice president Jeffrey W. Schneider emailed me.

In fact, the French news service AFP reported as far back as 2002 that according to the French government, Debat had never been a defense ministry official. “Alexis Debat, presented by the American [TV] channel ABC as ‘a former official at the French Defence Ministry’ in the context of the case of [Zacarias] Moussaoui … ‘has never belonged’ to this
ministry,” the AFP reported September 6, 2002. According to the annotated Debat CV, he had at one time had a low-rank desk job at the Ministry for less than a year.

And overnight Friday, Riché had a new scoop: a whistleblower inside ABC had alerted the network to its Debat problem, first in complaints to editors, and later, with a memo. “The ABC news reporter tried to alert the management of her network that Alexis Debat was not reliable,” Riché reported. “In an email she wrote last May to a researcher in a Washington think tank, she explained she had been ‘quietly concerned’ about Debat's work for ABC ‘for some time.’"

Stay tuned.

For more on the story, see Rozen's blog, War and Piece.

The importance of this story for me is that it not only raise issues of journalist integrity, but it demonstrates how much power the media has over our view of events. People rely on the press to tell us what is happening in our world, to filter out fact from fiction. This is a topic I've covered many times before, see, e.g., Put down the steno pad and Bush Lied & People Died. This, of course, is needed even more when the Spinmeisters are in control of government, as is the case with the Bushies. Yet all to often, we see have seen the press help promote the tall tale -- to become actively involved in the spin, rather than expose it, as may have occurred here.

Tags: Journalism, News and Media