MSM Navel-Gazing On The Bias Question

I think Laura Ingraham really did start something when she went after James Carville and David Gregory the other day about the scandalously one-sided negative reporting coming out of Iraq.
Today, Newsbusters highlights the very positive coverage the Today Show gave to the Coalition rescue operation that freed three Christian Peacemaker Teams hostages earlier this morning. (The fourth hostage, Tom Fox, was murdered by the terrorists. His body was found earlier this month.) In a related story, Michelle Malkin points out the dishonest manner in which the antiwar liberals at Christian Peacemaker Teams are handling the rescue story on its own website. You’d think the organization would have the guts to acknowledge just who secured their colleagues’ “release” but I guess that’s asking too much. It kind of blows their whole “the troops are evil, violent occupiers” narrative.
Getting back to the main topic, this sudden introspection on the part of big media about biased coverage hasn’t been limited to NBC. Last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper had Michael Yon, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Ware (Time Magazine’s Baghdad Bureau Chief) and Nic Robertson (CNN International Correspondent) to talk about the issue. (You can see the entire video segment at Yon’s site, and a transcript is available at CNN.com.)
Yon, who spent a long time embedded with the Army’s 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment (Deuce Four) made the following point early in the interview:

There are a lot of bombs, of course, and a lot of shootings and whatnot — a great deal. But it’s much easier to tell the bad news. It’s easy. The strobe light flashes, you know, the bomb goes off, you take a picture, you have a story. It’s easy news. It grabs people’s attention. And it makes money.

In response, Cooper countered Yon with:

Actually, let me ask you about that. Because what is easy about going, hanging out with insurgents or going out on patrol? Isn’t it easier, frankly, to go — I mean, if reporters are looking for the easy thing, wouldn’t they be going to a hospital opening and giving out toys to children and showing that?

Now, this was done partly to set up Ware and Robertson, both of whom have put themselves in dangerous situations, just as Yon did while he was embedded, in order to get their stories out.
I have to wonder, though, if this is the start of a meme we’re going to see coming from the MSM in response to all the criticism being heaped on them: They aren’t covering the hospitals, schools, businesses, infrastructure projects, and the kids because they’re too busy dodging bullets and shrapnel to bring home the hard, “real” news. Good journalists (like our MSM heroes) don’t settle for the “easy” stuff. This bears watching.
Hugh Hewitt spoke for the people here at home who are fed up with the media’s negative coverage:

But I think you’re missing the point of what happened in West Virginia today. What happened there is a public demonstration of growing contempt for elite mainstream media, because they do have an agenda. The agenda is perceived as being antiwar. It’s not Ernie Pyle. It’s a lot more like the Vietnam era, and the American people are growing in their conviction that not only is the media not helping win the war, but they are endangering soldiers.

It’s important that he stated this so plainly, because it really is that simple.
In response, CNN’s Nic Robertson offered up the “don’t shoot the messenger” defense, saying that reporters in Iraq are simply reporting what they see, and that they don’t serve anyone’s interests by bringing an agenda to the job, and that they are contractually obligated to be truthful and honest in their reporting. This is lame, misleading pap from someone who, as a reporter, should know better. I’m not impugning Robertson here: if he says he has no agenda coloring his reporting, then I take him at his word. But when he expands his defense to reporters in general, he gets into trouble. The idea that all reporters adhere to the same set of lofty, fair, objective journalistic standards Robertson alludes to is complete fantasy. If you disagree with me, I have two words for you: Dan Rather.
Michael Ware, who has spent time with the insurgents terrorists in Iraq, addressed the matter this way (my emphasis):

But one applies the same journalistic criteria to the insurgents that we apply to the military. I mean, there is war. Propaganda or information operations is an enormous part of that for both sides. Everyone in war lies to you. Everyone exaggerates, underplays and puts their spin.
There’s a political aspect to the very nature of war that needs to be capitalized and manipulated by these players. So we need to add these filters and distill the truth ourselves. I mean, just this anti-liberal media campaign that’s been driven from where? From within the political landscape of the United States.

