EXPOSE THE MEDIA

[michelle]

July 11, 2008
Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?
Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise
By Bill Moyers

Without a free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.

I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before my family moved to Texas. A tribal elder was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf won?”

The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.”

Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And in our society, media provides the fodder.

Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.

Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.

These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.

Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.

Let’s look at what is happening with the Internet. This spring the cable giant Comcast tried to pack a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing on network neutrality by hiring strangers off the street to ensure that advocates of net neutrality would not be able to get a seat in the hearing room.

SaveTheInternet.com — a bipartisan coalition — and its supporters helped expose the ruse. Soon after, there was a new hearing, this time without the gerrymandering seating by opponents of an open Internet.

Now Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to advance network neutrality, and it has become an issue in the presidential campaign.

We must be vigilant. The fate of the cyber-commons — the future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as open architecture — is up for grabs. And the only antidote to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots.

When Verizon tried to censor NARAL’s (National Abortion Rights Action League) use of text messaging last year, it was quick action by Save the Internet that led the company to reverse its position. Those efforts also led to an FCC proceeding on this issue.

Wherever the Internet flows — on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new digital television sets — we must ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium of expression.

By 2011, the market analysts tell us, the Internet will surpass newspapers in advertising revenues. With MySpace and Dow Jones controlled by News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft determined to acquire Yahoo!, and with advertisers already telling some bloggers, “Your content is unacceptable,” we could potentially lose what’s now considered an unstoppable long tail of content offering abundant, new, credible and sustainable sources of news and information.

So, what will happen to news in the future, as the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package?

Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it “communitainment.” (Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)

Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.

Mergers and buyouts change both old and new media. They bring a frenzied focus on cost-cutting, while fattening the pockets of the new owners and their investors. The result: journalism is degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of legions of reporters and editors.

Advertising Age reports that U.S. media employment has fallen to a 15-year low. The Los Angeles Times alone has experienced a withering series of resignations by editors who refused to turn a red pencil into an editorial scalpel.

The new owner of the Tribune Company, real estate mogul Sam Zell, recently toured his new property Los Angeles Times, telling employees in the newsroom that the challenge is this: How do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up? “Well,” said Zell, “I’m your Viagra.”

He told his journalists that he didn’t have an editorial agenda or a perspective about newspapers’ roles as civic institutions. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “All what matters in the end is the bottom line.”

Zell then told Wall Street analysts that to save money he intends to eliminate 500 pages of news a week across all of the Tribune Company’s 12 papers. That can mean eliminating some 82 editorial pages every week just from the Los Angeles Times. What will he use to replace reporters and editors? He says to the Wall Street analysts, “I’ll use maps, graphics, lists, rankings and stats.” Sounds as if Zell has confused Viagra with Lunesta.

Former Baltimore Sun journalist and creator of HBO’s The Wire, David Simon, chronicled the effect that crosscutting and consolidation has had in media businesses and on the communities where those businesses have made so much money. He wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “I did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after buyout.”

Or as journalist Eric Alterman recently wrote in the New Yorker: “It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.”

For example, we needed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in the American economy and infrastructure.

But as reporters at Knight Ridder — one of the few organizations that systematically and independently set out to challenge the claims of the administration — told us at the time, and as my colleagues and I reported in our PBS documentary Buying the War, and as Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed in June, the Bush administration deceived Americans into supporting an unprovoked war on another country. And it did so using erroneous and misleading intelligence — and with the complicity of the dominant media. It has led to a conflict that, instead of being over quickly and bloodlessly as predicted, continues to this day into its sixth year.

We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts, self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign policy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to show, when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.

The dominant media remains in denial about their role in passing on the government’s unverified claims as facts. That’s the great danger. It’s not simply that they dominate the story we tell ourselves publicly every day. It’s that they don’t allow other alternative competing narratives to emerge, against which the people could measure the veracity of all the claims.

Now the dominant media is saying, “Well, we did ask. We did do our job by asking tough questions during the run-up to the war.”

