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Archive for the 'Media' Category
In short, no. Thanks to Jim Miller I found this 1974 essay for Commentary by Edward Jay Epstein. I was also taken in by this myth. Excerpts:
A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy. The role that government institutions themselves play in exposing official misconduct and corruption therefore tends to be seriously neglected, if not wholly ignored, in the press. This view of journalistic revelation is propagated by the press even in cases where journalists have had palpably little to do with the discovery of corruption. Pulitzer Prizes were thus awarded this year to the Wall Street journal for “revealing” the scandal which forced Vice President Agnew to resign and to the Washington Star/News for “revealing” the campaign contribution that led to the indictments of former cabinet officers Maurice Starts and John N. Mitchell, although reporters at neither newspaper in actual fact had anything to do with uncovering the scandals. In the former case, the U.S. Attorney in Maryland had through dogged plea-bargaining and grants of immunity induced witnesses to implicate the Vice President; and in the latter case, the Securities and Exchange Commission and a grand jury had conducted the investigation that unearthed the illegal contribution which led to the indictment of the cabinet officers. In both instances, even without “leaks” to the newspapers, the scandals uncovered by government institutions would have come to the public’s attention when the cases came to trial. Yet to perpetuate the myth that the members of the press were the prime movers in such great events as the conviction of a Vice President and the indictment of two former cabinet officers, the Pulitzer Prize committee simply chose the news stories nearest to these events and awarded them its honors.
The natural tendency of journalists to magnify the role of the press in great scandals is perhaps best illustrated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s autobiographical account of how they “revealed” the Watergate scandals. The dust jacket and national advertisements, very much in the bravado spirit of the book itself, declare: “All America knows about Watergate. Here, for the first time, is the story of how we know…. In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it happened.” In keeping with the mythic view of journalism, however, the book never describes the “behind-the-scenes” investigations which actually “smashed the Watergate scandal wide open”-namely the investigations conducted by the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and the Congressional committees. The work of almost all those institutions, which unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate, is systematically ignored or minimized by Bernstein and Woodward. Instead, they simply focus on those parts of the prosecutors’ case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.
The result is that no one interested in “how we know” about Watergate will find out from their book, or any of the other widely circulated mythopoeics about Watergate. Yet the non-journalistic version of how Watergate was uncovered is not exactly a secret-,the government prosecutors (Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer, and Donald E. Campbell) are more than willing to give a documented account of the investigation to anyone who desires it. According to one of the prosecutors, however, “No one really wants to know.” Thus the government’s investigation of itself has become a missing link in the story of the Watergate scandal, and the actual role that journalists played remains ill understood.
In the latest New Yorker Eric Alterman examines the history and future of the “dead tree publications”.
According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.
Thanks to “Bob Cringely” for the link. In his post Bob describes the sort of smart RSS feed he wants — as do we.
Good on yuh Chris Muir! Chris closed his fundraiser as he got overwhelmed with contributors.
I liked this piece by Michael Fumento — see what you think:
Critics have labeled the new movie “Rendition” a “political thriller.” Thriller? Maybe. “Political?” Absolutely.
As I write in the NYSun, it’s merely the latest in an unbroken series of major films about the war on terror that range from those seeking to assure us that Islamist terrorism isn’t the threat we might think, to those depicting the terrorists as no worse than those who fight them.
Consider:
Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of all Fears,” when made into a film, converted Islamist terrorists into an Austrian neo-Nazi. How’s that for realism? The reason for the change was an explicit kowtow to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a supporter of Islamist terror activities.
In “Babel,” the accidental shooting of an American tourist is treated as a terrorist act; but in the end the only “terrorist” killed is a cute little boy.
“Live Free or Die Hard” makes you think at first that Islamist terrorists are the threats. Turns out it’s an evil cyber-villain with a beautiful Kung Fu sidekick who once worked for . . . the DHS!
In “The Kingdom,” we find out in the final seconds of the film that FBI agents sent to Saudi Arabia to track down the killer of 200 American civilians are on the same moral footing as the terrorists they tracked.
In “Rendition,” a clearly innocent American “family man” born is Egypt is snatched from U.S. soil and shipped to a country where torture is allowed. And torture they do!
The predictable excuses don’t wash.
1. “Hollywood just wants to make money. If we want to send a message, we use Western Union.” Right. “Babel” lost money and so will “The Kingdom.” “Rendition” is already a flop.
