I've meant to mention, for some time, blogger Zman Biur's summary of a Jeff Jacoby talk delivered in Israel. Jacoby offered five reasons that the mainstream media appears hostile to that nation (and, of course, appearance is essence in news media):
In breaking down the catchall excuse of "bias" in the media, I wonder if Jacoby has uncovered underlying reasons for leftist bias more broadly. On initial glance, the points he makes certainly seem applicable to other topics than Israel, as well as to other sources than journalists.
Jeff Jacoby assesses coverage of the war in Iraq with characteristic clarity:
No question: If you think that defeating Islamofascism, extending liberty, and transforming the Middle East are important, it's safe to say you saw the ratification of the new constitution as the Iraqi news story of the week. ...But that isn't a message Big Media cares to emphasize. Hostile to the war and to the administration conducting it, the nation's leading news outlets harp on the negative and pessimistic, consistently underplaying all that is going right in Iraq. Their fixation on the number of troops who have died outweighs their interest in the cause for which those fallen heroes fought -- a cause that advanced with the ratification of the new constitution.
Frankly, boredom at the anti-war crowd's gesticulations has played a (relatively small) role in my lack of blogging of late. But one instance has bothered me more than it should, recently, and Jacoby's piece provides a possibly fruitful context in which to mention it. From Rod Dreher's latest column:
Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.
A blogger could certainly spend some words wondering why a cause that was initially worthy would make a list of "unconservative things foisted upon America" by the President; at the very least, the foisting, so to speak, would appear to have been in accordance with conservatism in this case. With reference to Jacoby's column, though, my mind goes to other things. In a (coded) word: "quagmire."
Dreher, it seemed to me, began to drift not long after he made the leap from displaced red-stater-in-NY working for National Review to editorial writer and columnist for the mainstream media down in the Great Red Yonder. He's still to be counted among conservatives, without doubt, and fairness requires that I admit to not reading him much anymore.
Still, "rolling disaster" is a strong and unambiguous characterization of the war, and I wonder whether being steeped in media that "harp on the negative and pessimistic" explains the ease with which Dreher bowls it out. Or perhaps there are other considerations. A year-old blog comment of Dreher's comes to mind:
I am deeply concerned over the conduct of the war, and the prospect that family members of mine might die for the illusion that Iraq can be democratic. This is not an abstract threat. I'm looking at the possibility that my brother in law, a National Guard officer who never, ever imagined he'd be ordered to go fight in the Middle East (because who on earth could have invented such a prospect?), might have to leave his wife and three kids ... and never come home. If I still believed that this was a cause worth shedding American blood for, that'd be one thing. But now I'm thinking that our men are dying for an unwinnable war. You cannot force liberal democracy on people who don't want it.
Well, what about people who do want it — as evident in their ratification of a constitution? Perhaps the newspaper editors wouldn't allow space in his column for Dreher to discuss why something that appears to be a success is actually a disaster.
My latest column, "Speaking Past an Oppressive Template," remarks on the difficulty — in motivation and in practice — of being "well informed," and the accompanying difficulty of communicating.
In "Katrina and the Media's Demand for Racial Division," I note that Hurricane Katrina seems to have undone some of the good that came from the evil of September 11 by rejuvenating racial divisiveness as a focus of conversation. Depressing. Sickening. Discouraging. And yet there's hope if only we can find the patience to let the unimaginative among us think matters through... ideally without further catastrophes for precipitation.
Wesley Smith makes an interesting observation about the spate of state laws that open the way for some of the more controversial types of biotech fiddling:
...under both bills, if the purpose of cloning and implantation is the gestation of a cloned fetus for use in medical experiments or body part harvesting, no law would be broken. ... Moreover, NONE of this year's crop of state legislation intended to legalize therapeutic cloning would place outright bans on implanting cloned embryos into real or artificial wombs. Not one.This can only mean that there is a design and a purpose behind these proposals. The movers and shakers behind these bills want access to cloned fetuses when, technologically, they can be created. In other words, it ain't just about embryonic stem cells anymore.
Surely the just-ending stomach bug, following several sleep-little nights of sick offspring, and the flat tire this morning are affecting my outlook, but I'm beginning to get a feeling of dark inevitability. Note, particularly, the beginning of Smith's final paragraph:
What a story! Yet, it is goes unreported by the mainstream media.
Why does it seem that the made-for-TV controversies that never make it to TV are always those that might serve to wake the public up to the incremental steps toward an unrecognizable society that a handful of people are forcing on us all?
You've probably seen this, but I just have to wonder out loud how many times folks in the news have wished they had thought or been quick enough to do what Don Rumsfeld did on Meet the Press. After Tim Russert showed that typical clip of the soldier asking Rumsfeld about Humvee armor and Rumsfeld's answer being edited to seem dismissive:
SEC'Y RUMSFELD: That was unfair and it was selectively taking out two sentences from a long exchange--there it is--that took place. And when you suggested that that's how I answered that question, that is factually wrong.MR. RUSSERT: No, we...
SEC'Y RUMSFELD: That is not how I answered that question.
MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Secretary, it clearly represents the exchange and...
SEC'Y RUMSFELD: It does not.
MR. RUSSERT: All right. What is missing?
SEC'Y RUMSFELD: You want to hear the exchange? There is it. It's right here. I'll read it to you.
And read it he did.
Tim Graham highlighted an interesting paragraph from a piece by Tina Brown, who writes:
Even reporters on the ground in Iraq could hardly believe what they were living through as they watched the power of an idea transmute into the living, breathing form of black-clad women, Marsh Arabs and throngs of Kurdish mountaineers festively making their way to the polls. The father of a young reporter who has spent most of the last two years in Iraq shared with me his son's e-mail from Baghdad. "We journalists are all sitting round and asking each other how we missed what's clearly a far deeper drive for political and societal change than we realized. It is a measure of our isolation here -- and also, I think, a measure of how the violence and humiliation of the occupation has masked people's very genuine feelings."
Perhaps the journalists on the ground should come on back to the states and surf the Web. I'll admit that I sometimes feel isolated here in my basement office, but if utter shock at Iraqis' "drive for political and societal change" and "very genuine feelings" behind what American journalists perceive as "humiliation [because of] the occupation," then we bloggers must be virtually on the scene.
When it comes to corruption, the focus is always money, and I have to wonder whether the obsession over direct cash payments doesn't distract from a larger complication in sorting through information to find the trustworthy. Consider a question that John Hawkins posed in a blog symposium:
John Hawkins: If we're talking about 2008 and a candidate with the resources to do it, I would buy blogs every month for 6 months leading up to the primaries, ask several bloggers to consult (no pay) mainly to stroke their egos, do some interviews. It's easy to stroke egos in the blogosphere and get a buzz going. Then next thing you know, all the bloggers are talking about candidate X and people pick up on it. It's a pretty good way to create a huge buzz around a candidate and make sure you get good press (even if they won't admit that's part of the reason they're doing it).Karol Sheinin: I do invite bloggers to events..
La Shawn Barber: Would I take money from a political candidate to blog? Thinking...
Karol Sheinin: Hugh, you write in 'Blog' that everyone should have a blog. Wouldn't a lot of people then have conflicts of interest?
Hugh Hewitt: Yes, but the only conflicts I worry about are the bought-and-paid for variety. As a center-right Evangelical, pretty much everyone knows where I am going to come from. There is no hidden agenda, just an agenda. It is the hidden agenda that worries me.
Again, we focus on the money. So and so was given such and such a gift at such and such a value, but perhaps we underestimate the value of the giving. Everything from cash to advertising revenue to links to simple emails can "stroke the egos" of just about anybody. Pursuit of the favorable impression pervades politics, media, and business, requiring readers/voters to find ways to judge intentions on alternate bases whether money has changed hands or not.
I'm certainly naïve of the mindset of those who have enough money that it ceases to be something useful and becomes a form of compliment. Perhaps, though, it would assist us in understanding influence if we consider it in terms of that naïveté, rather than the jaded terms of the wealthy. As Hewitt suggests with his "just an agenda" comment, and as I've suggested in the case of Maggie Gallagher, there are more relevant kinds of evidence of sincerity — such as consistency. Seeing money as uniquely corrupting pulls our attention toward a shiny bauble for which many of the players about whom we should truly be concerned have no real interest.
Richard Dujardin has a long piece in today's Providence Journal titled "2004 in religion," and what a telling first sentence it has:
It was a year when many gay couples in Massachusetts rejoiced, being able to marry legally for the first time.
(In case you're wondering, the fact that, "with the help of religious conservatives, 11 states banned same-sex marriages" is held until the second to last sentence of the piece.)
Although the Google searches have continued to appear in my referral logs, I thought Jimmy Massey's accusations against American troops were a dead issue when the mounting wave of coverage began to subside after my exploration of it in May. Well, Massey's still got creds among the mainstream media, apparently. As Michelle Malkin notes, in relation to her column about Jeremy Hinzman, an American Army deserter now seeking refuge in Canada has brought Massey is back into the picture.
