Will the real war reporters please...

Chris Allbritton takes the New York Post's Ralph Peters to task for being sychophantic sack of shit:

Among the claims in his slanderous column: “The Iraqi Army has confounded its Western critics, performing extremely well last week. And the people trust their new army to an encouraging degree.” The Iraqi Army — and police, for that matter — stood by while Shi’ite militias ran rampant through Sunni neighborhoods. They only took up the security positions when the Shi’ite clerics, including Moqtada al-Sadr, had already calmed down the worst of the violence. That’s not “performing extremely well,” unless by “extremely well,” you mean not confronting the enemies and keeping your head down until it’s safe to come out. That’s usually called “hiding.” ...He also makes what may be an unintentionally ironic comment when he criticized Iraqi stringers: “The Iraqi stringers have cracked the code: The Americans don’t pay for good news. So they exaggerate the bad.”

First of all, the Americans do pay for good news. They have in the past, when American officers wrote stories and paid local papers to run them. These happy tales invariably painted a rosier picture than was warranted.

Secondly, Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. troops here, told reporters in a news conference three days ago that the pay-for-play program was on-going....

Thirdly, just what is Mr. Peters doing here? A former intelligence officer, riding around Baghdad, painting a rosy picture? I may just be assuming stuff here — hell, if Ralph can do it, so can I — but is Mr. Peters one of those story-planting Americans? Was he out getting material and pictures? And has he taken his skills at writing happy stories to the American public?

Peters’ little yarns sure sounds nice, but he sounds either desperately clueless or willfully blind. Officials in the American embassy, at least, are very worried that civil war is upon us, and it’s surely no coincidence that Caey has a reputation for not wanting to hear bad news. And so Peters continues to think because he rolls around in an armored convoy and no one takes a shot at him, there’s no civil war. As someone I’m sure he admires once said, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Comments

[Christoph]

Iraq is becoming a test case for journalism and the various forms of self-description, but also academic descriptions, in particular as they are dished out to journalism students.

Mr Peters is a particularly bad example of what has been going wrong.

How do you deal with the brazen propagandizing and the levels of public ignorance journalism is seemingly maintaining? (Why are blogs simply so much better in many ways?)

There was an interesting article in the Media Section of the Australian of last week by David Conley, contemplating an accreditation programme. I wonder if this might be worth considering in the US context, too.

[John S. Ransom]

When we confront these moves, it is well to remember some of the early treatments of mass persuasion. One of the things that makes these earlier descriptions especially valuable is that they retain a sense of surprise, disappointment, outrage and 'expose'. If that's right, then taking a look at Mass Persuasion by Merton, 1971, and Public Opinion by Lippmann, much earlier, will be very valuable.

[Christoph]

John, I am unfamiliar with Merton, thanks for that, I agree about Walter Lippmann (and in his wake perhaps Schudson & Schiller).

But I sincerely wonder: how *can* they take us further? When despite these guys, and say Mitchell Stephens and Mindich, that particularly hairy chestnut, "objectivity", is still taught in classes, inscribed in codes of ethics, and, of course, the logos of journalistic trailblazers such as Fox News: "Fair and Balanced".