News and/or Media
Newsweek – Weak news
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005I was going to say something about this yesterday, but held my tongue (fingers?) since it all seemed to be a lot of posturing on all sides. After doing some more reading on the subject, though, here are a few thoughts:
First of all, Newsweek didn’t cause the death of anyone if Afghanistan. What they did was provide a spark that some seriously crazy killers used to incite anger and fan it into violent rage. Let’s always remember that it was the killers who caused the death, not Newsweek. Blaming them for these deaths is akin to blaming George Bush for the September 11th attacks.
That’s not to say that Newsweek didn’t do anything wrong here. Their first mistake, of course, was printing something that they couldn’t confirm to be true. That’s just bad journalism, and whether it incites terrorists, sways elections, or ruins reputations, it’s still a bad (and easily avoidable) move.
Their second mistake is a bit more subtle, and also more endemic to today’s media: they jumped on a bandwagon and underestimated the consequences of their actions. There’s no doubt in my mind that had the Abu Ghraib scandal not occurred, this story would never have been printed. “Abuse by American Guards” is a hot story right now. It has “legs.” Someone at Newsweek heard an accusation about mistreating the Koran, and saw an opportunity to play “gotcha.”
The problem here is that media is cheaper and more global than it’s ever been before. They can read Newsweek in Afghanistan now. They have CNN and BBC in Iraq. Anti-war protests are visible to our enemies. Our media still has an obligation to report the facts and investigate the news, but we need to be prepared to face the full consequences of the free press we hold so dear.
In the first Gulf War, the Iraqi army seemed to fold up at the very sight of American troops. This time around, they fought back. I firmly believe the news coverage of the war protests and the various commentators who called the U.S. and the President “evil” had a lot to do with this. Our enemy, who had been too scared to fight 12 years earlier, had been enboldened by the appearance of a divided America – an America that appeared unsure of its commitment to the fight. Soldiers probably watched 250,000 people marching in Times Square and figured that some percentage of the American soldiers in Baghdad would surrender or run when the fighting got hot.
As they say, freedom isn’t free. We should never stop expressing our opinions, but we have to take our heads out of the sand and understand what happens when we do. Our actions have more consequences today than they used to.
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NYTimes, Heal Thyself
Monday, May 9th, 2005Kudos to the New York Times for this:
Times Panel Proposes Steps to Build Credibility – New York Times
In order to build readers’ confidence, an internal committee at The New York Times has recommended taking a variety of steps, including having senior editors write more regularly about the workings of the paper, tracking errors in a systematic way and responding more assertively to the paper’s critics.
I think all of these are good things. As someone who doesn’t believe I have the facts straight until I’ve read at least two accounts of something, any discussion of how the author reached his conclusions can only help to identify biases (both in the author’s writing and in the critics’ complaints about the writing). A discussion about how & when errors were made (including a dressing down of people who wrongly criticize an article) also tends to clarify the facts – typically by proving that the mistake wasn’t as sinister/politically motivated as many would have us believe.
I’ll also note that blogging is noticeably absent from the list of recommended improvements. It says the Times “should make it easier for readers to send e-mail to reporters and editors,” which reads to me as a tacit rejection of allowing reporters to blog, or establishing an official blogging strategy for the paper. E-mail, after all, is so 20th century…
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UPDATE! Jeff Jarvis points out that the dead-tree edition listed several recommendations, including the idea of starting a “Times blog.” Odd that they’d leave that part out of the online edition, huh?
Also, the full report from the committee is now available online here.
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