Posted on 03/29/2005 6:40:49 AM PST by Constitution Day
happy warrior
MARK STEYN According to Script
The other day, as their latest contribution to the death spiral of American journalism, the Associated Press announced that they would now be supplying newspapers across the country with alternative versions of important stories — in order, as they put it, to “enhance the value of the AP news report to your newspaper.”
“The concept is simple,” the AP explained in a memo to newspaper editors. “On major spot stories — especially when events happen early in the day — we will provide you with two versions to choose between. One will be the traditional ‘straight lead’ that leads with the main facts of what took place. The other will be the ‘optional,’ an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means.”
Imagery, narrative devices . . . Who can argue with that? Big important second-semester creative-writing-course stuff. Can’t get enough of it myself. If I’d been more on the ball, I’d have opened this column with a bit of specific gripping imagery myself. (Note: If you’re reading the “enhanced value” version of “Happy Warrior” that runs in the Pocatello Times-Indicator-Courier-Union-Picayune-Whig-Leader, the gripping imagery may well have been inserted by the helpful editors.)
Anyway, the AP offered a sample of the alternative versions it would be providing. Here’s the traditional:
“MOSUL, Iraq (AP) A suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners Thursday, splattering blood and body parts over rows of overturned white plastic chairs. The attack, which killed 47 and wounded more than 100, came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.”
Here’s the optional:
“MOSUL, Iraq (AP) Yet again, almost as if scripted, a day of hope for a new, democratic Iraq turned into a day of tears as a bloody insurgent attack undercut a political step forward. On Thursday, just as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad were telling reporters that they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government, a suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent . . .” Etc.
Wow. “Day of hope” turning into “day of tears.” I haven’t seen that kind of sparkling prose since Barbra Streisand stood up at that big pre-Iraq Democratic-party gala and solemnly regaled the party bigshots with that Internet-hoax Julius Caesar soliloquy about the drums of war being whipped into the fever-pitch of a double-edged sword. Whoever wrote that should be manning the Fresh Vivid Imagery desk at the Associated Press.
But in the midst of that unreadable sludge of clichés, the AP’s desert bard came up with one unreadable sludgy cliché that gets the gist of their Iraq coverage better than anything: “almost as if scripted.” Isn’t that precisely the problem? It is pre-scripted. The good folk of Basra and Kirkuk don’t spring out of bed each morning saying, “Ah, another day of hope,” only to trudge off to dreamland 16 hours later wondering why yet again the day of hope turned into a day of tears, daring to sing yet another chorus of “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” but knowing deep down chances are the Sunni’ll come out tomorrow and blow up the schoolhouse.
As we learned on election day in January, that doomy drivel is imposed on the Iraqi people by the media’s pre-scripters. And once the fellows holed up in the Green Zone hotels decided that the war was yet another Vietnam remake, everyone else got the hang of the formula pretty quickly. The old Baath-party translators the foreign press still use quickly learned to lead reporters by the nose to some whiny clerk from the Ministry of Fingernail Pullers and Genital Severers moaning about how he’d been laid off. The “insurgents” got the hang of staging their photo-ops on Eastern Standard Time, setting some secondhand Nissan alight each morning Baghdad time so that its plume of smoke could be conveniently filmed from the press-hotel balcony in time for The Today Show and Good Morning America. Days of hope turned into days of tears as regular as clockwork.
And in between their Bridges-of-Madison-County imagery and Horse-Whisperer narrative devices, the Western media somehow managed to lose the story — functioning municipal government in the south, booming tourism in the north, normality and progress in three-quarters of the country. The insurgent-of-the-day approach to Iraq didn’t even capture that element correctly: On the second anniversary of the invasion, Agence France-Presse ran a story remarkably like the AP’s hypothetical specimen. The headline: “45 Killed In Insurgent Attacks.”
The lead paragraph: “At least 45 people have been killed in insurgent attacks across Iraq as Washington defended its decision to go to war on the second anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion.”
It took an Australian blogger, Arthur Chrenkoff, to poke deep down into the story and emerge with the most salient fact of this bloody toll — that of the 45 dead, 29 were “insurgents” themselves. Terrorism is supposed to be one guy indiscriminately killing large numbers of the other side. No terrorist network can survive long if it’s losing two of its own men for every one of the enemy. That’s the story: a day of hope turned into yet another day of tears — for the insurgents.
With a few honorable exceptions, Iraq coverage has been a truly spectacular failure. One day in the future, we’ll dig out the yellowing clips and wonder how America managed to lose every daily battle and yet still win the war.
Thanks ... I'll look for that in the library and on the Internet. In the library in Tulsa, there was a series of videos about archaelogical sites, with footage of the actual digs plus computer recreations of what it might have looked like "new." Bill reminded me about them today, and I'll be searching the library catalogs here.
There is so much neat historical stuff out there. Hopefully the next 20 years or so will bring us good-quality video, with source-document backup, etc., on much of it. Most of us just can't travel to these places! I spent 14 years of Spanish class seeing videos about Spain, Mexico, and South America ... but I'll probably never see any of it in Real Life!
There's really some remarkable stuff out there on the 'net.
I had quite a bit of it bookmarked until a recent computer crash. :(
Another book that I pulled off the shelf is The Ancient Near East.
It's an anthology of translated texts and pictures of artifacts.
Hittite, Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian and other cultures are represented.
Hope you can find & enjoy both books!
But although Steyn is clear and lucid on TV, it doesn't compare to his writing.
Tis one's so good I can't do my usual thing of picking out a line to comment on. Steyn is the best!
"Homicide bomber" is just right-wing PC garbage, IMHO. It's like asking me to spell 'woman' as 'womyn'.
Hey, now WE'RE the press. =)
Thanks...
marksteyn.com is now bookmarked :-)
Cheers.
Well, it looks I've been a little bit selfish... as a foreigner, I wouldn't benefit directly from Steyn being a Senator... :-) and I would like to see him committed entirely to the task of my (and yours) intellectual indulgency.
One more thought: Arnie is now a governor. Can you imagine him to don Terminator's gear while in office?
So the moral of this story is "If you're in a hole, keep digging"?
Hell, no! He is too brilliant to be wasted on that bunch of Euro and Third World thugs.
It would be lost/lost situation:
If there are no swiping changes to the whole organisation, even Steyn wouldn't be sufficient to change their ways (or, as my Granny'd put it, you don't establish a new brothel with old whores).
On the other hand, if the UN is repaired from top to bottom, why to bother Steyn and detract him from creating his marvelous columns?
Apparently so!
He is good.
BTTT
Great detective work.
That is an interesting part of this story.
Yahoo and other internet sites often go to great lengths to hide the fact that many of their headline stories are AP stories.
You have to keep going back into their references on the story and original links to find out that the story was an AP story. Then you may have to go back several more links to discover the name of the writer. That happened with Thomas Hays, the AP liar re the cheering when GW said the Clintoon had been admitted to the hospital.
Does anyone else read Chrenkoff? I heard him interviewed by Dennis Prager in March. I enjoyed reading his take on the news of the day. Especially his "Good News from Iraq" and "Good News from Afghanistan" posts.
http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/
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