A Campaign to Discredit Pro-U.S. Writers and Analysts?
MEDIA BLOG
01/06 05:26 PM
Yesterday, AEI analyst Michael Rubin wrote an article for NRO defending himself from the insinuations of two New York Times reporters that he had improperly concealed an affiliation with a U.S. contractor, the Lincoln Group, when talking about Lincoln with the media (I commented here). As Rubin wrote, Lincoln had provided him with a travel reimbursement, but so had the State Department, Defense Department, various military units, and Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities at various times. Rubin also wrote that he had no prior knowledge of the Lincoln Group programs about which he made comments to the press.
Today, the Raw Story does a follow-up report on an article that blogger Bill Roggio wrote for NRO, in which he defended himself from Washington Post insinuations that he was part of an U.S. information operation because he had received an invitation to embed as a journalist in Iraq. As Roggio wrote, the military invites journalists to embed all the time, and he covered the entire cost of his trip with a fundraising drive on his blog.
The theme here, if you haven't already picked up on it, is that two major papers have used recent news reports about U.S. military information operations to try to discredit a pro-U.S. analyst and a pro-U.S. blogger. Both Rubin and Roggio write from a standpoint that is generally supportive of the U.S. mission in Iraq, and the NY Times and the Washington Post have attempted to portray their writings as untrustworthy and potentially motivated by financial considerations.
I think this has something to do with the fear and contempt some newspaper reporters feel towards online analysts and bloggers who don't buy into the objective model of journalism and are nevertheless taking a growing share of the news and analysis market. Writers like Rubin and Roggio, who have both traveled to Iraq and used the Internet to report their findings, are challenging the traditional gatekeeper role of papers like the Times and the Post, and some at those institutions don't like it. As true believers in the old school of objective reporting, they're seeking to discredit this new school of journalism — which has a clear point of view about its subject matter — as nothing but pro-U.S. propaganda.
But accuracy, fairness and honesty should count for a lot more than "objectivity," to the extent that the latter is even possible. Pressthink's Jay Rosen commented on this in a LiveChat on washingtonpost.com today:
Journalists like [Washington Post national political editor] John Harris find it genuinely hard to accept that they are being judged on their political thinking, assessment and role in Washington, as well as their reporting and journalistic work. They think, "that's just it, I am a reporter, my politics aren't in my journalism." The adequacy of that attitude is under pressure today. In my opinion, it no longer works as an answer.
I don't like what the Times and the Post did to Rubin and Roggio in these recent stories. It appears to me that the reporters who wrote these stories feel that Rubin and Roggio aren't legitimate sources of news or analysis because of their clear pro-U.S. stance, and deserved to be taken down a peg. But rather than just make that argument, the Times and the Post smeared them as propagandists. I don't think that's accurate, fair or honest.
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