Posted on 07/14/2005 7:50:34 AM PDT by Nachum
Early this week, Mark Yost, an editorial writer at Knight Ridder's St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote a column that sharply criticized Iraq war coverage as "bad" for focusing on the negative. Today, another Knight Ridder writer who may actually know what's going on in Iraq, penned a reply.
By Greg Mitchell
(July 13, 2005) -- On Tuesday, Mark Yost, an editorial writer at the St. Paul Pioneer Press wrote a column that sharply criticized Iraq war coverage as "bad," for focusing on the negative aspects when there's so much progress to report.
Yost, of course, is welcome to his opinion, but some of his colleagues in the press quickly counter-attacked, in letters to Romenesko and others, pointing out that, ironically, Iraq coverage by the company he works for, Knight Ridder, had been hailed by many (including E&P) for often running a step or two ahead of all others.
One of those letters was written directly to Yost, by a colleague at the Pi-Press, Chuck Laszewski. "With your column," he declared, "you have spat on the copy of the brave men and women who are doing their best in terrible conditions. More than 20 reporters have died in Iraq from around the world. You have insulted them and demeaned them, and to a much lesser degree, demeaned the reporters everywhere who have been threatened with bodily harm, who have been screamed at, or denied public records, just because they wanted to present the closest approximation to the truth they could. I am embarrassed to call you my colleague."
Pretty strong stuff, but I wondered, in a note Tuesday to Knight Ridder's Washington chief Clark Hoyt, if we would hear a defense from his estimable Baghdad bureau, or what's left of it, following the death of one of its prize reporters there last month.
The KR response arrived late Wednesday.
But first, a bit more from Mark Yost, writing from the air-conditoned splendor of his office or home in leafy Minnesota.
"I know the reporting's bad because I know people in Iraq," he revealed. "A Marine colonel buddy just finished a stint overseeing the power grid. When's the last time you read a story about the progress being made on the power grid? Or the new desalination plant that just came on-line, or the school that just opened, or the Iraqi policeman who died doing something heroic? No, to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up.
"I also get unfiltered news from Iraq through an e-mail network of military friends who aren't so blinded by their own politics that they can't see the real good we're doing there. ...Why isn't the focus of the story the fact that 14 of 18 Iraqi provinces are stable and the four that aren't are primarily home to the genocidal gang of thugs who terrorized that country for 30 years? And reporters wonder why they're despised."
Now here's the Knight Ridder reply, first from Hoyt, then Baghdad bureau chief Hannah Allam, from a memo sent to KR editors.
***
From Clark Hoyt:
It's astonishing that Mark Yost, from the distance and safety of St. Paul, Minnesota, presumes to know what's going on in Iraq. He knows the reporting of hundreds of brave journalists, presumably including his own Knight Ridder colleagues Hannah Allam and Tom Lassetter, is bad because his Marine colonel buddy tells him so.
Yost asks why you don't read about progress being made in the power grid, which the colonel oversaw. Maybe it's because there is no progress. Iraqis currently have electricity for an average of nine hours a day. A year ago, they averaged 10 hours of electricity. Iraq's oil production is still below pre-war levels. The unemployment rate is between 30 and 40 percent. New cases of hepatitis have doubled over the rate of 2002, largely because of problems with getting clean drinking water and disposing of sewage.
The "unfiltered news" Yost gets from his military friends is in fact filtered by their isolation in the Green Zone and on American military bases from the Iraqi population, an isolation made necessary by the ferocity of the insurgency. To say that isn't to argue that their perspective is invalid. It's just limited and incomplete.
Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau chief, Hannah Allam, has read Mark Yost's column. Her response, from the front, says it far better than I could.
***
From Hannah Allam:
It saddens me to read Mark Yost's editorial in the Pioneer Press, the Knight Ridder paper that hired me as a rookie reporter and taught me valuable lessons in life and journalism during the four years I spent there before heading to Iraq.
I invite Mr. Yost to spend a week in our Baghdad bureau, where he can see our Iraqi staff members' toothbrushes lined up in the bathroom because they have no running water at home. I frequently find them camping out in the office overnight because electricity is still only sporadic in their sweltering neighborhoods, despite what I'm sure are the best-intentioned efforts of people like his Marine buddy working on the electrical grid.
