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Lieutenant's Notes
Both Instapundit and Iraq Now linked up this detailed e-mail recording observations of the media by a Lieutenant who had to occasionally ride herd on them in Iraq. Many good points here, and things I've read before. What I find extremely disturbing is this:
Another major contributor to inaccuracy is most reporters are only in country for a month at a stretch. Though some embedded reporters were around long enough to establish a rapport with their units (during the war, before I got here) that is no longer the case.
One of the primary contributors to our failure in Vietnam was the rapid "ticket punch" rotation of individual soldiers in and out of the theater. Just about the time an officer, NCO, or even line-level grunt got his bearings and figured out How Things Worked, he'd be rotated somewhere else and someone new would take his place. Basic mistakes were repeated over and over again because of this. Men died because of this.
In contrast, the media would leave correspondents there for months, sometimes years at a time, significantly contributing to the accuracy and depth of their reports. This allowed people like Neil Sheehan, Stanley Karnow, and David Halberstam to expose the incompetence and excesses of the leadership of that conflict when that leadership was claiming absolutely nothing was wrong. It's no exaggeration to say that without such reportage Vietnam would probably have been an even bigger debacle than it turned out to be.
Now it would seem the situation has been turned on its head. Units seem to be left alone and to their own devices without the constant disruption of individual rotations or over-controlling careerists looking for a ribbon. They seem to be passing on what they've learned to their replacements. They seem to be, in short, succeeding in this occupation.
I say "seem" because, as this report reveals, the media can't tell us for sure. Instead of good investigations we end up with press release parrots (BWAHK! POLLY WANTS A PULITZER!) who tell us only what the military wants us to know on the one hand, and what a bunch of 6th graders tell them on the other.
The media complained bitterly about the controls and constraints of the first (and to a lesser extent the second) Gulf War. Yet during the most important part of the current conflict they are allowing themselves to become the willing mouthpieces of a system with a proven track record for deception, concealment, and reactionary self-protection.
How can we possibly even tell if Iraq is a "quagmire" when the self-appointed watchdogs can't even be bothered to drag themselves out of their air-conditioned press briefings to find out? How can we know if our billions of dollars are being spent to set up a stable democracy when most reporters aren't there long enough to unpack? How can we be sure the loss of a soldier was for a better cause and not the result of some incompetent policy or leader when the only people able to tell us are too busy getting their ticket punched to investigate?
People are dying over there. I find it horrific (and horrifically unsurprising) that the media seem more interested in the blood than finding out why they die
You're assuming that the media Want to find out what's really happening as opposed to simply pumping up their CV in the safest means possible. The argument also presupposes that the media types have an interest in educating themselves in the activities, training and character of military life. Yet I have seen little, if any, evidence through two Gulf wars that the interest runs beyond "gottcha" journalism or a rehash of the "evil soldier" mentality so favored by the elite - you can almost smell the desire for another Vietnam. The press (media) are the first to feel slighted if their perogatives - self defined, of course - are violated and the last to actually care about truth. You want to know what is really going on? Read the soldiers blogs and email. The rest isn't worth the time of day.
Posted by: William A Rost on February 9, 2004 11:51 AMthe "evil soldier" mentality so favored by the elite
Which is, what, the counterpart to the "evil media" mentality so favored by some people when the media doesn't see events exactly the same way they do?
Posted by: TedL on February 9, 2004 12:34 PMIt's not that I'm upset they don't see things the way I do. It's that I don't think they're seeing anything at all.
Posted by: scott on February 9, 2004 12:43 PMI said much the same here and was promptly chewed out by a professional journalist. I don't think he (a free-lancer) has the same perspective as those tied to news agencies.
Posted by: Mike on February 9, 2004 01:52 PMTedL,
My personal compaint with the "media" is their general ingnorance which seems to be a function of a culture of snobish lazyness. As an experiment, examine articles on topics you are familiar with and find the factual errors. More often than not big media reports network security stories - my expertise - in grossly inaccurate terms. If they cann't get that right in the USA how can they get facts right under fire? It appears they are not.
