February 16, 2007

Arkin Fallout

Retired Colonel Ken Allard will no longer serve as a military consultant for NBC News, in no small part because he's disgusted by NBC's decision to retain William Arkin as a military analyst. It's hard to blame him; having Arkin as a military analyst is a bit like having a Shia imam as your Islam analyst. Funny how the media works that way. If you're a hard core Democrat, it's assumed you can be objective easily. Tim Russert and George Stephanopolous both get to host Sunday morning talk shows where they are nominally an objective observer, but I can just imagine the screams if someone who had formerly worked for Republican Senator and Governor or in a Republican White House were suddenly tapped to serve as host of a Sunday morning show. And with Arkin it's the same thing: his anti-military views in no way serve to disqualify him from the title of analyst, while a reporter with pro-military views would quickly be dumped for a more 'objective' viewer.

Good thing conservatives control the media. Presumably Dr. Terpstra would be NBC's military analyst if the media didn't have such a conservative tilt.

Note: Yes, I opened the door on the whole media bias issue, but let's not waste much time arguing, as there's no evidence on Earth that's going to convince anyone they're wrong on this issue. Those on the left are going to continue to point to corporate ownership of the media as proof the media leans right and those on the right are going to continue to highlight the preponderance of Democrats in the media as proof it leans left. And nobody is moving an inch from those positions, so there's little point in arguing about it.

Note 2: So why did I write this post? Because it's my blog and I can write about whatever I want to. And by turning the question to media bias I hope to elide the fact I broke my promise about not mentioning Arkin again. Pretty clever, eh?

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February 12, 2007

Removing All Doubt

I promise, this will be my last post on Arkin. But for those who claim that Mr. Arkin is not necessarily anti-military despite his infamous columns, it would appear that you need to discuss that with him. Arkin describes himself as "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers." So, unless you're going to now tell me Arkin is lying about himself, let's put to bed the notion Arkin has some underlying respect for the men and women he slimed so viciously in his recent posts.

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February 06, 2007

Point of Order

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere is a atwitter over the failure of the Democrats to get 60 votes to end debate on the nonbinding resolution on Iraq. The media is portraying the vote as Republicans trying to block debate on Iraq. I can only assume that the reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post are not remotely familiar with Roberts Rules of Order, the standard for parliamentary procedure.

The media's line is simple: the Republicans are blocking debate by voting against cloture. Cloture, of course, is the process through which debate is closed so the body can vote. In other words, the Democrats are the ones attempting to end debate, not the Republicans. The Republicans are voting to keep debate open, the Democrats are voting to end it. It's really a quite simple point, and it's a little embarrassing to see the media so openly shilling a line that is so far from the truth.

Before the Republicans get overly pleased about this demonstration of the liberal media, the fact the media is getting the story wrong doesn't mean that the Republicans are in the right here. As hilzoy at Obsidian Wings points out, the Republicans are filibustering because they want to force a vote on four different Iraq bills, all requiring a 60-vote majority. The Democrats are willing to let all four bills come to the floor, but only for a majority vote. So what we really have here is a bunch of silly parliamentary procedure that masks the facts: there's a majority in the Senate for the harshest of the bills, but not a filibuster-proof majority. The vagaries of politics mean that many Democrats will vote for less harsh bills in addition to the harsher bill because they don't want to face a commercial explaining how they voted against such-and-such a bill to support the troops (even though all the resolutions are non-binding), so if all four measures go to the floor, the odds are the less harsh ones will do the best. This is a tough problem to resolve in our system: if you allow votes on all four resolutions and they all pass, what becomes law (granting that, in this case, none of them do)?

But while that's an interesting theoretical question, it's not relevant to the broader point here, which is that the media has, once again, done a lousy job of explaining what's really happening in favor of a facile and inaccurate summation built around its biases.

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February 01, 2007

Liberal Media? Where?

