Where’s the Tough New Benchmark Journalism From the Elite Providers?
Four points of depature from Greg Mitchell's welcome post, and thanks to him, Andrew and TPM readers for doing this with us.
1. I feel very indebted to all the reporters who have gone to cover this war-- and bloggers too. Whenever people are willing to sacrifice their lives and risk getting blown apart to get the story out to the rest of the world, reporting itself is re-anchored in a moral universe. This is especially so because they know they are going to fail. Most of the war will elude them.
2. I believe one of the failures in covering this war has been a dearth of imagination earlier in the process than articles, columns, editorials and "coverage" happen.
The full sweep of the Bush project for remaking executive power and asserting American might in the world was hard for the supervising editors to conceive of. For most reporters, the scale of the failure and incompetence in Iraq were beyond what their probability meters were likely to pick up. What I've called the retreat from empiricism by the Bush team-- not on their scopes. In a word, they weren't radical enough to match up with their subject. It's like the newsroom needed an Overton Window or something. I don't know how you solve that. Do any of you?
3. John Burns, in his five year retrospective for the New York Times, wrote of the trail of shocking discoveries among reporters who were committed to the story and there for the invasion. These included "the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell." For a long time, that was too radical a thought. A failure to conceive of something gone so wrong... is not the same thing as a flaw in coverage or what Greg calls "errors of judgment." Those are three different categories.
4. I think one of the big news organizations with a presence in Iraq and the processing power back home should have tried actually to measure the success of the surge. In its news pages, Gen. Petraeus should have gotten a running report card-- yes, a grade from A to F, with interim and final marks. It would be a political act, grading the general and the surge. But exactly the kind of action the press should be taking. (See Walter Pincus demanding a more political press. I wrote about his call for more courage here.)
They had everything they needed for a genuine accountability move. Clear enough timetables. Goals publicly stated, from which you could derive benchmarks, as in: Provide breathing room for political reconciliation. The guy responsible, Gen. Petraeus, is also the guy in charge; and he has the support of his superior. (How often in bureaucratic life do you find that?) Arguments for why the surge could and would work were all there, waiting to be proven by eventualities, and so on.
Keeping these markers constantly in view, you could try to narrate events against them, coloring in progress when it is made, keeping an eye on the clock, and of course the political calendar. Then, at strategic intervals, come right out with it: tell us whether the surge is working or faltering, and divide your judgment up along progress tracks that make the most sense. When Patraeus comes back to testify before Congress, give him his grades, A-F, on your list of key surge measures. If the surge goes from not working to mostly working, your measures should reflect it.
Would a Patraeus report card would be required reading that morning? I say it would. He said "progress!" she said "no progress!" they said "some progress!"... this is commodity coverage. Greg Mitchell wants to know, how do I judge coverage of the “surge” results in the past year? And I want to know: Where's the tough new benchmark journalism from the elite providers with Baghdad bureaus?
I dunno. With the exception of the period from late-August 2002 through the March 2003 pre-war presidential press conference how bad has media coverage really been? And even then, the Knight-Ridder guys got that period pretty much correct.
What anti-war critics seem to be upset about is the absence of an oppositional press, one that would hold the administration responsible for its failures to accomplish the goals which it initially stated were the reason it adopted its policies, one that would not allow the administration to get away with its claim that "we make our own reality."
But that function is the job of the Loyal Opposition, not the media!
March 18, 2008 9:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good post Jay. A lot to kick around there. No matter how cynical some of us might be -- who could possibly believe we'd still have 160,000 troops in Iraq 5 years later? Though I find it almost poignant -- though tragic -- that, almost 5 years ago, I may have been first to describe Iraq as a coming "quaqmire," and took a lot of heat for it. This past Sunday, John Burns in the NYT used that very word...
March 18, 2008 12:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
a failure of imagination?
puh-lease. what a cop out.
a failure to do their jobs.
it is the very essence of reporting that you report the facts and follows your leads. if a reporter cared to look, there were reputable critics of the rush to war that were sidelined by the MSM, the NYT consistently allowed itself to be used as an administration mouthpiece.
perhaps you say, these reporters did look and come back with facts suggesting there is no plan for an occupation, but the EDITORS killed it, watered it down.
