Betrayal, Redux - The big

Betrayal, Redux - The big question, as far as I'm concerned, about the revelations of the media's sitting on stories of Hussein's brutality is this: Were they pushed, or did they jump?

Victor Davis Hanson, in the National Review, digs into the Eason Jordan op-ed and the sickness underlying it:

...craziness often takes hold of our own elites and media in the midst of perhaps the most brilliantly executed plan in modern American military history. Rather than inquiring how an entire country was overrun in a little over three weeks at a cost of not more than a few hundred casualties, reporters instead wail at the televised scenes of a day of looting and lawlessness.

Instead I had been expecting at least some interviews about bridges not blown due to the rapidity of the advance. Could someone tell us how special forces saved the oil fields? How Seals prevented the dreaded oil slicks? Whose courage and sacrifice saved the dams? And how so few missiles were launched? Exactly why and how did the Republican Guard cave?

In short, would any reporter demonstrate a smidgeon of curiosity — other than condemning a plan they scarcely understood — about the mechanics of the furious battle for Iraq?

Indeed, such coverage is conspicuous by its absence.

In its place? Public Relations. That was, in effect, what it was - uncritical parroting of the Ba'ath party line.

It is impossible to calibrate how such Iraqi manipulation of American news accounts affected domestic morale, if not providing comfort for those Baathists who wished to discourage popular uprisings of long-suffering Iraqis.

There is something profoundly amoral about this. A newsman who interviewed a state killer at his convenience [Dan Rather] later revisits a now liberated city and complains of the disorder there. A journalist who paid bribe money to fascists and whose dispatches aired from Baghdad in wartime only because the Baathist party felt that they served their own terrorist purposes is disturbed about the chaos of liberation. Now is the time for CNN, NPR, and other news organizations to state publicly what their relationships were in ensuring their reporters’ presence in wartime Iraq — and to explain their policies about bribing state officials, allowing censorship of their news releases, and keeping quiet about atrocities to ensure access.

In general, the media has now gone from the hysteria of the Armageddon of Afghanistan to the quagmire of Iraq to the looting in Baghdad — the only constant is slanted coverage, mistaken analysis, and the absence of any contriteness about being in error and in error in such a manner that reflected so poorly upon themselves and damaged the country at large at a time of war. It is as if only further bad news could serve as a sort of catharsis that might at least cleanse them of any unease about being so wrong so predictably and so often.

In the weeks that follow, the media, not the military, will be shown to be in need of introspection and vast reform.

When the government, or the military, or big business is rotten or corrupt, it's the "free press" that's supposed to check and balance them.

So who checks and balances the press?

Posted by Mitch at April 14, 2003 11:13 PM