We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The Baghdad view Chief Wiggles is is on the warpath. I wouldn’t approach him too closely today if I were a reporter.
He’s absolutely right. The correspondents in Iraq are lying to us by choosing to report only the negatively spectacular. It’s an inherently false view and doesn’t help anyone understand what is actually going on.
I personally saw the same thing happen here in Belfast. I can remember more than one lovely peaceful day on which I found out from the international news there had been rioting a mile away from where I live. From what I have heard, there were times when reporters outnumbered rioters. You can do wonders with the right camera angle.
You see, reporters are like flies. The entire forest can be full of sunlight through leaves and the smell of spring flowers… but they will manage to find and congregate on that pile the bear left behind in the back of its’ dark den.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I detest having my news filtered for either good or bad. Let me know the bad. Let me know the good.
I visit many of the soldiers’ blogs. I would like to have some of what they see, their interactions, the life for many getting back to normal, etc. be reported in my media. I think people would be interested.
I’m tired of hearing just the negative. It’s come to the point I tune it out. I shouldn’t because I do want to know the bad. However, it’s just too much bad all the time.
I should know better than to expect our news media to report anything but just the bad. I learned long ago how stories get twisted and embellished when placed in the paper.
When I was about 16 years old, our high school was visited by the school board and the superintendent of schools (the school bosses). Don’t recall why these people came; I think they were having a meeting with our principal (person in charge of the high school).
We had a group of students who liked to play pranks. While the meeting was going on they managed to place super glue into the locks of the doors enclosing the offices where the meeting was held. They had also managed, somehow, to remove the hinge pins from the doors. So, once the doors opened, they would fall.
The school bosses were unable to open the doors when they wanted to leave. They ended up calling a locksmith as well as the local police department.
Once the doors could be opened, they crashed to the floor because they were not attached to their hinges. I think additional police were called due to the falling doors. (It was so long ago I don’t remember *all* the details.)
The rest of the students were still attending class and we were unaware of what had happened. Unless you happened to be near the area of those offices, or looked out a window and saw the police cars, there was nothing to indicate it was anything other than a normal day at school.
The following day, our local paper reported this incident as widespread vandalism throughout the entire school caused by a large gang of roaming youths.
The story indicated students were in danger due to this ‘roving gang’.
If you only had the account in the paper to inform you, you would have thought it was much worse than it was. The story in the paper *REALLY* stretched the truth. I remember feeling stunned that a paper would print such an embellished version of what happened. (I was young and didn’t realize people did this.)
All respect to the soldiers’ work, and to their respective blogs, but those mainstream media reports are focusing on one of the two things the media knows will get Americans’ attention. That is American casualties.
The other would be administration statements as to what it is trying to do in Iraq. I don’t mean bringing freedom and hope and sunshine; I mean making the streets safe where that is possible, rebuilding bridges and power lines, establishing local governments. Some of these things are happening, more than we read about here, but they are happening because the American military is making them happen, apparently without much direction from the CPA in Baghdad, let alone from Washington.
If reporters were still embedded with military units we might read more about this kind of thing, but that train left the station some time ago. I can appreciate that to a soldier used to his chain of command it probably doesn’t look as if we are stumbling around ineffectually in many ways in Iraq. A reporter covering the CPA probably sees things differently, which may mean the reporter is just perverse or wants to see America lose or only files from the swimming pool at his Baghdad hotel, or may mean that CPA does in fact have serious problems.
The way it looks to me is that we are relying pretty heavily on the military’s skill and talent for improvisation to make up for some significant shortcomings in the making and public explanation of policy. The immediate response of any administration so criticized is to blame the media, but what media coverage mostly does is effect how we feel back home. The media is not the problem.
The point one should take from my article is reporters are a simple commercial enterprise. The job of a reporter is to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible while keeping their job. There are many who see it is as glamorous so there is a fair bit of competition to drive the prices down. Newspapers want screaming headlines so they can outcompete their competition for eyeballs; the hotter the competition, the louder they scream and the more they push the reporters for “hot” stories.
It’s the nature of the beast. Newspapers and TV news and the like should not be looked on as a source of information, but taken instead for what they are. Entertainment.
If you want to be informed you are perhaps better off today with the blogs; it used to be a great deal of work and required the desire and finances to subscribe to things like Foreign Affairs and attending international conferences.
Blogs have brought this to everyman. The ability to really bring balanced news may be the forte of this media.
As a software contractor, I occasionally get a few days’ gap between 3 or 6 month contracts.
About 5 years ago I had a few days gap, and a friend of mine who works in Conservative Central Office phoned me up and offered me a little job where I could see William Hague (then the leader) and half the Shadow Cabinet in action.
They were doing a launch of a report where the Christian and Jewish party activists had interviewed hundreds of charities and religious groups and brought it together into a closely referenced and detailed report proposing that “Stronger Families for Everyone” would solve a lot of society’s problems.
My job was to take the £5 reusable/disposable camera I’d been given, note where all the press were taking their pictures from and try to use all the 36 shots up by taking interesting pictures from all the angles that the Press were NOT taking pictures from.
