Posted on 01/28/2005 8:01:07 PM PST by ekidsohbelaas
I get email from people who say they wish that journalists would engage in objective coverage of the war in Iraq. They are always indignant and often bitter, but they mean opposite things. Those against the war assert that the fascist press is slanted in favor. Those in favor assert that the leftist press is slanted against. All agree that reporters are reprehensible. I wonder whether either group has any idea what it is talking about.
When people say that they want the press to be objective, they usually mean that they want reporters to cheerlead for their point of view. They do not want objectivity, however imagined, but concurring propaganda. Anything else, they believe, is bias.
Most of them seem to lack the sophistication to know that their particular prejudices are in fact prejudices. Since whatever they believe seems to them obviously true, they regard anything that does not support their cause as evidence of depraved indifference to truth or as outright lying. Then they attach diabolical motives. A story that does not make the war look appetizing demonstrates that the reporter hates America, espouses Marxism, and all the other perfervid twaddle that makes reporters wonder whether they are not writing for an asylum of bellicose half-wits.
To all of these I say, “Try looking at things as they appear to journalists on the ground. Ask yourself how you would cover Iraq. Then tell me what “objective” means.”
Suppose that you (I continue saying to them) are a reporter somewhere in Baghdad with a squad of Marines. An Iraqi family in a car, not knowing the patrol is there, turn the corner. The Marines open fire on the car. The parents are killed. Their young daughter, splattered with their blood, stands screaming in horror. Mommy, though dead, is still moving. Ugly things are coming out of her stomach. The girl is ten.
This happens. What do you think automatic weapons do to people? Groom them? Being a reporter, you shoot pictures. It’s what reporters do: make notes, take pictures. Report.
What next? How do you report the—is “occurrence” a suitably neutral word?--objectively?
You have no apolitical choice. People react powerfully to wounded or emotionally devastated children, particularly little girls. If you publish that picture, it will tend to turn people against the war. Not being stupid, you know this perfectly well. On the other hand if you suppress it, you will be supporting the war by hiding the truth. You know this too. It’s A or B: you file the photo or you don’t. Which?
The military will want you not to write the story at all. They can’t quite say so, but will want you to emphasize that the Marines with good reason are frightened of car bombs (which is true) and that the killing was an accident, and couldn’t you leave out the photographs? It was an isolated mishap, a colonel will say. The military’s PR apparatus will want you to write about some Marines somewhere else who repaired a school. Hawks will say that the incident was unfortunate, but necessary in pursuit of a greater good. War is hell; get over it.
Doves will say that publishing the picture will show people what is really happening, that the public has a right to know what its soldiers are in fact doing. It wasn’t an isolated mishap, they will say (and they will be right). So: What do you do?
I would file the story, and the pictures, with no hesitation at all. My job as a reporter is not to shill for the war as a volunteer amateur Goebbels, nor to play Jane Fonda Goes To Baghdad, but to report what happens. If the military doesn’t want such incidents reported, it can stop committing them.
Again, suppose that you are trying very hard to be objective, whatever you think that means. How do you do it? Reporting of necessity requires that a reporter make choices. Any choice constitutes a slant.
Do you write pleasant home-towners—boyish young Marine relaxing in the compound and remembering his high-school sweetheart waiting in Roanoke? Do you focus on the alert courage of our young men as they patrol the mean streets, etc? On the sniper who says he likes to shoot a man in the stomach so that his screams will demoralize the enemy, before maybe finishing him off? On the Marine with his eyes and half his face gone because of a roadside bomb? The twenty-seven Iraqis killed by a car bomb downtown? Beheadings? Where do you put your emphasis?
Usually journalists turn against wars. Why? Consult the foregoing paragraph. It is not because they are Commies. It is because they are there. After a few weeks on the ground, you will find yourself acquiring pronounced opinions about things. This is inevitable. No one short of a diagnosable psychopath remains emotionally remote.
