The Media's Rush to Judgment

...astrously as a leader and his administration was for all practical purposes at an end...

...The evidence that we found, for the first time, is that the more open you are, the more productive you become," said a McKinsey official whom Sylvia Nasar of the Times quoted...

...The government worked with banks and industries to coordinate a mammoth investment program, so that industries could stay competitive as the yen went up...

...Some residents of Oregon might still sympathize with my old complaint about the Post's hesitancy...

...Yet within a decade, the oil shocks seemed, if anything, to have left Japan's economy stronger...

...But at the moment no one can be sure of that...

...Yet barely three days into the war, the pundit class had leapt beyond the immediate finding—that American forces would rout the Iraqis in a hurry, with little damage to themselves—to the more grandiose conclusion that every bit of equipment in the U.S...

...tone...

...This is why the Japanese government was so unenthusiastic about Operation Desert Storm...

...In fact McKinsey's list would seem to prove just the reverse...

...If the Post was willing to go for Nixon's jugular, why did it wait until he'd been returned to office before doing so...

...he demonstrated his charm on a visit to Japan...

...We haven't seen bombs that missed targets, but I'll guarantee you some have...

...George Bush triumphed in leading the Desert Storm coalition during the second half of his term...

...The smart bombs were flying in the mail slots and down the exhaust fans of Iraqi military installations, meanwhile sparing innocent civilians...

...American competitors may have grown sharper, after their own difficulties in the 1980s...

...For the next decade the fastest-growing markets in the world will probably be in Southeast Asia and China...

...No one knows today whether and how Japan will respond to its current distress...

...But that is exactly the point...

...But most of the events that lead us to classify presidents as successes or failures occurred well into their terms...

...Yet the details of the study left a quite different impression from the upbeat headline...

...By radically reducing its energy use and shifting to less energy-intensive industries, Japan was better positioned than the United States or Western Europe to deal with supply disruptions in the future...

...No one could possibly know, four months into a president's first term, how things were going to turn out in the long run...

...How different American politics would be now if we could approach health care, education, environmental problems, and scientific research with a "money is no object" attitude...

...We can be sure of two things: first, that Westerners have repeatedly been wrong before in counting Japan out, and second, that the Japanese economy retains tremendous strengths...

...Despite the "collapse" of Japan's economy, unemployment is lower there than it has been in America for many decades and no major company has announced significant layoffs...

...Who would buy the Sonys and Toyotas when their price doubled...

...But that hasn't stopped American punditry...

...Comeback Kids Whoa...

...The laser-guided "smart bombs" shown on the news clips seemed to have hit their targets without fail...

...During the Gulf War journalists should have known not to accept initial battlefield reports at face value...

...metal-working...

...But there is another possibility...

...Moreover, having heard for years about the annoyingly hard-working and omni-competent Japanese, many Americans are relieved and delighted that Japan can have problems, too...

...Western economists were unanimous in saying that Japan's export surge was at an end...

...The only serious setback in that period had of course come in the decade before and during World War II, which led the country to disaster...

...Ten years from now, it may be clear that Japan's "crisis" of the early 1990s, rather than representing a fundamental change, was actually like other "crises" in its economic history...

...During 1993 the Japanese economy contracted slightly, rather than continuing its decades-long record of steady growth...

...But few reporters and virtually no pundits could be bothered with such boring niceties...

...They could acquire assets around the world at bargain prices with their newly powerful currency...

...But of course the reporters didn't believe the things they were saying...

...Ten years from now it may be clear that the produc-tion-at-any-price system came to an end in Japan in the early 1990s, just as the military-strength-at-any-price system collapsed in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s...

...No one knew, after a week of fighting in the Persian Gulf, what the after-action reports would show about U.S...

...The weekend talk shows rang with schadenfreude-edged dissections of "another failed presidency...

...Within six months of the fighting it emerged that the Patriot's guidance software had simply failed to detect and lock onto the missile...

...Carroll is usually identified as an "advocate," since the Center for Defense Information generally recommends smaller defense budgets...

...It overwhelmed the doubts of even those who had called last week's single-shot success beginner's luck...

...The savings rate in Japan is still at least three times higher than America's...

...The optimists turned out to be right...

...The verdict is not in on technology although there are some remarkable performances out there...

...Next Topic...

...The Westerners who wrote about the "hollowing out" of industrial Japan in 1986 turned out to be wrong...

