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Jayson Blair's World, And Iraq
American Enterprize on Line - Bird's Eye ^ | July/August 2003 | Karl Zinsmeister

Posted on 06/15/2003 6:41:26 AM PDT by yoe

This installment of The American Enterprise is all about poor reporting. Unfortunately, there is enough of it out there that the issue was depressingly easy to put together.

I'm not talking about media lies like those generated by Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was recently discovered to have simply fabricated dozens and dozens of stories, quotes, and facts--without the folks at his august employer ever figuring out that they had a pathological liar writing on their front pages. I'm talking about a much more endemic problem, a more permanent and serious trauma. I'm referring to the mistakes, manipulations, and misimpressions fomented by journalists not out of dishonesty, but out of ignorance, pack thinking, or lack of intellectual diversity in the newsroom.

Many members of the media establishment who read this critique (this is a subject they hate) will be tempted to roll their eyes and pronounce me a member of "the right wing conspiracy" for even giving credence to the idea that we have a problem with media bias in this country. That's how they've treated all who have drawn attention to this subject in the past. Top reporters and editors are an extremely clubby group, and they punish anyone who doesn't close ranks with the club whenever its competence comes into question.

When you are as powerful and unchecked as our major news sources are (72 percent of Americans now say "the news media have too much power and influence in Washington"), and as ideologically unified (a remarkable number come from the same schools, and the same parts of the country; 11 out of 12 national reporters currently vote the same way), then ignoring your critics, or marginalizing them if they somehow manage to get attention anyway, is often a clever defense strategy. But in this case, there is a problem with that course: The American people are on the side of the critics. On the day we sent this issue off to the printer, the editor and managing editor of the New York Times resigned--wounded by the tumbling credibility of that newspaper in the wake of recent reporting scandals. The time for denial of this problem is over.

The credibility of our major media, and public respect for their work, have nose-dived over the last generation. By 58-38 percent, Americans think today's news organizations are more inaccurate than accurate. Back in 1965, that ratio was almost exactly reversed. Only 31 percent of the public now say the news media "help society to solve problems;" fully 58 percent feel reporters "get in the way of society solving problems." Only 30 percent believe news organizations "care about the people they report on;" 55 percent say "they don't care." Just 23 percent of our citizenry say the news media are "willing to admit mistakes;" a troubling 67 percent say our news reporters "try to cover up mistakes."

Asked in late March of this year how much confidence they had "that the press is giving an accurate picture of how the [Iraq] war is going," only 30 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center answered "a great deal of confidence." That is lower than the 40 percent who said they had "a great deal of confidence" that the U.S. military "is giving the public an accurate picture of how the war is going." If the supposedly neutral observers in the press corps are getting much lower marks for objectivity than the special interest whose performance they are examining, the press has a problem.

When survey researchers ask about specific news sources, they find that about one citizen out of four thinks he can believe all or most of what he sees on the major TV news networks today. This is down from as recently as 1996. Only about one out of five citizens gives his newspaper high marks for believability. Magazines like Newsweek and Time score at only 20 percent and 23 percent, respectively, for believability. Among broadcast media, National Public Radio comes in last. One of the ways the public is responding to all of this is by walking away: National TV news viewing fell by nearly half from 1991 to 2002. Newspaper readership tumbled from 54 percent to 41 percent of the public.

Asked whether news organizations are fair in the way they report on specific hot-button controversies, Americans respond by about two to one that the media tend to take sides. The number of citizens who believe the press is "politically biased" continues to rise, and currently stands at six out of ten (including the vast number of Republicans and also a clear majority of Democrats). And these citizens are not imagining things. National reporters admit that they vote for Democrats over Republicans by a ratio of about 12 to one. Sixty-one percent of Washington reporters place themselves on the left of the political spectrum, versus 9 percent who say they are personally on the right.

