August 16, 2005

While Editors Ponder…
Robin Mullins Boyd

The New York Times ran an article on August 15, 2005 that was an eye opening discourse into the
soul of the print media. The article, “Editors Ponder how to Present a Broad Picture of
Iraq�, was spurred by an anonymous email that has been making the rounds since January 2005.
The email was basically a list of many of the accomplishments that had taken place in post Saddam
Iraq. A number of editors of major newspapers, all Associated Press members, had concerns that they
where “not telling the whole story� about Iraq.

Mike Silverman, managing editor of the Associated Press, lamented the fact that “explosions
and shootings and fatalities and injuries on some days seem to dominate the news.� Silverman
cited the dangers in Iraq as one of the reasons reporters were not getting more of the good things.
Kathleen Carroll, the AP’s Executive Editor, actually said that “it was much easier to
add up the number of dead than to determine how many hospitals received power on a particular day
or how many schools were built.� Silverman than threw out the typical media excuse –
the positives listed in the email were actually in various AP stories but they were buried in the
articles.

Well here’s a news flash for the editors cited in the article. The email that started the
ball rolling was actually excerpts from an article published on the Internet on January 30, 2005.
The article, “Accentuating the Negative�, was published on OpinionEditorials.com. How
did I get all of this information about the original article? Easy – I wrote it.

Yes, the major print media was thrown into fits of “healthy discussion� by a woman who
lives in Guyton, GA. A southern belle, wife, mother and grandmother that works full time as a
Registered Nurse. A writer that has no degree in journalism but writes op-ed pieces for free (but
would not mind getting paid). A woman who loves to write and has book number 2 in production with a
publisher. I am just someone that seeks out the facts and doesn’t rely on what someone tells
me. Someone that can form an opinion all by their little self. I put my critical thinking skills
developed through years of nursing to work.

Believe it or not, a dreaded “FReeper� and member of the Pajamahadeen knows more about
the situation in Iraq than all of the high paid, high powered editors that rule what we read every
day. I have no connections, no anonymous sources. Ramsey Clark did not have to set up interviews
for me. I do not have an account at Kinko’s or access to forged memo templates. No one got
“outed� in my attempt to uncover the truth. Lives were not placed in jeopardy. Not one
single animal was harmed in my quest for information. No one was forced to wear panties on their
head or participate in naked pyramids. Heck, I didn’t even have to give money to “the
other side� in Fallujah to get the low-down.

In an ironic twist, a follow-up article, “Ignoring the Positive”, was published on opinioneditorials
.com the very same day. I did not have to be stationed in Baghdad or embedded with troops in
Fallujah to get my information. No one was firing RPG’s at me. The only injury I sustained
was a paper cut while printing out my rough draft of the article. The information for both articles
came the War on Terror section of the Department of Defense website – information that anyone with
Internet access can get any time of the day. Guess that blows Mr. Silverman’s excuse out of
the water.

Am I surprised that the print media executives were clueless about the reconstruction facts in
Iraq? Not hardly. Was the information more difficult to obtain than tallying up the dead and
injured in Iraq? Uh, no. Any one with any amount of common sense knows the truth. Things are not
all peaches and cream in Iraq but they certainly are not all black as the media would have us
believe. So the next time one of the media pundits laments the difficulty obtaining positive
information from Iraq, consider the source. The only difficulty the media has is setting aside
their hatred of President Bush long enough to do their job. And they wonder why the newspaper
circulation numbers are down across the board? Guess it’s easier to tally up the numbers than
find out the truth.

But they knew about it a week or two before it broke and refused to report it until Drudge broke the story and made it public. That is how Drudge got so big overnight, it kind of forced their hand.

They aren’t paying much attention to the siphoning of funds from the Boys and Girls club in NY by Air America Radio… if it was the Rush Limbaugh show you can bet your sweet behind it would be front page news for weeks….

Only web news gets around most of this, and it’s still kinda new. And web news still has a front page.

I’m interested in more complete news. Which means news about things that aren’t blowing up. The violence is part of the picture. But so are the efforts to get the power grids working, the water clean, the marshes restored, the kids innoculated, the schools open. Maybe there’s bad news in that department, too. Who knows until the media starts paying attention to it.

Good point. I think complete news is an ideal that every news organization should strive for.

I’m interested in more complete news. Which means news about things that aren’t blowing up. The violence is part of the picture. But so are the efforts to get the power grids working, the water clean, the marshes restored, the kids innoculated, the schools open. Maybe there’s bad news in that department, too. Who knows until the media starts paying attention to it.

Why does this pertain to the OP? Well, it means I think I can improve my prosecution of media bias, by not generalizing in a way that ignores scandals the media has broadcast about vanguards of the Left. In particular, this. My theory about big media’s motivation has morphed a little. I still think they do a poor reporting job in Iraq, but maybe it’s more simply a matter of a combination of more rational factors, such as bunker mentality, lack of penetration and sources in the domain of interest, and the ever-present Quest for More Eyeballs, rather than some sort of intrinsic lean to the left.

I’m not sure that the latter sacred cow of mine is quite dead yet. But I can at the very least separate it more cleanly now from the war reporting issue, including the perceived injustices of calling terrorists “insurgents” and “martyrs”, and the obsession of body counts, and frankly I feel a bit comforted by that.