Over in the Corner, Tim Graham objects to the title of a Washington Post piece, by Doug Struck, covering Massey's testimony on Hinzman's behalf: "Former Marine Testifies to Atrocities in Iraq: Unit Killed Dozens of Unarmed Civilians Last Year, Canadian Refugee Board Is Told." Although I'm loathe to evince the inflated beliefs that bloggers often have about what they do, I'm more bothered by Struck's credulous treatment of Massey. A query on any Internet search engine will produce links to discussions of Massey's questionable public testimony. (Google lists my post either second or fourth, depending on the use of quotation marks.)
I don't expect folks like Struck to contact me or other bloggers as experts or to cite our work in their MSM pieces. However, I know that my practice, when addressing (dare I say "reporting"?) potentially explosive claims, is to listen for general background noise in order to gauge my credulity. Even if the refutations are found on a Web site with arguably partisan motivations, one would think an objective reporter would take them under advisement and set his tone accordingly.
With a note to John Kerry of "kindly don't leave the country," Keith Olbermann, MSNBC blogger and host of Countdown, is pleased to announce that "no Presidential candidate’s concession speech is legally binding":
This is mentioned because there is a small but blood-curdling set of news stories that right now exists somewhere between the world of investigative journalism, and the world of the Reynolds Wrap Hat. And while the group's ultimate home remains unclear - so might our election of just a week ago.Stories like these have filled the web since the tide turned against John Kerry late Tuesday night. But not until Friday did they begin to spill into the more conventional news media. That’s when the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had "locked down" its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there.
Blood-curdling! Olbermann's mission, now, is to spread the spill. It's all under the impetus of fairness and democracy, of course. As Sheila Lennon puts it:
Everybody should welcome whatever recounts emerge. Faith in the integrity of our voting system is at the core of our democratic system. If anybody messes with the results, it damages us all. It's not fair, and could make voting in America no more reliable than in a tinpot banana republic. And if the numbers come out roughly the same, half the country won't have to spend the next four years saying, "We wuz robbed."
Moderating Lennon's "won't have to" language some, does anybody really believe that recounts will preclude the "we wuz robbed" syndrome? Not I. Imagining the worst-case scenario (from my point of view), I don't think you could test the civic temper any more ultimately than to reverse the election's results now — particularly as a result of an MSM-fueled investigation.
On a more plausible level, it seems to me that Olbermann's efforts will go a long way toward ensuring that various insinuations and myths gain a foothold among the fluid ranks of the malcontent Left. He certainly doesn't seem concerned about minimizing that effect. Consider:
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
What he neglects to mention is that Kerry won that county by 217,638 votes — 67% to 33%. Hey, maybe Kerry really won the county 78% to 22%.
Appearances to the contrary aside, if Olbermann would like to be objective in his investigation, he can pursue every curious decision and irregularity in the states that Kerry won by a similar margin of less than 150,000 votes. Every single one of them would be decisive if Ohio's 20 electoral college votes were to change hands. To help the MSM along, I'll even provide a list:
Delaware
Hawaii
Maine
Minnesota
New Hampshire
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Vermont
Wisconsin
Michelle Malkin uses leeches in her response to an ignorant anti-religious sneer from Maureen Dowd. At issue is Dowd's quip that the Bush administration will turn back the medical clock to an era of leeching, illustrating that the MoDo isn't aware that leeches are, in fact, useful medical tools. But it was something in Michelle's evidence that caught my eye:
For many people, leeches conjure up the image of Humphrey Bogart removing the bloodsuckers from his legs in African Queen, but FDA reports that leeches can help heal skin grafts by removing blood pooled under the graft and restore blood circulation in blocked veins by removing pooled blood.
Umm. I remember that scene, although I'd forgotten what movie it was in. Can't say it was the first movie to come to mind, and it probably wouldn't be for a majority of people under thirty-five, as Google attests:
"african queen" leeches: 1,450
"stand by me" leech: 3,410
ADDENDUM:
In contrast to my pop-culture reaction, Orrin Judd offers profundity:
Here's as good a definition of the difference between conservatism and liberalism as you're likely to find: liberals can't comprehend that leeches work, because we've used them for thousands of years, but they do think that Christopher Reeve would be walking around today if only they sacrificed enough lives at the altar of Stem Cell Research. And they think we're the fanatics.
Well said.
As I noted over at Anchor Rising, the first hints of a media tone-change with respect to goings-on in Iraq are beginning to emerge. I may have my media-cynicism adjuster set to eleven, but I wouldn't be surprised if the entire presentation of the Fallujah assault is almost unrecognizable from the Iraq-related reportage that has come before.
An interesting juxtaposition of headlines is up on the Providence Journal's main page:
Gee, what do you suppose the storyline is meant to be? Reading the articles, themselves, one mightn't find an answer. In the first one, AP writer Jennifer Loven does open by decrying "no sign that the biting rhetoric [Bush] has aimed at Democratic challenger John Kerry in recent days is as aggressive as it's going to get." (Huh?) Still, a perusal of the included Bush quotes hardly amounts to evidence. Kerry's statements "don't pass the credibility test"; he "can run but he cannot hide" from his legislative record; he's "liberal." Perhaps the most foreboding quotation is this:
"There's a lot more in (Kerry's) record that the American people are going to hear and know about by the time it's all over," said Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser.
Nasty! Turning to AP writer Mary Dalrymple's piece about Kerry's devotion to the middle class (the members of which he's able to spot from a distance), the contrast in rhetorical heat is palpable:
"The president makes his choices," Kerry said. "The president's chosen the oil companies and the power companies. He's chosen the drug companies over you."..."Here I am in the state of New Mexico. George Bush is still in the state of denial," Kerry told the supportive crowd Sunday. "New Mexico has five electoral votes. The state of denial has none. I like my chances."
Dalrymple doesn't mention whether there are signs that the biting rhetoric Kerry has aimed at George Bush in recent days, weeks, months, and years is as aggressive as it's going to get. Maybe we're just supposed to know that it's not.
Hats off to the editorial board of the Providence Journal. If only I could subscribe to just the section under these editors' control:
Actually, sanctions were already crumbling, because Saddam was bribing public officials and business people in various countries (especially France, China and Russia), as well as people in the United Nations -- which increasingly seems as much a festival of economic corruption as of hypocrisy. The U.N. "food-for-oil" program was an extraordinarily corrupt enterprise, which Saddam was manipulating, to, among other things, get back to making and stockpiling WMD. Not coincidentally, Security Council members France, China and Russia -- Saddam's major bribees in his partly successful efforts to get around the sanctions -- voted against U.S.-led efforts to get the United Nations to sign off on an invasion to enforce U.N. resolutions.
Lane Core asks someone to explain the origin of the support that supposedly has Kerry in a statistical tie with President Bush:
Let's see now. The Catholic vote went for Gore in 2000 (Kyrie eleison) and Catholics polled for Kerry a few months ago. But Catholics now poll for Bush. And the Gender Gap is narrowing, if not quite disappearing. (And don't forget the "battleground" states that are already being abandoned by the Kerry campaign as losses, nor the "blue" states that are being hotly contested by the Bush campaign.)So, tell me, somebody: how can the race be so close? What group(s) have shifted seismically towards Kerry to offset the shift towards Bush in two very large voting blocs?
Personally, I've been hard-pressed to resist a cynical smile with each bit of polling data. Before the debates began, one was apt to hear — from parents who've followed politics for decades, from Fox News, from blogs — how the media would be anxious for Kerry to close the widening gap, so as to make the race exciting and, therefore, closely followed, with all the media revenue that political photo-finishes attract.
What groups have "shifted seismically towards Kerry"? I can't say for sure, but I wonder if the polls' samples have been taken from among the MSM's phantom readers.
One's daily schedule will affect analysis of such things, but I have to say that the whole Rathergate episode has made the media bias game a little less fun. As with liberalism, there's still much power to be overwhelmed and dissipated, but hounding the old media is beginning to feel like chasing the gnarled old grouch out of town after the grownups have finally all acknowledged that he's been playing tricks on the neighborhood kids.
However, some of the characteristic differences between old media and new — characteristic at least for the moment — make for interesting consideration. The following paragraph from a piece by Joseph D'Hippolito provides an example (free registration required):
Consider [Chicago Tribune managing editor James] O'Shea's remarks in another Editor & Publisher article about how bloggers create what he called "information anarchy." "You have to look at who these people are," he said. "We have to put some scrutiny on the bloggers."
Perhaps it is only because we are in the game for our own reasons, but most bloggers aren't as fearful of "scrutiny" as — for example — professional journalists might be. Hey, scrutiny means traffic, which is our currency. And since it is in our nature to lay everything important out in our writing, that which such scrutiny will uncover is very likely to be precisely that which we are advertising.
