On A Sad Note
A Project for Excellence in Journalism study finds Iraq has dominated news coverage. Too bad our major news organizations have done such wretched and biased job of it.
The numbers game doesn’t begin to tell the story. The actual report notes that “there was somewhat less coverage of events on the ground in Iraq.” Dive in a little deeper and the report notes a drop-off in coverage of actual events in Iraq.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism may be on to something here. If the Project is in fact interested in Excellence in Journalism, it may want to take a closer, qualitative look at whether that ”saturation coverage” met minimal standards of meat-and-potatoes beat coverage, or even produced much in the way of decent parachute journalism. Seeing as the entirety of the national press seems to have missed what is now the big story and was clearly evident then. The surge was working, as advertised. Which suggests there is something deeply wrong with an American journalistic establishment that devotes so much attention to an issue and does such a pathetic job of it.
The Project has a separate report on Iraq coverage that takes a tentative step in this direction, but stops with a poll on Iraq war reporters, and how they think they are doing their job. They think they are doing fine (58 percent “good,” 16 percent “excellent,” 23 percent “only fair,” and 2 percent “poor.”) under frustrating circumstances.
It notes that the military has complained about the tone of coverage, but helpfully assures us that the journalists think it’s fine, if anything they’ve been too easy on the Bush administration. Interestingly, the Iraq beat reporters say the kind of stories their organizations want has been driven by the domestic U.S. debate. That sounds like a bit of a cart-horse issue. They also say they can’t cover good news because it’s too dangerous. I’d suggest the evidence is that by largely eschewing embedding … using it on a limited, event-oriented or parachute basis … they’ve chosen not to cover the news at all, except through Iraqi proxies. Most of them, 85 percent, say they have embedded, and they note significant advantages to embedding. This report doesn’t offer any updated numbers on how many have been embedding, with what kind of consistency, though it includes a link to last year’s controvery about the fact that virtually no one was. The bulk of news coverage and past head-counts on embedding suggest this tool has been used sporadically at best, maybe with a bump-up as the surge progressed. I haven’t seen evidence of any consistent effort to exploit this opportunity by the major news organizations.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:51 am on Friday, December 7, 2007
3 Responses to “On A Sad Note”
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December 7th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
It is sad indeed, and the American public is clearly the loser. On an issue as important as a war, one would think that reporting what is actually happening on the ground would merit some attention–from our side more than from the eyes of those who have been, and may still be, the enemy. Instead, we get “news” of what politicos are saying about the war–which they seem to do in a vacuum. From beginning to end, there has been a general disconnect. If it isn’t political spin from one side or the other, we don’t hear about it. The fog of this war has been mostly self-induced by those who made up their minds before the battle began, and have since worked diligently to pick and choose what facts fit their preconceptions. If there are no facts, they either make them up, or hire the enemy to supply them. This isn’t true of everyone, of course–Burns at the times has been good, for instance–but the problem is so widespread that it has become one of the major fronts in our battle against Islamofascism. The problem is that both sides of this front consist mostly of Americans.
December 8th, 2007 at 1:38 am
“Facts? We don’t got to have no facts. We don’t got to show you no steenking facts.”
And for that, they get a Pulitzer.
December 8th, 2007 at 2:38 am
“The media is a total distortion machine.”
- Michael J. Totten