Carpe Datum

Write What You're Told!

Thanks to Cursor for the pointer to this. Scott Rosenberg had an excellent response to conservative complaints about "liberal" or "anti-Bush" media bias on Iraq:

[Conservative blogger/pundit Glenn Reynolds says,] "It's not the reporting of criticisms or bad things that's the issue... It's the lazy Vietnam-templating, the 'of course America must be losing' spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer, and the relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones that's the issue. It's what the terrorists are counting on, and it's what too many in the media are happy to deliver, because they think it'll hurt Bush."

Notice that an argument that, at bottom, is about demanding that the U.S. media suppress bad news from Iraq has been inverted into an argument that the problem is really with the suppression of positive news (no examples provided). A neat trick.

Let's take it phrase by phrase: "Lazy Vietnam-templating" is not a charge I would level against, say, Max Cleland, who is the most forceful recent applier of the Vietnam analogy and who is far more qualified than I or most other commentators to apply it. If an observer feels that the U.S. is making the same mistakes in Iraq that it made in Vietnam, surely his duty is to speak loudly and try to get the U.S. to change its policies before we lose this war the way we lost Vietnam, and before too many more American servicepeople pay the price of our mistakes. This isn't "lazy ... templating," it's fair debate. So pace Reynolds, arguing that we should not oppose policies that we think will lose the war doesn't help the terrorists, it helps our democracy.

Then there's the reference to "'of course America must be losing' spin." Notice how the entire issue of whether the U.S. is winning or losing is bypassed, and the possibility that some of us actually feel the U.S., following the current botched Bush policies, is losing is reduced to a matter of "spin." But what if it's not spin? What if you're a journalist on the scene in Iraq and what your eyes and ears tell you is that the U.S. is losing? According to the Jim Marshall/Glenn Reynolds argument, are you supposed to just shut up? [...]

Personally, I wish the news from Iraq were better. I wish the killing would stop, and Iraq would quickly become a beacon of light and democracy to the Middle East, as the cakewalk-neocons promised us. But that isn't what's happening. And since it's clear President Bush is not going to change his policies in order to win the international cooperation that this nation-building project was always going to require, a patriotic American who believes we are on the wrong path has no choice but to say, "Bush is the problem." If he can't figure out that his policy is a disaster and we need to change course, the only way to get the U.S. -- and Iraq -- back on track is to change presidents.

Reynolds suggests that people like me are focusing on the bad news from Iraq in order to "hurt Bush." That's backwards. I want to "hurt Bush" (note to FBI: I mean politically "hurt" -- "hurt" meaning see him lose elections) in order to improve the news from Iraq.

Now for me personally, I have a hard time buying a media bias after the travesty of reporting by people like Judith Miller and other major media outlets leading up to the war (not the mention the million other examples I've pointed out in the past). Not only did they actively spread what we now know is a bunch of crap about all the WMD that Saddam had, they also failed to quash the Bushco disinformation campaign that had Saddam himself basically giving the orders for the planes to fly into the towers.

So to come out *NOW* and start bellyachin' that not everything in the press is coming up roses in Iraq. I mean, I'm sorry, but it just shows how empty the whole "liberal media" argument is, because it is trotted out EVERY SINGLE TIME a negative story appears. It brings to mind the old "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" argument.