All in all, it seems to me a superior model that encourages the sort of broad review that established players can find threatening.
An all-too-typical column enumerating the iniquities of the Bush administration and lamenting the fact that John Kerry hasn't already been crowned to cheers of "Long live the somebody else!" didn't strike me as worth mention. Until, that is, I read the stunning ending:
Americans will tolerate much hypocrisy. But they're less forgiving when the hypocrisy involves money. John Kerry needs to change his vocabulary: to go beyond saying that Bush has "misled" the country or "mismanaged" Iraq.Bush is cheating America and cheating on America. That's more akin to treason than mere lying.
Blogosphere readers will surely not be surprised to realize that the charge of being unpatriotic is apparently only offensive if spoken while facing left. What does raise questions, however, is the short author bio printed after the piece:
John R. MacArthur, a monthly contributor, is publisher of Harper's Magazine.
Funny, Harper's doesn't often seem to be treated as a full-tilt liberal publication in the mainstream media. I guess the lonely Rhode Island conservative can take comfort in the possibility that, with the doors open to this sort of writing, the Providence Journal will begin publishing an Ann Coulter column once per month. (Personally, I'd be satisfied — natch — with a Justin Katz column once every six.)
Is it me, or is the following AP headline (i.e., the only part of the story shown on the Providence Journal's homepage) indicative of the media's desire to make Iraq look like a mess so as to bolster Kerry and hurt Bush?
Over 100 Killed in U.S. Assault in Iraq
SAMARRA, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. and Iraqi forces battled their way into the heart of this Sunni stronghold Friday and moved house to house in search of militants in what appeared to be the first major offensive to regain control of areas lost to insurgents before the January elections.
More than 100 guerrillas were killed and 37 captured, according to an Iraqi official. The military said one American soldier was killed and four were wounded.
Maybe I just haven't seen it, but is it customary to make the enemies' death tally into the headline — particularly without specifying that that's what it is?
Having fallen out of the loop for a few day's, it's taken me a little while to reorient myself to the news of the day. As the election season heats up, it's easy to become acclimated to the pitch; step away for a time, however, and the line between the sides could not more clearly be a line between two entirely distinct realities.
Having picked one component of the investigation of Dan Rather's memos — the superscript — and decided, from personal experience, that the most superficial version of the evidence isn't true, Shiela Lennon grows in her respect for Mr. Rather:
A journalist's loyalty is to the ongoing truth of the story as it develops, whatever that may turn out to be.I've seen very little of that in the blogosphere this week. I've seen a lot of whoops based on ignorant assumptions that were just plain wrong. ("Typewriters couldn't do that then" about things I did with typewriters then.)
Certainty based on nothing doesn't affect the truth of what happened one bit and is worthless.
Although I can't put my hands on it, at this moment, in the first day's rush of analysis, I did come across a blog post noting that some typewriters could superscript, but that the results looked nothing like the "th" in the CBS memos. (The particular post that I saw had images of the two, but I'm sure the observation has been made multiple times.) The point is that Ms. Lennon's superscripting experience as an intern at Brown University is incomplete in its application to the controversy: what did those superscripts look like? Surely, loyalty to the ongoing truth requires that comparison to be made.
To be honest, my editor's eye has led me to believe that Ms. Lennon meant her phrase to be written thus: "the ongoing anti-Bush truth of the story." Here's her very next paragraph:
This developing story brought a witness forward, Marian Carr Knox, secretary to Lt. Col. Killian in the '70s, a witness who knows what happened then, who says the memos reflect the reality she saw, but she does not know how that particular set of memos came to be. The tale of the memos themselves -- where they came from, who typed them, who held them, who turned them loose -- is now a sidebar to that story.
Knox, in short, renders Lennon's typing memory irrelevant, and her detraction fatuous. However, with a neat turn of paraphrasing, Lennon omits Ms. Knox's certainty that the documents were fake so as to pivot toward a Michael Moore-like assertion that the underlying truth can be captured with false evidence, and that the falsity of that evidence is immaterial. Also immaterial, apparently, is Ms. Knox's status as a Democrat parrot of such lines as "selected, not elected." (As well as all conflicting testimony from others who knew George Bush during his Guard days.)
My essential point is this: all sides of a political battle will be inclined (to one extent or another) to accept witnesses serving their own opinions without thorough scrutiny, but I think the American Left, particularly its representatives in the mainstream media (if that's not redundant), are reaching near delusion in their practice of what ought to be a natural tendency that one strives to neutralize. The dubious motivation of those who help John Kerry must be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt (and even then...); the taint on those whose testimony helps Bush can be assumed by the fact that their testimony helps Bush.
For whatever reason, I prefer to believe that people realize, whether explicitly or subconsciously, that they're donning offal as finery. But do they? To some folks, Dan Rather is a hero; what percentage of his time does he spend speaking exclusively with them?
ADDENDUM:
There was another blog post comparing the superscripts with other superscripts from contemporary National Guard memos, with the latter being not only differently shaped, but underlined as well. However, this post was the one that I was thinking of. The bottom line is that, to approximate the superscript for his quick, never-to-be-seen memo, Killian would have had to switch the actual font ball in the typewriter and might have been required to make multiple tries to get the thing as perfectly as in the memos.
But remember: the point here is Sheila Lennon's scoffing at the blogosphere's "whoops based on ignorant assumptions," as compared to the serious journalism practiced by the likes of Dan Rather. Yet, here we have a widely linked blog post actually researching the technology involved and comparing samples. Many bloggers may not have been Ivy League interns in the early '70s, but they're clearly not afraid to follow a story to discover whether or not their claims are accurate.
Whoop!
Sheila Lennon links to Christopher Albritton's troubling account of events in Iraq:
Thousands of Iraqis are desperate to get a new passport and flee the country. These are often the most educated Iraqis — the have the money to get new passports and travel — so the brain-drain will accelerate.The poor and the disenfranchised are finding their leaders in the populist and fundamentalist Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr or in the radical Islam of the jihadis, who are casting a long shadow on this formerly secular country. Iraq has its own home-grown Wahhabists now, something it didn't have 18 months ago.
In the context of all this, reporting on a half-assed refurbished school or two seems a bit childish and naive, the equivalent of telling a happy story to comfort a scared child. Anyone who asks me to tell the "real" story of Iraq — implying all the bad things are just media hype — should refer to this post. I just told you the real story: What was once a hell wrought by Saddam is now one of America's making.
But y'know, I have to tell you that I'm having trouble buying it. Something about the note from the anonymous MP offering "my perspective as a grunt who was on the ground" just rings a bit oddly — like a journalist's voice in a soldier's mouth. It doesn't help that Albritton's subsequent post is a request for confirmation of Bush's admission, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." (Following the first commenter's link for context, we are reminded that the quotation comes second-hand, by way of an anecdote shared by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas while in "cease-fire negotiations" with Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts.)
It also doesn't help that, just a few days ago, Sheila Lennon tapped into the Gender Wars in order to distract from the fact that "a legion of young male bloggers" have caught Dan Rather and CBS peddling forgeries. (Although, Lennon says they're "likely" authentic.) Previously, she's implied that only the Right can be hateful, so much as to cause civil war.
Frankly, there's not a whole lot of credibility left on the Left to shake the conflicting impression that, for example, Arthur Chrenkoff leaves with his good news in Iraq posts. For one specific example, whereas Albritton's anonymous correspondent offers some vivid imagery...
No matter what we wanted to do, my squad was not going to restore electricity to Iraq. Every day for several months we had to drive past a blown up power tower with lines dangling about 20 feet off the ground.
... that imagery doesn't entirely square with Chrenkoff's military source, which notes:
U.S. engineers have helped place seven generators on line this month in Iraq, bringing the national electricity capacity to more than 5,300 megawatts - a level that exceeds the country's pre-war capacity of 4,400 megawatts.
Well, at least one can say with complete confidence that "power" is being lost somewhere.
So, it looks like I was wrong about a pending media attempt to pump some life into the phony Bush memo story. As happy as I am to see that be the case, the media cynic in me can't help but wonder whether the story's handling would have been quite different if it hadn't been for the extent, accuracy, and attention to detail, as well as the sheer amount of commentary, online. Kimberly, of IrishLaw, makes the same point, based on a sentence in the above-linked WaPo piece reading, "After doubts about the documents began circulating on the Internet yesterday morning, The Post contacted several independent experts who said they appeared to have been generated by a word processor":
I'm glad the news coverage of the apparent forgery is being run as prominently as yesterday's reporting, but I'm amazed that the Post only thought to contact independent experts and do its own reporting after the blogosphere got cranking and Fox News picked it up. If the blogosphere wasn't here, would the same questions have been raised? Would people have thought to be less credulous of these heretofore undiscovered memos? Isn't being reasonably skeptical what good journalism is all about, no matter what the eventual results of investigation? But I suspect that the journalists were, rather, falling all over themselves to "balance" the negative happenings for Kerry over the last few weeks by jumping on new allegations against Bush.
