The western media
One of the reasons for a site like this
is frustration not so much with the left (who aren't in power),
but with the media.
There are systematic problems with the media that surround me
(especially the less diverse
media: radio, TV and cinema),
that distort both history
and the reporting of current events.
One picture sums up the reasons why people go online for the news
This is not a Photoshop. Seriously.
This is a real newspaper page.
Could anything sum up the failure of the western media
- and the reasons why people go online for the news -
better
than this page
from the Toronto Star
after the
2006 Canadian Islamic terror arrests?
What could these people have in common?
How could they have become somehow "radicalized"?
Who knows. Maybe they're a hiking group?
Agnostic stamp collectors?
Buddhist fanatics?
Anti-Canadian Jews?
Anglican school teachers?
Extremist librarians?
Whatever it is,
this newspaper doesn't want to say it for some reason.
If you want the news, you've got to go online.
-
The Elephant in the Room
by Andrew C. McCarthy:
"Over the weekend, Canadian authorities apparently smashed a frightening plot
involving Islamic terrorists who planned a series of bombings against sites in southern Ontario.
Instinctively, the mainstream media went into its now-familiar coverage template,
Phase One of which avoids like the plague any mention of the fact
that accused terrorists are Muslims."
- When crimes occur, the media should tell us if the culprit is black, white or other.
Where are they from?
How old are they?
When terrorism occurs, the media should tell us immediately if it is Muslim or other.
Just tell us.
Tell us everything, without trying to spin it.
And trust us like adults to make our own conclusions.
Why is this such an old-fashioned idea?
- Michelle Malkin
on the "Broad Strata of Society".
- See
hilarious followup
where the Toronto Star complains about being made an international laughing stock.
"Some readers accused the Star of "political correctness gone crazy"
and suggested the obvious link was religion."
Oh, "religion" is it now? You mean Christianity? Buddhism?
Idiots.
Blind, wilful idiots.
One basic problem is described at length in
Paradox No.1:
The most criticised societies in the world will be the least criminal societies.
Another basic problem is described at length in
The left is racist - It does not treat all races equally.
More generally, the western media suffers from some basic problems
that distort the news:
- Respect for third-world tyrants:
For some reason, presumably
because they are racists,
modern journalists are obsequious and respectful to
third-world tyrants and killers,
and never ask them hard questions.
They only ask tough questions to harmless democrats.
- Respect for third-world beliefs:
Similarly,
because they are racists,
modern journalists tolerate hatred and bigotry from the
third world that they would never tolerate from
first world people.
-
Morally neutral reporting is dishonest reporting
- Dennis Prager describes what is wrong with so many journalistic
conventions.
Why can the papers not say "Islamic mobs slaughter hundreds
in Nigeria".
Wouldn't that be more true than the pious whitewashes
about "ethnic tensions" and "cycles of violence"?
-
Mealy mouth media,
by Thomas Sowell,
on journalistic conventions.
- "One of the pious phrases of the mealy mouth media is that
"the truth lies
somewhere in between"."
- General lack of scepticism about non-western sources:
The media has an admirable level of scepticism about, say,
IDF statements, or the Bush administration.
If only it would maintain that level of scepticism about, say,
its own Arab stringers,
or, say, the Lebanese government,
or, say,
what Arab villagers say to its reporters on the ground after an Israeli airstrike.
Good journalists should distrust and double-check everybody.
- Augean Stables
(Richard Landes)
and
The Second Draft
- "Pallywood"
- Acting and staged scenes for gullible western media
by Palestinian mobs.
- Reutergate
- Issues about the western media using images from local Arab stringers.
-
Reuters' Image Problem:
L.A. blog unmasks Hezbollah propaganda
by Brendan Bernhard.
"Johnson has raised the lid on a potential Pandora's box.
Namely, how our leading news agencies and newspapers increasingly rely on stringers
from hostile nations to tell us how we, or our allies, behave in wartime.
