November 02, 2006

I Got Your Liberal Media Right Here.

In general I think the media is neither liberal nor conservative. It's sensationalist: it wants to sell advertising space (its a business, after all), and the more people who want to read their stories, the more they can charge to advertise in them. Thus, they generally choose to run stories that emphasize controversy, "new" things, and try fairly hard not to be either too liberal or too conservative (if they are marked that way, then they lose readers who don't agree with them, which means less adds, which is less money; FOX news is the clear exception to this, but their business model is different - to be the place where conservatives can get news friendly to them).

However, when the New York Times runs a brutal story about a Navy Corpsman helping Marines in Iraq that contains descriptions of sniper attacks, head shots, blood in helmets, and a raging frustrated medic while a platoon of Marines stands around not knowing where the shot came from (just one shot; no firefight here), and a medevaced Marine who (it is inferred) isn't going to make it, I'd have to wonder about the timing here. It is just a few short days before a mid-term election that is billed as a referendum on President Bush's Iraq policy.

Now, don't get me wrong. Bush's Iraq policy (if one can said to exist) is awful, and I'd be more than delighted if the Democrats could take back one branch of Congress. This story cannot but help that cause. However, the story contains no real news (people are shot in war; medics have tough jobs), though I have to say it's gripping and compelling (and very well written). Thus, the decision to run such a highly emotional (but news-lite) story a few days before a national election is, to say the least, somewhat...leading (I had to think about what word I wanted to use there).

Just sayin'.

Posted by baltar at November 2, 2006 09:06 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Atrocities of War | Iraq | Media | Politics


Comments

Why on Earth is that not "news"?

Posted by: Armand at November 2, 2006 09:56 AM | PERMALINK

i suppose the question is what function newspapers ought to serve. if the premise is, the war, people being shot and killed and other incidental exigencies of said war, is only news in the first few days, because thereafter we all can infer based on the status quo, or the deterioration of same, and the mounting body count that the same descriptions salient in the first few weeks of the war, or for argument's sake the insurgency, then i agree that the times story seems gratuitous.

i disagree, however, that the premise holds. perhaps not you, baltar, but someone at this site certainly in the past has criticized the media for their lack of perseverence in covering stories, the failure to put back on the front page the more pedestrian denouement of a story that had something splashy about it in the first instance. a personal pet peeve, to illustrate my point, is that papers often blast on the front page above the fold massive plaintiffs' verdicts in big-time litigation but rarely report the subsequent "molding" of the verdict substantially downward. for example, the crotch burn victim from fast food coffee, who was awarded a 7-figure judgment by a jury, ultimately ended up with a moderately low six-figure award when an appeals court knocked the award way down; the first part of that was front page news and fodder for all the lawyers in congress who've learned that hating on lawyers is a nice strawman when all else fails, but the latter was barely reported at all.

the media, in my view, is there to make sure no one ever forgets what one's government is up to, the benefits and costs, and who's bearing the brunt of the consequences. while i'm cynically enough to appreciate the point regarding the timing, i'm also aware enough of how self-conscious the Times is about its supposed bias that i imagine their only justifiable approach is to ask when a story's done, whether it's ready to run and appropriate to run, and to run it without regard to the proximity to this or that moment in civic life. this one may reflect unfortunate timing for republicans, and may provoke more than a little criticism from those who tout liberal bias in the media, but correlation isn't causation, and i would consider it conservative bias for the paper to sit on a relevant, well-written story until after election day. the Times and other papers have grown craven enough; that sort of thing would signal a further slide down that slippery slope.

the times, it seems to me, runs stories like this periodically. (get it? periodically?) they are an important element of keeping the electorate informed about what $400B and counting of their money is financing. and i hope they don't stop for as long as the war goes on. should they do so, i'll consider it an abdication of their responsibility to the american people no different than that of the many worthless rags that would never dare to run such a story.

Posted by: moon at November 2, 2006 10:49 AM | PERMALINK

I strongly agree with Moon's last paragraph - though I'd come close to saying constantly instead of periodically. If a country has committed to war, putting vast amounts of its wealth and its families on the line, I think a state of the war story is almost always appropriate. Can that help or hurt a candidate? Sure. But whether the war is going well or going badly is something people should always be aware of - and political leaders should be held accountable for their actions, good or bad.

Posted by: Armand at November 2, 2006 11:23 AM | PERMALINK

Armand - its not "news" in the larger sense of informing the general public (if reader of the NYT can be considered "general public") about any relevant who/what/why/where/when sort of information. It is closer to a "human interest" angle than a news story. Does the NYT run "human interest" stories? Yes, but usually not often on the front page, and only days before an election (a more appropriate place would have been a longer story - there are many unanswered questions in the story, not the least of which is what happened to the injured Marine - in the Sunday Magazine. I expect the front page of the NYT to avoid telling me things I already know.

Moon - I don't disagree with that, though my quibble is with the utility of "human interest" stories as representative of what is happening in any situation. The story in question was about a single medic, a single Marine casualty, and a single incident. We have no way of knowing if this was representative of everyday life, unusual life (I though most injuries were IED, not sniper), or extremely rare.

