| | " The Bradley fighting vehicles moved slowly down this city's main boulevard. Suddenly, a homemade bomb exploded, punching into one vehicle. Then another explosion hit, briefly lifting a second vehicle up onto its side before it dropped back down again. Two American soldiers climbed out of a hatch, the first with his pant leg on fire, and the other completely in flames. The first rolled over to help the other man, but when they touched, the first man also burst into flames. Insurgent gunfire began to pop. Several blocks away, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Rosener, 20, from Minneapolis, watched the two men die..."
These are the lead paragraphs in the cover story on Iraq of today's Sunday New York Times -- the most important real estate in the most important newspaper in the world on the day (Sunday) when that paper is the most widely read.
The story goes on to tell a story of terror and confusion, seeking out and finding a soldier to quote who would go on record to say, plaintively and Bambi-like, "we didn't know it was going to be like this..." And telling us how the enemy seems to be "everywhere". Typical of the Times coverage of the war, this story comes across slightly phony in tone. The reporter is trying to hard to editorialize, straining to slightly over-dramatize the horrors of war for that Pulitzer.
It reads like the fairy tale of an imaginary war in which the American military is running scared before all powerful insurgents. The story is heightened by the photo which accompanies it: not that of a confident or purposeful American soldier, but one who looks catatonic. It would have been necessary to comb thousands of photos to come up with one that combines in such a pronounced way fearfulness and confusion with a numb, dazed, and stupid look. This is not someone I would trust to clean my windshield.
By implication, what this photo selection suggests, since a picture is more eloquent than words, is the mental and self-esteem state of the American soldier. It is especially significant because the Times doesn't often put the face of an American soldier on its cover page. It is clearly intended to be symbolic.
It is an attempt to say something they are too cowardly to come right out and say. (And which they want to slip under the radar into your subconscious.)
What is striking about this fiction-like story of a horrible incident is how dishonest it is. It involves a careful selection of a story to plaster on the front page which is diametrically the opposite of the real situation right, as any informed person knows who has actually been following the war over the last six to eight months:
The war is one in which the American army is winning every battle. The insurgents can't stay long in one place. They were not able to meet their main goal of cowing or convincing their own people not to vote. They are hated in their own country..and they seem to be less and less feared. They have not been able to foment a civil war. They have not been able to cause the Americans to withdraw or to terrorize the Iraqis into not joining the police or the army or the government.
All you need to do to see the impotence of the insurgents (and thus the slanted, twisted, dishonesty of the above out-of-context war coverage) is to focus on one single fact:
The insurgents are barely able to kill a dozen people a day - a ludicrously small figure in any war, comparable to the number of people killed by falling trees in any given week. More Americans died in most -days- in World War II than have died in the entire Iraq War.
I would not complain, nor would any reasonable person, if this were an isolated story. After all, a great newspaper has to cover the parts of the country and the respects where the war is going well and the places and respects in which it is going badly.
But here is where the sleaziness and dishonesty is revealed:
The New York Times does not cover in any serious or focused way the parts of Iraq or the respects in which the war is going well. Their coverage of that is almost as rare as the number of favorable articles they have published on ...oh, let's say...the Bush Administration.
They do mention that they have chosen the worst city in Iraq to write this story about. But the fact that they did not choose to write about the most successful city in Iraq to plaster on the front page of the Sunday Times is as revealing as anything could be.
The New York Times, for political reasons wishes to emphasize the negative with regard to those things it is opposed to. They choose to do this in every story on the topic. They are not the Washington Post.
The Times make it a matter of firm editorial policy (which they will heatedly deny) to never publish anything, at least not prominently, which suggests that anything whatsoever is successful over there or that that the war is anything but hopeless.
This is not to say that there is any guarantee that the war will be won, or to argue either for or against having gone into Iraq in the first place.
But it is to say that a newspaper that is still a great one when the topic is other than politics (the science pages, the culture pages, the business and technology sections) should separate fact from its own political opinion, needs to act like something better than a two-dollar whore when the subject of an article involves the ideology or politics of the owners, publishers, and editors.
Even worse, those who are slimed by the Times - for example, their frequent targets: the military, the department of defense, the business community, the "right", the Republicans - don't utter a peep about this dishonesty. By what comes across as trembling silence about this outright, belligerent dishonesty, their victims who do have the money and ability to get their response known allow blatant, fictionalized, sensationalist yellow journalism, as in the story cited above, to not only go unrefuted but, since it has been unexposed, to win journalism awards.
The unchallenged lie from the Des Moines Register may not be noticed before the next Ice Age but the unchallenged lie from the New York Times is accepted by everyone and appears on the evening news the next day.
Would it be better if other journalists had more spine and independent thinking? Yes, but you can't count on that, and that is not the way the world of ideas works. In almost every field, when the recognized big dog starts barking, all the other hounds in the neighborhood start barking in syncopated rhythm as well.
Where is Spiro Agnew, who went after the politicization of the Times from the bully pulpit? Where is there a prominent press critic with a megaphone when we need him?
--Philip Coates
PS, The sneaky little trick the Times does (and I read them essentially every day, so I'm quite familiar with this) is when they bury the other side of the story:
That things are getting better but slowly in the above city or in the general battle against the insurgents. In this case, it was hidden in the bottom of the story if you dig for it. But ninety percent of readers don't read every word. And usually the other side is treated in one of these ways: i) given less space, ii) hidden at bottom or on an inside page, iii) undercut or made to seem like less than solid in some way.
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 10/23, 2:03am)
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