Since you'd be hard-pressed to find Muslims in the U.S., let alone Europe,
who aren't strongly anti-Israel and opposed to any American presence in the Middle East whatsoever,
why on earth would you expect to find neutral Arab reporters in Baghdad or Beirut?
This is the kind of question newspaper editors should be asking themselves (and their stringers)."
- Refusal to ever praise the west:
For the media, a story does not exist unless it can cast some
sceptical look over western policy.
The idea of them saying:
"Government and military doing well,
given that they are humans. Not much to criticise."
seems absurd.
A story must criticise the authorities.
It must be negative, and slyly sceptical.
It must compare the government and military to
an imaginary utopia
where everything runs perfectly
(actually this is very much
the left-wing mindset).
This is all good and healthy, and essential to democracy.
But the point is, it can distort the news.
Governments do achieve good things.
Over the past 200 years, we have got richer.
We have got freer.
Tyrants have been destroyed and threats have
been ended forever.
But the media can never celebrate these things.
It must find things to be negative about.
And it will highlight these, even if they are trivial,
while ignoring the real story of success.
As I say, this is good and healthy.
Non-stop criticism is what makes democracy strong,
just as it does science.
My point is just that it distorts the news.
When government has a massive success, the media simply do not cover it.
Within days all their focus is on trivial problems
that people can feel bad about.
The Iraq War was the most amazing example.
The minute Iraq fell,
in perhaps the most amazing and powerful western military victory
since World War Two,
the minute it happened,
the media changed the subject.
- The West wins again
- and (yet again) the media misses the real story.
- The mind of the left
-
The Dissenters Club
by Jean Bethke Elshtain,
on how intellectuals and the media
cannot support the government.
They must complain.
- "Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that,
to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. The
intellectual is a negator.
Affirmation is not in his or her vocabulary.
...
The
widely repeated notion that no space exists within American society to make contrarian arguments is risible. Less
frequently heard, in fact, is intellectual assent
from academic and intellectual circles to something the government is
doing or that America is undertaking."
Cartoon from Cox and Forkum
(see here).
See Cartoon Use Policy.
Words You Can Never Say in the Media
The media's obsession with bad news
distorts the news.
It distorts our picture of what is going on in the world,
instead of enlightening us.
This was nowhere more obvious than in the media's
distorted coverage of Iraq in 2003.
- Having been
wrong about the war
from start to finish,
the media were utterly unashamed and unrepentant.
Barely pausing for one day to mark
the liberation of millions of people,
they got straight back to their old ways.
The same ignorant voices
that were wrong about the war
were back again, whining about the post-war "quagmire".
Within days of liberation,
the media were (and would remain) incessantly focused on bad news
in Iraq:
-
Winning After All by Victor Davis Hanson
- Do not expect to read headlines like
"85% of Baghdad's Power Restored,"
"Afghan Women Enroll in Schools by
the Millions," or "Americans Put an End to Secret Police
and Arbitrary Executions in Iraq."
-
"I understand that breaking news is largely driven by bad news. That's a structural defect of a free press"
says L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator in Iraq,
showing remarkable tolerance and understanding.
-
Dog Bites Man in Baghdad
by Max Boot
-
The Iraq we don't hear about
by Amir Taheri, June 06, 2004,
on how the media don't want to tell the truth about Iraq.
- "During the past 10 months elections have been held in 37 municipalities.
In each case victory went to the moderate, liberal and secular candidates.
The former Ba'athists, appearing under fresh labels, failed to win a single seat.
Hardline Islamist groups collected 1% to 3% of the vote."
-
Not So Innocent
by Ralph Peters
- The western media as a combatant.
Even worse, a pro-Saddam combatant.
-
Our media jihadis
by Bret Stephens
- The media have ".. resorted to a death-by-one-thousand-cuts strategy.
.... They failed to stop the war and they failed to lose the war.
But they haven't stopped trying to reverse the result, and it bids fair that they will yet do so."
