Shot In The Dark: Note To Reporters: Why We Hate You, Part I

July 22, 2005

Note To Reporters: Why We Hate You, Part I

Fraters has been leading the NARN on this story - you need to read their past week's posting on the subject - but I just gotta jump in.

Mark Yost wrote an absolutely spot-on column last week, slamming the press for its biased, blinkered, doom-focused coverage of the War in Iraq.

In response, he's been castigated by - who else - the press. Steve Lovelady - the biased-to-the-point-of-bigoted editor of the Columbia Journalism Review - wrote on a journalism forum:

Amazing. Mark Yost, an [editorial page] editor at Knight Ridder, the ONE news outlet which has consistently exposed the lies at the heart of the Iraq invasion and the grim reality of the current occupation, turns on his colleagues.

I can't wait to see how the KR Washington bureau and the KR Iraq
contingent reponds to this one!

There he is, guys. Go get him. You owe your readers no less.

In other words, Yost's great crime isn't that he lied about the conduct of the war (which he didn't - we'll come back to that later). It's that he broke ranks with his comrades in the press. Mark Yost didn't stand in lock step with the thin, gray, pallid, vaguely-reeking-of-booze line of his fellow journalists against the philistine onslaught.

Hyperbole? No. No, Steve Lovelady of the CJR doesn't much appreciate peasants breaking into the manor, referring to the bloggers and talk hosts who brought Eason Jordan to ground last winter as "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob..."

The "salivating morons" who were right about Eason Jordan, who was jettisoned from CNN shortly after Lovelady's remarks. Oops.

No. In the world of Steve Lovelady, the peasants must pay obeisance to the priests, the nobles, their betters in the search for information.

But, being the untrained buffoon I am, I have to keep coming back to the question - was Yost right?

What do you think?

Meredith Leyva is the founder of CinCHouse.com, a Web site which helps military families deal with the frequently confusing programs to assist them.

Consider that Lou Dobb’s weekly segment on a military family and TLC’s Operation Homecoming show calls me every week trolling for interviewees; Every week they turn us down because they only want ‘troubled’ military families – not the families who are proud of what they’re service member is doing and holding out just fine. CNN was the network that asked me if I could cry during an interview. ABC’s World News Tonight grilled me again and again about ‘aren’t you pissed at President Bush when you see the bodies coming in at Dover?”

So...Yost was right? The media manipulate the news?

Lovelady's wrong? The "High Priests of Information" are really shills for an agenda?

We're the "salivating morons?"

We, the people, can count on the media to present the story, rather than to puff up a a preconceived agenda?

Posted by Mitch at July 22, 2005 06:54 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Geez, this has the ingrediants for a good documentary; that is, a documentation of facts, as opposed to a trumped-up, disingenuously edited, screed that documentary makers so frequently indulge in (I won't give Michael Moore even that much credit). Somebody who can tell stories from Iraq, in how the American media covers the war, and from here, like how agenda-driven T.V. producers set out to tell stories which fit their agendas. Intercut it with scenes of common Iraqis, like the protest that Powerline blogged aboout today, which the media outlets here chose to ignore.

Posted by: Will Allen at July 22, 2005 04:16 PM

The whole enterprise is a bit like the fabled engineering fraternity at the old university, where the calculus and physics exams rotate in six or eight cycles, and the fraternity has them all on file with the various problem solutions that earned an A+. So, if you're a good boy, and join the club, you win the right to be lazy. Just buy your fraterity brothers enough beer, and you're golden. In the other fraterity, you win the right to Ted Kennedy's, Harry Reid's, or Nancy Pelosi's first-hand account of a meeting with the President, etc. and the occasional hot scoop. You just have to be good boy, highlight the "right" facts, and buy your fraterity brothers enough beer.

Posted by: RBMN at July 22, 2005 07:00 PM

The MSM is criticized daily by the alt-right media for painting with a broad brush, so to speak. That is, they take a rather extreme example of something and present it as a defining characteristic. Interesting that you, in an attack on the MSM, would use the same tactic. Lovelady's embarrassing letter to Romenesko is hardly indicative of the many eloquent defenses presented in that forum; it seems you sought out the most hysterical, ill-worded missive and presented that as an example of how Yost's colleagues are supposedly exploding with impotent rage at his editorial. A thorough perusing of Romenesko's letters on the subject would quickly do away with that impression.

Why not feature KR's Baghdad bureau chief Hannah Allam's remarks?:

Mr. Yost could have come with me today as I visited one of my own military buddies, who like most officers doesn't leave the protected Green Zone compound except by helicopter or massive convoy. The Army official picked me up in his air-conditioned Explorer, took me to Burger King for lunch and showed me photos of the family he misses so terribly. The official is a great guy, and like so many other soldiers, it's not politics that blind him from seeing the real Iraq. The compound's maze of tall blast wall and miles of concertina wire obscure the view, too.

