The Press

Something That I Learned From Reading Blogs

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Not only are there many extremely intelligent ordinary people out there, but a lot of famous, mainstream journalists and commentators get by mainly on their rhetorical skill and lack both analytical ability and common sense.

UPDATE: Mitch raised the hair issue in the comments, and I realized that I didn’t mean to restrict what I wrote to mainstream-media people. Andrew Sullivan (not to pick on him but he’s an obvious example) fits the pattern, despite not being a MSM person and not having important hair. He writes beautifully but his analysis of matters economic (deficits bad!) and geopolitical (we’re losing!) is somewhat less acute than is his rhetoric. Some people simply write better than they think. We should always examine arguments carefully, no matter who made them or how satisfying they sound.

Just Another Random Crime by Arab Muslims?

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Reuters is on the case. The key sentence:

The attacker said he was Algerian, police said.

Those wacky Algerians! Of course it could have been anyone who randomly attacked an airplane crew with an axe: a Chinese, a Brazilian, an orthodox Jew. The guy was probably just upset because his reindeer died or something.

Random violent crime is rare in the Nordic nation, but one person was killed and five others wounded last month when a knife attacker stabbed passengers a tram in the capital Oslo.

In case we haven’t gotten the point, Reuters added this gratuitous paragraph to make clear that the last Norwegian mass-stabber was an immigrant nutcase (i.e., not an obvious Islamist terrorist). It appears that readers are expected to infer, though there is no logical reason to do so, that the plane attacker isn’t a terrorist either.

But we don’t know the attacker’s motives. Maybe they weren’t Islamist, but that’s not the way to bet nowadays. Reuters, rather than merely presenting facts, seems determined to force the story into an editorial template. However, most readers probably are not going to accept Reuters’s version of the story at face value, and will read between the lines and use common sense to draw their own conclusions. The truth will out, even if it isn’t a truth that ideologically-engaged media operators like.

The Allegations Are False

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Journalist looking for a scoop.

Some people have accused us of disrespecting the press. They are mistaken. The press is an important institution and we accord it all the respect that it deserves.

UPDATE: Such thoughtful fellows — So fair! So balanced! So measured and restrained! So devoted to the reporting of facts without sensationalizing anything! Feh.

UPDATE 2: Perhaps all our journalist friend needs is a good editor.

“The New Defeatism”

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In a column that was overshadowed by Reagan’s death, Victor Davis Hanson counsels optimism, while expressing pessimism about the attitude and behavior of our press and intellectual elites (including conservatives). Kurdistan is a democratic model, we are succeeding militarily, there have been no mass-terror attacks against us since 9/11. Yet the elites’ attitude is one of defeatism, mingled, on the Left, with the selective exploitation of negative news for cheap political advantage:

Our Real Dilemma. We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don’t like done in our name. So ABC’s Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.

Hanson tells us to suck it up and muddle through, and he is right. His comments make me regret very much that Ronald Reagan is no longer around and that Margaret Thatcher is no longer an active participant in public life. We have nobody to replace them.

Oliver Stone, Idiot

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Instapundit links to an excellent interview with the great artiste. Here’s a representative sample:

[interviewer]: Did you ask him about his relationship with Juanita in Miami?

[Stone]: God, I don’t remember. There were so many women.

[interviewer]: Juanita is his sister.

[Stone]: Juanita’s his sister? … He seemed to be a very straight-shooter, very kind of shy with women.

[interviewer]: I’ve called him the movie star dictator. Did you get that sense about him?

[Stone]: Totally. I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel.

[interviewer]: For the second film, you received permission to see the dissidents [Stone]valdo Paya, Vladimiro Roca, and Elizardo Sanchez. They spoke critically of the government. Obviously, that couldn’t have happened unless permission for them to see you was granted, right? What do you make of Castro allowing that to happen?

[Stone]: I don’t think he was happy with it. I don’t think he wants to be in the same film with Paya. In his mind they are faux dissidents.

[interviewer]: He actually calls them faux dissidents? He called them the so-called dissidents?

[Stone]: Yeah, so-called, right. I was in Soviet Russia for a script in 1983, and I interviewed 20 dissidents in 12 cities. I really got an idea of dissidents that was much rougher than here. These people in Cuba were nothing compared to what I saw in Russia.

[interviewer]: Did you ever think to bring up why he doesn’t hold a presidential election?

[Stone]: I did. He said something to the effect, “We have elections.”

If you’re naive it’s easy to conclude that leftist cultural icons like Stone have some special insight. After all, they seem so confident in their views, and so many people in the press treat them deferentially. But it can take nothing more than a few pointed questions to make clear that a famous maker of politically themed movies is an ignorant fool. What’s remarkable is how seldom journalists ask such questions. But once in a while someone does, and once in a while the interviewee lets his guard down and the celebrity balloon deflates. (I give Stone credit for risking a hostile interview. Famous leftists like Barbra Streisand, who issues proclamations on her web site but otherwise shirks open debate, deserve even less respect.)