So I had a good knowledge of what had happened, as I’d been concentrating the whole time.
The next morning I checked all the papers to see what they had said about the report. I assumed that any professional journalist would follow the rules that my English teacher had told me at school when writing factual essays – look for the “Who, What, Why, When, Where and How”.
Basically, it seemed that the Telegraph was accurate and complete, the Times was accurate but incomplete, the Independent didn’t mention it at all… but the Guardian!!!!!!!
They reported absolutely nothing about the report or the launch – instead they took the tiniest, smallest-print sub-appendix they could find from the back of the report which was a 10 word reference to the American “True Love Waits” agenda to discourage teenage sex, and made a splash headline as follows:
“Tory Christians slam Hague for sleeping with Ffion before marriage at Tory conference last year”…
Porphyrogenitus has an interesting read from an LTC in Iraq.
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As for phrawnce, via Merde…
The United Nations must come and help us immediately. [The vehicle is labeled ‘Halliburton’]
This is the way freeloading French see American sacrifice in the ‘Libération’ newspaper.
Modern Liberals and Conservatives are two sides of the same coin. Both groups want to modify human behavior (individual and collective… presumably for what they consider the better) using the power of the state.
Sure… Left and Right they have different ideas about how and what the state should muck with in people’s lives, but they consider it at least okay (and sometimes an almost religious imparitive) to DO SOMETHING.
Never think that “Reducing Government” is going to hold water with a modern Conservative when it is time to axe their particular, pet program.
Dale,
I think it is a bit early for you to conclude that the media is painting a false, overly negative picture of what’s going on in Iraq. There *has* been a fair amount of negative news in recent month and it wasn’t simply invented by the media.
Note that there seems to be considerable concern within the Administration — why else do you think the President is now asking the United Nations and the international community to provide more money and military aid in return for some to-be-determined concessions…? This would have been unthinkable only 3-4 months ago. I also detect considerable anxiety in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, although they do keep whacking those awfully biased liberal journalists for all it’s worth.
We will see over the next year or so who was right.
MARCU$
Marcus: I disagree. When I watch the news on the UK TV channels or radio… I hear a very, very onesided account that barely seems to exist in the same reality as the information I’m getting from people who are *there*. It’s not just my opinion that this is happening. Lots of others are starting to compare the amount of ambulance chasing in Baghdad and other places to the on the ground reality as reported by, well, those on the ground in Iraq.
That’s what’s so cool about the ‘net. I can totally bypass the reporters and get my information direct.
I don’t believe the picture there is totally rose-tinted. But it is absolutely, and certainly not even near the unmitigated disaster one would be given to believe from ITV Channel 4.
I’m not sure what planet they are reporting on, but it ain’t the one I’m on.
Oh, a PS to that. I think the reason the Bush adminstration is approaching the UN is that they’ve started getting an inventory of just how far Saddam ran the infrastructure into the ground… and the bill to get the place actualling functioning is giving them sticker shock.
The place basically hasn’t had any infrastructure investment in 35 years… unless you count palaces and statues.
Dale,
I agree with you on the media reports all the way! Military life is 97% boredom and 3% sheer terror!
> That’s what’s so cool about the ‘net. I can totally
> bypass the reporters and get my information
> direct.
Logically, the best informed people of all would be the top level administrators in Iraq and the contact persons within the Administration. They have access to more data than anybody else. If these folks are getting a bit nervous, I think their cheerleaders out in the neocon blogosphere have reason for concern as well — no matter what the glowing e-mails from private X at freerepublic.com might be telling you about Iraq.
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I pay less attention to “first hand accounts” from soldiers or journalists in Iraq, who only see a limited part of the big scenario and (as you say) may be prejudiced about what they are seeing. You mention BBC journalists, but I don’t think relying on pro-war sources for all information is any better…
MARCU$
Why can’t the press report stories like Chief Wiggles and the little girl ? Or his appeal for toys for Iraqi children ? Remeber the US airman who dropped parcels of chocolate to kids during the Berlin airlift ? Its “hearts and minds”.
Why can’t the press ask for gifts that can be sent to Iraqi families ? We were concerned for them during the toppling of Saddam, we remain concerned for them now. Gifts from ordinary families in Britain and America could help express our concern. And they should be passed to our troops out there to distribute, to show that people care.
Thing is, since when have the media reported good news?
Sure, they only tell you about the bad things happening in Iraq, partly because they’re easier to identify, & make better news.
Similarly, you don’t hear about the *lack* of child abuse in the UK, only about children getting abducted etc. Do the media have an agenda to make people think paedophiles are everywhere then? Further, did you see any reports about the *lack* of famine in Ethiopia until recently? hmm.. nor me.
No big leftist-liberal conspiracy imho; just the nature of the market for news.
I don’t know about you guys but i’m left scratching my head on how this got past american liberal censors!
Pan-arabism dead in Baghdad’s streets!
It’s worth the read!
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/17_09_03_b.asp
A different point of view, that had to come from of all places the middle east!