2. “Islamic terrorists are unsellable villains.” Right. They routinely explode bombs in markets and launch chlorine gas attacks. They build torture chambers and make and display videos of beheadings in which the victim screams in agony as his head is sawed off with a dull knife. Even their foiled plots are often bizarre, such as Richard Reid’s “shoe bomber” attempt. These guys are a scriptwriter’s dream. Quentin Tarantino couldn’t think this stuff up.
3. “We don’t want to stereotype Muslims or Arabs.” Right. Nobody suffers more from Islamic terror than Muslims themselves. Islamist terrorists everyday kill and maim Iraqis and Afghans. Now they’ve blown up at least 136 Pakistanis greeting former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. All were Muslims.
Truly, Hollywood has declared war on the War on Terror.
Some of Michael Fumento’s combat footage from Iraq can be viewed on the History Channel over the Veterans’ Day weekend.
Technorati Tags: Hollywood
Now, how did Reuters get the story wrong? There are, it seems to us, three explanations:
Stupidity. The reporter was so bone-headedly literal-minded that he simply did not understand the rhetorical device Bush was employing.
Laziness. The reporter wasn’t actually at the press conference and didn’t bother to check the context of the quote.
Dishonesty. The reporter knew full well that Bush was speaking metaphorically and deliberately twisted his meaning in order to fit the stereotype that Bush “has a reputation for verbal faux pas.”
Remarkable — I listened to the podcast of the September 20th Bush remarks , which included this Mandela metaphor
Part of the reason why there is not this instant democracy in Iraq is because people are still recovering from Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule. I thought an interesting comment was made when somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, where’s Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas. He was a brutal tyrant that divided people up and split families, and people are recovering from this. So there’s a psychological recovery that is taking place. And it’s hard work for them. And I understand it’s hard work for them. Having said that, I’m not going the give them a pass when it comes to the central government’s reconciliation efforts.
which I thought was both obvious and apt. Bush chose a concise way to explain why there are so very few secular great leaders in Iraq today — any “Mandela” who emerged was tortured and killed. Well, what James Taranto learned today from a frequent emailer left me speechless…
Our correspondent sent us a link to a blog called First Draft, in which someone styling himself “Holden Caulfield” says of the president, “Christ, what a dumbass,” and links to the following Reuters dispatch:
Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader’s death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.
“It’s out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive,” Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush’s comments received worldwide coverage. . . .
“I heard somebody say, Where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,” Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday. . . .
References to his death–Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail–are seen as insensitive in South Africa.
Via Glenn, it appears that NYT has finally figured out how the real world works:
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.
Hopefully we’ll get our pro rata refund soon….
What Foer did not tell McGee was that Beauchamp was married to Elspeth Reeve, one of the magazine’s three fact-checkers (a point that the press missed too). So Beauchamp was effectively an insider—and would get treated as such.
That understandably human decision would have painful consequences for The New Republic’s reputation.
Richard Miniter has researched what happened at TNR — why did they fall for a fabricator for the third time in the past decade? Because the story was what they so wanted to believe?
The Monday after the party, at the magazine’s offices, Foer was locked in a long serious conversation with Leon Wieseltier, the bear-shaped intellectual who has run the magazine’s literary section with distinction since 1983. They were talking about Beauchamp. Foer couldn’t understand why anyone would just make things up.
Wieseltier did. “Maybe he [Beauchamp] is a sociopath.”
As new details about Beauchamp’s strange private life emerged, Wieseltier’s initial assessment would prove to be on target.
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris [The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara] wrote this thoughtful essay for the NYT. I’ve not seen a proper opinion poll, but I’ll speculate that 90%+ of the population thinks the photo at left depicts the “Hooded Man” of Abu Ghraib infamy. The NYT actually did publish a correction, but typically it was not on Page One Upper Left as was the original photo and story — i.e., it was buried in the part of the paper read by nearly nobody.
But why was this photograph/story immediately accepted by most? That is Errol Morris’ subject — well worth a read. The article is the outgrowth of Morris’ 18 months work on a documentary about the Abu Ghraib photos.
