HOW MEDIA GET IRAQ WRONG (W.Post Negative Reporting)

New York Post ^ | 7/02/04 | ERIC M. JOHNSON

[kattracks]

July 2, 2004 -- IRAQ veterans often say they're confused by U.S. news cover age, because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don't get much notice — or in many cases, any notice at all. Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq. Last week, he had a Pulitzer-bait series called "Promises Unkept: The U.S. Occupation of Iraq."

The grizzled foreign-desk veteran — who until 2000 was covering dot-com companies — now sits in judgment over a world-shaking issue, in a court whose rulings echo throughout the media landscape.

He finds the Bush administration guilty. Such a surprise. Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the U.S. operation a failure.

Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: Basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don't know what they're doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.

How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.

[garylmoore]

Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq.

Is this the only crew that gets information out from Iraq? Aren't there any honest, un-bias people who do this that will get the truth out?

[goldstategop]

Rajiv Chandrasekaran = Washington Post's Jayson Blair in Baghdad. All The Anti-American Slant That's Fit To Print.

[ThePythonicCow]

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[wayoverontheright]

As long as the Post can get away financially with printing lies, it means that this process is completely demand-driven, meaning there is still a significant cohort of readers who are not information seekers so much as seekers of vindication of their viewpoint. In short, when it comes to worldview, sometimes people DO like being lied to.

The NYT has carved out that niche for itself internationally, and though this particular market niche (diehard leftists) is dwindling domestically, it will still be a profitable target market internationally for some time to come.

The WaPo for a while there was showing signs of sanity, and as you can tell from this NY Post article, they have no clear cut market strategy, they seem to be guided by me-tooism as relates the NYT, while having to keep the other eye on the Washington Times.

[gubamyster]

bttt

[Piranha]

Don't take my word for it that the Post's reporting is substandard and superficial. Take the word of Philip Bennett, the Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news. In a surprisingly candid June 6 piece, he admits that "the threat of violence has distanced us from Iraqis." Further, "we have relied on Iraqi stringers filing by telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation."

Translation: We are reprinting things from people we barely know, from a safe location dozens of miles away from the fighting.

Do you remember when Paul Wolfowitz had to apologize for saying the same thing? Here's the beginning of the Reuters article (dated June 24) about the incident:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz apologized on Thursday to Iraq war correspondents for saying that many of them were afraid to travel and reported rumors.

In an open letter to journalists in Iraq, Wolfowitz said he appreciated the risks many take in covering the war and that he prays for their safe return.

Biased reporting? Where? I'm sure it's out there, but I'm sure not going to look for it...I might get hurt!

[lowbridge]

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