Mr. Yost could have come with me today as I visited one of my own military buddies, who like most officers doesn't leave the protected Green Zone compound except by helicopter or massive convoy. The Army official picked me up in his air-conditioned Explorer, took me to Burger King for lunch and showed me photos of the family he misses so terribly. The official is a great guy, and like so many other soldiers, it's not politics that blind him from seeing the real Iraq. The compound's maze of tall blast wall and miles of concertina wire obscure the view, too.
Mr. Yost can listen to our bureau's morning planning meetings, where we orchestrate a trip to buy bottled water (the tap water is contaminated, when it works) as if we're plotting a military operation. I wonder whether he prefers riding in the first car -- the most exposed to shrapnel and bullets -- or the chase car, which is designed to act as a buffer between us and potential kidnappers.
Perhaps Mr. Yost would be moved by our office's tribute wall to Yasser Salihee, our brave and wonderful colleague, who at age 30 joined the ranks of Iraqi civilians shot to death by American soldiers. Mr. Yost would have appreciated one of Yasser's last stories -- a rare good-news piece about humanitarian aid reaching the holy city of Najaf.
Mr. Yost's contention that 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are stable is pure fantasy. On his visit to Baghdhad, he can check that by chatting with our resident British security consultant, who every day receives a province-by-province breakdown of the roadside bombs, ambushes, assassinations and other violence throughout the country.
If Baghdad is too far for Mr. Yost to travel (and I don't blame him, given the treacherous airport road to reach our fortress-like hotel), why not just head to Oklahoma? There, he can meet my former Iraqi translator, Ban Adil, and her young son. They're rebuilding their lives under political asylum after insurgents in Baghdad followed Ban's family home one night and gunned down her 4-year-old daughter, her husband and her elderly mother in law.
Freshly painted schools and a new desalination plant might add up to "mission accomplished" for some people. Too bad Ban's daughter never got to enjoy those fruits of her liberation.
If they were indeed brave they would be doing something instead of sitting around reporting on people who are doing something.
"hundreds of brave journalists
What Crap!
They sit around and copy each others reports, and never go out of the green Zone.
the first Guy ...Yost, Has it right.
and its not just a little paint on the walls of a few Schools ...it is complete remodeling of Dozzens Of schools and many Water treatment plants and the Power is on alot more than 9 hours a day... these Lying Leftist Journalists
include some 1-Camel town in the corner of Iraq and factor in that it only has power for 20 minutes to drag down the Average for the rest of the nation. thats How they work...
Lying and Creating Negative News to add to their already Biased reporting.
They are the Scum of the earth.
The Worlds Media...Lower than Snake crap!
Tell it to the Marines.
Perhaps this anti-American POS could enlighten us on what Mr Salihee, their "brave and wonderful colleague", was doing when he got shot. This article should have a "quagmire alert".
These crapola stories have bee showing up as banner stories in the Colorodo Springs Gazette as well. I dropped my subscription.
I'm in Iraq and I agree with Yost. Those cappuccino-drinking, loafer-wearing, Baghdad Sheraton dwelling reporters can bristle all they want at someone pointing out the obvious distortion techniques they are using while reporting. They're just mad because someone dares to speak the truth.
And this Hoyt guy uses more doom and gloom to defend himself. How gullible does he think people are?? I myself am sick and tired of these weasels' refusal to report the many positive developments and the progress being made.
Their agenda is so transparent.
This bozo insinuates that the US military is to cowardly to leave the green zone, yet he's bashing Yost for his opionions on why Americans hate the media. Hello! Maybe it's because the media accuses the Army of being yellow? Ya think?
Related thread here with the entire content of the letters and links to the original blog sites.
This isn't suprising coming from the Pioneer Press.....this rag is trying to beat the RED STAR in being the most slanted new rag in the Midwest.
He and I went to Grad School together at University of Kansas '88!
More than 1700 US soldiers and about 200 from the other coalition countries have died in Iraq and these reporters have had no qualms with demeaning and insulting them. Who is putting themselves at greater risk and who is doing more to help the people of Iraq?
Clark Hoyt...etc
Sounds to me like someone has struck a nerve.
Mr. Yost could have come with me today as I visited one of my own military buddies, who like most officers doesn't leave the protected Green Zone compound except by helicopter or massive convoy.
There's a term for "officers" like this REMF
They have a way to go.
