A Rather Unreliable Media
Dave Price
This is just unbelievable. We've always suspected the MSM was severely biased, but now it appears they have been, for months, relying on a police Captain Jamil Hussein, who is so emphatically not a police captain that tomorrow's Ministry of the Interior press briefing will specifically address the issue.
Remarkably, the good not-Captain has only noticed nonexistent attacks on Sunnis. It's fair to assume he was actually a creation of Sunni insurgent propagandists.
I know this has been well-covered elsewhere, but I felt I'd be remiss not mentioning this travesty again because I can't tell you how deeply this offends me. As someone who tries to draw conclusions about events empirically, I rely on good data to make decisions, and the media's role in a free, rational society is to provide good data. This is an awful abdication of their duty to perform due diligence. How could they fail to exercise skepticism about sectarian claims in the midst of what they are desperate to label a civil war? Isn't this the same media that was in an uproar when the Pentagon was buying space to run true stories to Iraqi newspapers? Did it not occur to them that insurgents in Iraq who have no qualms about sawing people's heads off for dramatic effect probably have few compunctions about feeding the media entirely fabricated propaganda? Or, worse, did they suspect and simply not care?
And when our soldiers, who are dying every day, object, the AP calls them "ludicrous." While we're at war, no less, the press is not only acting as a megaphone for enemy propaganda, but blasting our own military. This scenario is so over-the-top that if you put it in a fictional movie script, they'd call it too unrealistic and paranoid.
Sadly, this incident is probably the very tip of the iceberg. Our media is in a frightening state of echo-chamber-driven self-delusion. Remember folks, Dan Rather still thinks the memos are real.
It's telling that the three best-known names from this war are Jessica Lynch, Lynndie England and most recently Peter Devlin, who are respectively a victim, a thug, and an unwilling, unwitting doomsayer (when the press finished with him).
I don't think the FDR option of threatening the media with government takeover is the answer, but I'm starting to think something has to be done, perhaps allowing the military a much larger budget for public affairs, and civil lawsuits for reports affecting the military situation that are provably false (this might act as a counter to the financial pressure media have to run lurid reports whether or not they are true).
Please, please help support the two Bills in Iraq. They're risking life and limb to bring back the real reporting from Iraq that we so desperately need.
Related Posts (on one page):
- the Associated Press is pro-victory
- A Rather Unreliable Media
And the MSM journalists are so emphatically not reporters. The profession is so irretrievably broken, so incredibly biased and built upon lies that it resembles nothing less than a decentralized version of the Nazi Propaganda machine.
60 years ago so called "journalists" of today would have been tried for treason. Dan Rather and your average AP/al-Reuters "reporter" make Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw look positively quaint in comparison. At least Tokyo Rose had a sexy voice and played good music between her propaganda blasts.
Malignant nihlism is not a political opinion. Unfortunately, it is certainly News.
I think we should be focusing more narrowly on the effects of the sloppy news collection rather than on the motives for it.
I had the same thoughts when I read the post, and, from a practical standpoint, I think you're entirely correct. The most traction is going to be gained by focusing on specific and documentable errors and the quantifiable reasons for those errors, rather than easily brushed aside accusations of enemy propagandism.
But the laziness factor in not doing due diligence on sources of questionable authenticity has sprung on some level out of bias when the sources are telling them what they already believe to be true.
Laziness, small news budgets, and dialectic could inspire any number of storylines in Iraq. The particular storyline chosen by many in the media is indicative of at least the motive to present that particular version of events to the exclusion of all others, and I think Dave P. is right to draw attention to that.
As in Vietnam and the Cold War, the unthinking acceptance of such propaganda by Western media is probably one part laziness, one part avarice, and one part political sympathy. Remember, they have been far more skeptical of our military's reporting. Seymour Hersh is a good example of their attitude.
Like the RatherGate memos, it was too much work to validate, it was a great story, and they wanted to believe.
Anyway, I'm not sure how one would go about measuring the effects of false reporting on something with so many constant ongoing inputs as public opinion. I suppose one could isolate a group of people, tell them this false "burning Sunnis" story, then gauge the effect on their opinion of the war.
Ultimately though, the focus needs to be preventing this sort of malfeasance, whatever the motive or effect.
As MSM organizations continue to lose audience share, I also think it is likely that we will see some shareholder suits alleging violation of fiduciary responsibility: it could be argued that by putting the political agenda of the organizations' executives so high on the priority list that it interferes with credible reporting--and hence damages the brand and drives customers away--the execs in question are in breach of their duty to shareholders. I think the situation would have to be pretty extreme for such a case to succeed, but some of the things going on in the media are trending toward such extremity.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.