Dick Polman: It's not unusual for journalists to be assailed during wartime
... It's not unusual for journalists to be assailed during wartime - President John F. Kennedy tried to get New York Times correspondent David Halberstam ejected from Vietnam because of his downbeat dispatches; Vice President Spiro Agnew later skewered Vietnam-era reporters as "nattering nabobs of negativism" - but the attacks on the Iraq coverage may set new standards for both fervor and frequency.
Fox News host Sean Hannity condemned what he called "a total and almost complete focus on all the negative aspects of the war." Bill O'Reilly said that "there is a segment of the media trying to undermine the policy in Iraq for their own ideological purposes." Frequent Fox guest Laura Ingraham said that many members of the media "are invested in America's defeat."
But these attacks are proof that the war itself is going badly; there would be no need to point fingers if it were going well. And many nonpartisan observers dismiss the conservatives' media-bashing as an attempt to pin blame to the wrong people - while exonerating Bush, whose handling of Iraq draws support from only 35 percent of the citizenry, a record low, according to the new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution analyst who follows the reconstruction effort and opposes U.S. troop withdrawal, said the other day: "The media has it about right, and public opinion has it about right. It's Bush and Donald Rumsfeld who won't admit they are not handling the war effectively, and that it has gone badly. Vice President Cheney, in particular, is living in positive-spin dreamland."
O'Hanlon said the media were rightfully stressing bad news - because that's the reality. His annual charts, which track Iraqi statistics, tell the tale: Two months ago, there was less electricity, less household fuel, and less oil production than before Saddam Hussein's ouster. The number of insurgents has more than tripled since February 2004; the number of daily attacks by insurgents has more than tripled since then; and there were twice as many roadside bombs in 2005 as in 2004.
Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon intelligence expert, now a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "The coverage is fairly accurate. If you go looking for the good news during an ongoing insurgency, in a place where there are major problems forming a government, a place where the economy is in disarray, well, good news may not be the best indicator of what's really going on."
Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who covered the Vietnam War and recently returned from a stint in Iraq, put it this way: "If you're covering the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, would you go spend time covering a healthy reactor, for 'balance'? The story in Iraq is the meltdown. It's a bloody mess. The story is not a schoolhouse that just got plumbing."...
Read entire article at Philadelphia Inquirer
Fox News host Sean Hannity condemned what he called "a total and almost complete focus on all the negative aspects of the war." Bill O'Reilly said that "there is a segment of the media trying to undermine the policy in Iraq for their own ideological purposes." Frequent Fox guest Laura Ingraham said that many members of the media "are invested in America's defeat."
But these attacks are proof that the war itself is going badly; there would be no need to point fingers if it were going well. And many nonpartisan observers dismiss the conservatives' media-bashing as an attempt to pin blame to the wrong people - while exonerating Bush, whose handling of Iraq draws support from only 35 percent of the citizenry, a record low, according to the new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution analyst who follows the reconstruction effort and opposes U.S. troop withdrawal, said the other day: "The media has it about right, and public opinion has it about right. It's Bush and Donald Rumsfeld who won't admit they are not handling the war effectively, and that it has gone badly. Vice President Cheney, in particular, is living in positive-spin dreamland."
O'Hanlon said the media were rightfully stressing bad news - because that's the reality. His annual charts, which track Iraqi statistics, tell the tale: Two months ago, there was less electricity, less household fuel, and less oil production than before Saddam Hussein's ouster. The number of insurgents has more than tripled since February 2004; the number of daily attacks by insurgents has more than tripled since then; and there were twice as many roadside bombs in 2005 as in 2004.
Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon intelligence expert, now a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "The coverage is fairly accurate. If you go looking for the good news during an ongoing insurgency, in a place where there are major problems forming a government, a place where the economy is in disarray, well, good news may not be the best indicator of what's really going on."
Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who covered the Vietnam War and recently returned from a stint in Iraq, put it this way: "If you're covering the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, would you go spend time covering a healthy reactor, for 'balance'? The story in Iraq is the meltdown. It's a bloody mess. The story is not a schoolhouse that just got plumbing."...