Fred Hiatt: Editorials Are Meant to Educate

Fred Hiatt, in the Washington Post (6-13-05)

Earlier this month Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioned the priorities of editorial pages such as The Post's.

"Two of the country's largest newspapers, for example, have devoted more than 80 editorials, combined, since March of 2004 to Abu Ghraib and detainee issues, often repeating the same erroneous assertions and recycling the same stories," he said. "By comparison, precious little has been written by those editorial boards about the beheading of innocent civilians by terrorists, the thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq, the allegations of rape of women and girls by U.N. workers in the Congo."

This wasn't the first time Rumsfeld questioned why a newspaper would devote so much more space to criticizing U.S. officials than to spotlighting foreign terrorists or dictators who behave far worse. It's a fair question, echoed by many readers who ask why U.S. newspapers focus so much attention on a few American soldiers who misbehave -- when most are performing heroically and when Iraqi terrorists are deliberately blowing up Iraqi civilians by the score...

...The premise of this highhandedness is that the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world -- a superpower that uses its might not to subjugate others but to allow them to live freely. This is a premise that The Post's editorial page on the whole accepts -- to the dismay of many readers.

But any nation asserting such a high calling will be judged by an equally high standard. Are we better than the beheaders, the mass killers, the U.N. peacekeepers raping young girls in the Congo? That's not close to the right question.

Do we behave as well as we claim, as we should, as we expect of others? That's the beginning of the right conversation -- and why it's fair to write more editorials about exceedingly mild Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay than about the unspeakable mass graves of Hilla.