Journalist A-Historicism, Part III, Voice of Experience
— Bruce Kesler
Democracy Project
Journalists inadequately grounded in history become tools of our nation’s opponents, who do gain lessons from history. Worse, Americans who may have even less knowledge of history are poorly served by many journalists’ failure to provide accurate historical perspective, instead of clichés they picked up by liberal osmosis.
Captured documents show that Saddam was counting on American timidity to risk casualties, based on his view of our Vietnam war experience. Zarqawi counts on our home media to be negative and undermine resolve, as during Tet ’68 and otherwise, with the aid of dramatic bombings for media effect, or intimidation of journalists, or subtle defeatism fed to Iraqi stringers for Western media.
Following my earlier posts on media a-historicism, (Links below), I corresponded with an experienced combat journalist on the matter.
David Kline reported in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, NBC, CBS, the Atlantic, and other mainstream media.
<<< He “was the first Western reporter to go behind the battle lines in Afghanistan in 1979 to report on the developing anti-Soviet resistance war there (for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting)…Kline was also the first American reporter to report on the famine in war-ravaged Ethiopia in 1983…” >>>
Kline blogs at BlogRevolt.
Here’s what Kline emailed to me:
<<< As for a-historicism among reporters, don’t get me started. I will say, though, that I don’t recall it being much different with young reporters back when I was covering the Afghan war in the 1980’s, when few knew very much about the protest movements or Vietnam War of the ‘60’s and even fewer knew anything about the history of the USSR…. It's probably just a matter of who has an interest in history and takes the time to read about it. Whether the numbers of those who do has changed over time, I couldn't say. But it's surely a minority of the general population, perhaps even a minority of the population of reporters. >>>
For American media to send inadequately trained journalists to cover Iraq, the few they even bother to send (see 5th link below), is disgraceful. To present poorly trained freelancers as experienced is similarly a disgraceful “dirty little secret.” This isn't the best the media can do. The American people deserve better, and many are finding it elsewhere on the Internet.
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