Failure of imagination? No way.
Fear of displeasing either the government, corporate owners or readers? Yes.
Real Journamalism? Absolutely not.
March 18, 2008 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
i just don't buy the failure of imagination argument.
the failure of the press to get the story right, to frame the issues, to report the facts... are all symptoms of MSM owned by corporations with specific viewpoints that color the news and, of course, pre-occupied with ratings.
reporters get ahead not by reporting where the fact lead, but, by producing articles that the editors want.
the greatest thing about the internet is that is has broken the stranglehold of corporate media as the sole source of reporting, analysis and coverage.
March 18, 2008 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Contrast this CBC piece with American reporting and the contrast is un-missable.
March 18, 2008 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Both Greg and Jay have mentioned the John Burns restrospective on Sunday. I'm curious to know whether anyone else had as much trouble with it as I did -- by my lights, Burns offered only a shallow, halfhearted mea culpa on behalf of the press's Iraq coverage, while repeating its worst sin. Namely, Burns still insists on the ahistorical, patriotic framing that made the press so oblivious to facts on the ground in the first place. He calls the Iraq War is a noble democratic project "betrayed" by bad planning, unlucky circumstances, the missing Iraqi "zest" for democracy, etc. -- even if the original objective had nothing to do with spreading democracy, and regardless of our long, not especially democratic policy history in the Middle East. The point isn't to bash the U.S. at every turn. But a blindness to history, and a tendency to couch all American actions in a grand democratic narrative, make it hard for reporters (and citizens) to engage in clear-eyed analysis.
Can't we leave out the blinkered exceptionalist rhetoric by now? Democracy would be stronger for it...
March 18, 2008 3:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I mean Here
March 18, 2008 3:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Burns also ended by saying that Iraqis he knows, when asked for a fully frank opinion, say they don't want Americans to leave. The next day yet another poll came out showing that 70% do want us to leave. Burns feels that most Iraqis will not speak the truth to pollsters -- but some few will, to him. Who do you believe?
March 18, 2008 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
No exit: I am not trying to excuse failure in the press corps where we have seen it, but to diversify our sense of it. A failure to imagine, and to re-imagine in light of new evidence, can be a failure to do your job. Isn't that we mean what we say, for example... "no one connected the dots"...?
Ellen: I think you're right to be cautious about expecting from the press what ought properly to be expected from the political opposition. A lot of stories that appear to be missing, the work of negligent or slanted press, can get into the news by normal reporting on what the opposition is doing. I acknowledge there's truth in that.
I don't think I am expecting the press to fight my political battles for me, but I recognize it as a danger.
My point is somewhat different. I think the Bush project, including Iraq, is a radical project for the American presidency. On many different fronts, though not all, it has operated on different principles than presidencies Republican and Democrat before. It pushed the boundaries of the executive, and the "thinkable." This happened in a whole host of ways that others have chronicled.
In my view the news machinery in general underplayed, understated, mishandled and smoothed out these differences. It didn't tell Democrats or Republicans how different this presidency was because it didn't know how to break that story. This isn't a problem in opposition, it's a problem in description.
That's kinda where I'm coming from.
I also think there's been a lot of great reporting from Iraq, and I wouldn't characterize the press there now as insufficiently skeptical.
March 18, 2008 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . the Bush project, including Iraq, is a radical project [that] has operated on different principles than presidencies Republican and Democrat before. It pushed the boundaries of the executive, and the "thinkable."
I assume that you mean that the GWB Administration has implemented the ideology advanced by the Christian Coalition, the Federalist Society, the Chamber of Commerce, the K Street Project, and many other conservative organizations by staffing federal agencies with graduates of those organizations. I assume, as well, that you are upset by the fact that the staffing, the goals of the appointees, and the discontinuity between what GWB put out for public consumption ("Compassionate Conservatism") and the reality was little reported. All well and good.
