Monday, April 21, 2003
A few days ago, Jeff Jacoby chimed-in on the Eason Jordan/CNN confession:
[...]We know about that conversation, and about CNN's silence, because Jordan admitted it last week. In a New York Times column titled ''The news we kept to ourselves,'' he confessed that CNN habitually suppressed stories of torture, mutilation, and other atrocities - ''things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff. ''
Jordan's disclosure triggered a storm of criticism, and no wonder. It is scandalous that a network calling itself ''the most trusted name in news'' would sanitize the truth about a dictatorship it claimed to be covering objectively. And the scandal is compounded by Jordan's lack of contrition. He makes no apology for downplaying the horrors of Saddam's regime. If CNN hadn't done so, he says, innocent people would have died.[...]
Jordan's disclosure triggered a storm of criticism, and no wonder. It is scandalous that a network calling itself ''the most trusted name in news'' would sanitize the truth about a dictatorship it claimed to be covering objectively. And the scandal is compounded by Jordan's lack of contrition. He makes no apology for downplaying the horrors of Saddam's regime. If CNN hadn't done so, he says, innocent people would have died.[...]
Jacoby also reminded us that problem goes much farther:
[...]Don't take my word for it. Listen to Thomas Friedman, who described in his 1989 bestseller ''From Beirut to Jerusalem'' what it was like to be a reporter in Beirut during the years when southern Lebanon was dominated by Yasser Arafat's PLO and Syria's Palestinian loyalists.
''No discussion about the reality of Beirut reporting would be complete,'' he wrote, ''without mentioning a major reporting constraint journalists there faced: physical intimidation.'' Friedman recalled his own terror on learning that Arafat's spokesman wanted to see him ''immediately'' about the stories he'd been filing to New York:
''I lay awake in my bed the whole night worrying that someone was going to burst in and blow my brains all over the wall.''[...]
''No discussion about the reality of Beirut reporting would be complete,'' he wrote, ''without mentioning a major reporting constraint journalists there faced: physical intimidation.'' Friedman recalled his own terror on learning that Arafat's spokesman wanted to see him ''immediately'' about the stories he'd been filing to New York:
''I lay awake in my bed the whole night worrying that someone was going to burst in and blow my brains all over the wall.''[...]
Most people are blaming the media for sacrificing themselves for ratings (greed). That's certainly a big part of it, especially in upper-management, but let's not forget another factor: A misguided desire to do good.
No one wants to do "work," they want to do "important work." People choosing reporting as a profession are no different. To be a talking head is one thing, to be a talking head with a "mission" is quite another.
So you find yourself in a place like antebellum Iraq. You see people around you that may need help. Do you tell the straight-up truth and get kicked out, or remove yourself voluntarily? Then you have no chance of effecting any good from inside. OR, do you shill a little for the Dictator, and hope to maybe get a bit of the truth out inside all that distortion...then at least there's a bit of hope for accomplishing something.
So, you see, you can rationalize almost anything in the name of the greater good. Could doing so be justified? It's possible, but one must be very careful when sacrificing the principled for the practical - it's a formula that can go wrong very quickly. Was it wrong to use war to remove Saddam? I don't think so. Was it wrong to shill for Saddam all those years rather than reporting more truthfully from the outside. I believe it was.
Now fast-forward to the postbellum period. You were wondering why so much of even the Western media kept focussing on the negative - power, water, looting - when to many of us it seemed a little more perspective was in order? Well, imagine you're a reporter in Baghdad, and people are asking you, "Sir, when will the water start flowing again, where are the medical supplies, etc..." Well, there's nothing you can do about any of that, and you probably have no idea of the answer anyway...BUT, one thing you do have is your pen. You can do your part for the people by emphasizing their plight. So suddenly there are dozens of stories about all the problems in Baghdad as every activist reporter (and member of the NGO known as "World Media") does their part to have their own agenda catered to.
You can go around the world and check each country's media's perception of what their part is to play in the conflict - either for affirming their own nation's goals or doing their more focussed "humanitarian" part. Fox News isn't the only outlet that knows what side their on. What's served as a convenient multiplier for this effect is that, for much of the world's media, their nation's goals have coincided very nicely with the simplistic "war is bad" meme. Accurately portraying a larger picture, measuring what overall effect their reportage has on events beyond their direct line of site, or actually doing some independant thinking as they move forward just isn't their concern.
As so often occurs to the Left, appearing to do good is many times more important than actually doing so, so you end up shilling for a dictator before the war, and making it harder for the victors to do the right thing when it's over.
