Josh Marshall points out this little exchange between New Republic editor Peter Beinart (playing the good guy, for a change) and Bill Hemmer, one of the airhead anchors at CNN.
Hemmer is asking Beinart (along with Wall Street Journal robohack John Fund) whether the media is overplaying the bad news out of Iraq (of which there was plenty today -- more on that later):
BEINART: You can't blame the media for focusing on what happens to America in Iraq. And the situation in Iraq is the security situation and it's dire. It's actually worst than John presented, because it's not just one a day. In fact the number of wounded is far, far higher. The ratio of wounded to dead is extraordinarily high. The number of attacks are much higher than actually reported in the U.S., because the military doesn't say how many there are. And the security situation can't be delinked from the infrastructure situation, because it's precisely because of the security situation you're not going to get foreign investments. A group of American senators last week weren't even allowed to stay in Baghdad for one night because it was considered too dangerous.
Now this answer is way too off message for Hemmer's tastes, so he comes back at Beinart with this brilliant retort:
HEMMER: Peter, I think there's two sides of that coin ... If you're saying it's actually worse than being reported, could it also be better than what's being reported also, if you consider that these reporters, many of them tell us they want to go cover the new school opening, but they can't because there's another bombing or shooting and that prevents them from sending that story?
OK, so now we've all had a good laugh at Hemmer's expense: The reporters can't report how great things are in Baghdad becaue those pesky suicide bombings keep getting in their way. Hardy har har.
But if you read the entire transcript, you get the distinct impression that Hemmer is just the clown in this particular media rodeo. The official line -- media exaggerates bad news -- clearly was handed down from on high. Hemmer's job was simply to stick to it at all costs.
The best evidence comes earlier in the show, when Hemmer briefly interviews Anne Garrels, a writer who spent "major combat operations" in Baghdad, and who just returned to the states three weeks ago. So Hemmer hits her with same "the news media: lying bastards or terrorist tools?" question:
HEMMER: There are conflicting opinions as to the accuracy of media reports that we see in this country. The White House complains oftentimes that the good news stories are not getting the same time and print space as the bad news story. Is there truth to that?GARRELS: I don't happen to think so.
The situation is extremely difficult in Iraq. If it were not so difficult, the American civilian administration would not be hiding behind coils of barbed wire and walls of sandbags. Once again, the security situation is dire. As long as these attacks can continue and happen anywhere, it's going to be impossible for the international community to work effectively.
Most international organizations have pulled out. New troops are loathe to come in. And Iraqis who work with the Americans are being targeted as collaborators. You only have to kill one in a town for the rest of those people, the rest of the Iraqis to be too frightened to work.
OK, so Hemmer asked his question, and he got his answer -- a pretty definitive one at that. No, the media are not exaggerating the seriousness of the security situation in Iraq. Period. Full stop.
So here's what Hemmer tells the viewers next:
HEMMER: So, then, the question continues a bit later: Is the coverage on Iraq too negative? More on that question in a few moments, as the White House pushes the debate again to the forefront this week.
The question continues. In other words, Garrels' answer was the wrong answer. The "debate" must go on. Why? Because it's already been written into the script. Fund and Beinart -- two pontificating pundits sitting around in Washington -- have to be asked The Question, even though the one person on the show who's actually been living in Iraq has already knocked it flat. Why? Because the White House wants the debate "pushed" to the forefront.
Fund, unfortunately, seems to have spent the past several weeks watching old reruns of Gilligan's Island. Either that, or Rush has been sharing his "little blues" with him. Here's Fund's answer to The Question:
The fact is one American is dying a day in Iraq, that's one too many, It's horrible. But remember after World War II we had Japanese fighting on islands for years afterwards. This is a necessary but unfortunate cost to bare.
After that bit of lunacy, it's easy to see how Beinart's perfectly lucid explanation of the facts could drive Hemmer (or the show's producer) to take desperate measures. I bet the little earphone in Hemmer's ear was just buzzing: "Say something, goddamit! Something about the schools!"
You can't blame Hemmer if his little non sequitur was the best he could do. The guy isn't paid to think, you know.
This nonsense actually would have been less offensive if it had been on Fox News. With Fox, what you see is what you get: conservative bias, amplified by every trick modern broadcasting can provide. But CNN is too fucking timid to show its true stripes (and nobody wants to look at those bland corporate pastels anyway.) So instead we get the television equivalent of near beer -- watered down Fox News.
Tastes fake; less thrilling.
I've always seen Hemmer as one of those empty heads that sit in front of the camera following a script, and this just confirms it.
A real journalist would perhaps know enough about what was going on to have an intelligent discussion, instead of what we get with Hemmer. He serves as nothing more than a talk show host (think Maury Povich or Ricki Lake) who is doing an episode on a certain topic and his sole job is to keep steering the guests to the theme.
Now stand back and marvel at the efficiency and power of a two-party state vs. a one-party state. Clearly, our ideology was superior.