Editorial: London calling/Terror again on city streets
July 8, 2005
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5495827.html
Poor London: From the ecstatic high of winning a bid for the 2012 Olympics, and besting rival Paris in the process, its residents were plunged overnight to the depths of grief and worry by terrorist attacks that killed more than 40, injured many hundreds and put a serious dent in the transportation system the city depends on to survive and thrive. The shift from the happy faces of Wednesday, with Olympic circles painted on joyful cheeks, to the drawn, bloody and bandaged faces of Thursday was wrenching. As someone said in a recollection of Sept. 11: Today we are all Londoners.
(so far so good, BUT wait for it..)
(snip)
But there are ways to fight it. Some are better than others. Just days ago, Bush said again that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. He asserted that the United States fights terrorists there so it won't have to fight them at home. The London bombings illustrate the fallacy at the heart of that argument: Terrorists aren't a finite army that you can defeat on a battlefield and achieve victory. Ivo Daalder, international security expert at the Brookings Institution, said it well: "Today's terrorists are independent operators, beyond the control of any state. They roam relatively freely around an interconnected world -- striking when they are ready and we least expect it."
Mark Rosenwinkel: Wanted: the truth, not a smokescreen
Mark Rosenwinkel
July 9, 2005
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5497579.html
Rep. John Kline, so eager to convey apparent "truths" about the numerous allegations of abuse at Guantanamo (Commentary, June 27), seems to have forgotten how far from reality his previous statements on military matters have proven to be.
Speaking during a heavily fortified tour of Iraq some time ago, Kline noted great progress being made toward shoring up the country's stability -- and lashed out at media for not portraying the situation in a positive light. In months since, however, we've seen a sharp increase in insurgent attacks, hundreds of military and Iraqi deaths, and little real progress on reconstruction. The situation has deteriorated so much that even members of his own party have become critical.
Kline now continues to lecture us on "truths" as he sees them -- showing more concern over assertions made by the Star Tribune and by Sen. Dick Durbin than over whether the Guantanamo abuse charges have any merit.
Gary Gilson: At last, press starts doing its job White House reporters showed some skepticism and vigor that's been absent for years.
July 14 2005
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5505394.html
At the most raucous White House press briefing in years, the president's spokesman, Scott McClellan, used time-tested techniques to fend off questions about Karl Rove's possible involvement in the outing of a CIA agent.
McClellan kept saying he would not comment in the midst of a federal investigation of the matter, and when pressed by reporter after reporter he kept saying that they all knew him, that they could rely upon him for a comment when the time was right. In other words, he was saying, "I'm a chum."
(snip)
It's time for the tough-minded, experienced and wise heads in journalism to reclaim their franchise and return to their mission in life: asking the hardest questions they can and digging out the truth. That would not only serve the public interest, it would set a great example for less experienced reporters just starting their careers, who may not recognize a bulldog when they see one.
Gary Gilson has been executive director of the Minnesota News Council since 1992.
Editorial: Karl Rove/Real issue is the case for war
July 14 2005
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5505382.html
(snip)
In the meantime, it's important to look beyond the immediate political spectacle in Washington -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan finally confronted by reporters who feel abused and lied to -- to the reason Rove was talking to a reporter about ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson at all.
The real issue, more serious and less glitzy than whether Bush will stand by his political adviser, is the extraordinary efforts the Bush administration made to protect a case for war in Iraq from all contradictory evidence -- in effect, as the British spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove put it, to "fix" the facts and intelligence so they would support a decision already made.
Enter Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction. As Wilson tells it, a question arose at the CIA early in 2002, prompted by an inquiry from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, about reports that Iraq had purchased uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger, where Wilson previously had served. When someone was needed to travel to Niger, Plame apparently told her superiors that her husband had good contacts there. CIA officials talked with Wilson and decided he should be the one to make the trip.
(note: you need to subscribe to read this paper, and they must be excerpted)
"LIBERAL" truth..Yup! It really struck a nerve...
Liberal Translation: "HOW DARE YOU, EXPOSED OUR LIES AND MISINFORMATION ON THE "EVIL" MILITARY/ "ILLEGAL" U.S. PRESIDENT TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE."
"With your column," he declared, "you have spat on the copy of the brave men and women who are doing their best in terrible conditions."
These people make money spitting on our soldiers. Turnabout is fair play. It is very instructive to note how these people see themselves. They live in a fantasy world where they are the heros. "To say that isn't to argue that their perspective is invalid. It's just limited and incomplete."
Refuse to enrich and enable them. DO NOT CONSUME THEIR PRODUCT wherever you can.
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