Along the Tracks has 20 questions the media aren't asking about Iraq, but ought to be.
But of course, how can they answer them when, according to a recent congressional delegation, there are only a couple of dozen American reporters in the entire country, all of them holed up in a hotel in Baghdad and who apparently see their entire jobs as consisting of reporting our very light casualty figures as earth-shattering disasters that threaten our efforts.
By any rational person's standards, most of the evidence we've seen is that Iraq is going amazingly, fantastically well, better than any rational person would have hoped for before the war began. The media keep giving us nothing but casualty figures--which are extraordinarily light by any historical measure, but pumped up as if they are horrifyingly huge--and not doing anything else in the country.
It's to the point where even Democratic congressmen are saying that this irresponsible media coverage is killing our troops, by simultaneously demoralizing them and emboldening the dwindling enemies they face.
Think I'm alone in my criticism? Try reading this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.
That's just for starters. I could keep going.
I suppose Democrats can hardly be blamed for jumping all over the President, claiming he "had no plan" for post-invasion Iraq. Even though many of them know that's a bald-faced lie, it's easy for them to rationalize when it looks like the plans the administration laid out are failing--even though they aren't. They can also hardly be blamed for claiming we have flubbed the greatest military victory in human history, with an astonishingly low number of civilian and military casualties, and even though our occupation has suffered extremely tiny numbers of casualties and has racked up impressive victory after impressive victory against dwindling guerilla forces. Even though the vast majority of Iraqis are known to be either friendly to the Americans or, at worst, mistrustful but cautiously optimistic. Because the media's doing such a piss-poor job at its job, it's easy for Democrats to smell blood and act like the political animals they are.
Why aren't reporters doing their jobs, and instead giving people at home an impression of what's going on over there that's directly counter to reality? Failure to go out and act like real journalists threatens the future of Iraq, to waste the lives of American GIs who've fallen, to embolden our enemies, and to cause pointless disunity at home, when we could be arguing about far more pressing and important issues.
Is that what they want? Or is it about time that they start really doing their jobs for once?
(By the way, I got 2/3rds of the above links from Instapundit, who's been doing fabulous work on noting the horribly irresponsible job the press has been doing in Iraq over the last few weeks.)
In a microcosm:
"The CPA press operation is sometimes even hostile to reporters who do their job. When an L.A. Times reporter dutifully covered the new trash service in Baghdad, she found that many of the crews working in the 120 degree heat included children well under the minimum age of 15. Worse, half their $3 a day pay was being demanded by trash bosses as a kick back for being allowed to work. It wasn't one truck either. She found the same situation on four trucks, and Iraqis were eager to talk to her about it. Rather than being thanked by the CPA for revealing the corruption so they might correct it, the reporter was told by a press officer they were considering not giving her a promised exclusive interview with water engineers 'because of what she did to the trash story.'"
A really good story on trying to report in Iraq, and why the CPA may be hindering its own effort to accomplish what Dean is suggesting (click on my name to access the article).
To quote one of his links (the NYU journalism review): "I don’t think the press is too negative. But it is at times too unimaginative to tell me what's going on."
Additionally, the press being negative in its coverage does not automatically mean, by implication, that there was sufficient reconstruction planning. The fact that there wasn't is a matter of little debate.
Type "'had no plan' reconstruction Iraq" into your friendly local search engine for contemporaneous run-downs of that issue.
Dean,
Before awarding all responsibility to the reporters in Iraq for misrepresenting the apparent actual situation (apparent from non journalist sources for the main part), it might be useful to reflect on the responsibilities of their editors. We simply don't know how many "good" news stories have been spiked nor do we know whether any good news stories have been solicited by editors. We only know what the editors (and managing directors of news shows) have allowed to reach print and screen. Considering the positions of authority held by editors and managing directors it is probable that it would be better to direct our ire (and questions) to them.
Those twenty questions are great. Directing them via email to editors and managing directors might prove useful (although I doubt it).
Blaming the entire problem of negative reporting on the fact that one reporter found something negative in one positive story and CPA got upset about it is a pretty shallow excuse. "CPA was mean to me because I found something they didn't like, therefore I'll never report anything good again!"
Feh.
As for the notion that there was "no plan" -- When critics say there were "no plans," what they really mean is that there were no detailed step-by-step, thousand-plus-page plans in place. Which contemporaneous accounts also often pointed out, correctly, would have been impossible to construct anyway.
