Month: October 2003

“While the players and their bats had a lot to say about the Cubs 5-1 victory, the fans, their love and positive vibes, deserve at least a bit of credit. Not to mention the array of superstitions. Take Marianne Scott of Tinley Park, for example. In the left field bleachers of Turner Field in Atlanta, she gripped her good luck charm, a hollowed-out baseball that holds her mother’s ashes.” – from the Chicago Tribune.

Hugh Hewitt on the Los Angeles Times and the recall.

Pity she can’t even spell his name right.

“It’s me. I’m still alive.” – the boyfriend at 11.44 am. These Cubs fans are a strange bunch, aren’t they?

“I’m sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.” – David Kay, Fox News.

From a balanced assessment in the Washington Post today:

The apparent absence of existing weapons stocks, therefore, does not mean Hussein did not pose a WMD threat. In fact, fragments of evidence in Kay’s report about ongoing biological weapons research suggest that Hussein may have had a quick “break-out” capacity to threaten his neighbors and, indeed, the United States with biological agents (possibly including infectious agents).

The author goes on to say that the presence of actual WMDs widely assumed before the war has nevertheless been debunked (at least, so far). What we need is an analysis of why we got wrong what we got wrong. There’s no question that we were led to believe that there were stockpiles of WMDs unaccounted for in Saddam’s Iraq before the war. And we still don’t have a good explanation for that. But this does not mean that the war was not justified in the terms under which it was waged: that Iraq had an obligation to account fully for its WMD program (it didn’t), that it cease all such research and development (it didn’t), that it stop deceiving U.N. inspectors (it didn’t), and, above all, that it posed a threat, via intermediary terrorists, that was intolerable after 9/11 (it did without a shadow of a doubt, as the Kay report shows). Is this kind of nuanced assessment – important for our future intelligence and war-making capacity as well as democratic accountability – possible in today’s polarized culture? We better hope it is.

How’s that for a combo? What they have in common was suggested to me by this very thoughtful and, I’d say, important piece by John Lloyd in the Financial Times over the weekend. Lloyd is writing about how one of the factors leading the BBC into its current state is the general media culture in Britain as a whole, and in particular its approach to politicians:

All of British public life has grown much more harshly questioning over the past two decades. In part this is a reflection of the well-discussed decline in public manners and deference. In his rooms in the Commons, Peter Mandelson – who has been forced twice from cabinet office after media revelations – told me that, “everyone is now treated in the same way: politicians, celebrities, sports people, without discrimination. The standards of manners and courtesy have dropped. Politicians, it seems, are regarded as being for the use of the media, purely and simply, to be used and abused.”

Used and abused. One of the saddest stories of the weekend was Matt Drudge’s photographic display of Maria Shriver in the headlights. Now, Shriver is a hardened journalist herself, but the toll of what now passes for politics had clearly taken their toll. But the ratings are surely up. The most popular – and lucrative – discourse now consists of both sides vying to call each other traitors or liars. This is not to say that the media should be what goo-goo types or Jim Fallows wants. Sharp elbows, wit, excoriations, sarcasm, polemic all have an important place. But big media organizations also have another obligation (which free-loading misanthropes like me can legitimately avoid). Lloyd sums it up well:

Public-service journalism is primarily concerned with one “output”: better informed citizens. In an organisation as rich as the BBC, this could be done by deploying journalists to report on the complexity of the world. The broadcaster could underpin, not seek to replace, democratic politics. It should assume that all power, including political power, can tend to corruption and it should investigate any possible abuses. But it must also do what the British media does not do: recognise that the media has become one of the largest powers in the world, and thus needs investigation itself. In that way lies some hope of trust, even in a cynical world.

The coverage of Iraq mainly as a means to bash Bush and Blair, the hounding of the private life of a pol like Schwarzenegger (or Clinton, for that matter) and the disguised conflation of reporting with opinion are all signs of a media in some kind of crisis. The popularity of blogs is, in some ways, related to this. But we are only a very small part of the solution. A deeper, wider cultural change is needed.