America's news media are out of balance. Our citizenry objects to this. (For some details, see the data assembled by Karlyn Bowman on pages 60-62.) If newspeople don't start taking today's complaints about poor reporting more seriously, public disaffection will only grow.

Many specific studies have documented today's media spin. An analysis of CBS News transcripts found that in one year of reporting on George W. Bush's proposed tax cut, the number of opponents cited on air outstripped the number of supporters by two to one. Another content analysis of news broadcasts from several TV networks during the period January to April of 2001 found that the environmental reporting on ABC, CBS, and NBC included not a single source who disagreed with claims that global warming is a dire global threat. Similarly, when the U.S. rejected the Kyoto Treaty, 69 percent of air time was given to critics of that decision, versus just 31 percent for supporters.

In the feature section of this magazine we pile up many examples of unfair, twisted, and adversarial reporting (as well as some exemplary good reporting), on subjects ranging from gun ownership, to the sources of local economic growth, to pollution questions. Our first feature article, by Karina Rollins, chronicles some of the many unnecessary errors of fact and interpretation that colored our news during the Iraq war.

One of my own favorite in-stances of war-reporting idiocy was NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten's statement on March 21--exactly one day after troops crossed the Kuwait border into Iraq--that "if the war is still going on a week from now, that will be a bad sign." Priceless. Here is a guy who I'm willing to bet has never won a fistfight, never mind a battle, telling Americans that if it takes more than a week to subdue a nation bigger than the entire northeastern United States, that constitutes failure.

By the end of March, many of Gjelten's fellow lemmings, er, I mean reporters, were following the same defeatist line. On April 1, Robert Wright of the online magazine Slate diagnosed with great authority "the Pentagon's failure to send enough troops to take Baghdad." "As the war drags on," he droned, "as more civilians die and more Iraqis see their resistance hailed across the Arab world as a watershed in the struggle against Western imperialism, the traditionally despised Saddam could gain appreciable support among his people." That same week, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh (who has filed enough false reports and way-off predictions over the years to justify a new Guinness Book entry for unreliability) blubbered that "Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks." Uh, fellas, U.S. forces entered Baghdad on April 5--before many subscribers had even finished reading your gloomy tales.

Around the same time, the BBC aired claims that the U.S. "could take, bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties." Actually, a lot less than 200 U.S. soldiers were killed during combat.

Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin had an interesting idea in mid April. She decided to compare the pessimistic reports published in the liberal press with real-life photos sent back from the front by cameramen. She quotes from the captions on photos from all parts of Iraq. They document Iraqis kissing, waving to, hugging, and giving flowers to American soldiers. The pictures showed that developments weren't nearly so dark as the reporters' words suggested.

The true course of the war--when compared to much of the media analysis that accompanied it--was the story of the dog that didn't bark. "Contrary to the predictions, there were no homeland terrorist attacks, no chemical gassings of the troops, no mass mobilization of Arab killers, no 100-percent-of-the-vote fierce support for Saddam Hussein, no quagmire of unending length, no public-opinion debacle for President Bush, no hopelessly fractured alliances," points out media critic Brent Bozell. "But," he continues, "being a journalist means never having to say you're sorry."

For some journalists, it also means never having to admit you're a nincompoop. Take a whiff of the megalomaniacal egotism in this war-time statement by TV correspondent Peter Arnett:

The first plan has failed...clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I've been there many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces.... But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration.

That's five uses of "I," "me," or "my" in three sentences. Gosh, Peter, I don't know how the boys finally managed to win without you about one week later (after you were fired for an even more tasteless interview aired on Iraqi TV).

Of course, no respectable media outlet should have sent Peter Arnett to the Middle East in the first place--for Arnett has a long history of making false claims and reporting unsupported inflammatory statements. This is the same journalist who back in 1991 peddled Iraqi misinformation about a "milk factory" bombed by Americans, the man who aired a famously false report on CNN claiming the U.S. military had used nerve gas on defectors in Vietnam, who once said he would let G.I.s die rather than reveal enemy plans he discovered as a journalist. Sending Geraldo Rivera to Iraq was a bad idea on the part of the TV fluffernutters. Using the thoroughly discredited Peter Arnett was out-and-out malpractice.