But I’ve been through the transcripts. And I’ll tell you, you will find very few tough questions. And if you come across them, you will discover that they were asked of the wrong people.

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, recently said of his colleagues in the dominant media, “They asked a lot of questions, but they asked even the right questions of the wrong people.” They were asked of the sources who had cooked the intelligence books in the first place or who had memorized the White House talking points and were prepared to answer every tough question with a soft evasion or an easy lie, swallowed by a gullible questioner.

Following the March 2003 invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped into a media dinner to thank the guests for their all-the-war-all-the-time coverage of the contrived and manufactured war.

Sadly, in many respects, the Fourth Estate has become the fifth column of democracy, colluding with the powers that be in a culture of deception that subverts the thing most necessary to freedom, and that is the truth.

But we’re not alone and we know what we need to say. So let us all go tell it on the mountains and in the cities. From our websites and laptops, the street corners and coffeehouses, the delis and diners, the factory floors and the bookstores. On campus, at the mall, the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque, let’s tell it where we can, when we can and while we still can.

Democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.

This article was adapted from Bill Moyers’ keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform Conference in Minneapolis on June 7. You can read and respond to the full speech at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Bill Moyers is the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

Source:
www.inthesetimes.com/article/3790/is_the_fourth_estate_a_fifth_column/

[michelle]

Reuters caught with 'fake' pictures from Georgia --
Media war against Russia 10 Aug 2008

Reuters agency posted horrible pictures of Russian bombardments of allegedly civilian residential buildings. But what if you take a closer look? [See: A Georgian man cries next to his brother's body in the town of Gori, 80 km (50 miles) from Tbilisi, August 9, 2008. REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili. Here he is again, alone still with some clothes on, or may be he got changed. The man in the checkered shirt keeps returning!]

Well, well, well, just goes to show you that nothing is as it appears....Gosh, the PTBs are getting sloppy; maybe it's all the pressure on them now, or fighting amongst different fractions...who cares anyway....It's just great to see someone caught fudging pictures...Michelle

Media war against Russia
Aug. 10th, 2008 at 9:42 AM

In the modern world you cant wage a war just with your tanks and planes.
You have to use media. In Germany during WWII they would say "Truth is not what happened, truth is what we tell people".
Yesterday Russian military aircrafts bombed several Georgian military bases. It worth mentioning that military men are located in the a five-storied buildings which look exactly alike residential. The reason for this is simple, they were built in the Soviet Union times and there was not much diversity in architecture.

This morning (its 7 a.m. Moscow time right now) one can read on the BBC news site. Russia deaf to Western voices, Reuters agency posts a horrible pictures of Russian bombardments of allegedly civilian residential buildings. But what if you take a closer look?

Warning: the pictures contain scenes with blood and allegedly injured people.

For instance on this picture you can see one obviously dead body of a person in a checkered shirt. The other body is carried by medics, carried as if it was a dead body, but you can notice that the hand of a person is holding a woman medic's sleeve. Well so far everything looks pretty real, except maybe for one guy in black who doesn't look anyhow concerned.
CLIP
See/Read more:
russia-insider.livejournal.com/25329.html

[michelle]

How I appreciate David Michael Green's brand of journalism! I never need to introduce his articles; he does a fine job of it himself....M:

Greetings, Good People –

I hope this message finds you well, happy and productive!

So, eight years later and I guess I’ve finally made peace with the fact that there is nothing conceivable that the current president of the United States won’t say to advance his personal interests. Even now, as he goes out the door making up complete fabrications about his presidency, I can’t be too shocked. But I’ve still never gotten used to a press corps that is impossibly obsequious, and remains so today, even when dealing with the lamest of lame ducks. When Bush floats another whopper, would it be too much for them just to say, “Uh, Mr. President, that’s not what really happened…”. Tragically for all of us, evidently it would. Grimace along with me in:

Tales From The Planet Bizarre, Episode 473:
Still Lying, Still Allowed To Lie
12/14/2008 5:52:04 PM Eastern Standard Time
David Michael Green

I’m sorry, but there are moments when I just feel like a total alien who stumbled onto some planet full of bizarre life forms. They call this place America, and it sure is weird. And, lemme tell ya, I know what I’m talking about here. I’ve visited some pretty weird places in this part of the universe.

