Scanning the blogs this morning I came across an interesting dustup between Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall. Since I’m sharing a panel with them at Bloggercon next week this naturally caught my eye.
Josh came across a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Democratic congressman Jim Marshall suggesting that negative media coverage might be “killing our troops” in Iraq, and wrote, “It really doesn’t get much lower than that.” Glenn disagreed with Josh Marshall and agreed with Jim Marshall — and his response is worth parsing closely.
Reynolds is too smart to simply suggest that the U.S. media should suppress all negative stories from Iraq. So he couches his complaint more subtly, maintaining that “It’s not the reporting of criticisms or bad things that’s the issue… It’s the lazy Vietnam-templating, the ‘of course America must be losing’ spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer, and the relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones that’s the issue. It’s what the terrorists are counting on, and it’s what too many in the media are happy to deliver, because they think it’ll hurt Bush.”
Notice that an argument that, at bottom, is about demanding that the U.S. media suppress bad news from Iraq has been inverted into an argument that the problem is really with the suppression of positive news (no examples provided). A neat trick.
Let’s take it phrase by phrase: “Lazy Vietnam-templating” is not a charge I would level against, say, Max Cleland, who is the most forceful recent applier of the Vietnam analogy and who is far more qualified than I or most other commentators to apply it. If an observer feels that the U.S. is making the same mistakes in Iraq that it made in Vietnam, surely his duty is to speak loudly and try to get the U.S. to change its policies before we lose this war the way we lost Vietnam, and before too many more American servicepeople pay the price of our mistakes. This isn’t “lazy … templating,” it’s fair debate. So pace Reynolds, arguing that we should not oppose policies that we think will lose the war doesn’t help the terrorists, it helps our democracy.
Then there’s the reference to “‘of course America must be losing’ spin.” Notice how the entire issue of whether the U.S. is winning or losing is bypassed, and the possibility that some of us actually feel the U.S., following the current botched Bush policies, is losing is reduced to a matter of “spin.” But what if it’s not spin? What if you’re a journalist on the scene in Iraq and what your eyes and ears tell you is that the U.S. is losing? According to the Jim Marshall/Glenn Reynolds argument, are you supposed to just shut up?
Reynolds doesn’t like “sneers,” either, but he doesn’t offer any examples, so there isn’t much to argue with here, beyond the fact that people are saying things he disagrees with in a tone of voice that he doesn’t like. It’s always nicer when those we disagree with are cordial; Reynolds himself is always a gentleman, and I don’t like sneers either. But a sneer never killed anyone, and sneering is not killing American troops in Iraq.
Finally, Reynolds complains about “relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones.” It’s strange to hear this line from a journalist/blogger; usually such reasoning is heard from the mouths of politicians who are unhappy that the media are focused on some scandal while failing to publish their own upbeat press releases.
We have all lived long enough to understand that government spin is ubiquitous and inevitable. The government spin from Iraq is that “everything is fine, these things take time”; and journalists’ job is to brush that spin aside and tell the world what they are actually seeing. If what they are actually seeing is a country in chaos, and American troops dying every day, and a nation turning against its “liberators,” then reporting that is their duty. In trying to “shush” opposition by playing the “aiding and abetting our enemies” card, the “blame the media” argument aims to choke the open democratic debate that, after all, is the basis of what makes our system better than the one we overthrew in Baghdad. What this argument really boils down to is, “Stand by our boys! Don’t report that they’re dying!”
Personally, I wish the news from Iraq were better. I wish the killing would stop, and Iraq would quickly become a beacon of light and democracy to the Middle East, as the cakewalk-neocons promised us. But that isn’t what’s happening. And since it’s clear President Bush is not going to change his policies in order to win the international cooperation that this nation-building project was always going to require, a patriotic American who believes we are on the wrong path has no choice but to say, “Bush is the problem.” If he can’t figure out that his policy is a disaster and we need to change course, the only way to get the U.S. — and Iraq — back on track is to change presidents.
Reynolds suggests that people like me are focusing on the bad news from Iraq in order to “hurt Bush.” That’s backwards. I want to “hurt Bush” (note to FBI: I mean politically “hurt” — “hurt” meaning see him lose elections) in order to improve the news from Iraq.
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