Media

Last year I discussed how the newspaper industry in general and the New York Times specifically were losing customers at an alarming rate. Now a blog dedicated to discussing business matters takes a look at the financial health of that august news organization. He even has a graph!

Summary: Things don’t look good.

(Since this is a “go look” post where I didn’t add anything of substance, the comments are closed. Please click on over and let Tom know what you think. He is smarter than I am about this stuff, anyway.)

Today’s Strategypage.com has an interesting post by Harold Hutchinson. (Post dated March 7, 2006.) The post discusses a recent decision by a Federal judge which forced the release of the names of more than 500 detainees currently being held at Gitmo. The court case was brought by the Associated Press in order to force the DoD to comply with a Freedom of Information request that they had filed.

Hutchinson says that the decision is a great victory for our terrorist enemy in the Global War on Terror, and compares it to the Axis powers in WWII learning that their codes had been broken by the Allies.

I don’t know enough about the intelligence gathered through interrogations at Gitmo to know if Hutchinson’s assessment of the damage to our efforts is hyperbole or not, but it is certain that one point he made in his short essay is correct. The release of this information will put the lives of those who cooperated in the capture of the detainees at risk. Not only that but, knowing something about the feud mentality of most terrorists, the lives of their families will also be in jeopardy.

Let’s be very clear about this. Innocent people will probably die.

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It is not so much the major media’s biases that bother me as it is their sheer incompetence. The New York Times story, “U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review” by Scott Shane is laced with both.

The lead graph:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

and later:

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department’s history series, “Foreign Relations of the United States.”The stuff they pulled should never have been removed,” he said. “Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.”

Gosh, how weird, why reclassify stuff that is already publicly available? I’m sure our intrepid reported will soon tell us.

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Last week I received a curious Email from the Canadian magazine The Western Standard. The publisher, Ezra Levant, was asking for my personal help by sending out a form letter in a mass Emailing.

And what was troubling TWS? It seems that Mr. Levant published the Danish cartoons that have offended so many Muslims of late, and retailers across Canada were refusing to stock the magazine. Not only that, but a “Calgary Muslim leader” (as Mr. Levant puts it) reported the magazine to the police and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, accusing Mr. Levant of hate crimes.

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Davids Medienkritik takes Der Spiegel to task for again pandering to the addiction to anti-American innuendo.

Torture in the name of freedom? Since when has America advocated torture as a means of promoting freedom? When someone is tortured or abused in a German jail in violation of established standards, does that mean the German government is torturing in the name of democracy as well? When illegal immigrants suffocate or commit suicide in German custody is that also in the name of democracy? It is as if the United States had never addressed the issue. It is as if the McCain bill torture ban had never been passed by Congress and signed by the President.

This is a dangerously cynical equation of two concepts. Particularly in a Europe where the general public is already so jaded that many no longer believe in the concept of freedom. Why? Because instead of reporting on the systematic violation of human rights in nations like North Korea and Iran the German media finds it necessary to exploit two year old photos of Abu Ghraib for profit (again and again). Never mind that Saddam’s Abu Ghraib was a thousand times worse or that hundreds of thousands are starving to death in Kim Jong Il’s gulags. There is no need for context in the world of asymmetric journalism.

I don’t doubt that torture is a blight on America’s good name, and it is a sin that needs to be rooted out. Many are of the opinion that torture is not, in fact, effective. (It must seem ironic to anti-Americans that John Yoo, who has written in support of the idea that the Constitution grants the executive expansive powers in times of war, happens to think that “answers extracted under torture might not be reliable” [answer to question 11] — but that won’t, of course, stop the demonization.) In fact, American policy appears to have gradually shifted away from reliance on torture. However, due to the slowness of the process of discovery, some of the worst abuses did not emerge until some time after they had been committed, and (hopefully) dealt with.

In the United States, one of the foremost critics of torture, who writes eloquently and usually does not fly off the handle, is Andrew Sullivan. Sadly, he is one of only a few who backs up his critiques by looking for facts to support his accusations. The rest, unfortunately, seem to regard torture less as reprehensible in itself, than as a vehicle by which to score political points against the current Administration. While Sully’s writings sometimes may seem to lean in that direction (and some have accused him of ulterior motives), they are nonetheless well thought-out, and do not get in the way of his desire to see the West triumphant. His aim primarily is to have the West win as cleanly as possible, and however idealistic, it is a worthy goal.

I regretfully observe, though, that it is far too easy for media outlets to capitalize on the market for sensationalist reporting. Not that Der Spiegel is really regarded as a font of serious writing (which does not mean that it’s never published thought-provoking material). In fact, I doubt Der Spiegel is any more highly regarded as a serious policy journal than, say, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone.

But as Ray D. notes:

The irony of it all is that publications like SPIEGEL would not even have the freedom to print this exploitative trash had it not been for the massive sacrifice in lives, blood and toil of American soldiers to liberate Germany from Fascism and defend it from Communism.

No context. No differentiation. Shock value. Manipulation. Emotionalism. Sensationalism. And then the same publication dares lecture us on the dangers of anti-Americanism.

That’s legacy media for you right there. Well, it’s not Davids Medienkritik for nothing!

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]