You have to be very ideologically committed indeed not to be worn down by the destruction and ghastliness of it all, by the mutilated kids and head-shot snipers’ victims, by flies crawling in the mouths of the dead. This is especially true of doubtful wars of uncertain provenance and murky purpose. Remember that what appears on the screen in Dallas is sanitized, adjusted, shaped at corporate to whatever end the networks seek to promote. The reporter on the ground sees the exit wounds, the woman’s face three days gone into decomposition.
Without profound ideological commitment, you will come to loathe the military command. This will happen regardless of whether you think the particular war necessary. The military lies, and lies, and lies. The flacks of the armed services, like any other PR types, do not recognize truth and falsehood as legitimate categories, but only positive and negative. They will tell you over and over with chirpy optimism things that you know by daily observation to be false. Everything is hunky-dory. There may have been a minor problem but we’ve got it licked. It was a precision strike with a 1000-pound bomb in a residential neighborhood. The people love us because we rebuilt fifty schools.
You get sick of it. In Vietnam it was the Five O’clock Follies, the press conferences with officers lying about pacification, lying about body counts, lying, lying, lying. The spin coming out of Iraq is exactly the same.
How do you juggle all of these things? Unless you are a witting propagandist, you will find that the best you can do is report the truth as well as you can discover it, as you would want it reported to you if someone else were doing it—not let interested parties tell you how to report it, and not give a damn who likes it.
And if we had reporters who thought like this in 1939 we'd have lost that war too.
There indeed is no such thing as a nonpartisan reporter. The problem is the MSM believes that destroying George Bush is more important then winning the war in Iraq.
Much like Rather's TANG fakes, the press will manufacture news to try and lose the war. This isn't to say the information is necessarily false, most of it isn't. It is the spin the press, knowingly, puts on it.
Consider two possible headlines from a previous war;
1) American Troops Capture Iwo Jima; GIs Knocking on Hirohito's Door.
2) American Death Toll in Iwo Jima Reaches 7,000; Japan Remains Undaunted.
Both true enough. The press today would certainly provide the latter interpretation, unlike the press of the WWII era.
[Again, suppose that you are trying very hard to be objective, whatever you think that means. How do you do it? Reporting of necessity requires that a reporter make choices. Any choice constitutes a slant.]
This is pure sophistry.
Truly objective journalism consists of adhering to strict standards of writing in style, content, mechanics, and many other parameters that journalists USED to learn. Now it's all about selling both an ideological viewpoint (angle) and a compelling story (info-tainment).
Maybe journalists should try seeing things from the enemy's point of view! Were journalists more idiologically incline during WWII? No, were they during the Korean war? What changed was TV. Context and perception were replaced with 60 second sound bites and emotive expressions from journalists. Soldiers reduced to automatons without any humanity left in them. Victims of violence still and unmoving expressing an emotive reflex from journalists to subdue the viewer and have them sympathize with the victims of violence (almost always the enemy of the US since 90% of casualties during combat against US forces are not americans!) Cry me a river will you?
I've read Fred's weekly column for some time, and I liked his writing better before he did the expat thing to Mexico.
In this article Fred wants the reporter "on the ground" to report what he sees, but when that reporter files his story it goes through an editor who may want something completely different on the front page.
We're constantly told, by the MSM, about the growing American body count, but the MSM leaves out the terrorists casualties. If it's American blood it leads. Terrorist blood, if it's reported at all, is on the back pages. Is it any wonder the MSM is losing readership/viewer-ship?
There's no way America could have won WWII with today's type of MSM against that war.
The first question from the liberals would be: "What did America do to force Japan to attack us?"
I would like for them to report what is happening. My complaint is that they don't but pretend to report what they ave not seen while sharing a bye-line with an Arab stringer who may lie just to get paid or may even be an agent of the enemy. I do know that where had a first-hand witness of events in Najaf, press reports contridycted what he saw with his own eyes. Reporters are always more interested in telling a good stort than in a bare recital of the facts, because unless they do they won't get reported.
