Tuesday - November 28, 2006

Cowardly Lions

The New York Times helped push Iraq to the brink of civil war by encouraging the insurgents, publishing classified information and doing everything in its power to discredit the Bush administration. Now that their goal is almost realized, they are taking time out to celebrate and to gloat over their victory ...

The Cowards Turned Out to Be Right
-- by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
_{(NY TIMES) - November 28, 2006}

For several years, the White House and its Dobermans helpfully pointed out the real enemy in Iraq: those lazy, wimpish foreign correspondents who were so foolish and unpatriotic that they reported that we faced grave difficulties in Iraq.

“Dobermans"? Have you poor babies in the media been bitten or chewed on? Nope. And why didn’t the reporters report any of the good news? All bad news all the time. “I told you so” just seems so tacky for a “newspaper of record”.

To Paul Wolfowitz, the essential problem was that journalists were cowards. “Part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors,” Mr. Wolfowitz said in 2004. He later added, “The story isn’t being described accurately.”

Don Rumsfeld agreed but suggested that the problem was treason: “Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side. It isn’t as though there simply have been a series of random errors on both sides of issues. On the contrary, the steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq.”

As for Dick Cheney, he saw the flaw in journalists as indolence. “The press is, with all due respect — there are exceptions — oftentimes lazy, often simply reports what someone else in the press says without doing their homework.”

Mr. Cheney and the others might have better spent their time reading the coverage of Iraq rather than insulting it, because in retrospect those brave reporters based in Baghdad got the downward spiral right.

“Brave reporters”? If you’re referring to Michale Yon then you’re right but if you’re referring to the mob of drunks hanging out in the bar at their hotel in the Green Zone then you’re full of shit, pardner. As for Cheney and the others (including yours truly), we got fed up with all the slanted news a long time ago. Nothing ever goes 100% right in war but by the same token nothing ever goes 100% wrong, as your reporters tried to tell us.

“Many correspondents feel a sense of vindication that the administration finally accepts what we were screaming two years ago,” notes Farnaz Fassihi, who provided excellent Iraq coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Now Ms. Fassihi wonders how long it will take for the administration to acknowledge the reality of 2006 that Iraq correspondents are writing about: the incipient civil war.

“Civil war”? Yes, if you wish for something hard enough and long enough and provide aid and comfort to the enemy by interviewing them and providing them a supposedly legitimate platform for their propaganda, then you will eventually get your bloody, damned civil war. There is really no need to be so smug about it though. The media have only shown how willing they are to be complete, utter tools.

Dexter Filkins, who covered Iraq brilliantly for this newspaper until his departure this summer to take up a fellowship at Harvard, says he was constantly accused of reporting only the bad news, of being unpatriotic, and of getting Americans killed.

“I don’t think it ever affected our reporting,” he said. “But I did find it demoralizing, the idea that the truth — the reality on the ground that we were seeing every day — did not matter, that these overfed people sitting in TV studios and in their living rooms could just turn up the volume on what they wanted to be happening in Iraq and that that could overwhelm the reality.”

Mr. Filkins added: “I have almost been killed in Iraq 20 or 30 times — really almost killed. “I’ve lost count. Do these people really believe that we were all risking our lives for some political agenda?”

Yes, as a matter of fact I do believe the media has a political agenda but no, I don’t think any of them actually risked their lives like the brave troops they disparaged and whose courage and conviction have been downplayed from the beginning.

Richard Engel of NBC says he was taken aback when pundits accused him of standing on a balcony in the Green Zone and simply feeding the world bad news. “Like most journalists in Iraq, I have never lived in the Green Zone,” he notes, adding: “To imply from afar we were just lazy was missing the point, and also dangerous. I know several reporters who were so incensed by similar criticism, they took extra risks.”

While it’s the right that led those toxic attacks, the left is also vulnerable to letting ideology trump empiricism. Mr. Filkins notes that while he used to get nasty letters and e-mail primarily from conservatives, much of the fire more recently has come from liberals accusing him of covering up atrocities — all of it from people whose ideological certitude is proportional to their distance from Baghdad.

Catching heat from both sides. Did you ever stop to think that you might be wrong and the rest of the world might be right. Get a clue, asshats. Stop being so self-righteous and convinced that you’re always right.

As we try to extricate ourselves from Iraq, a basic lesson for the administration is that it should deal with bad news in ways more creative than clobbering the messenger. From the beginning of the war, the Pentagon has had an incredibly sophisticated news operation (now including its own news channel, carried on some cable networks), but it has often seemed more concerned with disseminating propaganda than with gathering facts.

Take the Defense Department’s Early Bird news clipping service, which traditionally had been a dispassionate collection of outside articles to keep senior military officers informed. Lately it has been leading with in-house spin. The Early Bird of Nov. 20, for example, began with three separate unpublished letters to the editor by Pentagon officials before getting to the news from around the world.

So how about if the administration devotes itself less to managing the news and more to trying to manage Iraq?

I’m sure President Bush would appreciate having the chance to manage the war without all the biased, subversive coverage and Monday morning quarterbacking being done by the ignorant media. Also it might help if you didn’t publish all of the confidential plans the administration has put in place in their attempt to actually manage the war.

The job of the press is to report the news - all of it, good and bad - and to keep the public informed about actions in the war. The job of the press is NOT to propagandize for the enemy or to continuously look for ways to discredit an administration that it obviously loathes with a hatred that the entire public acknowledges exists.

The media in this country is ultimately going to discredit itself entirely if this pattern persists. Get a clue ... or move your offices to Teheran where this bullshit will be welcome.

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/28/2006 at 02:35 PM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias •  
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