Thursday,
January 27 2005
OLD MEDIA FAILING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BADLY: The election
in Iraq this coming Monday is easily the biggest story of the
year thus far and could arguably be one of the most consequential
events since the attacks of September 11 or the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Given its importance, you would expect the mainstream media
to devote a significant amount of resources to covering and analyzing
the run up to the election. But aside from a few notable exceptions,
that just isn't happening - especially in the major daily newspapers
across the country.
Instead,
what little coverage we get of the Iraqi election is either bundled
into or completely overshadowed by astonishingly negative stories
that get front page treatment with blaring headlines. Take yesterday,
for example. Here are the front page images and stories from four
of the nation's largest newspapers:
Story: "Budget
Deficit to Set Record"
Story: "War
Pushes Deficit To Record"
Story: "Iraq:
The Cost at Home"
Stories: "Year's
Deficit Projected at $427 Billion"
"Insurgents'
Campaign of Intimidation"
One front
page story about the Iraqi election - and a rather negative one
at that - among papers with a combined circulation of nearly 2.5
million daily readers. Interestingly, these papers are also all
owned by the Tribune
Company, though the negative coverage in them was hardly unique.
The vast majority of newspapers around the country also treated
the deficit as the most important story of the day, providing
little or no front page coverage of the elections in Iraq.
This morning,
ironically, on a day when The Baltimore Sun used the
death toll from what looks to be an accidental helicopter crash
to sprawl across the top of its page the banner headline "Deadliest
Day for U.S. in Iraq War," Thomas Sowell wrote in the
Sun's opinion section about the
pernicious effect of the press' relentlessly negative bias in
covering the War in Iraq:
If
a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and
terrorists, while sustaining 10 fatalities, that is an American
victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more
likely to read: "Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq."
This
kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat. Kept up long
enough, it can even end up with real defeat, when support for
the war collapses at home and abroad.
Again, I've
singled out The Baltimore Sun, but they are hardly the
only example. Click through the hundreds of images of newspaper
front pages around the country available
here to see just how depressingly uniform the press was in
reporting this story.
My complaint
(and Sowell's) isn't that these stories aren't news or that they
shouldn't be reported. Nor is it that the facts reported in them
aren't accurate in a technical sense. The MSM's biggest failing,
which we've seen becoming more pronounced as new outlets for information
become available to the public, is the priority, emphasis, and
the complete lack of balance and context with which they treat
these stories.
Clearly
part of this failing is driven by liberal bias. Another part of
it is that the MSM has become utterly reactive and entrenched
in the mind set that carnage and chaos sells newspapers.
The new media,
however, isn't burdened by any such orthodoxy. Just take a look
at the new Iraqi election web site/blog, Friends
of Democracy that is being edited by Michael
J. Totten. It's a collection of reports from local Iraqis,
none of which are trained journalists. The first hand accounts
are interesting, informative and by no means Pollyannaish.
Yet they
provide a completely different context through which people in
America can watch the Iraqi election unfold, one that isn't overshadowed
by the "if it bleeds it leads" mentality and the ideological
baggage of the U.S. press corps.
The old media
is failing the American public badly - and the worst part about
it is that they don't seem to have a clue. Even as viewers change
the channel and readers drop subscriptions, many in the traditional
media keep playing the same tune, unwilling or unable to address
the ever-growing number of justifiable criticisms of the way they
choose to package and deliver news and information. -
T. Bevan 1:00 pm Link
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Wednesday,
January 26 2005
CONDI'S CONFIRMATION:
From CNN:
Leading
the charge against Rice on Tuesday were Democratic Sens. Edward
Kennedy of Massachusetts, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Barbara
Boxer of California.
There is
nothing quite like letting a heavy-drinking liberal most well
known for letting someone drown, a former Klansmen and a radical
lefty from California be the face of the Democratic party, proudly
leading the charge to block the first African-American woman from
becoming Secretary of State. At times I wonder if the Democrats
have any sense at all or whether they've just come completely
unglued. - T. Bevan 12:20pm
Tuesday,
January 25 2005
A GOP REALIGNMENT OR NOT? Adam
Nagourney and Richard Stevenson took a look at this question
in yesterday's New York Times. The article makes a few
decent points, but from the title ("Some See Risks as Republicans
Revel in Power") to the selection of quotes ("this conservative
cycle is long in the tooth") to the conclusion at
the end by Yale political science Professor David Mayhew ('"I
do not think this is a lasting, mountainous achievement in terms
of building coalitions") it's hard not to view the entire
thing as The Times' best effort at offering a Xanax
pill to anxiety-ridden Democrats.
So are we
in the midst of a political realignment in favor of the GOP? Clearly,
we are in the middle of something. Some, like Professor
Andrew Busch argue that we are experiencing a "rolling
realignment" which began as far back as 1968 and has been
punctuated over the decades with victories in 1980, 1994, 2002
and now 2004.
Karl
Rove also uses the term "rolling realignment" to
describe the significant Republican gains in recent years, often
likening results of the 2000 and 2002 elections to the era of
GOP dominance ushered in by the election of William McKinley in
1896. Fred
Barnes argued in the Weekly Standard last November that the
2004 election was the exclamation point on a decade-long realignment
toward the GOP: "Republican hegemony in America is now expected
to last for years, maybe decades."
Many Democrats
continue to argue that the rough seas they find themselves sailing
are the result of a tempest created by 9/11 rather than a shifting
of the political tides. They point to pieces of evidence (the
difference of a hundred thousand votes in Ohio this year, for
example) and cling to theories of an "Emerging
Democratic Majority" to suggest that things aren't really
that bad.
With the
impending election of Howard Dean as head of the DNC and members
in Congress digging in their heels on everything from cabinet
members to judges to Social Security, Democrats hope, as Nagourney
and Stevenson wrote yesterday, that by killing Bush's agenda
history will view the 2004 election as "little
more than a fleeting alignment of the political stars: the short-lived
victory of an incumbent president running for re-election in wartime
against an unsteady opponent and a weakened opposition party."
It's possible
that a scorched earth opposition to the President is the quickest
road back to power for the Democratic party. Then again, absent
at least the perception of a positive agenda to offer as an alternative
this is a strategy that could, at least in the short-term, send
Democrats sailing even further out to sea.- T. Bevan 9:15
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