...Again in the short run this depresses spending but in the long run it gives the country great maneuvering room...

...For the previous 125 years, since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 began a massive effort to catch up with the industrialized West, Japan's economy had seemed capable of moving only one way: forward...

...In retrospect, the most accurate assessment of complex weaponry during the fighting was that of retired Admiral Eugene Carroll, of the Center for Defense Information, who said on "Crossfire": We're nine days into a war...

...With that exception, Japan had always advanced, and had generally done so faster than outsiders anticipated...

...In fact, Congressmen were told at the Perry-Sprey hearing, it had taken 72 "smart bomb" sorties to destroy one bridge...

...John Kennedy, by enduring and learning from the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, became much more sophisticated about foreign policy during his first year...

...The very pundits who had been pronouncing Clinton dead in June proved this point in the following two months, with the predictable raft of stories about the president's miraculous "comeback...

...and consumer electronics...

...I'm happy to have been wrong about this, and I still believe that when it comes to military commitments the risks of mistaken pessimism are smaller than the risks of mistaken optimism...

...Surely (I asserted) the paper could see that the trail of incriminating facts was leading straight toward Nixon himself...

...Ah, to have such problems today...

...In the culture of "Crossfire" and McLaughlin, you're all For an issue or you're all Against it...

...A New York Times editorial asked "Can the Democrats Govern...

...Is Indeed Productive...

...Japanese manufacturers enjoy near-monopoly positions in many of these markets...

...It is weak and wet to say, "No one knows...

...Even David Broder, usually the soul of sobriety, weighed in with a column calling Clinton's performance a "calamity that reached beyond our borders...

...barracks in Dharan, causing America's major casualties in Desert Storm...

...But it does suggest that it's too early to print stories with an "America has won...

...Japan has obviously been regulated and protectionist, so anyone with an American economics training is on the lookout for signs that Japan has finally failed...

...In the "McLaughlin Group" era, Washington journalism celebrates positions, opinions, spin, and "takes" on an issue...

...The headline: "Why the U.S...

...Yoo-Ess-Ay...

...The Patriot missiles were shooting down every Iraqi Scud...

...Yet what is going on in all these cases is something broader: It is the clinching evidence that John McLaughlin has supplanted Woodward and Bernstein as the symbol of Washington journalism...

...Ask Robert McNama-ra...

...He demonstrated his legislative skill by getting his budget passed...

...Are they operationally ready in sufficient numbers...

...When the Patriot downed nine missiles out of a volley of ten over Saudi Arabia late Sunday, it knocked down more than Scuds," a reporter for The Los Angeles Times wrote one week into the war...

...One is that something fundamental about the Japanese economy really had changed...

...People like me, who said that the war could go on for months, were proven wrong...

...Well, maybe—but we've heard similar conclusions before, and so far they've always been wrong...

...auto parts...

...We haven't received reports on how these systems are holding up...

...All we know about this war sitting here right now is what we've been told through the filter in Riyadh and the filter in the Pentagon...

...The talk show verdict was: Technology, Yes...

...and foods...

...No one in America, and probably no one in Japan, can prove how this combination of strengths and vulnerabilities will balance out for Japan over the next decade...

...Doubters (and Iraqis and Scuds), No...

...Japan, which produces virtually no petroleum of its own, feared that it would literally be left to freeze...

...euphoria was ill-founded...

...With the possible exception of William Henry Harrison, who caught pneumonia on Inauguration Day and died a month later, no president has made mistakes in his first four months in office that proved to be the fatal and decisive errors of his presidency...

...The Japanese central government usually operates with a balanced budget or a budget surplus, in contrast to America's gigantic deficits...

...This might seem to be another case in which people like me should be happy to be proven wrong—except that the seeming success of the first few days of combat did not prove us wrong...

...The joke was on all the people who had said that the American arsenal was full of high-tech turkeys that would fail when put to the test...

...Every industry on Japan's list of strengths has for decades been affected by formal and informal trade restraints...

...weapons...

...If Clinton in his first four months had "used up" his political capital, if his administration was an "international disaster," if his errors were "fatal"—the term used repeatedly on talk shows—then by definition he could not have recovered...

...If the Post itself, along with the Orego-nian, had pushed harder with stories about Bob Packwood in the month before the 1992 election, Packwood might have been removed from the Senate quickly and cleanly...