Try this on for size as an example. You might think that a president who is widely known for lying, who leads a party also known for the same, who is at the end of his term and virtually without any punitive power worth speaking of, and who is widely despised at home and abroad – you might think such a president would get a serious grilling when sitting down with the American media for an exit interview. And, even if that might seem like a giant leap for some, perhaps you’d at least be surprised if such an individual was allowed to continue to tell revisionist historical lies without being called to account in the slightest for doing so.

Yeah, well, different galaxy, I guess. On Planet America it seems a lot more like it’s still 2002, and a frightened, compliant press is still learning how to embarrass itself by becoming a tool of a massively deceitful White House. Now that it’s almost 2009, they’ve got it down to a science. Only today they don’t even have the pathetic and shamefully flimsy excuse they did back then, in the wake of the 9/11 scare.

So here’s what happens when one of America’s most prominent journalists – Charles Gibson – sits down to interview George W. Bush. Bush, of course isn’t doing the interview because he can’t think of what else to do with himself anymore (although if you ask him what comes next after January 20, that’s pretty much exactly what it looks like). He isn’t just killing time, waiting for Cheney to dream up some other target for the administration’s predatory instincts. He’s got an agenda, which is why he’s been granting a plethora of (safe) interviews lately. And that agenda is to write the first draft of history. Just like Jackie did her Camelot rap, successfully constructing the frame through which the Kennedy administration would long be seen, so a ham-fisted Burt and Ernie – er, sorry, George and Laura – are running around trying to rehabilitate, for the sake of history, the worst presidency ever.

According to the Washington Post, this is the implementation of a strategy put together at a White House meeting two months ago, where it was decided that administration officials should reiterate key talking points in their speeches and interviews. Per a memo obtained by the LA Times, those include pointing out that the president “‘kept the American people safe' after the September 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained 'the honor and the dignity of his office’”. That’s a cute list, isn’t it? In a certain nausea-inducing way. I don’t even know where to get started with that, and it’s probably better for all of us if I don’t. One thing I do have to say, though. Just as in our movie rating system, what passes as the standard for honor and dignity in the White House is so very America. You can murder in cold blood as many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as you need to to get your rocks off, and that’s fine. But if you actually do get your rocks off – literally, the old-fashioned way – you’re considered obscene. Go figure, eh? Like I said, it’s a wacky little planet.

Of course, George W. Bush trying to save his legacy is not, in and of itself, so outlandish. A politician who doesn’t spin is like a conservative who doesn’t lie. It does happen. It has actually been observed in nature. Just not that often. The outlandish part is, first, the magnitude of the tales being told and sold. And, second, that a still obscenely compliant media allows these to be promulgated, without challenge, completely disregarding any notion of fulfilling a public service mandate to actually inform the people, let alone to hold the country’s leaders accountable. What a concept, eh – a critical media and governmental accountability? I guess all that hardball stuff is only for Democrats.

Anyhow, here’s a good example, for starters:

GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn't campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents – one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whatever really happened on 9/11, the very best case scenario one might make is not that this president was unprepared for war, but rather that he was unprepared for defense. That’s unforgivable, and had he been a Democrat who also ignored five-alarm warning bells prior to 9/11, and who spent the entire month prior on vacation after being warned about the danger, he would indeed never have been forgiven, least of all by Mssrs. Bush, Cheney and Rove. And then, of course, there’s the impression that Bush’s response to this question leaves, suggesting that the principal war of his administration – the one in Iraq – was somehow thrust upon him. A real interviewer would never have just let this statement go. This was the ultimate war of choice, conducted for the ultimate of disingenuous reasons.

Here’s another:

GIBSON: Given the fact that you did start campaigning for change, said you were going to change the ways of Washington, do you feel you did in any way? Or did 9/11 really stand in the way of doing it?

