Journalists May be Unintelligent, But They are Certainly Biased

Journalists are a lot like actors in many ways. Generally flakey and prone to superstition and groupthink. Few journalists have the talent and courage to stand out from the crowd, and present original, fact-based stories. The more we learn about how modern journalism is done, the more typical Jayson Blair seems to be of journalists. Most simply do not get caught.

James Q. Wilson, an expert in government and public policy, takes a look at how the media has presented the Iraq military action by the US coalition.

Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. About 40 percent of the stories reported terrorist attacks; scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts.

When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51 percent of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77 percent were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89 percent were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94 percent were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.

....Thankfully, though, the press did not cover World War II the way it has covered Vietnam and Iraq. What caused this profound change? Like many liberals and conservatives, I believe that our Vietnam experience created new media attitudes that have continued down to the present. During that war, some reporters began their coverage supportive of the struggle, but that view did not last long. Many people will recall the CBS television program, narrated by Morley Safer, about U.S. Marines using cigarette lighters to torch huts in Cam Ne in 1965. Many will remember the picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured Vietcong through the head. Hardly anyone can forget the My Lai story that ran for about a year after a journalist reported that American troops had killed many residents of that village.

....Reporters and editors today are overwhelmingly liberal politically, as studies of the attitudes of key members of the press have repeatedly shown. Should you doubt these findings, recall the statement of Daniel Okrent, then the public editor at the New York Times. Under the headline, is the new york times a liberal newspaper? Okrent’s first sentence was, “Of course it is.”

What has been at issue is whether media politics affects media writing. Certainly, that began to happen noticeably in the Vietnam years. And thereafter, the press could still support an American war waged by a Democratic president. In 1992, for example, newspapers denounced President George H. W. Bush for having ignored the creation of concentration camps in Bosnia, and they supported President Clinton when he ordered bombing raids there and in Kosovo. When one strike killed some innocent refugees, the New York Times said that it would be a “tragedy” to “slacken the bombardment.” These air attacks violated what passes for international law (under the UN Charter, people can only go to war for immediate self-defense or under UN authorization). But these supposedly “illegal” air raids did not prevent Times support. Today, by contrast, the Times criticizes our Guantánamo Bay prison camp for being in violation of “international law.”

....mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan. And in the Iraq War, they have kept up a drumbeat of negativity that has had a big effect on elite and public opinion alike. Thanks to the power of these media organs, reduced but still enormous, many Americans are coming to see the Iraq War as Vietnam redux.

....This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.

The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines, and television programs we enjoy.

Source.

Not many people are motivated to look beyond exclusively negative media coverage, to the "new media" outlets run by veterans of Iraq. Fewer still are motivated to look at the history of the various political and religious movements that come together in the current violence in today's Iraq, and neighboring countries. The multi-level truth of Iraq and today's middle east (including Lebanon, Syria, and Iran), is somewhat beyond the interest and comprehension of most people--who are otherwise occupied.

Iraq is a disaster, no question of that. The entire arab world is a disaster, if the truth be known. Oil wealth conveys a false image of progress in some arab states that fools many.

The trick is to find better ways to keep the disaster of arab countries contained to the arab countries--without paying too high a cost in western lives. Because if the arab madness escapes to the world at large, many intelligent people will look back on the current "quagmire" in Iraq with nostalgia.