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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (453)	12/12/2003 8:10:30 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Susanna Cornett offers some thoughts on the protest coverage that seem applicable here: InstaPundit I think you're correct to a degree that the lack of coverage has to do with the media's conscious or unconscious preference on how the reconstruction goes in Iraq. <font size=4>However, I also think the media reflexively thinks that anti-establishment protest is more "honest" and newsworthy than anything supporting the establishment - and in their view, anything conservative or associated with a conservative administration is by definition "establishment". I also think they're suspicious of demonstrations supporting the US or at least tracking a parallel position because they assume the US had some role in setting it up. So it's what you said, but it's also part process as well as ideology because they're lazily activating their frames rather than critically assessing the situation. <font size=3> I'm reading up on research on media framing right now, which is why this leapt to my mind. Essentially, for the most efficient production of news the media as a whole has developed frames, pigeonholes for news, that quickly organize raw information that comes in. They assess a situation, associate it with an established theme, and file it away there. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but what happens is that journalists either become lazy and mentally assign a situation to a theme or frame without critical assessment of it, or they don't examine the ideological foundations of their themes and assume the theme/frame is based on some objective reality when in fact it's a subjective categorization. Like any categorization method, this means that some aspects of the situation are ignored and others emphasized in the process of making the decision. <font size=4> A CNN reporter hearing about this may see "support for US interests" and mentally file it under "administration hype" (shorthand: ignore) rather than seeing "Iraqis freely demonstrating" and "Iraqis rising up against terrorists" and filing it under "Important changes" (shorthand: cover). <font size=3> Frames are passed along as part of the culture of journalism. Not always bad, but like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, when they're bad they're horrid. Just some thoughts on what's going on. <font size=4>I think the media is in part ideologically hostile to the administration, but I also think some of this is just lazy pigeonholing. Which doesn't diminish the harm, just shifts the bias from a wholly thoughted partisanship to lazy perpetuation of faulty themes. I think this is largely right, though it's interesting how often "mere laziness" conveniently leads to the same result as "outright bias," isn't it? <font size=3> instapundit.com

To: Sully- who wrote (453)	12/12/2003 8:56:34 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

MEDIA VS. HOPE From: LindyBill I would hate to be the New Ombudsman at the Times right now. His mail box must be overflowing. Message 19589049 <font size=4> MEDIA VS. HOPE <font size=3> John Poderhedz NY POst December 12, 2003 -- <font size=4>CALL it the "good news brownout." In Baghdad on Wednesday, as many as 10,000 Iraqis marched in support of democracy and against terrorism. They marched in broad daylight, out in the open, which meant they knew they might be spotted, even photographed, by Saddamite monsters. The demonstration surely would have been larger<font size=3> but it was difficult for people in Baghdad even to find out the date of the march because its organizers were properly fearful of terrorist disruption. <font size=4> Unless you spend your days and nights trolling the Internet, you probably know nothing about this wondrous and hopeful event - for which the lion's share of the security was provided by Iraqi police. The New York Times buried a paragraph on the march deep inside its daily Iraq story, giving far more prominence to a bank robbery in a Baghdad suburb. Nothing in the Washington Post. Fox News Channel did a story, but the other cable channels, and the three national newscasts, said nothing about it. <font size=3> In the current issue of the Weekly Standard, MSNBC producer Noah Oppenheim flatly describes the situation in Baghdad following a reporting trip there: <font size=4>"Most journalists did not support this war to begin with, and feel vindicated whenever the effort stumbles." Which means, as well, that they have no particular interest in telling a story that might cause them to question their own prejudices. <font size=5> If you are a conventional consumer of news, from newspapers and TV networks, you have basically been kept in the dark. That would once have been the end of it. No longer. The failure to cover the march is not a full blackout but rather just a brownout. <font size=4> Unconventional sources of news on the Internet will keep this story alive, right in the middle of Baghdad.<font size=3> For those educated Iraqis hungry not only for liberty but also for worldwide recognition of their plight under Saddam and the far-from-horrific daily reality of life beyond the Ba'ath dictatorship, the Internet has proved invaluable. <font size=4> We knew about the march beforehand, and about what happened at the march afterward, from the most important "weblog" in the world right now - a blog called Healing Iraq.<font size=3> (You can find it at healingiraq.blogspot.com.) Its author is a 24-year-old dentist named Zeyad who lived as a boy and briefly as a teenager in London, which explains both the fluency of his English and his endearing lapses of grammar and spelling. He spent weeks trying to figure out when the march would be, as he pointed out last week: "We spent some time investigating whether the rallies were still schedulled[sic] for December 10th. Yes, <font size=4>it was like doing some kind of detective work. <font size=5> "It's strange that nobody seems to know any details about the event. We went to different local newspaper offices which had published articles about it. All we got is that the demonstrations are still being organized but no exact date has been given out due to security considerations. Hmmm. How are people supposed to demonstrate when everything is being so secretive? This isn't good at all." <font size=3> But on Wednesday night, after the event, he was exultant: <font size=4>"The rallies today proved to be a major success. I didn't expect anything even close to this. It was probably the largest demonstration in Baghdad for months. It wasn't just against terrorism. It was against Arab media, against the interference of neighbouring countries, against dictatorships, against Wahhabism, against oppression, and of course against the Ba'ath and Saddam." <font size=3> The photos accompanying this column are Zayed's; he posted more than 100 by uploading them to his blog at a Baghdad Internet café. <font size=4> This new kind of journalism <font size=3>- personal, unabashedly ideological, fueled by passion and a hunger to inform the world - is beyond exciting. <font size=4>It is world-transforming,<font size=3> and if the frighteningly conformist and pathetically self-satisfied mainstream media don't pay attention, they will continue their fast fade into irrelevance. They will be the ones browned out.E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com nypost.com