Say Anything Blog

From an interview between Howard Kurtz and UPI's Pam Hess on CNN's Reliable Sources this morning:

KURTZ: One last question before we take a break.

Pam Hess, you have covered Don Rumsfeld for years. How frustrated do you believe that he is by the Iraq coverage? And what do you make of this "New York Daily News" report that some White House officials expect him to quit in the coming weeks?

HESS: I've never made any money guessing when Rumsfeld is going to quit. And I think if people think he's going to quit, he might just stay, to be irascible.

I think he's very frustrated, and it actually comes from a military perspective. What's important for people to understand here is that what the military is fighting in Iraq is a counterinsurgency, and that's something -- they'll say it over and over again, "You can't win that militarily."

What it is, is a quest for the will of the Iraqi people to stand up against the people that they're fighting, and the will of the American people to allow our troops to stay there long enough. So media becomes a tool in that.

And I think if there's a criticism to be made of the American media over there -- and there are plenty of them, and I think some of them are outside -- one of the important things to keep in mind is that we are quite vigilant about U.S. propaganda. We are less so about insurgent propaganda. The 24 news -- 24-hour news cycle feeds into that, but we don't quite know what to do with the information that they send us, so it becomes he said-she said reporting.

KURTZ: That is a good point.

In other words, the media meets every claim by our government with skepticism. Something that is, in most instances, great. But problems emerge when the media doesn't meet the claims of our enemies with the same level of skepticism.

For instance, some months back our military took out what they said was a meeting of insurgents out in the desert with a missile attack. Later insurgent groups claimed that this was not a meeting of terrorists but rather a wedding party full of civilians. Did our media meet that claim with skepticism? Did they ask the insurgent groups to prove that it was a wedding party that was hit? No, they swallowed the story that was fed them whole and started demanding explanations of our government.

And remember that Newsweek story about American troops flushing the Korans of detainees down the toilet? On that one the media had to eschew skepticism entirely and embrace a sort of willful naivete in order to report the story with a straight face, because while they were telling us what an awful thing it is to see your holy book flushed down the toilet most of us at home were scratching our heads wondering how any book could possibly be flushed down the toilet. It turned out that the story was entirely false, but the damage was already done. Scores of Muslims in the middle east rioted in response to the story and some people lost their lives in the furor.

All because the media often refuses to apply a bit of incredulity toward claims that make our government (or, more specifically, the current Presidential administration) look bad. Most journalists these days would rather be first with a hot, controversial story than take the time to get the facts straight and put the story into perspective.

(via Instapundit)

Update:

Video here.