Both of you: I fully support the idea that any and all newspapers should report frequently about what our government does. But the NYT story is the equivalent of those "man in the street" interviews that the TV news does. A single case is not representative of anything. If the NYT wants to show what a medic does over the course of a week (month/day/whatever time period), that's interesting (and more representative).

This is like the local news grabbing some person randomly, asking them what they think of Bush, getting a negative answer, and then concluding the interview by turning to the camera and saying "well, the people of Morgantown don't like the President."

Actually, it's worse than that: what answer did they expect when they interviewed a medic?

It was a very powerful story. No one reading it can possibly have any sort of positive opinion about war (any sort of war). It is not representative (it makes no attempt to show life over a reasonable time frame, and seems to deliberatly pick the most horrifying aspect of the medic's day). The story seems odd on the front page of the NYT. Not ineffective, but odd.

Posted by: baltar at November 2, 2006 11:52 AM | PERMALINK

well, for one thing, the multimedia presentation that accompanies the article provides more information, albeit not terribly more. second, while it's a lead piece online, do we know for a fact that it's on the front page of the paper edition? (okay, just looked it up, and yes it's above the fold and everything with one of the more graphic photos from the slideshow i just watched.)

baltar, i don't necessarily agree or disagree, speaking generally, with the idea that human interest stories shouldn't be the province of the front page of a major international newspaper. as a longtime Times junkie, however, i disagree that there's anything extraordinary about this; human interest, features, and news analysis, all appear in turn on the front page, probably nearly one piece per day, albeit not as frequently top left above the fold with a picture that's the equivalent of a screamer headline. even so, that's the sort of story this is, and it's obviously well written.

i think the audio slide show also is useful in illustrating the concrete value this sort of story has in informing the polity. by now, we don't need the reporter to tell us this is, broadly speaking, less than extraordinary. we just ended the deadliest month in two years for american servicepeople -- it would risk redundancy or pedentry to spend much time telling the reader / listener, oh, by the way, this isn't a one-of-a-kind thing -- soldiers are dying all over iraq. although newspapers usually err on the side of assuming an ignorant reader, as one works one's way down the pyramid, some stories eventually come to speak for themselves, and become impossible to tell if the entire background is to be re-rendered. there are only so many column inches.

perhaps if our government were more forthcoming about the travails in iraq, i would feel different. but i think there should be an inversely proportional relationship between the candor with which the government speaks and the gap filling behavior of the media. this is important information, and while it may be suited as well or better to TV or long-form journalism, that a given person attends neither medium shouldn't dictate whether one has any idea what it's like for the soldiers on the ground.

war is hell. nothing about people dying in war is news, in that sense. but you can't honestly tell me you don't think american deaths are something all media should cover and prominently. there are many commonplaces, at least if reviewed at a sufficient level of generality, that i don't imagine you would argue should be left alone by the newspapers because there's nothing new. think death and taxes.

and as for timing, i'll simply recall my former point, with an illustration. there was lots of chatter about the timing of NJ's civil union decision, but the only thing worse than them releasing the decision, once it was completed, when they did, would have been holding it back for political purposes and someone finding out about that later. there are people involved in litigation, and litigation takes too damned long as it is; they shouldn't have to await resolution of their challenge for extra-legal purposes. regarding the media, if it's a story worth printing, it's a story worth printing now, and to let political concerns creep into a decision when to run something is as bad as letting political concerns creep into the question whether to run something. truly, it's a slippery slope.

Posted by: moon at November 2, 2006 01:02 PM | PERMALINK

Well obviously it's an empirical question, but I'm with Moon in saying that man-on-the-street stories aren't all that unusual for the front page of the Times.

And I think those types of stories from afar count as "news". People probably have a decent guess/understanding of what's going on down their own street (one reason Iwhy I often find local news boring beyond words). But most American's don't know this type of slice of life. And it's one that they are bringing about (or their governmen is) so I think it's important to be put out there.

Plus of course a lot of people will develop their views and values by looking at these types of stories. A lot of people will find these policy implications much easier to understand, judge and evaluate then stories on the NSC or strategic planning.

The only problem I'd have with this is if we have a reason to think it's an anecdote that's not representative of a larger whole. But from the way this story is framed - I don't see that.

Posted by: Armand at November 2, 2006 01:13 PM | PERMALINK

Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't consider this "news" in any real fashion, and the Times could have covered the same material (medic in Iraq) in a more interesting fashion (the Medic is Navy, the soldiers are Marines; does he live with them? How often has this medic had to do this? Did he have the option of going on the helicopter to work on the shot soldier more?), one that allowed readers to get a better view of Iraq, the Marines and the medic.

As it stands now, its a verbal snapshot. It's a powerful piece, but not reporting.

And if you remember, the Times sat on the NSA/Wiretapping story for over a year before putting it out (only doing so to prevent their own reporter from scooping them in a book about to be published). The Times has had a past political agenda, why not now?

Posted by: baltar at November 2, 2006 01:33 PM | PERMALINK

In my opinion, this is the kind of story that should have been coming out regularly, since the beginning of the war, and there hasn't been nearly enough reporting on the impact as it applies to individuals like this, i.e. in a way the average reader can really identify with. That's the best reason behind the "human interest" approach, anyway.

Posted by: binky at November 2, 2006 02:53 PM | PERMALINK
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