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| How the media works |
| 2007-06-20 |
| James Bowman, Wall Street Journal Excerpted from a long piece on David Halberstam and the Vietnam mentality in American journalism; emphasis added. Events have a way of exposing bad information in ways that provide their chroniclers with endless temptations to such bogus wisdom. The chief of these is the temptation to say: "I know now, therefore they should have known then." In this respect, Halberstam's legacy to today's Iraq war coverage--which was the subtext of so many of his posthumous tributes--has been not only to make yielding to this temptation OK for journalists--whose business of "getting it right" can always proceed at greater leisure and with fewer consequences for error--but to make it almost the whole business of journalism. This became apparent once again with the release of George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm"--a work which will long be remembered for its self-serving chutzpah and its ingratitude in a field that is far from short of examples of these qualities. . . . In spite of its special pleading, the book does have at least one serious point to make. Although the former DCI's claim to have been quoted out of context when he said that the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk" is laughable, he has a legitimate grievance when he says that whoever leaked his remark to Bob Woodward behaved very badly. "It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," he now says. "You don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me." A bit late in the day, some might think, for someone who has spent as much time talking to Bob Woodward as Mr. Tenet has to start complaining about what's honorable and what isn't when it comes to feeding the media's scandal machine. Yet there should be more joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth than the ninety and nine (if you can find that many) who never strayed. Now we should all recognize, along with the Mr. Tenet who found it out the hard way, that the media pursue their own interests in deciding what to report and how to report it and that, therefore, the picture we get from them is not a mere reflection of reality but something which, like David Halberstam's reporting from Vietnam, helps to shape it, often in ways that are disastrous for everyone but the media--and, of course, America's enemies. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 Good argument for why we need the (conservative) blogosphere and sites like rantburg. |
| Posted by: Grumenk Philalzabod0723 2007-06-20 19:44 |
| #1 So...what's your point? |
| Posted by: Sy Hersh 2007-06-20 13:32 |