...Just Desserts I had a stake in this argument, since I had written in the early 1980s about the risks of relying on very costly, highly complex weapons that worked much better in the laboratory than in the dirty, confusing circumstances of real war...

...America's trade fights with Canada often involve wood and beer...

...But few journalists and virtually no pundits could be bothered with such boring niceties...

...Worst of all, no one knows how long we will have to wait until the journalistic culture changes again...

...No one knows just how strong or weak Bill Clinton will look by the end of his administration, or even what emergencies may have arisen by the time this magazine comes out...

...The industries in which America was more productive than Japan were: computers...

...This column ended, "That this is happening to a man who will remain as president for the next 43 months is an international disaster...

...The Tokyo stock exchange plunged to levels at least 60 percent below its peak from the late 1980s...

...Half a dozen years later, it was clear that endaka—"high yen"—had left Japan's industries, including its exporters, stronger than ever before...

...Within a week of his column's appearance, Xerox announced that it would cut its permanent work force by 10,000, and Boeing said it might lay off 3,000 people...

...The areas of America's strengths have been, in different ways and at different times, among its most protected industries...

...American companies made inroads against the Japanese in the car, semiconductor, and computer markets...

...In early June, Time published its cover story on "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency," and News-week's cover showed a picture of Clinton with the caption, "What's Wrong...

...Next Topic...

...Japan didn't need the oil as badly as the Americans did...

...Despite the huge numbers of bad debts on the books of Japanese banks, no major bank has been allowed to fail...

...It is weak and wet to say, "No one knows...

...he demonstrated determination by drawing a line in the sand about NAFTA...

...facile pronouncements on Clinton, the Gulf War, and fapan dramatize a dangerous new tendency: a McLaughlinized press would rather jump to conclusions than work to get it right BY JAMES FALLOWS When I started working for this magazine nearly 22 years ago, Richard Nixon was about to win re-election over George McGovern in the face of mounting evidence about Watergate...

...About a month before Samuelson's column appeared, The New York Times publicized a study rebutting the impression that American industries had fallen behind Japan's in productivity...

...Certainly we've seen bombs hit targets and collapse buildings...

...In short, however we ultimately feel about Bill Clinton, it will be different from the way we felt four months into his term—because that has always been the case with presidents...

...The most significant aspect of these "comeback" stories is that, by the logic of the earlier "failure" stories, a comeback should have been impossible...

...We read about one world-threatening peril this week, a completely different one next week—and pretty soon we are numb to all of them...

...Instead, the government acts as mid-wife for mergers in which stronger banks absorb the weak...

...For years, Samuelson said, Japan's economy enjoyed "special advantages"—an undervalued yen, sleepy competition in the United States, an ability to copy technology others had pioneered...

...within months that advantage was stripped away...

...If reporters really believed these things, then they'd have no good reason to keep covering Clinton: He was doomed...

...Yet no one knew, in June of 1993, how Bill Clinton would ultimately fare as president...

...Late last year the talk-show consensus was that the Japanese model had been conclusively proven a failure...

...and he demonstrated that he took established Washington seriously by hiring David Gergen...

...What is going on in the Japan case is partly a struggle of ideologies...

...steel...

...Industrial Strengths Maybe this new "crisis" of the Japanese economy really is different, and maybe this time the Japanese business system will not be able to respond...

...They shifted low-wage work to low-wage countries, and expanded high-wage jobs in Japanese factories...

...Perry said (according to David Evans of the Chicago Tribune) that the Patriot simply "is not effective" against battlefield missiles like the Scud...

...But these Oregonians would be in the minority...

...One Scud had fallen on a U.S...

...At a congressional hearing three months after the fighting, two authorities who usually agree on very little about weapons design—William Perry, generally seen as an advocate of hightech weaponry, and Pierre Sprey, who had for years made the case for less-complex weapons—agreed that the Patriot had not performed as advertised...

...beer...

...Yet his "advocate's" point was exactly the one most journalists should have been making—that the evidence was not in, that it was a mistake to accept initial battlefield reports at face value, that there would be time to decide what worked and what didn't when the smoke had cleared...

...This is a nuisance in the short term, since it makes it harder for Japanese consumers to spend their way out of a recession...

...at a minimum its products would be priced out of world export markets...

...Six months into his presidency, Bill Clinton was a success again...

...After decades of smug boasting about their "no layoffs" policy, big Japanese firms began talking about having too many people for the work at hand...

