another pundit heard from
May. 1st, 2004 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisyphusshruggedAs Lou Reed memorably put it,
which brings us to Christopher Hitchens, who is Shocked! Shocked! to discover that members of the media with an agenda have been known to tailor their coverage to support their prejudices.
Yes, it's the triumphant return of the Claude Rains Memorial Gambling Awareness Award (bet you thought only Sullivan ever got one of those) for Christopher "but you know, the marxists were pretty solid on tactics" Hitchens for this little effort:
There now. Our boy Hitch knows precisely dick about covering war, except for those warzone hotel bars he has frequented, and he acknowledges that what the nice correspondent, who actually knows what he's doing and puts his own ass on the line in the combat zone, wrote is factually correct, but he could have phrased it in a way which made it clear that even though our policies have failed spectacularly to do what they were intended to do, they are still good and effective policies, and the fact that he did not is clear evidence of his irrational bias, the miserable son of a bitch.
I'd send him a bottle of Vichy water if I thought he'd drink it, but instead, it's a very special Claude with malt clusters for clearing up the question "What does profoundly dishonest reporting really look like?" winging out to Christopher Hitchens, who not only raised the question but did a spectacular job of illustrating the answer.
Oooohh whee, look at me, looking for some sympathy
It's the same old story, of a man and his search for glory
And he found it, underneath the bottle
Things are never good, things go from bad to weird
Hey gimme another Scotch with my beer
...So long world, you play too rough
And it's getting me all mixed up
I lost my pride and it's hiddin'
There, underneath the bottle
which brings us to Christopher Hitchens, who is Shocked! Shocked! to discover that members of the media with an agenda have been known to tailor their coverage to support their prejudices.
I am not a war correspondent, though I have put in some time at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, the Commodore in Beirut, and other places of journalistic legend such as Meikles in Harare and the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. In any case, the emergence of a consensus among a press corps is something one can witness without having to duck the occasional incoming projectile. It was widely agreed in the Manchester, N.H., Sheraton in the early weeks of 1992 that Bill Clinton was a "new Democrat" and the presumptive nominee. There were very few if any Milosevic sympathizers among the Sarajevo contingent (a bias that suited me). There were no more than three Bush-Blair sympathizers in the Kuwait Hilton during the days of the "southern front" in last year's Iraq war, and I know this because I was in that case in the minority. One doesn't have to be an "old hand" to detect the signs of a conscience collective or, if one doesn't care for it, a "herd mentality."
It's now fairly obvious that those who cover Iraq have placed their bets on a fiasco or "quagmire" and that this conclusion shows in the fiber and detail of their writing. I give you a sentence from Jon Lee Anderson's essay "The Uprising" in the current New Yorker:
[A] score or more armed men, most with their faces masked by kaffiyehs and wearing the black turbans of the Mahdi Army, controlled a checkpoint. They were brandishing RPGs and Kalashnikovs at cars. Several of them had yellow U.S. Army-issue grenades. We had been following seven Red Crescent ambulances for a while, and as we drove up, the fighters at the checkpoint and the drivers of the ambulances began shouting Sadr's name. The drivers had decided to join the uprising.
Now, I wasn't there. But I am sure Anderson, an experienced writer about war and revolution, saw just what he says he saw. What I don't know is how well he knew those ambulance drivers personally, and how certain he can be that they "joined" an "uprising" led by "fighters." Nor does he say how he knew. I think, in other words, that exactly the same scene could be rendered in quite starkly different words.
There now. Our boy Hitch knows precisely dick about covering war, except for those warzone hotel bars he has frequented, and he acknowledges that what the nice correspondent, who actually knows what he's doing and puts his own ass on the line in the combat zone, wrote is factually correct, but he could have phrased it in a way which made it clear that even though our policies have failed spectacularly to do what they were intended to do, they are still good and effective policies, and the fact that he did not is clear evidence of his irrational bias, the miserable son of a bitch.
I'd send him a bottle of Vichy water if I thought he'd drink it, but instead, it's a very special Claude with malt clusters for clearing up the question "What does profoundly dishonest reporting really look like?" winging out to Christopher Hitchens, who not only raised the question but did a spectacular job of illustrating the answer.
