Truth wears combat boots
In the midst of a trial in which Saddam Hussein is accused of brutally persecuting those Shi’ites who attempted to assassinate him back in the eighties, words spoken yesterday by former Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi are rather chilling. In a Washington Post article, Crowd Attacks Allawi In Najaf, Allawi describes the scene of what he calls an “assassination attempt”–and he goes on to foretell what will happen to those “rebels” who attacked him. Emphasis mine:
“After the prayers, a group of about 60 people dressed in black and carrying daggers and pistols started chants against us,” Allawi told reporters. “We have seven bullet shells from the incident. One of them lost his gun when he tried to shoot me. We believe that these are hurtful rebels. This will increase our insistence to cleanse the country of them. We warn them that after the elections, we, the people in power, will pursue them toughly.“
It always heartens me when our allies talk of cleansing opponents.
In another story out of Iraq, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld urges optimism on Iraq. In a catchy phrase, he said, “A lie moves around the world at the speed of light while truth is still trying to get its boots on.”
By “lie” he was apparently referring to the LA Times story last week concerning private contractors working for the military who paid Iraqi media outlets to run optimistic stories.
“We don’t know what the facts are yet. The story goes out and we’re still trying to find out what the facts are,” whines Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld would have Americans believe that the LA Times rushed to press with mere gossip and innuendo. The newspaper probably had been sitting on this story for weeks, as editors carefully investigated the details of the story and parsed words to state only what they knew for certain. Anyway, how does keeping a damaging story in the darkness of secrecy help us to discover “the facts?”
Conservatives trumpet the “new media” of the Internet for its immediacy and its ability to uncover information that the “old media” elite disregards or is too squeamish to report. However, when the old media follows the lead of bloggers and begins to do some in-depth investigating of claims made by those in power, the powerful whine about a rush to judgement.
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Conservatives only like the Internet because there’s no editing process, nor any need to be fair. Talk to all sides. Take Concerned Women for America. A typical “news” item on their site takes a sound bite from a person on the opposing side–and usually someone they didn’t even talk to. It’s usually a sentence or two plucked out of another news story, many times out of context. Then this sound bite is “thoroughly trashed” by someone on the CWFA payroll, likely LaRue. Not only does the opposing side not get space to respond, but there’s not even the fascade of equal space or consideration given. You even know what the “opposing side” is. This is the Internet. But it’s not journalism.
The L.A. Times story is well documented (of course. It’s the L.A. Times) and quite thorough. They had copies in hand of much of what they reported on. It’s a word game Rumsfeld is playing here: The truth is positive, the work the troops are doing to rebuild infrastructure and whatnot, which they are clearly doing. But the L.A. Times “truth” is not truth because it didn’t originate with the administration and/or makes the administration look bad.
Troops in Iraq are doing good things, I’m sure. But the bad so overshadows it, I don’t know how you can forego the bad to report the good. Or give good equal time, as I think is being suggested. Or rather, do this and give some sort of accurate, responsible picture of what’s going on in the country. I see it this way: What is the news of the day–the big lead story–in this situation? A fire comes through your city, wipes out half of your downtown. Meanwhile, across town, the cops are helping to raise a house. Or to put the analogy closer into Iraq’s lap, the house that’s being rebuilt across town was in a neighborhood destroyed in an extremely violent clash between cops and gangs, when the mayor ordered a bombing on the gangs in that neighborhood.
It’s absurd. Sure the troops are helping people. But it’s a WAR. You can’t ask the American people to support a yearslong “war on terror,” but be sure to pump them up with information about house rebuilding and other “good news” and skimp on the bloodshed. The fact is, many parts of Iraq are scary places to be, years after Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” Our invasion pissed a lot of people off, far more people than the administration wants to acknowledge, and are far more wily than the administration bargained for before the invasion. No amount of “good news” is going to change that. But the administration’s solution? Word games.
Comment by Heather — Tuesday, 6 December 2005 @ 4:30 pm
The old axiom that “good news is no news, but bad news sells papers” may sound cynical, but it is true. “The news” isn’t supposed to be good. Papers and TV and radio stations aren’t in business to tell us how great everything is. We go to them to learn about the latest disaster, corruption scandal, or breakout of violence. Sorry, that’s just how it is, Mr. Rumsfeld.
I’m sure our politicians would love to go back to the day when the media kept their secrets—who’s screwing whom, who’s on the take, who’s got mental problems. I’m sure our politicians would love to go back to the forties when Americans didn’t know about the high cost of the invasion of Normandy, or the even higher cost of the invasion of Iwo Jima, until long afterward. I’m sure they would like to go back to a day when the media was a willing mouthpiece for government war propaganda. That’s perhaps a broad generalization; there was dissent in the media in the forties as well. But overall, the media was a propaganda machine–a free and willing propaganda machine, but a machine noentheless.
But we don’t have a media willing to do that, even if it were possible. We have a media today that is freer than ever before to speak and write whatever the heck it wants, and it all goes out at “the speed of light” to use Rumsfeld’s comparison. You can’t stop that. No government can stop that. No plea to the media for “self-reflection” can stop that.
One hopes that the result from the media’s close inspection of policy is not more determined secrecy or a crackdown on free speech, but greater honesty among our leaders. One hopes so, anyway. Transparency is the only antidote to the bright light of truth.
Comment by Matthew — Wednesday, 7 December 2005 @ 7:40 am