As a side note in college I was required to take classes in a variety of subjects. The papers I wrote for those classes will never be considered the seminal research of the discipline, but they also at least got basic facts write. Perhaps, journalism classes don't maintian those standards as major media centers don't.
zman
Posted by: zman on February 9, 2004 02:32 PMOver the years I have been interviewed by local media about a half dozen times, on a variety of topics.
In all cases but one, there were substancial errors of fact and/or misquotes that were inexplicable.
In that one exception, I was given the opportunity to preview the article, where I was able to point out errors before they were committed to press.
There was no political agenda, no major contraversy. On a couple of occassions I was being interviewed about my artwork - on the others, in others, it was reporting on activities of local kennel clubs.
It would be easy to dismiss this as experience on the part of junior reporters - but not so. Open an issue of Time or Newsweek, when they do feature articles on purebred dogs (usually a direct result of behind the scenes prodding by animal rights groups) and the quantity and magnitude of errors in fact remain - and they are virtually always errors that support a criticism or negative portrayal.
Posted by: Kate on February 9, 2004 02:52 PMIt's all about drama, not facts.
My mother called me in an absolute panic because of national television reports that Fort Collins, Colorado had practically been washed away in a flood.
There was damage (I had four feet of water in my basement), but it only effected a square mile or so of the town. The creek that overflowed was normally small enough to step across. The news reports made it seem as if it were a second Biblical Flood. There's no drama in reporting the facts: A couple dozen mobile homes were destroyed, less than a hundred homes with flooding, the campus library archives destroyed, and LOTS of water in the streets. Hardly a major disaster.
I now ignore television news almost completely.
Posted by: mrsizer on February 9, 2004 03:01 PMI was a public library director, so besides doing fact checking for a living, I dealt with local news media constantly. I found that unless I wrote a story about the Library myself they ALWAYS got it wrong. I have been lied to and lied about by reporters so often that I now never believe them, ever. Either learn to be a discriminating consumer of news or avoid it completely because objective journalism is dead.
Posted by: Rob on February 9, 2004 04:15 PMTV is for sensationalist stories that, more often than not, use disinformation to inflame viewers. Even local news channels have succumed to the temptation of a 5:00 announcement, "A household chemical that could kill your children...more at 11:00. (11:00 report) Our top story tonight will have parents locking their cabinets and watching their children a little more closely. Tragically a teenager died this weekend when his stomach was exposed to bleech after chugging Clorox from his family's laundry room."
Big Media is about making money. Plain and simple. They are big business. They only pay lipservice to the words "journalistic integrity" and "facts" and "truth." Between the horrible bias of Peter Jennings and Fox News they are all only concerned about ratings.
Posted by: Giya on February 9, 2004 04:17 PMI'll chime in with agreement on the essential ignorance of the average journalist. Few know very much, if anything at all, of what they cover.
Much of this comes from what has happened to journalism in the last fifty or so years. Once upon a time there were people in the trade of reporting. Reporters were usually blue collar kids with a flair for words. They started as copyboys in newspapers as an alternative to working in the steel mill or construction sites. When they got their break as reporters they were put on a beat, to advance in the trade they learned the subject. A reporter on the police beat had the advantage of having the same background as the cops he covered. It was easier for him to learn the subject.
Now jounalism is a 'profession'. It isn't learned as copyboys, it's learned in J School. The bright working class kids don't go to J Scholl, it's the dimmer upper middle class kids. What counts is the ability to read from a teleprompter, important hair and a perfect set of teeth. The bright kids study business and engineering. The less bright go to J School. The dumping ground, of course, is the college of education of any university.
Check the SAT scores.
It's not just the TV guys (although they are definitely the worst). It's all of them.
And, really, nothing has changed. Sherman said something along the lines of if he killed all the reporters following him down to Georgia he'd have (misreported) news from Hell the next day. It's just that after Vietnam and Watergate, where the press really did make a huge difference, a culture of infallibility has taken hold. Scandal after scandal makes no difference to the newsies. We just have to make sure to spread the word when they screw it up and hold their feet to the fire until they promise to change.
Posted by: scott on February 9, 2004 06:39 PM