I've posted about the plans, and will do so again, but anyone who digs deep and avoids politically-spun sites can find contemporaneous accounts of what the plans were--and can see how those plans are still being followed now. The "no plan" meme is bunk.
Oh, you're right about that, RDB. Blame would fall mostly to the editors, in fact. If they're content to let a couple of dozen reporters handle the whole country, to let those reporters do little more than report casualty figures from within the confines of Baghdad, what should we expect to get?
Oh, but RDB? Look more carefully at all of those articles I linked. Many are by Iraqis, or are detailed reports of the actual attitude of everyday Iraqis, or are from people serving in Iraq. I linked as few opinion pieces as possible, and the ones I did still contain hard, objective data.
Dean,
Sorry for not being clear, I do consider the first hand reports from non-journalist to be valid. I used apparent in its positive sense not in any pejorative sense.
I also believe that if the US reporters in country were told to balance their reporting (even on a 3 bad 1 good basis) - they would do so. Editors and managing directors can focus any reporters attention very quickly. Baghdad my way or Tierra del Fuego your way would be a line of reasoning that even I could follow.
The fact that we see so little positive reporting from Iraq might be indicative of some type of attidudinal disposition on the part of newsrooms and news studios. I am certainly reassured by nearly everthing that I read that Fox is the only network, the Washington Times the only newspaper and NRO the only magazine that has a detectable bias to its reportage and commentary.
RDB,
Its true that Fox, the Washington Times and NRO have a detectable bias...they are on our side. They are, in the end, refusing to be unbiased between the fire and the fire-brigade. Personally, I don't see whats wrong with this attitude - NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times all make their money off of the United States of America...they are staffed by Americans and their product is almost exclusively consumed by Americans. Its time they got on the right side of the river.
Honest criticism is fine and dandy, but the attitude of any American vis a vis any foreigner should be one of given the benefit of the doubt to fellow Americans.
Now, who's bitching about the American prescence in Iraq? Saddamites, al-Quedists and other terrorists, the French....they might, somewhere in there, have a point...but unless they can come up with "stand up in court" evidence of American wrongdoing, then I'm going with the Department of Defense, L Paul Bremer and the United States government on this one....
Mark,
You made need an iron(y) supplement.
Police pay has gone up from less than $50 a week to more than $200 a week (or something like that), and the Administration had no plan. Give me a break.
You think maybe it was a mistake to dis-embed the press after Iraq fell?
I'm just saying.
Ara:
You think maybe it was a mistake to dis-embed the press after Iraq fell?
Yup. Although that, too, was a press decision, not a military one, so it only adds to the press's PR woes.
RDB,
That occured to me right after I hit "post"...ah, well, its not the first (nor the last) time I shall be caught short...If I were perfect, it'd just be all too much....
Got this from Romulas at http://www.asininity.com/ about Bernard Kerik back from setting Iraq poice.
After reading this -- how in the world, with NO PLAN, did we end up with Bernard Kerik in so early, and was working to set up these police units? He had to be in on this from day one, to get there, organize and move! No plan? Seems Bernie had one, early.
Don't know about you, I'm a real media, news stuff junkie, and somehow, the fact that he was there, flew under the radar, till he was almost ready to come home! Job well done.
Here's the words from the man that was there.....
Bernard Kerik gives a cop's eye view of the situation in Iraq:
To those who claim that we're not doing enough, fast enough, it helps to put matters in perspective. We're doing a hard job to the best of our abilities, in postwar circumstances, with really scarce resources and a clock ticking above our heads. In my four months there, I oversaw the setting up of 35 police stations in Baghdad. Try setting up 35 stations in New York in four months!
New Yorkers will remember that it took the Giuliani administration eight years to create the safest large city in the world and that was with every resource under the sun. Five months ago in Iraq, we adopted a country of 24 million, with no electricity, water, technology, Internet, telephones or radio communications, etc. There was nothing, and yet the critics are saying that it's taking too long. One would think that they themselves have the answer, or the magic pill that will fix it all, but unfortunately, there isn't one! It's always easier to criticize--as some Congressional delegations in Iraq are prone to do--when you have no operational involvement, insight, authority or responsibility.
Read this, too... ;)
http://www.thiefsden.net/archives/000067.html
I hope that by acknowledging what political animals Democrats are, you aren't denying what political animals Republicans are. This is politics.
I'm sure Bush really did have a plan for post-Saddam Iraq. Whether that plan included humanitarian considerations is another matter.
, :)Great literature and big content to find another information