"It's our fault."
I briefly posted blogger Jeff Jarvis's appearance on CNN last Friday night. Jeff joined host Aaron Brown and commentator Jeff Greenfield in critiquing Michael Moore's demogogue movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. (He sliced it up pretty well.)

Jeff was a mainline media figure long before he started blogging, whose media notches include creating Entertainment Weekly and Sunday editor of the New York Daily News.

Having read Jeff's work since I began blogging almost 2½ years ago, I know that Jeff is a man of integrity with a self-critical, analytical mind. I have not always agreed with his stance on certain issues, such as firearms rights, but his voice is one that should be taken seriously, for he is a serious, sober man.

That's why his post today, "Extremism," while brief is also powerful. He starts by citing an email he received after the CNN segment, which said in part, "I am much more afraid of Bush, Ashcroft, and the rest, then [sic] I am of any terrorists."

Says Jeff,

Now that is truly frightening. This man -- a guy named Robert who lives in Moscow, ID (supply your own irony) -- truly believes that his enemies are his fellow citizens and his President, not the terrorists who murdered 3,000 of my neighbors before my eyes. ...

It's our fault -- in media and politics -- when we paint America as a nation divided and it's as if we want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is why I have such a problem with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11: It seeks to divide.

It demonizes. And it picks the wrong demons. It's us vs. them, but the them is us.

I hated it when the right wing demonized Bill Clinton. So, you know what? That pretty much makes me honor-bound to hate it when the left wing demonizes George Bush. For I do not believe that the half of America that elected the one is evil while the half that elected the other is angelic.

I can't stand Michael Moore for looking at America as inspiration for leftist invective just as I can't stand Rush Limbaugh for looking at America and spewing his right-wing rants.

I hate it when my colleagues in media talk about how we all hate each other when I see absolutely no reporting that backs that up; I can't stand being turned into a one-dimensional fool by my own business.

Am I going to light a candle and ask, "Can't we all get along?" No. The issue isn't us. The issue is how we are portrayed by politicians, political activists, and media. They're wrong about America.

Wrong? Yes, not only about America but Iraq as well. This piece by US Marine Eric Johnson sheds much light on media bias, this time by the Washington Post. Johnson names Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the paper's Baghdad bureau chief, as a man who would be comical if the stakes were not so high.

Before major combat operations were over [last year], Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the American operation a failure. Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don’t know what they’re doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.

Another example - the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraq yesterday, two days before the scheduled date, somehow reminded MSNBC's Keith Olbermann of the near-panicked helicopter evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon as North Vietnamese tanks and soldiers closed in. Speaking to guest Robin Wright, a WaPo reporter, Olbermann said,

Tapping into your story in the "Post" today, does anybody fear that in Iraq, where symbolism is so important, or throughout the Middle East where it‘s so important, that the nature of the handover today, just the behind the doors kind of thing, I mean, immediate exit of Ambassador Bremer today, might look a little bit like the helicopters taking out—off out of Vietnam in 1975. Would there be Iraqi democrats or Iraqi insurgents who might see it that way?

Wright rejected the comparison, but the piece Olbermann referred to was an analysis piece published Monday called, "Iraq Occupation Erodes Bush Doctrine." Judge for yourself whether it is a balanced account of the subject. I think not, but as the piece points out,

The administration would not make a senior official or spokesman available for quotation by name to support its policy. But top administration officials insist the Iraq experience has not invalidated Bush doctrine, and they contend its basic principles will endure beyond the Bush presidency.

So at least some of the "anti" slant in the piece may be from a hole the administration left unfilled. As I have said before, this administration's public communications expertise doesn't impress.

Even so, the accusation of bias is not one the media can duck by pointing out, however accurately, that the administration communicates poorly. As Eric Johnson described from first-hand experience, on-the-scene reporting is so badly done that the kindest accusation one can make is journalistic incompetence.

[WaPo reporter] Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Al Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers, and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.

"The Untouchable 'Mayor' of Kut," his article's headline blared the next day. It described a local, Iranian-backed troublemaker named Abbas Fadhil, who was squatting in the provincial government headquarters. He had gathered a mob of people with nothing better to do, told them to camp out in the headquarters compound, and there they sat, defying the Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

Except that Fadhil "controlled" a single neighborhood and the Marines knew that the entire rest of the city were contemptuous of him. No matter, the story's conclusion had already been written and facts that could have been easily obtained could not be allowed to stand in the way.

The there was the infamous report by the Daily Telegraph's correspondent Toby Harnden:

... I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.

She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now - there was no choice about this - going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script - no WMD, no 'mminent threat'(though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.

But then she came to the point. Not only had she 'known' the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the 'evil' George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. 'Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.' Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry's poll numbers. 'Well, that’s different - that would be Americans,' she said, haltingly. 'I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.' That’s one way of putting it.

But not just Iraq policy gets the slant. Mickey Kaus reports today,

Soxblog notes that a month ago, the CBS poll had Kerry up by 8 in a head to head with Bush (and up 6 with Nader in the race). This month, the NYT/CBS poll showed Kerry's lead had dropped to a single point in the head-to-head, and Bush was actually winning by a point with Nader included. Kerry dropped seven points in a month. [emphasis original ] So what do the Times' Nagourney and Elder lead their story with?

Bush's Rating Falls to Its Lowest Point, New Survey Finds

You don't find out until paragraph 11 that the candidates are essentially tied, and only in the 13th graf do Nagourney and Elder slip in the previous months poll results - without pointing out to readers the decline in Kerry's lead. ...

Now it is true that many media outlets and their reporters are trying to get the facts straight, ensure their news reporting is straightforward, and keep personal views out of the stories. The problem is that they are badly overwhelmed by the majors, which don't. As Fred Barnes once observed, "The media can't tell you what to think, but it can tell you what to think about." Hence, what stories the major media choose to cover, to what extent and in what way shapes the debate for the rest, and then for you and me. And it's not shaping up too well.

by Donald Sensing, 6/29/2004 07:51:23 PM. Permalink |