But because political appointees always stone-wall and spin, this type of investigative reporting is dependent upon reporters having access to and having maintained the trust of non-politicals in the various agencies. And when there are no reporters regularly assigned to the agencies -- and with the exception of the White House and the Department of Defense there aren't any anymore -- this trust which is dependent upon long-term relationships is absent. Ergo; no stories.
Blame the media? the economics of media ownership? the FCC?
Quien sabe.
March 18, 2008 8:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
@ greg and graves: I respect Burns as a reporter and journalist. I think he's a man with a conscience, and a morally serious person. I don't think he thought failure and fiasco on this scale possible, and that's what you could read in his retrospective.
Burns reported on Iraq under Saddam, and felt it to be in a category of bad by itself. In 2004 he said, "For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone."
I don't think of the Burns article as any dramatic coming clean or anything like that. It's very measured, and not fault finding or confessional. But it does have an emotional center. This part:
This started to tell him he had miscalculated. The suffering to come could actually be greater, which meant that both the WMD and the human rights cases were in doubt. I think over time, with events, he saw that.
March 18, 2008 6:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
i haven't accused you of trying to excuse the failures of the press corp, no honest man could, i just don't think you've made the case that a failure of imagination played a role in it.
take judith miller for example. she reported wildly inaccurate things based on anonymous sources in the white house... repeatedly, even when she should have known she was being used as tool of misinformation. i think she knew, but she didn't care. she had access and plenty of imagination.
perhaps you could offer a specific example of where a failure of imagination and not just bad reporting.
March 18, 2008 6:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Judith Miller committed multiple sins. It might be said she had too much imagination, as you suggest.
But to discuss the run-up to the war for a moment, one reason that skeptical accounts got buried on A17 is that editors and producers literally could not imagine that so many official sources, high up sources, and sources closes to the White House could be wrong, or have bad information. In general, the closer your sources were to the White House--to the decision-makers. to the inside--the more likely your coverage was to be off.
By imagination I mean what Anthony Cordesman said in the New York Times op ed forum Sunday, "the most serious surprise was that what appeared to be the American A-Team in national security ignored years of planning and months of interagency activity before the war, and the United States had no meaningful plan for stability operations and nation building after the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces."
It's a shock, because you never imagined it... Wait a minute, there was planning but they didn't use it, they substituted their own, but that didn't really exist so they went with nothing...? It kinda boggles.
Switching to the war on terror, by imagination I also mean things like Andrew Sullivan is getting at in this post, which is called "Imaginationland" and this one, related. He's speculating, not reporting; and his outrage fuels his speculation, which is permissible in blogging but not in news reporting.
But it's hard to be right in covering the Bush Administration without taking a few leaps.
March 18, 2008 9:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Disconnect
There was a tremendous break with reality in the Iraq story. How to wrap one's mind around it requires lots of reading, something most daily newspaper and wire services reporters don't do and are encouraged NOT to do. Might veer the narrative.
First, one needed to read the contracts for "rebuilding" Iraq. Those were available in 2003 at the Center for Public Integrity. In 2003, I read them and wept. "Rebuilding" Iraq meant creating a vast wasteland ribboned by four pipelines to Haifa, military bases and a fortress at Baghdad. No civilian housing. No cities. No roads. Just huge highways to and from bases where cities once stood. After reading and reading the material a few times, all I could think of was this is urban renewal with relocation to Allah.
Secondly, the British history in Iraq. At least watch the movie "Lawrence of Arabia." It's as fundamental to the Iraq folly as "Apocalypse Now" is to Viet Nam.
Thirdly, read what Bush 41 had to say about why he DIDN'T invade Iraq: there's no way to extract troops once they've landed. It's a bottleneck.
Fourthly, read the Arabic blogs. Translation software is not great but it beats missing out on what Arab speaking people are saying about the terrible calamity that has befallen them. Many Arabic forums are a mix of Arabic, English and French posters. I first learned of the plight of Iraqi farmers, who were being forced to give up their seeds for GM crops, which sterilize fields.
Fifthly, pre-emptive war was a concept discussed in Congress and discarded in the 1870s in favor of a carefully considered rationale for taking up arms against another nation. Reading the arguments that were made then offers a framework for understanding the present folly.