Wow.
You cannot, as a supposedly responsible journalist, put the United States military on equal footing with the terrorists, which is exactly what Ware does. He assumes that everyone is lying, and that it’s up to him to determine what constitutes the “truth.” This is media bias at its most fundamental level: Ware refuses to concede that the US military may, in fact, be far more forthcoming and honest than the terrorists. Instead, he makes no real differentiation between the two, saying that both are fighting a propaganda war. A propaganda war in which, I should remind you, one side “propagandizes” by cutting people’s heads off on camera while the other builds schools, hands out toys, and treats the sick.
But really, it’s all the same thing. Michael Ware says so.
And Ware is wrong about the genesis of the anti-media groundswell that has now become too large for the media to ignore: it comes from the regular people of the United States. They are the ones who are calling talk shows and writing their newspapers calling out the media for their lopsided and misleading coverage. Ware tries to pin it on the political class because that makes it easy for elites like him to sniff at the criticism and dismiss it out of hand. That is not the case here. Americans are simply fed up.
The chatter on the topic continued this morning on the Imus in the Morning show.
Imus had Richard Engle of NBC News on the air to discuss the idea that the major news media outlets are knowingly giving good stories from Iraq the short shrift.
Don Imus is a talk show host who trades in opinion. His personal stands on the war (he opposes) and the current administration (he doesn’t support them…he voted for Kerry) are common knowledge to regular listeners. You cannot accuse him being dishonest. He tells you exactly what he thinks. Whether or not you agree is another matter.
That made his interview with Engle, which I caught in its entirety, all the more interesting. MSNBC only has a partial transcript up as today’s “news quote of the day,” but the selection they posted contains the meat of the interview.
Here it is. I’ve added emphasis to sections I want to point out:

Imus: “How many American troops do we have who are out doing stuff with Iraqis other than killing them or killing terrorists or just defending themselves?”
Richard Engle of NBC News: “I would be hard-pressed to find an exact number on that…”

Imus: “But there are some right?”
Richard Engel: “…but I think, I know where you are going. A lot of, certainly a lot of troops out here and I think, I hear this, personally I get e-mails from soldiers, I was writing back to some of them yesterday, there is a lot of frustration from the troops that say, ‘Listen we are out here… and I was just out with an Iraqi child and I went to a school and my unit gave this school ten thousand dollars to try and re-paint it and try to fix up a bridge or a mosque in a particular town that had seen some violence and we were there and Iraqi kids were smiling at me and we were handing over money and helping build a wall or build some sort of drainage ditch.’ These kinds of stories are certainly happening. From what a soldier is seeing, then he turns on the news and he sees car bombs in Baghdad and I can understand why he would be tremendously frustrated, that well what I saw this morning from a soldier’s perspective was kids smiling at me as I was doing a project, and when I turn on the news I only see bombings and chaos. To a degree both are correct. From the soldier’s perspective what he saw is correct, he saw something good, he did get smiles but that doesn’t mean that a lot of the stories recently, and you know obviously there as been a major controversy that a lot of the coverage has been too negative etcetera. A lot of the stories recently have focused on this three year anniversary and I think with most Iraqis we speak to also are the ones who are smiling at U.S. Marines and the ones who are experiencing positive things from the troops will say that these last three years have been tremendously traumatic, and that their lives are not necessarily better than they were three years ago and people are very much afraid, so on a small level a lot of soldiers are out there doing things that make them feel good, that are building community relations, but the situation in Iraq is undeniably still deeply troubled.”

Translation: The positive developments seen by the military on the ground are illusory. The reality of the situation is that it really is a mess. Just ask us. We’re the media, and we know everything.
To his credit, Imus actually pressed Engel, saying basically, that there’s something to the argument. To paraphrase Imus, “Listen, I’m not here to support the administration, but all we do here is watch the news, and it’s pretty obvious that everything coming across is bad news, and that none of the positive developments are getting meaningful coverage.” Interestingly, Engel didn’t have much more to add.
Three years’ worth of negative stories from Iraq, filed without even a cursory attempt to show balance, have finally come back to haunt the MSM. The media people see this, and that’s why they’re trying to address the matter now by talking about the “perception” of bias on their part. That they’re talking about it at all shows just how worried they are.
The narcissists in the elite media are coming to realize, at last, that the average American no longer sees them as credible providers of information, and they can’t handle it. After all, what good are their monolithic soapboxes if people simply tune out what they’re saying from them?
Originally published 3/23/06 at The Noonz Wire.