← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Angler
Thread ID: 10930 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-11-05
2003-11-05 03:18 | User Profile
*Here's the latest spin on the Iraq situation from our good ol' buddy John Podwhoretz. Note how the very first sentence of the column uses the now-threadbare neocon tactic of dismissively labeling Bush's critics as "liberals." In the rest of the column Jew Podwhoretz criticizes the media for their insufficient neocon bias.
-- Angler*
[url]http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/9832.htm[/url]
November 4, 2003 -- THE president earned new scorn from his liberal critics when he told a reporter a few weeks ago that there is a "filter" between him and the American people when it comes to news about Iraq. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels," he told a reporter, "and somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people." His critics scoff at the notion that Americans are getting the wrong ideas about post-war Iraq from the mainstream media. And in part, they have a point.
Things in Iraq are difficult. It is a dangerous place for our military. It was appropriate and proper for every newspaper and newscast in America to lead with the news that a U.S. helicopter was shot down over the weekend. Americans should know every detail about that, about yesterday's explosions in Baghdad and about everything else that happens there.
The problem isn't that the American people are hearing bad news. The problem is the way the bad news is delivered to them. It's delivered through the very "filter" Bush mentioned - a fine web of attitudes and myopic perceptions about war, peace, the Bush administration and the American people.
You might think that an attack that killed 15 Americans and wounded hundreds more might inspire even the merest hint of anger on the part of those Americans whose job it is to write about it. Their articles might offer some perspective on how those seeking to kill Americans in Iraq are working for the restoration of one of the most barbaric regimes in world history. They'd ask the key question raised by such an attack: What is to be done to smoke out these barbarians?
But that's not the central focus of the news coverage. Instead, the question that obsesses the media filters is: How much is this going to hurt George W. Bush?
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post greeted the news of the attacks on the helicopter by framing the incident almost entirely in political terms. "New Attack Intensifies Pressure on Bush" was the Post's headline. "Public Doubt vs. Bush Vows" was the Times'.
These two newspapers of record questioned whether the public would continue to support the president and his policy in Iraq. "The political challenge posed to President Bush by the deadly helicopter attack in Iraq on Sunday is this: how to keep public opinion from swinging against him over Iraq while not abandoning his quest to bring a stable democracy to that country," wrote the Times' Richard W. Stevenson.
Tom Ricks in The Washington Post: "The helicopter downing came as two worrisome trends face the Bush administration. In Iraq, there are signs that the anti-U.S. opposition is escalating its attacks both in numbers and sophistication . . . Meanwhile, the American public's support for President Bush's handling of the war is declining, which makes the situation even more volatile."
The filter's effect here is to turn attention away from the perpetrators of the killings - the guerrilla-terrorists - and onto the president's political fortunes.
The political question is interesting, but it's entirely secondary to the real issues raised by the Ramadan offensive inside Iraq.
Those issues are tactical ones. Is the U.S. military going about things the right way? Does it need to get more aggressive with its counterinsurgency tactics? Do we have enough troops? Are Iraqis being trained quickly enough to take over some Coalition duties?
These issues are discussed, of course, but with far less enthusiasm and energy than the political question receives.
Filtering the news in such a way that the focus is not about how to stop the killings of American soldiers but the political effect on the president has another purpose: It exacerbates Bush's troubles, but without leaving any fingerprints.
After all, the media can claim, they're only "raising questions" about the president's popularity. They're not affecting his poll numbers in any way by doing so.
That's how the filter really works at its most effective, and why the president's words have the ring of truth even more today than they did three weeks ago when he first spoke them.
2003-11-06 01:35 | User Profile
The problem for the current administration is not that some "anti war" filter exists, but that there is a LACK of filters. In other words, fact is that in every past war, there was only one "official filter" run by the war party. The Gulf of Tonkin, for example, could not have been used for the desired results today as easily as in the Vietnam era because of the status of "filters" today... or lack thereof. The internet's ability to expose lies has caused a giant "monkey wrench" to be tossed into the machine. Newspapers and TV news outlets can't be sure of the "tone" in which to report stories anymore because the spin is likely to be countered or exposed elsewhere.
It's a battle of the filters, and certain "special" people who used to control the single pipeline of information are losing that control.