Media

From United Press International: Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, comments on the “evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon.” (Obviously, the world now appreciates the work of Green Helmet.) Chris Warren, spokesman for the Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, responds “I don’t think journalists have got it so wrong as some governments did on weapons of mass destruction.” Pajamas Media reports on the newly declassified reports: “For those keeping score, this most recent discovery raises the total number of chemical weapons found in Iraq since 2003 to more than 700.”

Gateway Pundit graphs a decline in deaths in Iraq in August. However, even hawkish reporters have found the Pentagon downbeat this week. The AP military writer, Robert Burns, summarizes the testimony:

Sectarian violence is spreading in Iraq and the security problems have become more complex than at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report said Friday.

In a notably gloomy report to Congress, the Pentagon reported that illegal militias have become more entrenched, especially in Baghdad neighborhoods where they are seen as providers of both security and basic social services.

The report described a rising tide of sectarian violence, fed in part by interference from neighboring Iran and Syria and driven by a “vocal minority” of religious extremists who oppose the idea of a democratic Iraq.

While the world is a complicated place and all may be true, surely each can’t be broadly representative.

In a performance on Broadway a few years ago, Robin Williams riffed on French impotence by doing an impression of a suffocatingly snobbish Frenchman deriding all things American. In the middle of this imaginary Frenchman’s tirade, his head snaps around, and he declares, “The Germans are here!” Whereupon this realization, he faces the audience again, stretches out his arms, and says, “We love Americans! Welcome Americans!” Now, Robin Williams is not a fan of George W. Bush by any stretch of the imagination; but that bit always tickled me for the excellent way in which it shows the double standards of a power so seemingly impotent.

In a similar vein, Ray D. of Davids Medienkritik has this to say about the German magazine Spiegel Online:

According to SPIEGEL, Americans are warmongers, mercenaries, cowboys, Rambos, religious nuts and conceited bungling occupiers who have created a catastrophe-disaster-debacle-quagmire-civil war in the Middle East. And now the same online magazine wants us to believe that the current crisis in the region “calls for US leadership”!? Does that make sense to anyone else? Could it be that the United States really is a positive force in the world and not the summation of vile stereotypes and chronic biases displayed on German newsstands?

And never mind that Europe can do little about the crisis other than look on in bumbling impotence. This is all America’s fault, because Bush is not being decisive enough and has allegedly tied his nation down in Iraq. Mascolo quotes Time magazine’s assertion that America is too weak to act because it has “bled itself white in Iraq.” Bled itself white with fewer US deaths in Iraq than on 9/11 alone? Bled itself white with dozens or even hundreds of times fewer casualties than in previous wars? As an historic reminder to Mr. Mascolo, the United States suffered 81,000 casualties and 19,000 combat deaths in the Battle of the Bulge alone, and the nation was certainly not too weak to finish the task of occupying Germany.

I’m not so naive as to think that all Germans necessarily feel this way. Specifically, though, I find Spiegel Online to be like the child who declares his parents unfair and unjust for disapproving of his rebelliousness, but then turns around and demands a raise in the allowance so he can carry on with that very rebellion.

Hopefully Spiegel Online doesn’t speak for all Germans. I suspect they represent Germans about as well as, say, Newsweek or Time represent all Americans. But certainly, by the very inconsistency of their protestations, they cannot be taken seriously. It would be like saying that the editors at Vanity Fair ought to be given run of the United States.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Via Instapundit comes word that House members are circulating a letter asking that the House revoke the New York Times’s press credentials. I think I have a better idea. Politicians and other interviewees should simply refuse to answer any questions from Times reporters on any subject. Unlike a more traditional boycott where the consumers refuse to purchase the target’s products, this boycott would cut the Times off from its sources of information.

Let the Times try to do real reporting on political matters when a large number of major politicians will not talk to them.

There have been many predictions about the impact of blogging. Some people have claimed that this hobby of ours (la blogga nostra?) will replace main stream media some day. Eventually there will be no more TV news shows, no more newspapers. Everyone will get their fast breaking news from the blogs.

I think this prediction is not very realistic, if for no other reason than bloggers usually write about items they find in the news instead of getting out there and nailing down the story by themselves. But there is no question that blogs have done a great service to this country.

The scandal known as Ra^thergate showed just how blogs can be used to keep traditional media sources honest. Forged documents were held up as evidence in a story that would have seriously damaged President Bush’ chances to win the 2004 election. If not for bloggers, history would have been altered.

Ra^thergate is the single great blog success story so far even though it is two long years in the past, but it has some very long legs. The Washington Post reports that Dan Rather will probably be forced into retirement some time this year.

It could very well be that the scandal which bears his name has nothing to do with the end of Rather’s career. I do note that the author of the WaPo story keeps mentioning that piece of old news, though.

One of the executives at CBS had an epitaph for an old anchor who spent his career in the service of one of the traditional media giants.

The CBS executives hope a dignified exit can be arranged and that Rather can find a second career, perhaps in cable, the sources say.

Or, I suppose, he could start his own blog.

Isaiah Berlin’s contrast of the hedgehog & the fox is widely applicable, though I’m not sure it works as well as Philip E. Tetlock does when he applies it to pundits. He is, however, quite correct in his assumption that A) being extreme is likely to be more often wrong, and, B) also more interesting. Partisan pundits (or ones with a fixed idea) are seldom broad, deep, historical thinkers but rather hyperbolic, emotional ones.

He is also right, few are asked to compare their prognostications with what actually came to pass. While our politicians, rightly, are held accountable for assessments and predictions of years ago, the pundits doing the critiques are seldom confronted with their unfulfilled prophesies of even a few months.

Of course, bloggers, with access to a variety of search engines and a keen sense of competition with the “old” media, sometimes entertain themselves with just these discrepancies, but our imaginations prefer broad & graspable generalization rather than more ambiguous modified ones.

This is discussed in more length in Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know? (Thanks to A&L.)