BUSH: No, you know – actually, 9/11 unified the country, and that was a moment where Washington decided to work together. I think one of the big disappointments of the presidency has been the fact that the tone in Washington got worse, not better. ... I mean, there were moments of bipartisanship. But the tone was rough. And I was obviously partially responsible because I was the President, although I tried hard not to call people names and bring the office down during my presidency.

Again, this is remarkably disingenuous, all the more so because it feigns humility and quasi-responsibility. Bush may not have called his opponents names, but he sure as hell marginalized them as rarely ever before in history, and he sure as hell polarized the country. If you weren’t with the president, then you were with the terrorists. If you didn’t agree to his invasion of a country that had not a thing to do with 9/11 nor any other justification for attack, then you couldn’t be trusted with America’s national security. Let’s not kid ourselves here, people. There’s no Democratic equivalent to Karl Rove. There’s no liberal guy called The Hammer, like Tom DeLay was for the GOP. No Democrat ever ran an ad morphing the face of a triple-amputee Republican Vietnam vet into that of Osama bin Laden. True, damn few Republicans – the folks who are so keen on maintaining American security, remember – actually made it over to the jungles of Southeast Asia forty years ago, but that ain’t why ads like those used against Max Cleland in 2002 were never used against the right. It’s a matter of integrity, and there was rarely an occasion when the Bush administration showed any of it. Moreover, Charles Gibson knows that.

But the greatest crime of the Bush administration, of course, was always Iraq, and it is here that the abomination-in-chief lies the most egregiously and the most shamefully. And it is here where he is given the greatest free pass by the media:

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don't know – the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.

BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

This astonishing little dialogue packs more deceit, and more permission to engage in deceit, into one passage than any ‘blivet’ (ten pounds of bullshit in a five pound bag) I’ve ever seen. Or a thousand blivets. Stacked in a manure warehouse. In the Republic of Crap. On the planet Turd. What an amazing string of lies. And all of it unanswered.

It starts with the intelligence “failure”, which was no failure at all. Is this 2008 – nearly 2009 – or am I stuck in some sort of time warp here? With all that has been revealed about the lies that were lied, the omissions omitted, and the exaggerations exaggerated, do we still live in a country where the president can continue to tell this tall tale yet again? Is it really possible that a journalist would let such an absurd claim go unchallenged still to this day? Can we really continue to allow this rogue president to surround himself in exonerating complicity, pretending that everyone had the same intelligence reports that he did? And, even more ridiculously, that they all concurred that war was the preferred option at that point? Is that why the Bush administration couldn’t get even half the votes it needed at the United Nations for a war resolution? Even after beating Security Council member-states over the head with skyscraper-sized sticks? Even after offering them more carrots than in all of Bunny Heaven?

It gets worse. To claim that Saddam was unwilling to let the weapons inspectors in is just a sickening and complete inversion of the truth, a full 180 degrees. The inspectors were, of course, absolutely in Iraq. Indeed, not only were they there, they were begging the United States government to tell them where the WMD could be found, an obvious thing to do given that the Bush administration was running around telling the world that it not only knew for sure there were WMD, but even knew where the weapons were located. This is the most massive lie. And, of course, it comes with other cool benefits as well. If you’re already lying in claiming that the inspectors were refused entry, you no longer have to overtly lie about how they left. If they were never there, they could never have been forced to leave in order to avoid being obliterated by Bush’s bomber squadrons. Nor, if they had never been there carrying out most of their inspections, could they ever have begged for just a few more weeks to finish their work. Doesn’t it all just fit together nicely?

And where, exactly was Charles Gibson, so-called ‘journalist’, throughout all this? Is this really what it means to be at the top of this profession? That you allow those whom you’re supposed to be keeping watch over for the benefit of an entire country (not to mention the rest of the world) to say anything – including absolutely the worst self-serving rubbish – without challenge? Why not just sign on to the GOP payroll and get it over with? Or perhaps he already has.