Fred has the creds to write what he writes and I agree with him.
No, I'm not missing the point. Though the author and you are.
There indeed is no such thing as neutral reporting, and until the Vietnam War few if any American reporters during a conflict would have desired to be neutral. They were *American* reporters.
The press currently claims this amoral neutrality, which would be bad enough were it real, while in fact supporting our foes.
Even one were to believe Bush was the evil moron the press does, trying to lose the war for America to damage a domestic political opponent *should* be beyond the pale...
Reporters turn 'against' wars if it's a Republican in office. There was little complaint when Clinton impotently shot missiles at abandoned camps and warehouses, and committed, perhaps rightly, the US to Balkan 'peace-keeping'. Not a peep. Not a complaint. But a Republican President is another matter. Reporters aren't against war because they are there. They are against Republicans and Americans because they are there, because they continue to vote Republican as long as Republicans continue to best represent the best of American values. They turn against it all because reporters are none of that. FOX attempts to be different in that way. But we can still recall the pro-sKerry coverage granted by what some might call a turn-coat network embarrassed, perhaps, by a film only they saw called, Outfoxed. They must have thought the film made some good points. And it shows how difficult it is, truly, to find reporters who think American, rather than with the enemies of America.
"Don't know if you've heard of Fred Reed. IMHO one of the best commentators on the net."
I've been reading Reed for a long while. IMHO he's a jerk, just like all others who vilify the US while whitewashing the atrocities of the mad Moslem murderers we're fighting against. He's a Vietnam Era throwback who sees no good in anything we do, just like his buddy Colonel Hackworth. These guys are locked in some anti-US Vietnam time warp. They couldn't define "objective" if they looked it up in the dictionary.
Ask yourself why Reed chose an example of American soldiers firing on Iraqis who obviously broke a safety perimeter improperly. If the guy had any interest in objectivity at all, he'd take his camera to the mass graves or torture chambers where the blood of innocent Iraqis have been flowing by the barrel full over the past thirty years under the demon Hussein. Then he'd provide some REAL perspective for his readers looking for justification for the War on Terror. But he's not interested in anything but seeking out incidents that validate his own personal opinions. And that's what bias truly is!
Which is really meaningless if he writes what he does. No, people do not have some right to publicly follow every step of a battle. That is self-defeating. The enemy can read the same accounts and change his plans accordingly. There is no reasonable need even to know, beforehand, the general's operational plan, for just the same reason, and precisely because so much effort goes in to diversion and disinformation in order to help the plan succeed and reduce our own casualties.
Reporters don't turn against war because they are there. They turn against whatever Republicans do, but not Democrats. That's literally the history of the last decade and a half. And you can't ignore that history, that fact, and that bias which eats at the heart of nation to the extent that citizens take the talking heads seriously and consider their words to be even somewhat reliable, when it all might be a complete and utter work of fiction, or at least a gross misrepresentation of the situation, intended only to further the reporter's own partisan agenda.
Well you start out by not telling half truths Mr. Reed
"An Iraqi family in a car, not knowing the patrol is there, turn the corner. The Marines open fire on the car. The parents are killed. Their young daughter, splattered with their blood, stands screaming in horror. Mommy, though dead, is still moving. Ugly things are coming out of her stomach. The girl is ten."
... this is a summary of an actual event from last week. Unfortunately he leaves out the part of the original story which described the Marines a signaling the car to stop and firing numerous warning shots. Curious he chose to leave this out.
This could be an isolated mistake, my instincts tell me it is not.
But the point he did make--that is compelling--is that seeing the horrific nature of war first hand takes away the objectivity of reporters.
Isn't that what you and the other critics of the column assert? That objectivity of the MSM is a phantom? I don't see that this makes Fred a jerk. It just makes him right.
I suppose this would be the ideal headline:
After 7000 casualties, US troops captures Iwo Jima; Even as America is ready to invade Japan, Imperial Forces are undaunted.
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