Not everything sucks, of course. Here’s a judicious essay in the Washington Post Outlook section on the mix of good and bad news in Iraq, with more emphasis on the slow return to normality and even signs of prosperity. It manages to convey good and bad news in ways that help us make sense of what’s going on. Money quote:

It may seem strange, but this city is suddenly throbbing with street life, even as the guerrilla insurgency drags on. Baghdadis have become tired of waiting for order to be restored, and have decided to get on with life. Traffic jams are monstrous, as drivers burn nickel-a-gallon gas. Some drive used, spit-shined BMWs and Mercedes Benzes imported – basically tax-free, since there’s no government – from relatives or salesmen in the rich Gulf states. Many mornings, it can take an hour to drive from the shopping districts of east Baghdad to the leafier residential neighborhoods west of the Tigris River. Last week, U.S. officials shortened Baghdad’s curfew by an hour, making it from midnight to 4 a.m., saying that the city’s security had improved.
Telephones in Baghdad have barely operated since American missiles shattered the main communications centers last April. Yet across town countless signs in store windows and on walls announce new Internet cafés linked to satellite receivers. A hand-painted banner across one street in east Baghdad advertises new Internet service with “bowsin and chatin 24 hour,” notwithstanding the curfew. In late September, workers began repaving Firdos Square – where Saddam’s giant statue was hauled down on April 9, marking the war’s end – and replanting the central island where Iraqis celebrated that day.

Even the Observer in London is beginning to acknowledge that the Vietnam scenario – so longed for by some – isn’t coming to pass:

“The degree of transparency and cooperation in the work of the council is impressive,” says Rend Rahim Francke of the Iraq Foundation, a non-governmental organisation working for democracy and human rights. “Self-government, long advocated for Iraq, appears to be working well when put into practice.”
For the first time in almost half a century, Iraq has no executions, no political prisoners, no torture and almost no limits on freedom of expression. Having a satellite receiver no longer means imprisonment or even death. There are almost 200 newspapers and magazines that require no police permit and suffer no censorship, and more than 70 political parties and dozens of NGOs. Old professional associations have held elections and new associations have sprung up. People can demonstrate freely – and do.

Yes, some of this will redound to the benefit of Mr Bush and Mr Blair. But that’s no reason to begrudge Iraqis their enw freedom and their latest signs of progress.

Creeping Raines-ism is back at the NYT. Blogger Rantingprofs compares two stories from Kirkuk – one in the Philadelphia Inquirer and one in the New York Times. The stories were filed within days of each other. Cori Dauber comments:

Not a single step taken by the US troops to facilitate security, stand up the police stations, get the place moving again, none of the innovations noted in the Inquirer’s article are mentioned by the Times. Did their reporter not see these things, not ask, or not think they were worth reporting? It’s unlikely all these things developed in the few days between the one article and the other. Compare the two articles side by side and ask yourself: which one seems like more balanced reporting, and which one leaves you feeling more informed about how things are going in Iraq?

And which one is more designed to undermine domestic support for the effort in Iraq?

LITTLE DARK CLOUD II: One of the tactics of some journalists these days seems simply to invent what the administration said before the Iraq war to discredit them today. We’ve seen the classic argument, insinuated in the New York Times news pages, that the Bush administration claimed that the Iraqi threat from WMDs was “imminent,” when the clear indication of every speech Bush gave was that we should act before the threat was imminent. Here’s another one. A day after Dana Milbank and Dana Priest spun the Kay report to say precisely what it didn’t, they came up with the following sentence:

[H]ours after Bush spoke, Kay provided a more mixed assessment of his finding. He said his team had turned up “no conclusive proof” that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger, a controversial allegation made in Bush’s State of the Union address.

Now what was the claim in Bush’s State of the Union? The famous sixteen words are: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Not Niger – Africa, a critical distinction. And, in fact, Kay did come up with evidence of a uranium link from Africa to Saddam, with the subtle distinction that nothing was bought and the offer was unsolicited. Still, Priest’s and Milbank’s claim, as written, is false. Correction?

“Let’s face it – intelligence is the new morality. For the left there are no long-term historical precidents to cite or follow. They are all rooted in a misogynic and racist western culture. There is no transcendent truth because that demeans the individual and takes away individual liberty. By what standard then do you judge an individual and determine their worthiness? Not by character … not by integrity … but by how bright they are. This intelligence of course is demonstrated by embracing the tenets of the left. Personal morality, sound legal judgement and basics such as keeping one’s word do not have be followed as long as one is bright enough to to see the world from a left perspective. All other failings are excusable.
What a terrifying concept! History is littered with bright people who made horrific moral decisions. Intelligence is not conscience and an intelligence uninformed by a conscience (a real honest to goodness sense of the reality of necessary demarcation between good and evil) ultimately becomes a slave to the pale substitue of one’s political ideology and the expediancy of its accompanying agenda. All it takes to understand this to see the moral bankrupty of the feminists in their differing reactions to Bill and Arnold. Expediency rooted in the new morality rules the day. Give me ‘dumb’ and principled any day.” – more reader feedback on the Letters Page.

THE NYT AND BLOGS: An attendee says that Allan Siegal, the new “ombudmsan” at the NYT said the following at Brown a few days ago: “We’re not happy that blogs became the forum for our dirty linen, but somebody had to wash it and it got washed.” Was that a thank-you?