Then there’s Bush telling us that, gosh, he really can’t “speculate” on whether or not there would have been an invasion had there been no WMD. That’s just classic. As if the decision wasn’t his. As if they didn’t build nearly their entire case on the WMD threat. As if Saddam just absolutely had to go, but Mubarak and Musharraf and Abdullah didn’t even get a good talking to about democracy. As if Saddam’s depredations were enough to justify an American invasion, even though we had previously covered for him at his worst, and even as we say almost nothing while Darfur melts down into a genocidal ocean of blood.

Then, on top of all these lies, are the frustratingly silent ones that no one ever mentions, and never really did (and, excuse me for my petulance, but shouldn’t journalists be doing this?). Like this one: Suppose the Bush people had been right in their lies about WMD, after all – so what? Dozens of countries have them, including now North Korea, and the Bush administration never seems to have a problem with that, except when it does. Whatever happened to deterrence, the little dynamic that kept the Soviet Union and the United States from unleashing their tens of thousands of nuclear weapons against each other for over four decades? When did that stop mattering? Does anyone seriously imagine that a nuclear Saddam would have attacked the United States? Knowing that he and his country would instantly have been atomized in response? And, speaking of inconvenient questions, what were we doing invading a country that had never attacked nor even threatened this country?

Somebody please awaken me from this nightmare! Really, I don’t mind a politician acting like a politician. I suppose this is a sad fact in its own right, but truth be told, my expectations there are not huge.

But what’s up with an American media, itself drenched in blood up to its earlobes, still offering this guy a free pass, and a global megaphone? Hey, Charlie Gibson – do you really earn enough to bury all that shame? Me, I wouldn’t have thought there was that much money anywhere on the planet.

As for that good ol’ boy, America’s first cracker president, it seems he has managed to figure out a couple of things, after all. Talking about his parents, who have no doubt been in agony for eight years now (how would you like to have produced Caligula?), he offered up this slightly too accurate assessment of their feelings as he leaves the White House:

BUSH: And so, no doubt they're going to be relieved to have their boy out of the limelight. And I bet a lot of our friends will be relieved, too.

Ya got that one right, pal, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Which is no doubt what also produced the following exchange:

GIBSON: And final question, just to finish the sentence: I will leave the presidency with a feeling of?

BUSH: I will leave the presidency with my head held high.

Maybe this is the kind of nonsense Gibson had in mind when he asked, “Is the president too much in a bubble?” To which Bush responded:

BUSH: I mean, believe me you understand what's going on in the world. This idea about how the President doesn't understand this, that, or the other, just simply is not the case. I mean, there's a lot of information that comes through the White House.

Yeah, no doubt Cheney’s there every morning to provide the president with “information” about how well it’s all going. No doubt that makes it easy to leave the White House with your head held high, even after you’ve wrecked everything in sight.

That, plus a fawning press that would never dream of being so rude as to interrupt your fantasy with the cognitive dissonance provoked by a tough question or two.

Lordy, lord. Take me back to my home planet, please.

This one’s way too messed up!

Source: www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Tales_From_The_Planet_Bizarre.html

[michelle]

Beyond Two Percent
To repeat: we need more—and more extensive—coverage of the Iraq war
By Megan Garber
December 23, 2008 05:20 PM

In a recent New York Times column, Thomas Friedman laid out the current conventional wisdom about the war in Iraq:

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem — a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

Friedman’s simple summary pretty much hits the nail on the head, orthodoxy-wise. The larger story of Iraq right now—the story that’s emerged from a melting pot of individual dispatches and analyses, bubbling up from blogs and wire reports and magazines to radio and broadcast and cable news to permeate the general cultural atmosphere—is basically Friedman’s things-in-Iraq-were-really-crappy-but-they’re-getting-better-now narrative. Indeed, the only thing the columnist’s succinct little recap really omits is the truism, repeated so often that many of us have stopped questioning its truthfulness, that The Surge Is Working.