Some of the most overwrought bits of reporting during the Iraq War--subsequently echoed and re-echoed around the globe by pouncing critics--centered on the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. The initial reports that thousands of priceless artifacts had disappeared gushed out when low-level museum employees entered the building after American forces liberated Baghdad, saw empty cabinets and shelves, and shrieked to drama-seeking foreign reporters that all the best pieces were gone.

But the reporting that sparked all this storm and fury was wrong. Completely wrong.

Yes, the cabinets were empty. Because the museum's senior employees had stashed all the really valuable parts of the collection in vaults just as fighting broke out. "We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," explained a museum director.

Alas, only one reporter in Baghdad bothered to check beneath the surface of the juicy treasure-looting story for the real facts--Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal. (More on pp. 24-25.) And by the time Trofimov's revelation was printed on April 17, the reporting frenzy had proceeded so far that the international public had become irrevocably convinced that the national treasures of Iraq had all been hauled off or destroyed by vandals. Even after the facts were in, the media did very little to correct the record. I dare say most readers of this magazine will be learning for the first time that the museum-looting story was almost entirely bogus.

The media were guilty of more than just reporting unchecked information and then rumor-mongering that falsehood into an artificial scandal. Right from the beginning, there was an accusatory tone to much of this reporting. Why were American soldiers blamed because Iraqi yahoos decided to go wilding the day after they threw off Saddam's 30-year yoke?

There was no intelligent differentiation in the reporting between the several varieties of looting: righteously outraged citizens plundering Saddam's palaces and government offices (political behavior); scavenging by desperately poor people long denied life's very basics while the oligarchs among them luxuriated (survival instinct); thefts from museums, libraries, and banks that included some inside jobs carried out by Baath Party bosses with keys; simple criminal activity; and everyday post-Super-Bowl-style anarchy. Worse, in all these cases, media castigation tended to be directed not at the Iraqi perpetrators, but at American troops for "not doing enough" to stop them.

There was much criticism of U.S. officers, by anchormen and sniffing Western curators safely ensconced far from where the bullets were flying, for their "failure" to stop Iraqis from breaking into the national library. But this failure to intervene was no casual dereliction. It was a battlefield decision taken to avoid casualties and the destructive fire of weapons into a sensitive site. Once again, the Wall Street Journal was the only media outlet in Baghdad enterprising enough to discover the truth. As the Journal eventually reported, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division's Task Force 1-64, "whose functions also include feeding the lions in the abandoned Baghdad Zoo next door, couldn't move into the museum compound and protect it from looters because his soldiers were taking fire from the building--and were determined not to respond."

It didn't occur to the people casually excoriating American G.I.s for...........

(Excerpt) Read more at taemag.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bogusreporting; lies; media; mediabias; newspapers; truth
check and double check the media and print news.........
1 posted on 06/15/2003 6:41:26 AM PDT by yoe
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To: yoe
"Among broadcast media, National Public Radio comes in last."

I listen to NPR only to see what the enemy is thinking. I've heard them now actively supporting Islam and Islamist. They had a piece several weeks ago about how Islam=submission and submission was good -- well actually to them it is great.(They interviewed an Egyptian author who wrote 40+ books on Islam - a scholar of the Koran.) "When you submit to Islam and leave the desires of the world you are at peace!"

They loved the eastern European communist now it looks like they love Islamists?? Go Figure??
2 posted on 06/15/2003 8:47:06 AM PDT by BeAllYouCanBe (Maybe this "Army Of One" is a good thing - You Gotta Admire the 3rd Infantry Accomplishments)
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To: BeAllYouCanBe
Here is the authority: Daniel Pipes

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1120

3 posted on 06/15/2003 11:56:54 AM PDT by yoe
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