With that kind of mental frame, one might approach the horrors of what has befallen the Iraqi people. Dahr Jamail, with whom I corresponded from time to time, did the best job of any reporter who set foot in Iraq. Robert Fisk, of course, did a great job, too.
Reporters embedded with troops or trapped in the Green Zone filed stories that passed military censorship or were second hand news. I doubt anybody who was given official press credentials for Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter, was anyone whose forte is enterprise stories.
It's a tragedy beyond comprehension, and it may be repeated in Iran.
Will the press do anything differently? I doubt it.
March 19, 2008 1:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
No exit: Judith Miller committed multiple sins. It might be said she had too much imagination, as you suggest.
But to discuss the run-up to the war for a moment, one reason that skeptical accounts got buried on A17 is that editors and producers literally could not imagine that so many official sources, high up sources, and sources closes to the White House could be wrong, or have bad information. In general, the closer your sources were to the White House--to the decision-makers. to the inside--the more likely your coverage was to be off.
By imagination I mean what Anthony Cordesman said in the New York Times op ed forum Sunday, "the most serious surprise was that what appeared to be the American A-Team in national security ignored years of planning and months of interagency activity before the war, and the United States had no meaningful plan for stability operations and nation building after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's armed forces."
It's a shock, because you never imagined it... Wait a minute, there was planning but they didn't use it, they substituted their own, but that didn't really exist so they went with nothing...? It kinda boggles.
Switching to the war on terror, by imagination I also mean things like Andrew Sullivan is getting at in this post, which is called "Imaginationland" and this one, related. He's speculating, not reporting; and his outrage fuels his speculation, which is permissible in blogging but not in news reporting.
But it's hard to be right in covering the Bush Administration without taking a few leaps.
March 19, 2008 4:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know next to nothing about the news business. I do know something about empiricism and other philosophical matters. I find it difficult to place too much blame on an acquiescent media in the face of the RADICAL BLUNDER that this administration embarked on when it adopted the "action" model of governance at the expense of empirical data.
The interplay of actions and events (the latter being a kind of empirical data that can be recorded) is rather subtle. Every action gets absorbed into reality in some way that makes some difference in subsequent events.
Human actions have an intention--a goal--and the intention is prior to the act. Intentions can be broad or the can be narrow. My intention to take a sip of coffee precedes my action that produces the event. Intentions can be very broad, as for example the intention to exert hegemony over the Middle East by establishing a military presence there. The actions required to achieve that goal are far more complex and uncertain than lifting a cup of coffee to my lips. In fact they are monumental.
However such is the nature of the actions typically carried out by the leadership of a government.
Prudence would require one study the possible methods of achieving this goal along with all the contingency trees that go along with such a study.
It appears that this administration was (is?) of the mind that they have sufficient raw power to make it happen no matter what contingencies arise by sheer force. We are an empire after all.
The whole mindset behind this approach to governance is ludicrous.
Actions and empirical data are not separable in some magical way. For example, even one who renounces the "reality based" method of doing things and embraces exclusively the action from superior force idea, needs to implement the desired outcome (Hegemony in the Middle East) by concrete steps. And concrete steps are limited by what reality you have to deal with. Namely, how many divisions you have, how you are going to get them over there, what are you going to do when you get there, etc...?
Do actions create some reality? Sure. Do they control all relevant reality needed to achieve your goal? Absolutely not.
By being incurious and by ignoring or suppressing data that does not fit the goal, they were undermining the very goal they were trying to achieve. Perhaps the goal was not achievable with the means at our disposal in the first place. To assume that it is achievable a priori is a monumental blunder. To think that we would have the necessary power to tackle any problem that crops up on the way to achieving our goal is more folly.
How can the press in all honesty try to convey this to the general public through the media?
Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from sense experience. In order to achieve a macro goal such as asserting Hegemony in the Middle East you have to know a) If you have the necessary means to achieve that goal and if yes b) what are the necessary steps to be taken to reach that goal. By renouncing the need to know either of these things and by asserting that you have sufficient power to get it done come what may is tragic foolishness.
March 22, 2008 1:21 AM | Reply | Permalink