None of the above is to say that the press hasn’t been skeptical when it comes to the situation in Iraq. But our skepticism, in many ways, has turned into apathy. The fact that President Bush’s surprise visit to the country last week—one the administration apparently intended as a valedictory, a more subdued version of “Mission Accomplished”—received, overall, such a tepid response suggests that transformation. As does the fact that the coverage Bush’s trip received was extensive only because of The Shoe Heard ‘Round the World. Indeed, the press’s lame-duck treatment of the president—which often translates into an ignore him until he goes away attitude—seems to have filtered into its treatment of that president’s war.

And that, in turn, translates to a bigger problem in the war’s coverage—there’s not enough of it. The media are simply not providing—and the American public, therefore, is simply not getting—enough coverage of events in Iraq. Yes, it’s been said before; but the fact that that’s so shouldn’t make us stop saying it. Complacency shouldn’t stop us from being indignant at the fact, for example, that, per studies from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the war regularly wins less than two percent of the weekly U.S. news hole. (For the week of December 1-7, PEJ reports, coverage of the war rang in at a high point of a full two percent—tying the attention it received with the attention given to O.J. Simpson.) And complacency shouldn’t keep us from being fairly shocked when, after Iraq’s cabinet approved a 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq—suggesting a measure of resolution to the “timetable” debate that had been raging in Washington for years, not to mention a de facto end to the war—the agreement was all but ignored in the media. (It was beaten out for press attention, in this instance, by the all-important Somali pirate story.)

The problem is partially logistical: on-the-ground reporting from the country is both exceptionally expensive (The New York Times’s Baghdad bureau cost, last year, over $3 million a year to maintain) and incredibly dangerous (Iraq, for the sixth year in a row, has been named the deadliest country in the world for journalists). Still, while those facts may explain for the dearth of original, on-the-ground reporting from the country, they don’t explain the paucity of general coverage. We could still use much more—and much more thorough—analysis of the Iraq war; what we need nearly as much as hard news reports are explanations of the situation there from perspectives political, military, and cultural.

We’re largely missing, in other words, the nuanced treatments of Iraq that would flesh out our simplistic things were bad but they’re getting better narrative into something more substantial and therefore more valuable. (And, therefore, more accurate.) Treatments that measure “success” and “victory” in Iraq not by a reduction in human casualties alone, but by the much more complex—and much more viable—metric of political stability. We see commendable examples of this kind of journalism every so often in our Iraq coverage; we need, however, to see more of it. And, in turn, the cable news networks and aggregative Web sites and other Gatekeepers to the National Zeitgeist need to do a better job of filtering it to the general public.

In November 2006, The New York Times published ninety stories whose headlines included the word “Iraq.” In November 2008, that number dropped to thirty—a decline of 67 percent over a mere two years. For The Washington Post, the breakdown was ninety-six stories in November 2006 to thirty-three stories in November 2008. The numbers are striking, but they’re hardly necessary here: even the most casual and passive of news consumers would likely agree that story of Iraq is, if not fading altogether from our collective consciousness, then at least fading generally from our collective conscience.

And while the decline in the urgency of our coverage implies that the situation in Iraq is currently improving, long-term success there—which is to say, long-term stability—is by no means a given. While, in terms of casualties alone, we may be seeing short-term improvement in Iraq—the kind we’ve seen when it comes to the surge, the kind that has led to the proliferation of “the surge is working” truisms—it’s an open question whether the relatively low levels of violence in Iraq will last. Just as it’s an open question whether we’ll achieve some semblance of victory in and for that country—and an open question how, ultimately, we’ll define that victory. There may well be hope for Iraq’s future, as Friedman and so many others have said. Or it could be that the 150,000 U.S. and coalition troops currently stationed in Iraq are serving as, among other things, a collective keystone, keeping Iraq’s precarious, faction-dominated political structure intact—and that, when the keystone is removed, the archway will topple. We don’t yet know. But while the history of Iraq is being made, and the history of its most recent war written, let’s make their first drafts as extensive and as nuanced—and, therefore, as valuable—as possible.

Source:
www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/beyond_two_percent.php