...The Washington Post ran a front page story presenting Clinton as a case study of what it means to use up your "political capital...

...In the build-up to the war against Iraq three years ago, some people said that American forces would be slaughtered and others said it would be an easy win...

...During the fighting Pentagon officials said that Patriots had not fired at this Scud because the air-defense system assumed that it had already broken up in flight...

...The Woodward and Bernstein era, for all its excesses, at least celebrated journalists for their reporto-rial effort...

...Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt got off to strong legislative starts in their first years in office...

...The result is to aggravate the cynicism and short attention span that characterize today's political culture...

...Within months, it became clear that the initial "Everything worked...

...In the culture of "Crossfire" and McLaughlin, you're all For an issue or you're all Against it...

...In 1972 the Japanese economy was shaken to its foundations by the rise of OPEC and the sudden skyrocketing of oil prices...

...The computer industry got going largely on the strength of government contracts...

...Doubters (and Iraqis, and Scuds), No...

...On the talk shows Republicans demanded apologies from those who had criticized the Reagan defense build-up...

...In 1986, the Japanese economy was shaken nearly as badly by the yen's sudden doubling in value against the U.S...

...Yoo-Ess-Ay...

...My old friend Robert Samuelson, writing in Newsweek in December, offered three pieces of evidence to show that the Japanese miracle was over: a continued decline in department store sales, one-day furloughs for the Mazda Motors work force, and a comment from Japanese industrialists that they "may have to start laying people off' if the economy didn't rebound...

...The talk show verdict was: Technology, Yes...

...They had seen enough politics and knew enough history to realize that nothing could be settled by the fourth month...

...This doesn't prove that America should adopt a similar policy, and it doesn't prove that Japan's economy will continue to grow...

...Nonetheless, something in the climate of modern journalism made them feel either pressured or entitled to exaggerate...

...So why did the stories taper off and the paper seem so timid in the month before the election...

...Our principles tell us that protectionism and government regulation ultimately backfire...

...But any system can reach limits, and perhaps that is what had happened to Japan in 1993...

...0 Late last year, American punditry discovered that the Japanese economy was doomed, much as the Clinton administration had been a few months before...

...arsenal had worked miraculously well...

...For every case in which today's press errs by being over-cautious, as in the Packwood episode, there are dozens of cases of the reverse—of reporters and commentators reaching sweeping conclusions for which they cannot possibly have proof...

...His most obvious failures, involving the Iranian hostages and the Soviets in Afghanistan, occurred in his final year...

...the beer and food industries are both subject to notorious protectionist provisions...

...and a Times columnist wrote, "Four months into a new presidency, people who voted for it are wondering if it can be saved...

...In the "McLaughlin Group" era, Washington journalism celebrates positions, opinions, spin, and "takes" on an issue...

...Economists had been saying for years that an undervalued yen gave Japanese exporters a crucial advantage...

...Here are three examples of what I'm talking about: • Four months after Bill Clinton's inauguration, the verdicts were in: He had failed disJames Fallows, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1972 to 1974, is Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly...

...He reneged on his "no new taxes" pledge in his second year and vomited on Ki-ichi Miyazawa in his last year...

...Japanese consumers and oppressed salarymen may at last have had enough...

...dollar as it had been by the earlier oil shocks...

...All these favorable conditions are now vanishing," he said...

...The study, which had been conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, concluded that Japanese industries, taken as a whole, were only 79 percent as productive as American industries...

...One of the first stories I did for the magazine, which like so many other stories reflected the heavily guiding hand of our editor-in-chief, Charles Peters, blamed The Washington Post and its Woodward-and-Bernstein team for not pushing the story harder while it could still have made a difference at the polls...

...From this evidence two conclusions might be drawn...

...Jimmy Carter's main success, the Camp David peace agreement, took place near the end of his second year in office...

...It is a godsend in the long term, since it gives the country's industries more money to invest...

...By the tenets of post-World War II American economics, the Japanese economy can't really have worked...

...So what if the Iraqis controlled Kuwait's oil supply...

...The industries in which Japan was more productive: automobiles...

...soaps and detergents...

...Sprey said that, according to Israeli intelligence, Patriots had scored a mid-air hit on only one incoming Scud—not all of them, as TV viewers would have assumed, or 24 of them, or nine out of ten, as had been reported during the war...