Read the whole thing.

What's really going on in Iraq? Who the hell knows? Yost says 14 of 18 provinces are stable. Allam calls bullshit on that. Yost makes his observation from St. Paul, Allam from Baghdad. Who do you believe? It depends on what you believe:

We, the people, can count on the media to present the story, rather than to puff up a preconceived agenda?

The answer is: no, you can't. Not any more than we can count on the alt-right media to present the story, rather than puff up a preconceived agenda.

Posted by: Tim at July 22, 2005 07:03 PM

Sorry, I didn't know your comments section didn't accept HTML tags. There should be quotes around the paragraph after "Allam's remarks" and the second to last paragraph where I quote the OP.

Posted by: Tim at July 22, 2005 07:07 PM

Tim, the reason Lovelady gets picked out for slamming is because he's editor of the CJR and ought to know better than to behave like such an obvious tool in public. Not only that, he doesn't seem to have learned that bloggers do dig out facts and also do research on their own, just like real reporters are supposed to do. It doesn't fit his preconceived notion that we're all part of the giant Republican Anti-Media Attack Machine.

Posted by: Kevin at July 22, 2005 08:27 PM

"Lovelady's embarrassing letter to Romenesko is hardly indicative of the many eloquent defenses presented in that forum; it seems you sought out the most hysterical, ill-worded missive and presented that as an example of how Yost's colleagues are supposedly exploding with impotent rage at his editorial."

Two things:

First, I felt that Lovelady's letter DID represent - in convenient lampoonable form - many of the arguments I read elsewhere,which seemed to me to boil down to "Close ranks, Yost. You're with us, or you're against us". Kevin's right, though - Lovelady, as an archbishop among the high priests of information, should be less of a hack, methinks.

"Why not feature KR's Baghdad bureau chief Hannah Allam's remarks?...Read the whole thing."

I have. I've been following Allam for a while, and have had questions about her reporting:

http://www.shotinthedark.info/archives/000898.html

"What's really going on in Iraq? Who the hell knows? Yost says 14 of 18 provinces are stable. Allam calls bullshit on that."

Without saying exactly why. Look at a map of attacks of Coalition troops; easily 9 out of 10 of them take place in the four provinces that make up the Sunni triangle. The Kurdish provinces are fairly tranquil by all rational accounts, and the Shia-majority provinces are not far behind *by non-journalist accounts* from Iraqis, US military and just plain statistics.

"Yost makes his observation from St. Paul, Allam from Baghdad. Who do you believe? It depends on what you believe:"

Yost makes his observation from Saint Paul by quoting US service people and civil aid workers who are in the sandbox and have a vested interest - who are owed a blood debt, really - in making sure that Iraq succeeds. Allam makes her observations from Baghdad using sources who (at least in the article I cited above) have an interest in seeing Iraq collapse.

"The answer is: no, you can't. Not any more than we can count on the alt-right media to present the story, rather than puff up a preconceived agenda."

I, like most of the alt-right media, am honest about my agenda. You can judge the relative amounts of my reporting and puffery with that in mind. The press is not honest about its agenda.

At least, not directly. Brouhahas (Brouhahae? Brouhahi?) like the Yost rhubarb are key indicators.

Posted by: mitch at July 23, 2005 07:18 AM

Funny that I read in Allam's column how much trouble she has to go to in order to get bottled water. At the same time I read a bunch of stories with photos by Michael Yon that he writes from all over Iraq from the far north to the far south and all areas in between. He has photos of meetings he has with the Iraqi people in Mosul and Kirkuk as well as with the Iraqi people in the small towns. He is able to do this reporting about what is going on and the bureau chief of a major US newspaper cannot even get free to buy bottled water? Something is totally out of kilter here.

As to the commentary on Poynter, Lovelady is definitely the norm in commentary on the Yost posting. When I read the comments, one supported Yost and the rest all said he didn't know what he was talking about and he should get over there first. I think from all my reading of the Iraqis and from the military and the reporters who are actually out there outside the Green Zone, Yost is right on the mark.

Posted by: dick at July 23, 2005 11:58 PM

What bothers me the most is that when the bullets were flying early in the war, each news division had their "imbed" rolling along with the tanks. No more. You saw what was happening, they interviewed the troops camped in their foxhole, had footage of people celebrating and protesting. You had a good sense of what was going on. Now its just scenes from the latest bomb blast. Rarely do you get updates or interviews from the field. I've found many of the Millitary Blogs to be top notch in reporting the good, and the bad, of what is going on over there.

Posted by: Dave V at July 25, 2005 12:34 PM

Posted by: george at October 28, 2006 05:08 PM