The related point that struck me in Post writers Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen's sentence was the minimal extent to which the blog angle — a huge story by any measure, I would think — played a role in the Post's coverage. John Podhoretz follows that angle in the other Post:
THE populist revolution against the so-called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush.
Of course, it's only natural for reporters and media organizations institutionally to be averse to exposing their decreasing influence, but after decades of excuse making about how such-and-such a story had to be reported because journalists ought only to judge newsworthiness, not content or effect, it's certainly worth a snort, here. Bordering on shocking, however, is Dan Rather's apparent decision to pick this battle in the ongoing war of the medias (new and old) to make a stand. The boys at Power Line, who have remained all over this story, speculate that Dan Rather is intending to retire soon, anyway, so he's cashing in his chips, including those usually reserved for legacy, in an attempt to get John Kerry in the White House.
Given, again, the sheer force and credibility with which the Internet media responded to this particular affront, however, the predictable stall of focusing on any coulda/maybe that still remains probably won't be an adequate guard to the flood. If it's not, then Dan Rather may very well take CBS News and perhaps even the already sinking Democrat party, if some of its members are right (or especially if it comes out that the Kerry campaign was involved in the promotion of the forgery), with him.
In response to my post on the subject from yesterday, Ben Bateman comments:
I imagine that nearly everyone who gets their news on the web pities the poor people who still rely on the old media. Perhaps this tale will play a key role in helping large numbers of those people understand just how ignorant they are choosing to remain.
To the extent that the general public actually follows news, rather than passively accepting whatever items land on the front step or the television, I imagine Ben is correct. What continues to amaze me, however, is the path that the mainstream media seems to be choosing. They could have adapted to the new reality — meaning not just the technology, but the revolutionary ethic, as well — and pretty much held their dominant positions, perhaps even using blogs as a sort of minor league from which to farm talent. Rather than swim with the current, however, they appear to be digging in, watching the flood rise, insisting that it will stop before it topples them.
Although it raises interesting questions about the degree to which the ideologues who populate the industry realize, deep down, that their views would not hold up to scrutiny, it's still a shame. Whether it's ultimately a more healthy scenario from society's vantage point may be a matter of debate for decades to come.
The point has probably been made elsewhere, although it's the sort of perspective reminder of which one tends to lose sight over time and in the heat of discussion, but the argument over whether the mainstream media is biased might really be over the degree of leftishness that represents the objective center. The East Coast is discouragingly west if one is adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, after all.
Taking a look at Project Censored's top 10 "censored media stories of 2003–2004" (or the full list of the top 25) illustrates what people probably mean when they say that the "corporate media" tilts right, if anything:
#1: Wealth Inequality in 21st Century Threatens Economy and Democracy
#2: Ashcroft vs. the Human Rights Law that Hold Corporations Accountable
#3: Bush Administration Censors Science
#4: High Levels of Uranium Found in Troops and Civilians
#5: The Wholesale Giveaway of Our Natural Resources
#6: The Sale of Electoral Politics
#7: Conservative Organization Drives Judicial Appointments
#8: Cheney's Energy Task Force and The Energy Policy
#9: Widow Brings RICO Case Against U.S. government for 9/11
#10: New Nuke Plants: Taxpayers Support, Industry Profits
Curious as to what methodology — from a university-affiliated "media research group" — yielded a media bias list without a single conservative issue of complaint, I took a look at Project Censored's drippingly and unapologetically progressive Web site:
Between 700 and 1000 stories are submitted to Project Censored each year from journalists, scholars, librarians, and concerned citizens around the world. With the help of more than 200 Sonoma State University faculty, students, and community members, Project Censored reviews the story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources and national significance. The university community selects 25 stories to submit to the Project Censored panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. Current or previous national judges include: Noam Chomsky, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally, Frances Moore Lappe, Norman Solomon, Michael Parenti, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, Mike Wallace and Howard Zinn.
Recognize any names? Surprised that "wealth inequality" is the #1 "censored" story? (This is not a quantitative analysis; other conditions apply.) Who considers the media to be censorious of liberal causes? Well, group leader Professor Peter Phillips, for one. Of last year's reports of mass graves in Iraq and of prosecution of Serbian military leaders, Dr. Phillips writes:
These stories show how corporate media likes to give the impression that the US government is working diligently to root out evil doers around the world and to build democracy and freedom. This theme is part of a core ideological message in support of our recent wars on Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Governmental spin transmitted by a willing US media establishes simplistic mythologies of good vs. evil often leaving out historical context, special transnational corporate interests, and prior strategic relationships with the dreaded evil ones.The hypocrisy of US policy and corporate media complicity is evident in the coverage of Donald Rumsfeld's stop over in Mazar-e Sharif Afghanistan December 4 to meet with regional warlord and mass killer General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival General Ustad Atta Mohammed. Rumsfeld was there to finalize a deal with the warlords to begin the decommissioning of their military forces in exchange for millions of dollars in international aid and increased power in the central Afghan government.
Upon reading the example of a Good v. Evil Mythology spoiler, perhaps you rubbed your eyes and looked again. You see, the U.S. isn't working to remove the power of evil doers and establish democracy and freedom. How could it be, when it's leveraged a warlord to remove a theocratic regime and then — talk about war being a last option — began efforts to buy-down the warlord's military forces? The simplistic right-wing mainstream media apparently chooses to hide the reality that the only options in dealing with unsavory geopolitical conditions are war and culpable complicity.
Here's more explanation, from Prof. Phillips, of how and why "the U.S. news is so biased against democratic liberation struggles all over the world":
The U.S. media ignores big questions like: Who loses in the process of economic growth and wealth accumulation? What about the one billion people in the world who are surplus labor and un-needed in the international market place? How are they to survive? What about the global issues of environmental sustainability and the using up of our unrenewable natural resources.These are the questions of a socio-environmental apocalypse. Free market capitalism is creating an evil empire of corruption and waste that generates wretchedness for billions of people. All the indicators are that wealth and resources do not trickle down but rather become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the elites in the nation states of the First World and their senior and junior partners around the globe.
Now, I'm not a fan of all that Western culture exports with its dollars, but as I suggest to my fellow Christians, the responsibility for bringing our message across thresholds opened through economic means lies with us. So, too, could progressives see the removal of fascists, theocrats, and dictators as an opportunity. I guess the politically driven ideologues of the secular Left prefer other methods of... ahem... persuasion.
Frankly, I can't help but think that Doc Phillips is heading toward that conundrum whereby "democracy" involves the people's receiving a government and society that they wouldn't choose above the individualist "ideological messages" of the West. One might also find reason for scrutiny in the bifurcation evident in the statement that "[s]everal times over the past 100 years working people have joined with progressives." Who, in that partnership, did the heavy lifting, do you suppose?
From my perspective, working people are increasingly on to the progressives' game, and the further Left the "academics, progressives and leftists" manage to pull the mainstream media, the more discredited becomes the whole modernist bunch.
By way of a train of thought beginning with an area blogger who lives near there, as I walked into BJs wholesale club, today, another New England blogger came to mind — Bil Herron. And lo, what should I find in my email inbox this evening but a trackback from Mr. Herron responding to my previous post. School starts tomorrow, and I've only got a few more hours to prepare myself — both planning-wise and mentally — to walk the line between educating and entertaining 28 twelve year olds, but I do want to make a couple of points (seeing as Bil called me a "smart guy" and all).
What came to mind, when I noticed the AP's return to the Air National Guard story, were statistics like this, this, and this, as well as the grilling that White House spokesman Scott McClellan underwent over President Bush's National Guard pay stubs. In other words, I'm glad that I wasn't sipping any beverages when I read about the AP's having "identified five categories of records" that [insert innuendo] are absent from the president's records — in an article that doesn't happen to mention that John Kerry hasn't released his Vietnam-era government documentation.
As busy as I am — and this close to the election — I don't know that I can fruitfully debate the topic of media bias with somebody who, at this stage in the game, is still suggesting that "BIAS!" is just an "incredibly effective distraction" perpetuated by "the Big Republican Communications Machine." For instance, Bil finds it grasping that I highlighted the "heroism" paragraph as editorializing, but as I suggested, that paragraph serves to touch on the Kerry-related controversy without offering a single specific claim.
