Enough to make you sick
By Phil Lucas
Executive Editor, News Herald - Panama City
The stories we tell define the nation. Stories poorly told can destroy it.
It works the same with children. If you tell 10 stories a day to a lovely child and nine of them say she is weak, ugly and stupid, she will come to believe it. She may be pregnant by 15, a meth addict by 17, join a cult by 19, then elope with the family cat to get married in Massachusetts.
So it goes with the country. Consider our national storytellers: the media.
Ten days ago, American and coalition forces engaged Iraqi “insurgents,” as the national press politely calls them. Sane Americans know them as the enemy, gunmen of an Islamic religious leader. An American brigadier general gave a televised briefing on the battle for several cities. As he explained the fight for Fallujah and how we had taken three bridges at Kut, suddenly across the bottom of the screen appeared a Fox News Alert: EXPLOSION HEARD IN BAGHDAD!!!!!
Fox immediately switched to a camera shot of a Baghdad skyline. The voice of a reporter came on, urgently speculating about an explosion, perhaps caused by a car bomb or a mortar or an RPG (rocket propelled grenade, to the unwashed) or whatever else the reporter could think of. Then the camera zeroed in on a hole in some concrete, perhaps a parking lot or sidewalk. The hole appeared to be about the size of a wheelbarrow, the evident location of the EXPLOSION HEARD IN BAGHDAD!!!!!
They got an expert on the phone. The TV guys keep a herd of experts handy for just such an event. The reporter asked the expert what could have happened.
He said to her, and I paraphrase, “I’ll tell you what happened. This is a war of information. You were showing the general’s briefing, and they wanted you off it, so they set off a bomb in Baghdad.”
The reporter stammered, “Uh, oh . . .” and commenced to get the guy off the phone. He had more expertise than she expected.
A quick flick to CNN showed the same camera shot: a hole in concrete. On MSNBC: a hole in concrete.
No doubt the general continued his briefing, the subject of which was the most intense and costly fighting in a year.
A war of information. Of storytelling. Comically inept, you think? True. But this sort of reporting by the national press is not the exception. When the press reports about Iraq and virtually all other contested issues in the news, ineptitude is the rule. This is true of television and also of print reporting. We zero in on the worst thing that happens, time after time, day after day, the effect of which is to present the worst thing as the norm, even when it is only one-tenth of the whole story. For good measure, we throw in our personal opinions, arrogantly certain they are correct.
We have all noticed that the few stories we get from people who have served in or visited Iraq rarely match the sky-is-falling enthusiasm we get from our press.
Some call this biased reporting. I call it deceitful, or
just plain lying.
Four weeks ago the Israelis killed Ahmed Yassin, the
Islamic religious leader who founded Hamas, one of the
purposes of which is to kill Israelis. Some news reports
called him “revered spiritual leader.” Revered by whom?
Israelis? Americans? Palestinians? Is there any doubt as
to the reporters’ opinion?
Virtually all news reports said he was “assassinated,” which means murder, an illegal act. From the Israeli point of view, is it illegal to chop the head off a snake trying to strike you? Reporters could have written “executed,” a word loaded in the other direction, implying legality and favoring the Israelis. Or they could have just written “killed” and let readers and viewers decide what is right and what is wrong.
Here’s a line from an Associated Press story about the president’s press conference last week. “Bush sidestepped at least two opportunities to say he wanted to apologize or take personal responsibility.”
“Sidestepped?” “Opportunities?” Nobody sidesteps
opportunities. You sidestep duck droppings on the
sidewalk. Think this reporter has an opinion he wants to
share? If he reveals this kind of blatant bias in any part
of a news story, it casts a shadow over every word he
writes.
USA Today wrote this: “Offered numerous chances to second-guess his approach to Iraq, he rejected them all.”
Nobody “rejects” any “chances” worth taking. It defies human nature. As for “second-guessing,” we don’t need to guess whose opinion that is. The reporters’ two names are in the byline. Assuming perhaps that their readers were too stupid to get it, the reporters used these words a few paragraphs down: “denied,” “argued” and “conceded.” All referred to Bush. These are words for the opinion pages, like the one you are on now, unless you draw no distinction between news and opinion, unless you believe your opinion is the news.
Press folly plumbs new depths when witnessed live, as in
the televised press conference itself.
It was enough to raise old editors from the dead, their
standards and self-discipline sorely missing from the
modern newsroom. Others of us just squirmed with
embarrassment, partly for the president, prone to trip
over a syllable, but mostly for the profession. Reporter
after reporter couched questions in the negative, assuming
the worst was true, knowing the worst was true, looking
for the kill. They used words like failure, defeat and
mistake, time after time after time. That’s not reporting.
That’s not seeking truth. That’s an agenda.
Smelling blood, the pack salivated for an apology from the
president.
On this point I agree. An apology is in order.
So here it is.
I am sorry our storytellers have us by the neck. We are
better than they picture us. We are better than they are.
As an editor, I apologize to Americans for the national
disgrace of inept and self-indulgent journalists, who
hound after the worst and ugliest to the exclusion of much
else, who strut their opinions with conceit, and who spew
it all forth upon the public and call it news. |