Surprise, surprise. Herr Arkin, Mr. 'The Troops Ought to be Grateful for What they Get,' has a piece [Update: please note that these are not columns] up in response to the firestorm he's raised. And, as always, I'm shocked to see that he has once again refused to respond honestly. Rather than address some of the points made by displeased soldiers like yours truly, he has cherry-picked (or made up) comments that he can respond to that make him look like the big hero defending freedom of speech. He titles his piece 'The Arrogant and Intolerant Speak Out,' demonstrating either an amazing grasp of or a complete disregard for irony.

He then goes on about how he is a martyr for free speech and that he didn't really mean what he said, it's just that us awful right wing warmongers twisted his words. And I'm sure Arkin thinks he deserves great credit for his magnanimous admission that he shouldn't have used the word 'mercenary,' although he doesn't actually go so far as to apologize for doing so. [Update: My mistake. We're actually worse than mercenaries. Mr. Arkin's disdain for the military truly knows no bounds.]

The fact Arkin's a stereotypical left wing military-hating jerk doesn't really matter to me. It would be nice if they weren't as common as they are, but life is by nature imperfect. What bothers me about Arkin is that the Washington Post, one of the two really big newspapers in this country, think that a guy who considers the military 'mercenaries' is a perfect guy to be their military affairs columnist. Granted, you don't want a guy who's nothing but a cheerleader for the military, but isn't someone who looks for every opportunity to tear the military down going a bit too far in the other direction? Apparently not at the Washington Post. [Update: please see the comments for Gary Farber's detailed explanation of Arkin's position with the Post.]

I know that my friends on the left (and I do have some) dislike the whole 'liberal media' line, but it's hard to avoid when you look at things like this. My good, dear friend Mr. Arkin has spent his life, save four years in the Army in the mid-1970s (newsflash to the Post editors: the military has changed just a teensy bit in the intervening years), working for lefty causes like Greenpeace, the Institute for Global Communication, and so on. As Armed Liberal pointed out when Arkin got the job, Arkin has a long history, and it's solidly antimilitary. Did the Post not notice that when they hired him? That's hard to believe. Yet somehow it didn't disqualify him. Why do I get the feeling the Post wouldn't be so eager to hire someone known to work for causes on the other side of the political spectrum?

Arkin has every right to say what he thinks about the military. But I fail to see why he merits the platform provided by the Washington Post, particularly when the Post can't seem to see fit to hire anyone from the other side of the spectrum for any non-opinion jobs. It's hard not to assume that Arkin's editors hired him because his views and theirs are closer than they'd like us to believe.

Update: For those who think Arkin's just an honest broker, listen to this interview in which he sets up so many strawmen it's a miracle that he didn't burn the studio down.

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November 13, 2006

Our Glorious Media

As I'm leafing through today's copy of the New York Times, what do I come across but a picture of a tank, labeled 'an Israeli tank in Lebanon.'
But looking at the tank, I realize it's a T-55, an old Soviet-model tank, their first post-World War II model. And Israel doesn't use T-55s; it's tank forces are armed with Magahs (upgraded U.S. M60s) and Israeli-made Merkavas. So it's pretty unlikely that's an Israeli tank in the photo.

It's a minor point, I'll admit, and one that isn't going to be noticed by very many people. But it is a distinct reminder of the disconnect between the media and the military, that they make such basic mistakes about military equipment. Is it really so hard to do some basic research?

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June 24, 2005

With Apologies Like These...

At the risk of kicking off another unwinnable debate over the perceived slant of the media, I couldn't resist taking a look at Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley's response to the uproar generated by her claims that the U.S. military was deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq a la former CNN chief Eason Jordan. Glenn Reynolds says she has backed down. I'm not sure where he's seeing that.

Before I could even read Foley's response it was hard to miss the 'top story' listed in the right-hand column: Right-wing attack-dogs savage TNG president for comments on Iraq deaths. A good header, I think, that explains the situation without being inflammatory, right? After all, what could be inflammatory about right-wing attack-dogs? Most people are right-handed. Our national symbol, the bald eagle, has wings. Everyone loves dogs. OK, attack generally has some negative connotations, but for the most part that phrase has nothing at all that could be considered objectionable. Clearly claims of a liberal bias in the U.S. media are overblown.