Saying that people have attacked somebody's "heroism" is akin to saying that they attacked his "patriotism" in that it's easily dismissed as dirty politics — even more so when 250 veterans are tagged as "some veterans who support Bush." (Note that I'm running out of time to check that 250 number, but it's about right.) For the sake of illustrating what I'm talking about (in case it isn't clear) let me contrast reporter Matt Kelley's language with something that I think would have been more balanced in an article that addresses very specific findings against Bush's record:
Democrat John Kerry commanded a Navy Swift boat in Vietnam and was awarded five medals, including a Silver Star. But his heroism has been challenged in ads by some veterans who support Bush.Democrat John Kerry commanded a Navy Swift boat in Vietnam and was awarded five medals, including a Silver Star. But the circumstances under which he received those medals have been challenged in ads, public statements, and books by about 250 veterans who do not support his bid for the presidency.
Although I realize that it may seem a distraction, given the multiple pleas of busyness on my part, if Bil has the time and interest, I would very much like to see his substantiation of this claim:
Bonus points if you can do that while remembering that the AP duly covered the, let's say, "credibility-challenged," charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
In all sincerity, I truly could have missed something, but I haven't seen any AP (or other Big Media) coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that comes anywhere near "duly" thorough. The existence of such reportage would seem a minimum requirement if we are to believe that media balance requires resurrection of the amply addressed Air National Guard story.
In the meantime, I'll be keeping an eye out — you know, in the BJs parking lot — for Bil's SAAB. Honk if the image is too perfect for comment.
(NB: that closing jibe is made in the spirit of respectful mirth that Bil's post about his bumper sticker seems to invite.)
A partisan news service, the Associated Press, is going to bat for John Kerry:
Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts. ...Challenging the government's declaration that no more documents exist, the AP identified five categories of records that should have been generated after Bush skipped his pilot's physical and missed five months of training.
Reporter Matt Kelley does mention attacks on Kerry's record — admitting, it seems to me, that his reportage is meant as return fire — but he manages to do so without citing a single specific accusation. Check out the editorializing:
Democrat John Kerry commanded a Navy Swift boat in Vietnam and was awarded five medals, including a Silver Star. But his heroism has been challenged in ads by some veterans who support Bush.
You know, it's almost getting boring to highlight these things. Maybe the growing public discontent with news services offers a partial explanation for AP reporters' hearing people boo everywhere they go.
Jay Nordlinger passes along an anecdote that made me laugh aloud (in a cheering way):
You may want to hear a little more from Zell Miller — this is from the Imus radio program: "A 73-year-old man doesn't have any business coming to New York and getting involved in all this stuff. He ought to stay down in Young Harris with his two yellow labs, Gus and Woodrow, and let the world go by, I guess. I had just been holding one" — just been holding one! — "for Chris Matthews ever since I saw him browbeat Michelle Malkin on his show that night. He wouldn't let that little 5'2", 95-pound girl say a word, and I just said to myself, 'If he ever gets into my face like that, I'm gonna pop him.'"
ADDENDUM:
For readers who are squeamish about violence (at least when insinuated by those of conservative bent), I note that Uncle Zell obviously meant a rhetorical pop.
Proclaims Providence Journal blogger Sheila Lennon:
Nobody who voted for Al Gore is likely to vote for Bush this time, but a lot of 2000 Bush supporters -- fiscal conservatives, gay Republicans such as Andrew Sullivan, people living on fixed incomes, people of faith who aren't so sure that the voice speaking to George Bush and molding American policy is actually the voice of God -- are likely to stay home or vote for Kerry.
Sounds like repercolated by-the-coffee-machine wisdom from around the Projo staff lounge — "it stands to reason" logic on a question that ought to be a matter of evidence. Interestingly, just a few paragraphs down, Ms. Lennon mentions Zell Miller. Nobody, I guess.
I'm loathe to be over-confident, and I have to admit being a bit fearful of its extent, but I am so looking forward to reading around the Internet the day after President Bush wins (perhaps in a landslide). Will the by-the-coffee-machine chitchat include at least a hint of the honest question, "How could we have been so wrong?"
Wizbang, who has a link to video, mentions it, but I haven't seen much commentary on what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of the Zell Miller v. Chris Matthews fight: the Senator's defense of Michelle Malkin's honor. From the transcript:
MILLER: If you are going to ask me a question, step back and let me answer.MATTHEWS: Senator, please.
MILLER: You know, I wish we...
MILLER: I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.
MILLER: Now, that would be pretty good.
Don't ask me—don't pull that...
MATTHEWS: Can you can come over? I need you, Senator. Please come over.
MILLER: Wait a minute. Don't pull that kind of stuff on me, like you did that young lady when you had her there, browbeating her to death. I am not her. I am not her.
MATTHEWS: Let me tell you, she was suggesting that John Kerry purposely shot himself to win a medal. And I was trying to correct the record.
MILLER: You get in my face, I am going to get back in your face. ... You ask these questions and then you just talk over what I am trying to answer, just like you did that woman the other day.
For a sense of Miller's effect on Matthews, just slowly scroll down the Miller interview portion of the transcript. After Matthew's chastening, the questions and answers come in large blocks — almost paragraphs. I'm not a big-time TV personality, but that sort of discussion seems much more productive, and much more interesting, to me. That a Senator had to demand it makes this comment from Matthews later in his show even more delectable:
I think when he goes back and starts reading what I said, instead of checking on the latest blog site, he will learn a lot more about what's going on here.
I think Miller does know "what's going on," and Matthews is beginning to figure it out, too. Online transcripts make it obvious who talks in incomprehensible bulletpoints. And even the talking heads are beginning to feel the media earth shaking.
ADDENDUM:
Michelle applauds here.
It's starting to seem as if having gone so far out on a credibility limb in support of John Kerry has given news folks a taste of honesty, and they like it. I mean, this post from Ramesh Ponnuru is simply jaw-dropping:
Doug Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, sent out a press release on the latest partial-birth ruling. Here's an email he got in response from Todd Eastham, the North American news editor for Reuters: "What's your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?"
Yes, yes, it's Reuters, and we all know what that means, but Mr. Eastham has just rendered nearly worthless any reportage that his company might offer on matters pertaining to abortion. And I'm surely not alone in believing that all he has done is to express what many of his peers wish professional ethics permitted them to say.
Personally, I'm thrilled to have the obvious laid out so candidly, and it's fascinating to watch. Still, waiting for the public to catch on can be frustrating; meanwhile, the scornfully presented misinformation continues.
ADDENDUM:
As Hugh Hewitt puts it, with reference to a separate incident:
But poor, embarrassed Jim Boyd has performed a service, even in his humiliation. His exposure as a blustery, bullying and ultimately bittter hack is another warning sign in a month of such warnings to old media. The rules have changed. The monopoly is broken. You can't ignore the truth or the people who publicize it, and if you slander them, they have the tools of both rebuttal and exposure. As I wrote last week, it takes a considerable amount more talent, learning and drive to succeed at the highest level of the law than it does to be a time-serving fast food outlet for cliches of the left at a largely ignored editorial page of a second tier paper. Boyd mixed it up with the wrong guys, and even if his friends won't tell him the truth, he must already know that his paper saw what he did and gave the Powerline men another column as a result.
BY THE WAY:
I've learned not to expect major blogosphere coverage of news mistakes and/or bias related to matters of abortion. One might call it a bias about bias.
I haven't had much to say about the Swift Boat Veterans and the media reaction to them, because it's in the high-profile blogger domain, and it's so obvious a call that I've nothing to add. See Instapundit for broad coverage; see Michelle Malkin's heavily trackbacked post for her first-hand encounter with the smoking and wheezing media spin machine in action.
As much as I've read on the topic, and as accustomed as we all are in the online world to stunning bias on the part of our better-paid counterparts in the mainstream, however, it's still a surreal experience to come across the coverage about which we're all complaining. Heading back from the post office, I just caught a brief ABC radio news segment related to the Vets, and the entire story — without mentioning what sorts of things the group is saying — was about how it might "backfire" on President Bush. ABC's official analyst George Stephanopoulos — yes, the former Clinton aide — described the dramatic moment at which John Kerry will turn to President Bush during a debate and say, "John McCain has condemned the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on me. Why won't you?"
To anybody who's keeping track of both sides of this aspect of the campaign, that segment is reminiscent of one of those cliché scenes in a comedy when the con artist doesn't know that everybody else knows what he's up to and keeps going with some ridiculous story. I can't help but wonder how many people laughing behind their hands the newsies can willfully ignore before they find it necessary to try to salvage their credibility.
Can they even stop?
This part of Gary Aldrich's advice from experience to the swift boat vets is chilling:
The establishment can't stand people like you. Especially not now, not after the candidates have gone through the primary process and are coming down to the wire. There is much campaigning to come, and so much money to be spent. You just cannot have a circumstance where the people are given honest information that would alter the course of an election. It's just not done, you see?Besides, the mainstream media does not like George Bush, and they will do nothing to help him win re-election. Did you think for a minute that they would rush to cover your press conferences and report the news that the majority of Veterans cannot stand John Kerry? Did you actually believe you would be invited on "Sixty Minutes"? Even now, reporters are out looking for your dirty laundry and trying to poke holes in your stories. After they find out that your stories match, have the ring of truth, and that you're decent folk just trying to do what's right, they will simply close their notebooks and quietly walk away.