- "So here's the question of the week, month, year: After Iraq, will the media ever again allow a democracy to topple a fascist dictatorship?"
- You can read the US soldiers' blogs direct on the Web,
instead of filtered through the bias of the media:
-
A blinkered view from the Baghdad Hilton
by Katie Grant,
28 Feb 2005
- on the western media's desire to report bad news from Iraq,
instead of the fantastic good news of the
Iraqi election.
- The election was a day of joy,
one of the greatest days in Iraq's history,
but:
"You would never guess that from some British media reports,
which are about as cheerful as coverage of a funeral. There is no difficulty telling the difference
between the BBC's Caroline Hawley and a ray of sunshine. You get the impression that most commentators
are disappointed that the elections happened at all and, when they did, were secretly hoping for an outrage
so dreadful it would turn 30 January into a day of wailing rather than cheering.
There was a brief flicker of hope for the press pack when a British Hercules aircraft crashed,
killing nine RAF personnel and one soldier.
...
The crash gave commentators what they wanted: an excuse to downplay the success of the first democratic elections
in which many Iraqis had ever taken part, and imply that they were a failure."
-
Slighting This Greatest Generation:
We Focus on the Bad Apples and Ignore the Courageous Heroes
by Bing West.
-
In the fighting in Fallujah:
"Hundreds of gripping stories of valor emerged that would have been publicized in World War II.
...
Not to take anything away from The Greatest Generation, but the behavior of our soldiers today will stand scrutiny when compared to the performance of those in any past war.
The focus of the press on abuse is not due to any relaxation in military discipline or social mores.
Why was valor considered front-page news in 1945 and abuse considered front-page news in 2005?"
- "As a nation, we'd best be careful about what we choose to accentuate about ourselves.
This is not a plea for cheerleading; it is an argument for balance.
To subdue hostile cities such as Fallujah, our country needs stout infantrymen
such as the Marines and the paratroopers. Fed a steady diet of stories about bad conduct
and deprived of models of valor, the youth of America will eventually decline to serve."
(As is now true in Europe, for example.)
- TV's Bad News Brigade,
Media Research Center, Oct 2005
- Survey of the American media's negative, defeatist coverage of the War in Iraq.
Of the 1388 stories sampled:
- 848 stories focused on negative topics or presented a pessimistic analysis of the situation.
Only 211 stories featured U.S. or Iraqi achievements or offered an optimistic assessment.
- Even coverage of the Iraqi political process was negative.
124 negative stories focusing on infighting, etc.
Only 92 positive stories about the fact that the Iraqis have a political process at all,
for the first time in their history.
- Just 8 stories recounting heroism or valor by U.S. troops.
79 stories on allegations of combat mistakes or misconduct by U.S. military personnel.
- 8 stories out of 1388 recounting allied heroism!
It's a wonder anyone ever joins the army,
when the culture is so indifferent to their sacrifice.
-
In this paper, war heroes are MIA
by Frank Schaeffer:
"When it comes to reporting on the military, it's as if we're back in the 1950s,
only this time the media prejudice and insensitivity are aimed at military service rather than race.
In the 1950s, you rarely saw a story about an African American
unless he or she committed a crime
or was portrayed with condescension as a victim."
"What I would like to see is acts of military heroism regarded once again as newsworthy."
-
Touting Military Misdeeds,
Hiding Heroes
- Study of U.S. network television
- 20 members of the U.S. military have received the highest recognition for bravery
since the war on terror began.
- 14 of the country's top 20 medal recipients have gone unmentioned
by ABC, CBS and NBC.
Coverage of top 20 U.S. military medal recipients on U.S. network television,
in the five years from 2001-2006.
From the study:
Touting Military Misdeeds,
Hiding Heroes.
"Crisis on Omaha".
How the modern media would have covered the D-Day landings on
Omaha beach.
From
The Combat Report.
Cinema
(separate page)
"Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy."
- P.J. O'Rourke
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