But we're here to examine Foley's words, not those of her organization, so let's see what she has to say. Well, her opening sentence is as follows: "Note to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (or whatever you’re calling yourselves these days): I was just re-elected president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, and I’m not resigning." In other words, her remarks have the backing of her union and they're not backing down. (Those remarks, btw, are available here.) She then turns her attention to those who really matter: the newspaper guild. I suppose it should be to her credit that she so freely admits that her guild is quite far-removed from the Right; normally the media swears up and down they're not biased.

The rest of her essay is little more than an attempt to justify her words without ever addressing the question at hand: what is her evidence that the U.S. military is deliberately targeting journalists, as she claims? (The companion essay neatly elides this issue as well.) But the piece de resistance is her final paragraph.

That’s why I hope Americans who actually care about democratic discourse and public debate will support independent, fact-based journalism and professional journalists who strive to practice it. Please refrain from attacking reporters who are trying to get to the truth. Focus instead on re-creating a media climate where a future Woodward & Bernstein can investigate abuse and speak truth to power without fear of government retribution or an orchestrated deluge of hate mail calling for their demise.

Foley isn't backing down on anything. She's just preaching to her choir to establish herself as a noble truth-teller, using an unsurprising reaction to a scurrilous accusation to create a self-aggrandizing myth about herself. I don't expect the Newspaper Guild to note this, because they're coming to the party with the same preconceptions she does. But those who claim the media is scrupulously balanced have one more data point to explain away.

Update: I am informed that several of my inferences regarding the Newspaper Guild are inaccurate and therefore invalidate parts of my conclusion. I will give more details once I'm sure I can do so accurately.

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February 21, 2005

Symbiosis

Bloggers occasionally fall prey to the conceit that they are somehow either superior to or a replacement for the media. While the blogosphere has had a few successes since its inception (although not necessarily as great as we sometimes think), blogs generally serve as an enhancement to the media, not as a replacement to it. Yes, I'm aware that there are blogs that provide occasional original reporting, but those blogs are neither common nor reliable as the media. If a bomb goes off in downtown Austin, the media will send reporters there to cover the story. Bloggers must rely on locating local bloggers who both can and will take the time to do their own investigations. People come to the blogosphere for analysis of news, not for the news itself.

This is due to the corresponding weaknesses of the media. Reporters are rarely experts in the subjects they cover, and they have a bad habit of seeking out experts who can confirm what they already believe when they're writing a story. The media does a reasonably good job of getting the basic facts of news out to the public, but is not properly equipped to take a look at those facts and determine what they mean. Not that this stops them from trying to do so, but media analysis pieces tend to be weak because the author is usually expounding on a preconceived notion rather than really analyzing the facts on the ground.

The blogosphere is great at analysis not because bloggers are necessarily superior to reporters but because the blogosphere tends to include experts on just about anything. Want to know about the law? Run by The Volokh Conspiracy. Interested in the military? Check out Blackfive (or your humble servant). If there's a topic of public interest, there's probably multiple bloggers who actually work in that field whose opinions are informed by their practical experience. That gives us a major advantage over reporters: I can't count the number of times I've heard reporters describe very basic things about the military and get them entirely wrong. Hell, my own family still doesn't really understand a lot about the military, and I've been doing this for 16+ years now. I believe it was Michael Crichton who observed the fascinating cognitive dissonance we have when it comes to the media: we'll read an article that is on a subject we're familiar with and spot errors throughout the piece. Yet we'll then turn around and read the articles we're not well-versed in and accept them without question. Thanks to blogs, errors like that can be identified and corrected. But the blogosphere as it now stands is somewhat hit-or-miss; if I see an essay correcting something in the media, I'm aware of the differences, but those I don't see I probably will never hear about.