That's an image to store away for future usage as the final scene of a book or movie. The notebook closes. It never happened.
ADDENDUM:
To change the layout of this page to one that you may find easier to read, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
I'm not sure my blood pressure could take the viewing habits required of the good folks at the Media Research Center. That's my conclusion, anyway, after a half-hour of uncharacteristic television watching tonight.
Appropriately enough, the segment of ABC's Primetime Thursday that aired directly before Reagan daughter Patti Davis's report on a teenage activist for embryonic stem-cell research was called "The Joy of Selling." ABC ought to have run a disclaimer before Davis's segment admitting that it was an unpaid advertisement, not to be mistaken for reportage.
The segment profiled Tessa Wick, a thirteen year old daughter of Hollywood producers, who was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age eight. Sadly, somebody is leading Tessa to false hope:
"Nobody can tell you, tell a kid to their face, 'I don't care about you enough to help you,' " she said. "The science did their part, now it's [President Bush's] part to take a chance on it and he hasn't."
In fact, the scientists have not yet accomplished anything definitive, something that stands as a huge silence in the report: viewers would have no sense of how "potentially" (Dr. Gary Small's word) it is that "a stem cell could be developed that produces normal pancreatic cells, and those could be injected into somebody like Tessa who has juvenile diabetes, and in a sense she could grow a new pancreas." Even more resoundingly absent from the report is any mention of the fact that there's an alternative, thus far more promising, way of procuring and using the technology: adult stem cells.
President Bush, it merits mentioning, could represent the entirety of the opposition movement, as far as Primetime makes its viewers aware, so the segment is sort of a bias twofer — support embryonic stem-cell funding, don't vote for Bush. The online text version does acknowledge that private funds can still back the research, although it reads like an afterthought, and I didn't catch the factoid on the televised version. What did come through loud and clear was the mother's response to President Bush's stem cell speech a few years ago (emphasis added):
"We sat in front of the television as a family and sobbed," Fisher said. "Every single one of us, as we watched him talk about taking years off our child's life."
Increasingly, I've noticed a recurring discussion in the comments sections of some of the posts on this blog, about the appropriateness of equivalence between liberals and conservatives. While it is of course true that, for any given person on the Left, one can find an individual on the Right to stand as an antipodal representative, and vice versa, at this point in time, any sense of proportion — and of perception — belies assertions of broad balance. Primetime, if its handling of the stem-cell issue is any indication, is certainly no more "neutral" than Rush Limbaugh, and Rush's biases are headlined, rather than hidden. (Going by this segment, I'd actually place Rush a bit higher on the fair and balanced scale.)
Moreover, watching the flashy, polished presentation of the news shows, one gets a sense of the degree of production behind them. There are crews and professionals working together to make the shows happen. There's money. Power. And when those who wield it decide that they want some policy or other, well friend, let's just say that one shouldn't consider himself informed based solely on the "news" that they provide.
Garry Trudeau must be going through bad times, indeed, when newspapers are having to sacrifice readers in order to run Doonesbury:
I am amazed that you continue to print Garry Trudeau and his Doonesbury daily diatribe on the comics page. These vitriolic ramblings are no more comic than an obituary. Please cancel my subscription until such time as the cartoon is, preferably, removed from the paper altogether, or at least moved to the editorial page, where it might more appropriately belong.SHELLY SHATKIN
Warren
Brent Bozell wrote something that caught my attention in a recent column about hatred of Fox News and a "documentary" that has emerged as its crystallized form:
When Fox News debuted in 1996, liberals couldn't contain their laughter at what they considered a sophomoric challenge to the dominant media. Then Fox became a pest, the proverbial gnat that wouldn't go away. Ultimately -- almost overnight -- Fox overtook its cable competitors and became king of the hill. Fox became a menace on the media landscape that should have been aborted before birth, a blatantly biased and bullying blight on America.
One would have to check ratings numbers and the like to confirm this, but my sense is that the exact "overnight" was that from September 11 to September 12, 2001. All Fox stations plugged into Fox News for a few days, and I can't be the only American who realized immediately that the network offered a chance to keep up with events without having to sift through agenda-driven distractions and to bite lips over inane liberal commentary. Personified, I couldn't stand to turn, for information about the horrific history unfolding, to the smirky, perky face of Katie Couric.
Thereafter, I went through the not-very-easy process of requesting that Cox Communications, my cable provider, carry Fox News in its regular line up. After calling several employees of the company, I finally learned that the pick-up had already been scheduled for some time in December (as I recall).
I don't know whether a wave of similarly persistent customers brought about that change after 9/11, although it's entirely possible, because it took me about a week of remotivation and effort to make my request. But just think about that: almost instantly, I realized that I could trust Fox News more than I could any other station. What does that say about the news sources with which we'd been living for the previous decades?
So a report that nuclear missiles had been found in Iraq was pretty quickly refuted. Although coverage has been limited, a quick look at Yahoo!'s news search suggests that the refutation was reported more prominently than the possibility of discovery.
Probably very few supporters or, especially, opponents of war expect to find anything as clear as mounted nuclear warheads. Moreover, just as few supporters hinged their support on such a tremendous find. However, the blip does provide an opportunity to observe one way in which the media shapes the news.
As we've seen with many of the fool's gold finds for the Bush Lied! prospectors, massive reportage of a claim or finding gives the public a sense that something is, or at least could be, true. The subsequent retractions or substantial rephrasings, usually more subdued, are rarely enough to right the gut feeling of citizens whose politics are mostly decided at that level.
Sadly, the gut has increasingly reigned supreme even among those who are supposed to be better informed — hence the opinion among ostensibly respectable people that Michael Moore's film illustrates some underlying truth, even though it is built entirely upon falsehood, that "the confusions trailing Mr. Moore's narrative are what make 'Fahrenheit 9/11' an authentic and indispensable document of its time."
In an informational climate in which the charges of one side are shouted, while the rebuttals and other charges of the opposite side are whispered, who wouldn't be confused?
Check out this interactive stunner from the Providence Journal:
The sad thing is that, when I checked the results a little while ago, the combined responses for "Bush" and "Both" were exactly equal to "Hussein." (Although this seems to have improved somewhat already.) The encouraging thing is that many of the written responses fault the paper for even asking the question.
Perhaps better questions would be:
ADDENDUM:
Well, look at that. The folks at Projo.com have replaced the survey.
Probably a good idea.
Bruce Bartlett has given some thought to the economic aspect of liberal media bias. This isn't representative of the breadth of the piece, but it begins to formulate a response to the economic "proof" that the media isn't too liberal:
Economic theory says that conservative news outlets should have come into existence to serve that market. However, Prof. Daniel Sutter of the University of Oklahoma points out that there are severe barriers to entry into the news business that make it very difficult to start a new newspaper or television network, thus allowing liberal bias to perpetuate itself.Another answer comes from a study by Prof. David Baron of Stanford. He theorizes that profit-maximizing corporations tolerate liberal bias because it allows them to pay lower wages to liberal journalists. By being allowed to exercise their bias, they are willing to accept less pay than they would demand if they were in a business where bias was not tolerated. Conservatives are perhaps less willing to pay such a financial price.
I'm not so sure about that last sentence. To my limited experience, there are plenty of conservative writers who would pay that price were the offer on the table. Baron's point, it seems to me, is more of an extension of Sutter's. The bias is ingrained among the newsie folks, and the business folks let it remain thus not just because it enables lower wages, but perhaps more because a battle between the administrative and content departments would be hugely disruptive. (I'm sure there is also aversion to shifting an outlet's "voice" too quickly.)
ADDENDUM:
Chris Muir's got cartoon commentary related to this topic.
In April 2003, I noted the truth by repetition strategy of creating "common knowledge." In September, I described the mechanism whereby true statements are transformed into a pattern of deception. A sort of in between strategy — which I think I've described before but can't find just now — is to add layers of spin until an untruth is common knowledge. The 9/11 Commission's suggestion about links between Iraq and al Qaeda has already entered its second phase of spin.
The statement itself, the context of which seems to overstate what can be said to be "apparent," is simply: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." From this, the Associated Press reported:
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks found "no credible evidence" of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks against the United States, contradicting President Bush's assertion that such a connection was among the reasons it was necessary to topple Saddam Hussein.
Note the contorted language: "a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks." What does that even mean, grammatically? What it means, in practice, is that the reporter, Hope Yen, was trying to find a way to reconcile the first-paragraph declaration of a Bush "assertion" with the sixth-paragraph admission that:
[The Bush administration] stopped short of claiming that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but critics say Bush officials left that impression with the American public.
