FOREIGN POLICY: Are Americans getting an accurate picture of what’s going on in Iraq?
Rod Nordland: It’s a lot worse over here [in Iraq] than is reported. The administration does a great job of managing the news. Just an example: There was a press conference here about [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi’s death, and somebody asked what role [U.S.] Special Forces played in finding Zarqawi. [The official] either denied any role or didn’t answer the question. Somebody pointed out that the president, half an hour earlier, had already acknowledged and thanked the Special Forces for their involvement. They are just not giving very much information here.
That's the thing here that the "good news" ninnies aren't getting through their thick skulls -- it's not that conditions are actually better than the media portrays them. The media is holding out on us, but in the opposite direction, because of military coercion. This should have been obvious a long time ago to any dispassionate observer.
FP: The Bush administration often complains that the reporting out of Iraq is too negative, yet you say they are managing the news. What’s the real story?
RN: You can only manage the news to a certain degree. It is certainly hard to hide the fact that in the third year of this war, Iraqis are only getting electricity for about 5 to 10 percent of the day. Living conditions have gotten so much worse, violence is at an even higher tempo, and the country is on the verge of civil war. The administration has been successful to the extent that most Americans are not aware of just how dire it is and how little progress has been made. They keep talking about how the Iraqi army is doing much better and taking over responsibilities, but for the most part that’s not true.
I can't find the exact link right this second, but I linked a piece on a chat with Nordland before, probably in February or March of '05. The guy is not exactly Cindy Sheehan; in the chat he dispensed with goofballs from either fringe rather abruptly. So his admonitions should be taken quite seriously; he's not grinding an anti-Bush axe.
The fact of the matter is that, despite empty proclamations as to improvements in 14 of the provinces, most Iraqis live in the rest of the provinces. Over a quarter of all Iraqis live in Baghdad alone. And those people have no semblance of a normal life -- almost no electricity in scorching heat, no jobs, no water, no foreseeable future, violence every day. How much has that been reported on by the treacherous liberal media, given the sheer proportion of all those things? Check out the entire interview with Nordland, it's very interesting and informative, two things which are in short supply with the MSM these days.
Harper's not only links to the FP piece with Nordland, but bolsters his assertions about military control of what the media can and can't do:
Many embedded reporters have managed to do fine work from Iraq, but there are significant obstacles for even the best and most determined journalists. I recently spoke with a former senior TV producer for Reuters who worked in Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The producer, who asked that she not be identified by name, arrived in Tikrit soon after the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, and was embedded with American troops for 45 days. She told me that, over the years, she has worked closely with the French army, NATO troops in the Balkans, and UN peacekeepers in covering war and conflict, but she said had never faced the sorts of restrictions imposed by the Pentagon on journalists in Iraq. “I was,” she said, “a mouthpiece for the American military.”
In Tikrit, she was based with U.S. troops at a military compound established at one of Saddam's former palaces, where she provided pool coverage for Reuters TV and AP TV (which was fed to other media outlets). When insurgents attacked civilians, she told me, the American military would rush her to the scene so she could record the carnage and get shots of grieving Iraqis.
When it came to other stories that were clearly sympathetic to the U.S. side, such as funerals for American soldiers killed in combat, the U.S. military was extremely helpful—indeed, encouraging. In such cases, she was granted full access and allowed to film speeches by officials honoring the dead, the posthumous awarding of medals, and other aspects of the ceremony.
But when this producer wanted to pursue a story that might have cast the war effort in an unfavorable light, the situation was entirely different. Every few days, she said, she would receive a call from the Reuters bureau in Baghdad and discover that reporters there had heard, via local news reports or from the bureau's network of Iraqi sources, about civilians being killed or injured by American troops. But when she asked to leave the compound to independently confirm such incidents, her requests were invariably turned down.
Well, of course she was turned down, and no doubt the "good news" claque expects and requires no less. But they should also take to heart what CBS reporter Lara Logan, who has been over in Iraq for quite some time now, had to say about reporting on infrastructural improvements:
Logan said she sympathizes with the feeling among individuals involved in those type of improvements that they are seeing a different picture but insists that is an isolated view that ignores the bigger picture. She says new schools, water projects and sewer improvements so far represent “a fraction” of what is needed. Looking back to her recent trip to Ramadi to report on the violence in that city, Logan pointed to the fact that she found herself on patrol in the streets, “wading knee-deep in human waste.”
In a CNN clip from about that time, Logan also alluded to the problem of insurgents going out of their way to destroy new improvements, thus obviating the utility of reporting about them. In fact, she said that there had been instances where military personnel had specifically asked her not to report improvements, for fear of subsequent attack.
But let's be realistic about this "good news" meme -- it emanates from a demographic that doesn't really want actual news anyway. They are the people Stephen Colbert lampoons; they want "truth" (or truthiness) rather than facts. They don't think critically, nor do they have any real intellectual honesty, so facts are useless to them; they don't know how to process them.
What they seek is affirmation of their stated (if not actually practiced) convictions and "values", and when facts get in the way of all that, well, rather than examine their convictions and values and their relationship to those things, they'd rather just dispense with the facts and insist on the "truth". And that is where people in the media need to really make a decision as to whether they want to be journalists or news-readers, fact-finders or water-carriers.
Because as this lunatic fringe of truthiness clashes more and more with the reality of things, they really don't learn, they just react. I think the rhetorical talk-screamer exhortations to violence are just the beginning of a rather troublesome trend in the more ignorant quadrants of the (dis)infosphere. I think that while a blowhard like Melanie Morgan may have just been more or less talking out of her ass when she opined that Bill Keller should be gassed (or murdered by victims' families) for compiling and printing public knowledge, she and her fellow professional screamers overestimate their audiences.
Since much of the appeal of these nasty little shits depends on pushing psychological buttons, exploiting and conflating nationalist hysteria with deep-rooted inferiority complexes and projecting them, the audience is self-selecting. They jump from Limbaugh to Hannity to Savage to Malkin to Morgan, and it's a toxic feedback loop. They already have little jokey-joke t-shirts that suggest lynching journalists who dare report on various and sundry episodes of Chimpco's little fiasco, aka The Great War Between Absolute Divine Perfection And Ineffable Unholy Eeeeevil. All it takes is one moron who takes the feedback loop just a little bit too seriously, and you have yourself a whole new dynamic.
I don't know if Michelle Malkin or Melanie Morgan really want to get someone killed with their snide little comments and "outings"; having some experience dealing with some of these people I suspect at least some of it is on the same level as professional wrestling. They get paid to scream because lots of yahoos enjoy the (heretofore) verbal bloodsport. But I think many segments of their audiences take these things more seriously than the professional yellers realize, and they are flirting with some potentially very dangerous and very irresponsible people.
And even if the SCLM gave them what they think they want, even if they ran wall-to-wall coverage of repainted schools and fluffy kittens, their rageaholia just moves them on to other imagined treacheries. They're spiritual vampires, projecting their own ignorance and despair and feeding off of it.
Still rarely comment here, but I stop by regularly to take in your your excellence.
ReplyDeleteYou've outdone yourself with this one H - every word stunning perfection.
(off to pimp you)
- Sharkbabe