John Tierney’s column in today’s NYT, Bombs Bursting on Air takes issue with the media’s obsession with suicide bombers.
There was no larger lesson except that some insurgents were willing and able to kill civilians, which was not news. We were dutifully presenting as accurate an image as we could of one atrocity, but we knew we were contributing to a distorted picture of life for Iraqis.
The standard advice to newly arrived journalists at that time was: “Relax. It’s not nearly as bad here as it looks on TV.”
Never mind that this was back in the summer of 2003, when it really was not that bad yet. Now, of course, Western journalists stay locked in their hotels afraid to set foot on the street for fear of abduction or worse.
I suspect the public would welcome a respite from gore, like the one that New Yorkers got when Rudolph Giuliani became mayor. He realized that even though crime was declining in the city, people’s fears were being stoked by the relentless tabloid and television coverage of the day’s most grisly crime. No matter how much the felony rate dropped, in a city of seven million there would always be at least one crime scene for a live shot at the top of the 11 o’clock news.
Mr. Giuliani told the police to stop giving out details of daily crime in time for reporters’ deadlines, a policy that prompted outrage from the press but not many complaints from the public. With the lessening of the daily media barrage, New Yorkers began to be less scared and more realistic about the risks on their streets.
I’m not advocating official censorship, but there’s no reason the news media can’t reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world’s dangers.
Just as New Yorkers came to be guided by crime statistics instead of the mayhem on the evening news, people might begin to believe the statistics showing that their odds of being killed by a terrorist are minuscule in Iraq or anywhere else.
According to the BBC: “More than 300 people are believed to have died in violence this month.” If we extrapolate this number from a country the size of Iraq to the United States it would be as if 3000 people had been blown up in May alone. The United States is engaged in a global war because some 3000 people were killed by suicide bombers.
If we extrapolate the number of people blown to pieces in Iraq by suicide bombers over the past 10 days to the United States for a full year, it would be the equivalent of more than 100,000 blasted bodies. Not quite so miniscule after all. If you add in the number of wounded survivors and the number of people affected in some way, the number quickly climbs into the millions.
It might be different if the statistics were going down and the situation actually improving, as it was in NYC in the ’90s. In Iraq this is not the case.
As Bob Herbert recently wrote we need to see more of what is actually going on in Iraq, not less.
Americans’ attitude toward war in general and this war in particular would change drastically if the censor’s veil were lifted and the public got a sustained, close look at the agonizing bloodshed and other horrors that continue unabated in Iraq. If that happened, support for any war that wasn’t an absolute necessity would plummet.
Can they really find no better columnists for the right at the Gray Lady? Compare Brooks and Tierney even to Friedman, forget Dowd, Herbert and Krugman, and they come off looking like sad intellectual midgets.
It’s the job of the loyal connected media to maintain support for the war. That is how they see it. They do not want to be blamed for turning the country against the war. And they want to maintain their cozy connections to power.
This would be acceptable if the war was necessary. But it wasn’t. Has it become necessary? I’m not sure. But the NYT’s and Washington Post are going to continue for a while to come, in downplaying the bad news and highlighting the good. And a phalanx of right-wing columnists will continue to do the same.
He lied and obfuscated but at least he has more than two brain cells to rub together. One could get really angry at him and he was losing it towards the end but he could write and even think. Additionally, there were some issues on which we could agree, such as his opposition to media consolidation.
but Safire was responsible for spreading some of the worst lies about Iraqi WMD. In other words, he was either working directly for the CIA, or more likely, directly for military intelligence. And I think he did so for most of his career.
I don’t care for columnists I can’t trust. It’s one thing to spout GOP talking points, it is quite another to just lie in order to scare the crap out of the country and make us want to kill Arabs.
I won’t forgive Safire for his treachery.
All that can be said for him is that he was not unarmed. But could there not be a Friedman of the right who is infuriating and occasionally right?
Good to see your nick again 🙂
The NYTimes is falling under the “librul media” pressure, and is apparently actively seeking to hire even more like those two.
Adding in the one the LA Times recently hired who is also as dumb as a box of rocks, and one could think that maybe it really is a liberal media plot… to give them enough rhetorical rope, and let things take their natural course.
Giving them enough rope might work if people did more thinking for themselves.
Still I wish that the conservative columnists were better. It’s not that much fun engaging in intellectual combat (even vicariously) with unarmed men.
And still be considered “conservatives’ these days. At least, not by the Republican/Conservative groups in the US now. Whatever definition those words have now, being an intellectual or engaging in free thinking and critical analysis is not part of it. Except for approved things like talking endlessly about long dead conservative thinkers and philosphers, and how their thoughts really do dovetail with present thinking. Really!
Some columnists who do depart from the ‘right’ way to view politics and the world today are shocked and appalled at the emails and phone calls and threats they get. So, many of them seem to be constrained by that, or else decide to become outcasts of a sort.
Then again, maybe they really are just as silly as they seem.
indefensible. I still think that most of us could do a better job than these particular millionaires.
The columnists at the NYT have enormous privileges and freedom. It is sad to see them so oblivious, arrogant, wrong and insipid.
Orwell is spinning in his grave, groaning, “Ohh, they are better than me, ahh, they are better that I thought possible,” and Kafka is grinning at the sight.
I realize I may a lone voice in the wilderness in saying this, but perhaps the “liberals” in charge of the New York Times editorial and op-ed pages know exactly what they’re doing in having provided us with twice-weekly doses of Brooks and Tierney. Since neither of them is likely to write a genuinely thoughtful column capable of causing a progressive to stop and consider the potential validity of the argument, they permit readers to come away with the impression that conservatives have nothing intelligent to offer. The reaction they engender is typically, “See, I told you those right-wingers are all a bunch of buffoons!” (The Letters to the Editor that usually follow their columns tend to bear this out.) If this is what the Times is trying to achieve, they may be succeeding brilliantly.
Yes, I would much rather be stimulated, challenged and provoked as I drink my morning coffee, but there’s also something to be said for the sense of outrage that Tierney and Brooks regularly generate. I don’t fear their words, and I doubt that anyone else does, either. Bobos in Paradise, indeed. Who’s getting the last laugh now?
We won’t know until the last laugh belts out.
Perhaps it is too much to ask of a normal, mortal man to defend this administration coherently but in the Clinton years that president was mercilessly attacked by many writers supposedly on our side of the ledger now.
Why isn’t Bush subject to the same kind of internecine squabbling Clinton had to face?
Is partly why he’s not subject to the same vitriol from his own side as Clinton was. Basically, one doesn’t attack fellow Republicans.
I think it’s more than that though… Democrats, left-leaning people, etc, are not perfect by any means, and there is plenty of corruption everywhere.. but with at least this current crop of Republicans… winning and power and keeping that power seems to be the entire point. The end political goals, while still sometimes spoken of, seem mostly to have been jettisoned and there is only left one goal; being in power… not especially what they do with it, good or ill.
It’s very strange to me… freaky, even… to see someone turn on a dime and believe almost the exact opposite thing today than they did yesterday. And to seemingly have no clue that they are doing so. What changed in the meantime? The Party view of the issue, that’s all.
they are taking to heart the lesson of Larry Lindsay. Truth isn’t welcome in the spin cycle.
Also, they vividly remember Helen Thomas being cordially invited to NOT return to the press room.
They’re scared.