Be the difference between giving critics an impression and making an assertion what it may, "no evidence of cooperation" has become "no evidence of a link," something that the commission's document (PDF) clearly disproves:
The Sudaneses, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Ladin to cease this support [of anti-Saddam Islamists] and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Ladin in 1994... There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.
Nonetheless, the layering continues. Today, the AP blurs all distinctions between ties, links, collaboration on specific projects, and so on, and presents the commission's statement as evidence that one of the president's justifications for war has been undermined:
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said Wednesday that no evidence exists that al-Qaida had strong ties to Saddam Hussein - a central justification the Bush administration had for toppling the former Iraqi regime. Bush also argued that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which have not been found, and that he ruled his country by with an iron fist and tortured political opponents.Although bin Laden asked for help from Iraq in the mid-1990s, Saddam's government never responded, according to a report by the commission staff based on interviews with government intelligence and law enforcement officials. The report asserted that "no credible evidence" has emerged that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 strikes.
Bush said Saddam was a threat because he had not only ties to al-Qaida, but to other terrorist networks as well.
Now, "cooperation on attacks" is made to cover everything from vague "strong ties" to specific involvement "in the Sept. 11 strikes." Everything but the carefully worded claim that the commission actually made. In this way, the president can always be said to have premised the war on something that isn't proven.
Recollections may differ, and I'm not going to go in search of contemporary statements, but my sense is that the pattern hasn't changed from the very start, with "critics" saying that the president premised the war on specific involvement in 9/11, and the administration clarifying that the War on Terror is more broadly against a network of groups and states and that Iraq was part of it. When information comes out indicating a lack of links, the accusations of the "critics" grow broader. When information comes out indicating some communication, the claims of the "critics" become more specific. When pressed, the media throws up the "impression" screen.
At what level of the process, I wonder, is it necessary for mutually reaffirming delusions to give way to active (and despicable) deception?
Jonathan Gurwitz has a good addition to the mounting commentary dealing with what the media thinks we can afford to be shown and what it thinks we can afford not to be shown:
Acknowledging this disparity does, however, reveal something about the motivations of those in the media who practice this double standard. Abu Ghraib is the realization of an anti-American fantasy, the embodiment of "the Ugly American" in the post-modern age. Its images are a montage of every perceived vice of American society, and every grievance against it. Islamic fundamentalists see the emancipation of women, homosexuality and sexual decadence taken to its logical -- American -- end.Arab and Third World nationalists see evidence of American imperialism.
Multiculturalists see proof that American society is no better than the societies that globalization and the spread of democracy threaten to supplant.
Anti-war activists revel in a digital My Lai -- a final reckoning of decades-old indictments of the American military.
When all the images have been broadcast, when all this American self-flagellation is complete, perhaps the media will finally show us the Americans tortured by flames and forced to leap 100 stories to their death. Perhaps they'll give us the images of the other incomprehensible crimes that have occurred in the Mideast in the two weeks since the Abu Ghraib photos emerged.
Gurwitz isn't talking about our crimes, and he isn't optimistic about his maybe.
Donald Sensing highlights an example of military heroism that is surely one of many:
He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advance directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.
When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.
When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.
It wouldn't take much television production wizardry or creative report writing to make that a compelling war story. Yet, the wires show only a few papers and one television station mentioning Capt. Chontosh, and all but a niche market magazine were from Chontosh's local area in New York state.
Remember that the next time the necessity of entertainment value is cited as an excuse for skewed coverage.
Dr. Karl Stephens, of Barrington, Rhode Island, diagnoses the problem with the Providence Journal's coverage of Donald Rumsfeld's testimony before the Senate and House Armed Services Committee. Stephens notes that Rumsfeld and Gen. Meyers emphasized the actual timeline of events related to Abu Ghraib and the importance of allowing problem cases to work their way up the investigative chain, given the direct and strong authority of those of greater authority. Then:
Not surprisingly, none of the accounts of the hearing published by The Journal mentioned either point. Instead, the journalists preferred to concentrate not on the facts presented by Rumsfeld, et al., but on the deceitful implications of Senators Edward Kennedy, Robert Byrd, et al., that none of this would have ever been investigated if the pictures hadn't been -- illegally, one might add -- shown on TV.The Journal still doesn't seem to understand that in this era of cable TV, with multiple news outlets, people can watch for themselves entire hearings and press conferences, and then see the next day how the newspapers distort what was said. (It is then especially disillusioning to realize it has probably always been like this.)
Wonder what Dr. Stephens's practice is. Barrington isn't that far away, and confirmation that I'm not insane would surely benefit my health.
I realize that this is just an unfortunate confluence of a useful technology employed by Google's advertising program with a horrific story, but I have to admit that my eyes bulged when I spotted the following on the Providence Journal's Web page. I also have to admit that, fairly or not, all companies involved took a hit in my impression of them. Click the image for the actual-size version.
I was a little more snide than I ought to have been while responding, on April 15, to an AP article about an unexpected increase in the number of new unemployment claims. My hints that the Providence Journal only ran the piece because it was bad news have been made less justified by the paper's running a more sunny piece this week:
Employers added 288,000 jobs to their payrolls in April as the nation's unemployment rate slipped to 5.6 percent, reinforcing hopes for a sustained turnaround in the jobs market that had lagged for so long.Payrolls have risen now for eight straight months, with 867,000 new jobs created so far this year, the Labor Department reported Friday. The strengthening jobs market comes just in time to aid President Bush's re-election efforts, which were in question a few months ago based on his economic record.
Bush is on track to be the first president since the Great Depression to have lost jobs under his watch. But the hiring gains in recent months have shrunk those losses to about 1.5 million.
One mitigating factor, for my part, is that the previous piece reported an unexpected weekly change:
The increase was far above the rise of 7,000 that economists had been expecting, but analysts cautioned against reading too much into a single week's change in the volatile series. Labor Department analysts noted that the period covered was the first week in a new quarter, a time when the jobless claims can be even more volatile.
Whereas the current piece notes an unexpected monthly change:
Revisions to payrolls also showed a stronger jobs market than previously reported. Last month's 308,000 payroll gains were revised up to 337,000. April's showing surprised analysts, who had expected payrolls of about 180,000 to 200,000.
I'm still not sure whether the Projo runs weekly updates, and as the monthly view shows, they don't appear to be particularly useful. Still, hopefully the improving job market will lift my baseline mood enough to temper my suspicions.
Gabriel Rosenberg commented to my post about the prison photos as follows, in part:
It seems to me that Goldberg is implying that since there was no need to influence government action, there was no need to run the photos. That seems rather odd to me. I don't think influencing government action should be the primary objective of the news media. Rather it should be to report the news. Now that requires making quite subjective decisions of what is news and how to tell the news story.
Actually, I took Goldberg to be applying the sabotage aspect of his comment to whomever handed them to the press to begin with. As for CBS, the point is that, barring some ethical requirement — like exposing a cover-up — its decision to publish is, as Rosenberg subsequently suggests, a prudential matter. In this case, I think the network made the wrong decision, one that will have a cost in both money and lives.
And, indeed, Goldberg has clarified along these lines. He also mentioned something that I'll look into if I have the time (which I probably won't):
CBS had a wide range of options available to it. It chose to do the (second) most sensational thing it could (apparently they had the pictures a while ago and held off at the army's request pending an investigation. Couldn't they have held off longer, pending a trial?) They deserve no praise and they cannot claim they had no choice.
The interesting part is in parentheses. The decision to hold off may very well have been out of courtesy, or even as part of some deal with the military, and I don't know that I'm prepared to attribute this level of coordination of anti-war activity in the media. But still, all in one batch, we've got these pictures, the Fallujah "pull out," and Ted Koppel's roll call of death. If I were trying to define a war effort as an echo of Vietnam, presenting these three events in close proximity couldn't hurt.
During sweeps. While the Democrat candidate's campaign is beginning to flag.
ADDENDUM:
Gabriel Rosenberg has pasted the following in the comment section of this post:
Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes II received an appeal from the Defense Department, and eventually from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast -- given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq.60 Minutes II decided to honor that request, while pressing for the Defense Department to add its perspective to the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison. This week, with the photos beginning to circulate elsewhere, and with other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report.
He doesn't provide a link; I'll look into it when/if I have a chance.
ADDENDUM II:
Dr. Rosenberg has placed two relevant links in the comments section. The second, to a piece by William Scott Malone, has the more interesting angle:
But it was Rather's rather disingenuous statement at the end of the segment that set many tongues a wag. As Rather explained it, "with other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report." Perhaps true enough on its face, but it was CBS News who had approached Hersh about the story in the first place.In essence, Rather and crew played it rather well, pointing to "other journalists" as the cause for Gen. Myers to relent not only on his "appeal [for a] delay," as Rather carefully phrased it, but to provide the anchorman with an exclusive satellite interview with the deputy coalition commander, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit about the abuse allegations in Bagdhad.