Now my once and future neighbor Steve Green offers an interesting suggestion for resolving that problem. Technorati already offers a great service for checking blogs: if I'm interested in what people are saying about a topic, I can enter it into the search box and see how many blogs are addressing that issue. Steve suggests they develop some code that could be appended to online articles that would allow readers to read the base article and then check out what the blogs are saying about the piece. This would allow the papers to offer virtual ombudsmen who are not beholden to the paper while keeping their costs down. It's hardly a perfect solution, but it would be a reasonably simple one to implement that could benefit both sides. Bloggers who provide value-added to media pieces would see increased traffic, while the media could highlight links to particularly insightful pieces that enhance the coverage they provided.

I don't see any way that the blogosphere can replace the media. But they can make the media significantly better (and vice versa) is both sides are so inclined. I wouldn't hold my breath.

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February 18, 2005

Gannon Revisited (So I Lied)

Yes, I said I was closing out my discussion of Mr. Gannon's follies, but that was before I saw this Jim Henley post pointing to an actual (although still potential) issue regarding Gannon: he may have been getting press passes prior to the creation of the mighty Talon News Service. If that's the case, then the case for this being another incidence of the White House trying to manipulate the press in the wake of the payola issues (which I think were laid to rest far too quickly; I'd like to know just how much of my tax dollar is going to journalists).

This, for the record, is one of the reasons why I found the other investigations so distasteful. All those allegations did was distract attention away from what I believe is a more significant issue (and did so successfully enough that I was prepared to put the issue aside completely). This White House has developed some fascinating methods for manipulating the media, and shedding some light on those methods is definitely a good thing.

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February 16, 2005

Closing Out Gannon

Yesterday's post discussing certain people's pursuit of Jeff Gannon certainly got people talking, thanks in part to a small misunderstanding between Jim Henley and myself. This will be my last post on the subject, because I don't find it all that interesting, but I would at least like to try one last time to make my position clear.

For me the issue of Gannon is pretty simple: I don't like what's happening because what we're seeing is the destruction of a man simply because he's a useful tool for attacking the President. Gannon's 'crime' was to ask the President or his Press Secretary softball questions at press conferences. For that crime some people who don't like the President dug into the man's life and found a number of odd things. The justification they're now offering is that the White House failed to properly vet Gannon, and that they were allowing a security risk inside the White House. Apparently these people are of the belief that being gay somehow makes you a security risk; I thought we'd gotten past that. I particularly like the fellow who told me that Gannon was being persecuted for 'getting special treatment from people who hate gays.' The logic apparently being that if you're allegedly gay and the administration doesn't spit on you, you deserve censure. Another commenter has suggested that Gannon may have been (or may be) a prostitute, and prostitutes are security risks. I'm not sure I follow that logic, unless I've missed all the stories about rings of prostitute-assassins running around Washington. Yet Gannon was, in fact, a representative of a news agency. Not a well-known one; indeed, I'd never before heard of Talon News Service. But they do exist and therefore I see no reason why their representatives shouldn't have ever opportunity to compete for day passes to the White House alongside every other reporter. If we put the White House in the business of deciding which news agencies it considers legitimate, we're giving them a veto over the First Amendment.

We also have attempts to link Gannon to the Plame issue. The White House showed poor judgement in telling Gannon that Plame was an undercover operative, it is claimed. It seems to me that the answer to that is pretty easy: if Plame was, in fact, still undercover, the White House showed poor judgement in telling anyone that fact. If Plame was no longer undercover and the White House was pointing out her connections to Joe Wilson to undermine his claims of impartiality, the fact they brought Gannon into that circle is hardly surprising given that the agency he works for is an arm of GOPUSA and could be counted on to publicize the news.

The bottom line on all this for me is simple: despite the rationalizations of some, all this is is an attempt to destroy a man for the crime of holding the wrong opinions. It's open season on all White House reporters now; both sides can dig into their favorite targets' lives and publicize whatever embarassing tidbits they dig up. The right has already found one example, albeit one not quite so entertaining as Gannon, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more of this gossip disguised as news over the next few weeks. This is a discredit to all involved, and I want no part of it.

Update: To forestall further timewasting, if you just want to insult me for not seeing the issue the same way you do, do so on your own weblog and don't waste my time or yours in the comments. Thank you.

