The gap between perception and reality in Iraq
Lance on Oct 22 2007 at 4:26 pm | Filed under: Lance's Page, Media, Notes on the war
Michael Yon has a wonderful post up about the disconnect between what is happening on the ground in Iraq and what the media has convinced much of the world is occurring. He is not unsympathetic to the difficulties the media faces in doing this story right and has plenty of links to his thoughts over the years on the reasons for this disconnect. Michael has been a singularly entertaining and reliable guide over the last few years. Ready and willing to tell us uncomfortable truths as well as see the intriguing successes. He makes no bones about being biased in our favor, no false act of objectivity on that front. He also has been willing to criticize, disagree with administration happy talk and tell us that things were getting worse.
He has a new project that he hopes will help the media become the institution it needs to be in Iraq with his readers help, so read the whole thing.
Technorati Tags: Iraq, media, Michael Yon, independent journalism
4 Responses to “The gap between perception and reality in Iraq”
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How many incidents have been accurately reported in the past week or two regarding Iraqi citizens dying at the hands of Americans? Ten is my rough guess. Maybe the anti-American media made them all up…
Maybe I should go search them and link them individually..
the point, of course, being, that what Mike Yon sees and what’s happening aren’t the same.
I saw your comment at Mike’s place.
I think Mike would say that maybe you are right, but it hardly changes what he is talking about. Nobody here, or Mike, is denying such reports, though some may be worth denying. The question is the overall situation, not that wars have awful things happen.
Similarly, even though there were many hopeful instances last year (which should not have been ignored, with the shifts in Anbar being a prime example) the overall situation had deteriorated. It is silly to use some bad things happening in an improving situation to argue that it is being portrayed accurately as it was to claim that the situation was improving last year because of some good things happening. In both instances they are important, but in both instances coverage excessively focused on that would have been and is distortive.
Some is of course absurd. The reports of chaos in Basra were flat out false. It does not matter if later events in Basra take a turn for the worse (a common justification for many inaccurate and distortive reports) the reports were false. The same is true for the bogus stuff from the WAPO on casualty figures, which subsequent figures show were largely correct, and actual research shows was not being implemented the way the WAPO claimed. Reports not adequately portraying the massive changes in the situation in Iraq are a shame, no matter whether that situation persists. No matter that some things we wish did not happen still do.
I don’t have a problem with Mike Yon personally, but I have a problem with his reporting.
I’m on Mike Totten’s place all the time. Mike is also, frankly, pro-american in his writing. I’ve come to accept - well, take on faith - that Mike Totten doesn’t deliberately slant his reports - he just reports what he sees and is told and draws inferences from context he thinks he knows. People can be blamed for just reporting what they see and hear, and the right wing does that all the time
(the meme of “the lazy MSM just reporting what they can see from their hotel room - a car bomb!)
but I… try not to. I’ve managed to avoid being hostile to Mike Totten. What’s the difference between Mike Totten and Mike Yon? I think Mike Yon has gotten, at least in some of the opinion bits I’ve read - too far beyond reporting and into editorialism on his opinions about Americans not involved in Iraq, which are fair game and grounds for immediate sacrifice/loss of a fair hearing, at least from me.
But I have the same problems with Mike Totten’s work as with Mike Yon’s - it’s just that my depth of emotion about Totten’s have been neutralized to an extent by reasonable conversation with him.
Neither one of them lies, but if you left it up to them you would never hear about bad things done by Americans, despite the fact that bad things, are, in fact, done by Americans.
Their reporting may be literally accurate, but I do not trust it to give representative pictures. I don’t neccessarily believe they do it on purpose, and I don’t even neccesarily hold it against them, but the bottom line is I believe that they fail to capture the aspects of the war which don’t reflect well on us as a nation - systematically, they miss those.
Now, one could make the same argument about the MSM - except that I see positive stories about the US in Iraq in the MSM all the time. Sure, it’s a theoretical shame when large changes on the ground aren’t theoretically reported, but in the real world the NYT, for example, reports the heck out of every piece of good news it finds on Iraq. Shall I go link to the piece they did on how Shiites are supposedly falling out with Al-Sadr- something I don’t really believe- about a week ago?
Anyway, without calling any of them dishonest, I just don’t buy what they’re selling. It doesn’t wash with what I would call the inherent structure of the scenario.
By the way: I guess I shouldn’t find this amazing anymore - I agree with you in principle, but I 100% disagree with every single example you brought up there. I can’t believe you’ve reinterpreted ****US Government Stats that disagreed with each other***** as something the ***WaPo made up****, for #2. (As for the implementation, what you had was a denial. And you accepted it as truth. Congratulations! You’ve proved nothing!) As for chaos in Basra, I don’t know what you’re talking about - but I’m pretty sure the reports on **events** in Basra **happened as they were described**. I don’t know who jumped to conclusions about “chaos”, but I doubt it was the WaPo, and even if it was, that is a fundamentally subjective assessment, so your description of it as “false” uses a word that is not logical or coherent in that context.
At least we agree in principle. Better than nothing.
glasnost
Actually I have made it clear repeatedly that I think the NYT reporters do a pretty good job, as does Michael Yon, of reporting on both the good and bad. You say you don’t believe they report the things that reflect badly, I think they do, it is just that they are rare. The media focuses on them, but they are reported as such major events because they are uncommon. That is ironic because such focus is distortive, but they actually have few of those types of things to report. The two Michaels do not report on them because they don’t see them, though of course most of the media rarely sees them either. However, in a war with thousands of things they could report, what are they going to report? What they actually see or what they think will be sensational? The question answers itself. The two Michaels instead give us a pretty good picture of what they actually see and the conclusions they derive from that and what they hear and research. Full context, not what will make the biggest splash. Because of that they have amassed an audience. They will travel an area and make a story out of nothing sensational, though that may be the most sensational story of all. Other reporters say, “nothing to report.”
That is another way of saying that your mind is made up, whatever the evidence is. Of course the MSM is catching up with them and starting to see what they see.
As for the rest, I didn’t accuse the WAPO of claiming chaos in Basra. Some reports did however make such claims, but your complaint is with Michael, and no, the events didn’t occur as described. Prove it if they did, or at least provide some evidence that Basra descended into chaos as the Brits moved out. Even subjective assessments need some basis. The chaos was of a quite violent character, so that is not subjective. Either the violence occurred or it did not.
As for the WAPO, they ran stories based on anonymous sources that were false, period, about how sectarian deaths were calculated. We suspected as much at the time and that was proven true. Those who used that story to impugn all the data have been proven wrong. Every source supports Petraeus’ general numbers, if not every jot and tittle (which he wouldn’t have claimed was correct either.) As the WAPO has pointed out, the critics were frankly wrong in doubting Petraeus’ assessment of the improving conditions as they relate to violence. The sustainability of that may be doubted, but that both the level and, more importantly, the conditions within which it was occurring, had changed dramatically is now not worth questioning without some new evidence.