Joe Mariani, of Guardian WatchBlog thinks the news media is intent on breaking the stubborn will of the American people to support the President along the many fronts in the War on Terror:
It wasn't enough for the Left when the "mainstream" media made it a point to include the daily US soldier body count from Iraq in every news report in every medium. It wasn't enough when they unapologetically added the number of those killed in accidents in Iraq -- which, frankly, could have happened almost anywhere -- to those killed in combat, just to inflate the American body count further. It wasn't enough for the Left that, for the last half of 2003, the media talking heads almost gleefully announced a second daily Iraq soldier body count, with the tagline, "since President Bush declared major combat over on May first." Support for the liberation of Iraq from dictator Saddam Hussein remained strong, despite the best efforts of the Left to instill an anti-war attitude into every viewer.
Mariani notes various turns of strategy in this effort. Similarly, John Hawkins suggests that it's a pattern of behavior that leads a large portion of the American audience to be suspicious to the point of anger of Ted Koppel's lament-the-lives special:
Put simply, there are a lot of people, myself, who think the left leaning media's coverage of this war has been, largely for political and ideological reasons, lopsided to the point of being despicable. Remembering the lives ended and forever altered by the war is important, but obsessively playing up every life lost, every problem, and dramatically exaggerating every negative while either ignoring or downplaying the reasoning behind the war, what we're trying to do, and all the positive things that have been accomplished, should in no way, shape, or form, be considered to be objectively "reporting the news".
Hawkins believes that a non-sweeps-week production by Brit Hume would be received differently. Mariani asks why the casualties from Afghanistan aren't included in the honor roll. Me, I wonder if anybody in Koppel's crew considered splitting the screen to show pictures of smiling Iraqi children, a captured Saddam Hussein, or soldiers at work helping with reconstruction. The basic idea — names and faces, in this case — doesn't really convey the message of a thing. Presentation, author, and context do that.
Lane Core says the same, with reference to the President's belief that the media does not represent the public:
Journalism is politics by another name. The idea that "the press" represents "the people" is, and always was, smoke & mirrors. The press isn't objective; the press was never objective. The press, in its various manifestations, represents only those people who happen to agree with it. ...If you follow a story in mainstream media and in conservative media, you'd often be tempted to think they're covering two different stories, the facts presented are so different and their presentation so different.
I agree with Lane that there's nothing wrong with this state of affairs, as long as one can turn to varying sources and find each reasonably explicit about its angle. In fact, that's ultimately a more effective way to dig through to the reality, because the contrast highlights which facts are identical (objectively true), similar (somewhat debatable), or conflicting (subjectively layered).
Of course, the mainstream media will guard the "objective" label on its door like a foreign hooker guards a clean statement of health. For one thing, admitting to partisanship lessens the target demographic (on paper, at least). For another, if the biases were well delineated, there would no longer be plausible deniability or basis for outrage when people point out which side of a dispute, controversy, or war each version of a story helps.
Sheila Lennon writes about those disturbing pictures of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners. She focuses on the wired man on the box:
There are more photos, and video, but this one photo above -- part scarecrow, part crucifixion -- is the one that sticks. Like the photo of the fleeing girl, her clothes burned off by napalm in Vietnam, it will be the icon for the Iraq war.Terror? Can the person perched on that box, told he would die if aching muscles give way, be feeling anything else?
The icon for the Iraq war? Only if the members of the media strive to make it so. Only if they discard all those compelling pictures of liberation and falling statues. Only if they never bother to publish pictures of those large sections of Iraq returning to a state of life and freedom that they haven't known since the elders were children. Note Lennon's language: it will be. Not could or might, but will.
The despicable acts of a handful of idiotic soldiers — somewhere around one one-millionth of the total force — have unforgivably given these aging Boomers exactly what they wanted: hope that they can once again defeat the United States military. Pictures of Ba'athist prisoners. Pictures of coffins. Pictures like this one currently on the Providence Journal's main page:
Click on the picture and the next headline softens the message: "Marines Hand Over Positions in Fallujah." Read about two-thirds through the article, after relation of some incidents in other cities and a tally of casualties in April, and the reality shifts a little bit more:
Under the plan, a force of 600 to 1,100 Iraqis, many of them former soldiers from the Fallujah area, are to man checkpoints inside of the city. Marines will remain on or near the city's perimeter and at a later stage conduct their own patrols inside the city.
The fact that the withdrawal, such as it is, and the revelation of those photographs have hit the news at the same moment in time is unfortunate indeed. God help us if the media wins its war.
ADDENDUM:
Jonah Goldberg's comments raise a worthwhile point:
I don't blame 60 Minutes for running them -- though I don't applaud them either. But a person would/could be morally obligated to leak these pictures if the army was covering it up or refusing to investigate. It doesn't sound like that was the case. So releasing the photos isn't prodding the government to do the right thing, it's encouraging millions of Arabs to hate us. That's not whistle-blowing, that's sabotage.
ADDENDUM II:
Interesting how reporters pick what numbers to disclose and highlight. The Baltimore Sun piece by Ariel Sabar that Lennon quotes offers only the following numbers:
The Army said yesterday that 14 of the 17 soldiers implicated in an investigation of abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison are from the 372nd. They face either criminal or administrative charges.
In contrast, an AP piece by Salah Nasrawi offers the following:
Six U.S. soldiers facing courts-martial in the abuse allegations have been reassigned in Iraq. Their boss, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and at least seven others have been suspended from their duties at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. military said.
The six seem to be the central group responsible, and although details are scarce, it would seem reasonable to guess that most of the others either knew of it at the time or found out later and are being punished for not reporting it (or similar offenses). In other words, if it's true that only the six were directly involved, the Sun almost triples the impression of the extent by making reference — without breaking down the numbers — to those "implicated." (That's assuming that the 17 figure came from a reliable source.) On this basis, Lennon declares an emblem to have been born.
Six soldiers out of a group that's currently 138,089 Americans strong. Think of the power of a handful of soldiers to tar the United States! The blame for the disproportionate damage rests centrally with the soldiers, but there's plenty of culpability for exaggerating the incident — declaring it representative, even iconic — to go around.
Was Jennifer Levitz able to find no one to offer a contrasting view for her Providence Journal article, "Doubts about the war hit home"? It wouldn't even have had to be somebody local; after all, she devoted 208 words to Virginia anti-war protester Larry Syverson.
It wouldn't be appropriate to fault grieving or just worried families for their sentiments, and Levitz only quotes some of those in the article regarding other people's reactions. But there's a growing storyline in the mainstream press:
The doubts about the Bush administration's steering of the war in Iraq are rising, according to experts who study public opinion, as April ends with the highest number of U.S. casualties in a month. Tomorrow marks one year since President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and declared the mission accomplished. ...People in the United States are making up their minds on how they view the war in Iraq, she said yesterday in an interview. ...
Americans are comparing those wartime sights with what they are hearing from the administration -- that the electricity is back in Iraq, and schools are open, and that only small parts of the country are unstable. ...
[Kathleen Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania] said that when the public starts asking itself these questions, "you have the potential" for an attitude shift.
A little research would show that the media has been proclaiming shifts in attitudes and doubts about the war all along, but frankly, the whole thing is too nauseating to investigate in depth. Levitz's entire piece offers not a single statement from anybody — family or "expert," local or national — declaring pride and the understanding that the job must be finished.
By way of contrast, in John Mulligan's "Historians, soldiers hesitant to call Iraq another Vietnam," we get this:
WHEN CRITICS of the war look at these problems, they see shades of Vietnam: a misplaced American confidence in its economic and military might and a refusal to take into account the cultural and political realities of a foreign country.Further, the war's critics find echoes of Vietnam in the Bush administration's changing emphasis in its rationale for war. Before the invasion, Mr. Bush and his team stressed the "gathering" threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to international terrorism.
Since the post-invasion failure to turn up evidence of such weapons, Mr. Bush has stressed the promise that Iraq holds "to change the world and make America more secure" by becoming a beacon of democracy.
"WE'RE FACING a quagmire in Iraq, just as we faced a quagmire in Vietnam," Kennedy said in a television interview after his April 5 speech. "We didn't understand what we were getting ourselves into in Vietnam. We didn't understand what we were doing in Iraq. We had misrepresentations about what we were able to do militarily in Vietnam. I think we are finding that out in Iraq as well. . . .
Suggestions that Iraq and Vietnam don't equate get a "but still"; statements that Americans are anxious about war (as well they should be) get unwavering reinforcement. We can only hope that Americans don't allow the media's assessment to be self-fulfilling spin. Every loss is lamentable. Every casualty is deserving of prayers and tears. But we cannot afford to forget that each
