The Media at War

[dmr]

New York Metro

Did journalists working the Iraq beat botch the story of the year? At a forum hosted by New York Magazine, The Guardian, and The New School, we turned the microphone on the press.

By Michael Wolff

At the end of June, I went to London to participate in a conference hosted by the Guardian newspaper about the media’s coverage of the war in Iraq. The Brits were asking, it struck me, exactly the questions the U.S. media was trying to avoid asking about itself. How much had the press bought the Bush package? How much had professional skepticism been overwhelmed by Pentagon spin (Victoria Clark and General Vincent Brooks), commercial patriotism (flag logos on every television news show), war romanticism (the embeds), and the intimidation factor (9/11 and the Fox effect)?

In the column that I wrote when I returned from London, I said that I could hardly imagine an American news organization holding such an event. Whereupon it occurred to me: We ought to hold such a conference. And to make it a little hotter for the American media, we ought to do it with British reporters, who had had a significantly more critical war (and who were having a much more hostile peace). The Guardian immediately offered to send its war editors and reporters to join us, and we rounded up their American counterparts.

More ....

This article's discussion is between John R. (Rick) MacArthur, president and publisher, Harper’s magazine; Mike Elliott, editor-at-large, Time magazine; and Bill Hemmer, anchor, CNN’s American Morning.

Quote from the discussion: "MacArthur: I once asked Christopher Hitchens why it was that the British press was so much more ferocious than the American towards politicians who were, for the most part, lying bastards, and he said, interestingly, that in a constitutional system, to attack our representatives is in some sense to attack ourselves. The sad thing is that we haven’t progressed to the point where we realize that it isn’t our government anymore. And that the press’s first responsibility is to the Constitution, not to the temporarily elected administration."

[Jim Sagle]

1. Except that it wasn't elected - and it may not be temporary.

[rucky]

2. Quote From Al-Jazeera Corespondant...

Q: Whose side is Al-Jazeera on?

Al-Mirazi: The sad thing for me is that some of the American networks behaved in similar ways as government-controlled stations in the Arab world before 9/11. They used to call us the Israeli-U.S.-backed network. We were suspected of trying to divide the Arab world. The Americans were so positive about us before 9/11, but afterward, when we gave both sides, they behaved the same way that other government-controlled media in the Arab world did to us.


The sad thing for ME is how the question was framed. Nice answer, tho.