The photograph of the Hooded Man has created its own iconography and its own narrative. Like the unknown soldier, there is something mysterious about an unknown victim. Who is the Hooded Man? The Times picture of Clawman provides not just an identification of the Hooded Man. It provides the solution to a mystery. (A who-is-under-it, rather than a who-dunnit?) The Times piece assumes that we know what happened to the Hooded Man – the nature of the abuses he suffered – but if Clawman isn’t the Hooded Man, whose account are we listening to?
Clawman was playing to an expected narrative of abuse. The story had been widely circulated. The wires, the threat of electrocution had become well known. But herein lies the circularity. We see the picture of the Hooded Man. We imagine the abuse. Quotes from Clawman in the accompanying text confirms our worst suspicions about what happened at Abu Ghraib. Our beliefs about the picture are confirmed – except that we know nothing more than when we started. We have learned nothing.
At left is a photo taken by M.P. Sabrina Harman of the in-reality Clawman.
The identity of the figure under the hood is actually known. His real name is Faleh, his nickname is Gilligan, but what is his story? What happened to him at Abu Ghraib?
One human rights worker suggested that it made no difference whether Clawman was really the Hooded Man – that his testimony was no less valid.
I do not agree. Now we are talking about reality – not about photographs. Clawman was a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. He was most likely subjected to abuse, but whatever his account might be, it’s not the account of the man in the picture. That man is Gilligan – not Clawman.
…The problem was not a lack of research. Yes, there was archival material that could have cast suspicion on the claim that Clawman was the Hooded Man. But the mistaken identification was driven by Clawman’s own desire to be the iconic victim, to be the Hooded Man, and our own need to believe him. It is an error engendered by photography and perpetuated by us. And it comes from a desire for “the ocular proof.” A proof that turns out to be no proof at all. Indeed. What we see is not independent of our beliefs. Photographs provide evidence, but no shortcut to reality. Photographic evidence – like all evidence – needs to be seen in context. It needs to be evaluated. If seeing itself is belief-laden, then there is no seeing independent of believing, and the “truism” has to be reversed. Believing is seeing and not the other way around.
There are several thoughtful comments. E.g., Bill Brent wrote in part:
About the “Hooded Man” photograph, Errol Morris describes it as, “a photograph which in all likelihood will become the iconic photograph of the Iraq war.”
Why?
Why will the Hooded Man photography become the iconic photograph of the Iraq War? Why not Michael Yon’s incredible photograph of an American soldier carrying a tiny Iraqi child who had been mortally wounded by an enemy suicide bomb? Why not a picture from inside an American field hospital of American doctors and nurses tending to Iraqis with the same care they attend to Americans?
Because they don’t fit the NYTimes narrative about how war dehumanizes people? They don’t fit the Leftist template about the Bush administration turning our good young men and women into torturers? (And doesn’t the latter infantalize the men and women who’ve volunteered and reenlisted to fight for what they believe in?)
Errol Morris uses the word “torture” once in his own words, once in a quotation from the original NYT front page story. In context both usages assume that the reader agrees with the writer’s definition as in “we all know that American soldiers [routinely] tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib”. I am well-acquainted with thousands of cases of horrific torture in Iraq: by Saddam’s regime, by al Qaeda in Iraq, by Iranian-sponsored Shia “Special Groups” and other militias that are practicing familiar Mafia-style governance by intimidation. If any readers can provide links to credible documentation of any real cases of torture by American soldiers in Iraq I would greatly appreciate the URL via the comments section.
I’m looking forward to the Morris documentary on Abu Ghraib — in the hopes that it clearly presents how history was changed by the media firestorm raised about an insignificant activity by a few poorly disciplined night shift guards. A firestorm enabled by trophy photos — absent the pics there would have been no “story” and the severe damage done to the Iraqi people would have been avoided. Yes, that is the direct consequence of this exercise of the First Amendment — the prospects for a prosperous, free Iraq were set back by unknown time and cost. How important that damage is relative to other mistakes I don’t know, but it obviously accelerated the time and the number of Iraqis who would switch from regarding the MNF as liberators to occupiers. Today the MNF is winning back credibility as a moral force — but I doubt that positive Iraqi public view has recovered to the level before the Abu Ghraib story — which, according to one commentator, was driven by 40 straight NYT front page stories.
Glenn Reynolds has the backgrounder links regarding both media and university profs:
By a 39% to 20% margin, American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% believe that ABC, CBS, and NBC deliver the news without any bias.
Similar results are found for CNN and National Public Radio (NPR).
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