Abstract

The History of Smoking Guns

The article presents the author's view on the concept of "the smoking gun" or the attribution of news in mass media. As long as I've lived in America I've enjoyed the comic ritual known as the "hunt for the smoking gun," a process by which our official press tries to inoculate itself and its readers against political and economic realities. The big smoking-gun question back in 1973 and 1974 concerned Richard Nixon. Back and forth the ponderous debate raged in editorial columns and news stories: Was this or that disclosure a "smoking gun"? There are enough smoking guns in the Iraq saga to stock a whole new national museum. It's what makes the current muttering in the official press about the Downing Street memo so comical, with all the huff and puff about the "blogosphere" and how yes, this is an old story, and an "uncorroborated" one (like all those stories from detainees about desecration of the Koran). What's striking to me is how querulous and old-fashioned those "old story" put-downs about the Downing Street memo by Todd Purdum and others in the New York Times, or Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, sound—rather like very old uncles wagging their fingers at naughty little children and admonishing them to stay quiet until all the facts are in.