Update 2: A good summary of the case for why you should care. I'm not saying I'm there yet, but it lays out the information very nicely.

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February 11, 2005

Jordan Joins Gannon

Eason Jordan has resigned from CNN in the wake of his comments at Davos. His resignation comes within days of the resignation of a lesser-known light in journalism, Jeff Gannon. While I suspect that many will spin these as victory for the right and left halves of the blogosphere, I'm less certain.

Jordan apparently (I say apparently because the World Economic Forum refused to release a tape or transcript of the comments) accused the United States of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq. When confronted by Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) and journalist David Gergen, Jordan backed down. According to some reports Jordan then basked in the accolades of various Arab journalists for daring to speak truth to power regarding the United States. How egregious this sin is generally depends on your position on the left-right axis. I believed that the claims deserved to be investigated in greater detail because when the chief news executive of the world's largest news channel makes a statement, I'd like to believe (although I suppose I shouldn't) that there ought to be more than just a hunch backing those words. Others believed that Jordan's comments were no big deal or even that his comments are probably correct and in either case, it was no big deal if the media ignored them.

Then we have Mr. Gannon, who I just heard about today but whose story is apparently rather interesting. Gannon works for a media outlet called Talon. I've never heard of it before this, but it is apparently a news organization funded by GOPUSA, a Republican fundraising organization of some kind. Gannon asked the President some softball questions at White House press conferences, and it turns out that Gannon was actually reporting under an assumed name. Somehow this, combined with the fact he owned the rights to several interesting web site domain names, was sufficient to throw suspicion on him, and so he quit. Apparently parts of the left wing of the blogosphere (in particular Kos, who was instrumental in digging into the man's personal life to locate these details; Tailgunner Joe would be proud) are convinced that Gannon was a plant by the White House. (The White House has done itself no favors in this arena through its admitted sponsorship of various columnists to support White House projects.) I confess I find this incident more creepy than demonstrative of some great Republican plot. The lesson I take from this is that if you take an opinion that is not approved of by the left, and there is anything in your past that might be embarrassing, God help you.

Be that as it may, it's hard to look at either of these instances as victories. The right may be happy Jordan is gone, but no investigation actually has uncovered what really happened at Davos. It is certainly possible that Jordan was just throwing out an anti-American line he knew would be popular in that forum, but it is also possible that Jordan is honestly concerned that reporters are being targeted and he expressed himself poorly. With his resignation, the odds are few will look into the matter further, and so we'll never know if Jordan merited censure or not. Gannon, meanwhile, has been publically embarrassed for the crime of asking the President a softball question. It's hard to see an America where each side digs into the past of every reporter they dislike in hopes of discrediting them through some past transgression (real or imagined) is a good thing.

The blogosphere has demonstrated that it can certainly bring a great deal of heat to bear on issues of the day. But it doesn't appear we got much light this time.

Update: In the words of Smooth Jimmy Apollo, "when you're right 52% of the time, you're wrong 48% of the time." Jim Henley points out two reasons why taking down Gammon was a legitimate bust: the fact that he used an assumed name to get into the White House and the fact the details about him were from his business dealings and not his personal life.

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December 24, 2002

The Danger of Nexis

We all change our positions over time, or at least some of them. But today, thanks to Google, Nexis, and other search engines, our words are far more apt to come back and bite us at some later date. Such is the fate of Michael Walzer, who argued in favor of unilateralism four years ago, but who today argues against it, largely because Walzer is a liberal who was supporting a Democratic (happy, Gary? ;)) President, and who is now trying to oppose a Republican one. Robert Kagan has the details. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the original articles yet, so I can't say with certainty that Kagan's interpretation is fair. It is quite interesting, however.

UPDATE (12/25/02): To clarify, it is not my intent to suggest Walzer is necessarily wrong in his current views simply because he has changed them. As Jonathan Gewirtz correctly notes, Walzer's arguments should be addressed on the merits. But thanks to Nexis and other search engines, Walzer cannot easily slip his earlier arguments in favor of war with Iraq under the rug.

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