"But CNN is too fucking timid to show its true stripes (and nobody wants to look at those bland corporate pastels anyway.) So instead we get the television equivalent of near beer -- watered down Fox News.
Tastes fake; less thrilling."
that's going in my saved quotes archive.
What a great analysis, Billmon. I thought Anne Garrols' reporting was amazing during the invasion, and she really does tell it like it is over there. But it's obvious no one wants to hear that. I wonder why this new theme song of the Bushies is so powerful when obviously he wouldn't have the power he does if people would just stand up to him and report the obvious. That's probably a rhetorical question. Nevermind.
Once again, you need to keep reminding people: ZERO American soldiers were killed by those "holdout" Japanese soldiers. ZERO. See this reference from Left I on the News
Thank you, Billmon.
CNN, Fox, CBS, NPR, it's all the same. Works the same outside the States, too. There's a script, and guests are there to add colour and nice soundbites. The editors and writers decide what will be said, even if that's not actually what is said. Context and framing are everything.
You think you'll go on Big Media and tell them the real deal. And you do. Go home and listen to it and you find that what you said just didn't register/matter. That's where power is these days. Make no mistake, those people are The Enemy.
Thank you, Billmon.
Ditto. x 1,000.
It's a brilliant post. Drop dead so right on brilliant.
What do a few starving Japanese holdouts after WWII who were more concerned with finding food than killing U.S. soldiers have to compare with a sophisticated guerrilla movement that is killing our troops with increased efficiency? Methinks Fund is borrowing some of Rush's "pep pills."
Ditto. x 1,000.
Suddenly I feel a craving for an Oxycontin or two...
Ah, yes, Bill Hemmer, the world's oldest adolescent boy ......
No American was killed occupying Japan, mainland or outlying islands. The Japanese were wary but polite to the Americans from the beginning of the occupation despite the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians by atomic bombs.
How can idiots get away with twisting history like this? Because most TV news has become pure entertainment with no regard for objective education. And conservatives have become masters at making their propaganda enertaining, at least to their gullible followers and those who don't know any better.
thanks billmon, for the great post!!
i should have listened to my mother and stuck with pre-med...
Peter, I think there's two sides to that coin... If you're saying it's actually worse than being reported, could it also be better than what's being reported..."
The Lewis Carrol money quote.
In other words, it's so far away from where our audience is, who really knows (and who among them can verify)? This thing isn't taking place in a shopping mall in Ohio, so let's just make shit up. No one will know the difference.
Rock on, Billmon.
From the WP, Michael Kinsley with amusing comments on “Bush’s Unfiltered News”:
”…Bush's beef about news from Iraq is a variation on the famous complaint that the media never report about all the planes that land safely. And it's true: Many American soldiers have not been killed since the war officially ended. You rarely read stories about all the electricity that works, or the many Iraqis who aren't shouting anti-American slogans. For that matter, what about all the countries we haven't invaded and occupied in the past year? And what about the unreported fact that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power? Well, maybe that isn't actually unreported. But an unfilterish media would surely report it again and again in every story every day, in case people forgot.
…Bush also will have a campaign treasury of $170 million that he can spend in the next year delivering any message he wants, completely unfiltered. Who can top that? Well, until recently there was Saddam Hussein. He could talk as long as he wanted and Iraqi TV never cut away for a commercial, let alone brought on annoying pundits to pick and pick and pick. And the next day's Baghdad Gazette would publish every single word, also without any tedious analysis. A few others, such as Fidel Castro, still have this privilege. I was under the impression that George W. Bush found this distasteful -- the sort of thing one might even tighten a boycott or start a war over.
Bush doesn't really want people to get the news unfiltered. He wants people to get the news filtered by George W. Bush…”
Billmon - Another CLASSIC post! Keep up the absolutely EXCELLENT WORK!
Hemmer does suck big time, but so does that 360 weasel-eyed tele-creature that made me give up on CNN and go to the BBC.
At least you could look at Paula Zahn until she opens her mouth. But the BBC has suitably telegenic exotic female newsreaders that don't make me want to barf when they start to read the news.
Sooner or later, a large media outfit with initials CNN, that is currently trailing the right-wingnut FAUX outlet is going to get wise to the fact that most of the applause is going to the Begala/Carville side on Crossfire. Then some programming manager there with a brain and some cojones instead of a dittohead, will start trying to capture some market share by doing real newsinstead of timidly regurgitating right wingnut pap. FAUX is better at propaganda and spin.
As more Americans get tired of the 'whitebread' diet of 'Things are going really well in Iraq, we are building schools there, but not here. And, by the way, another bunch of American kids bought it for our Glorious Leader Georgie Halliburton today' some news outlet is going to find it's ratings climbing.
Perhaps, we could tune back to ESPN now that 'Rush the Doper' is no longer putting down black people on a sports channel? And, could I just get one more Irish Whiskey before you call me a cab?
.
Michael Kinsley does turn a few nice phrases in that linked piece - "unfilterish" is a good touch. But Billmon, line for line, in style and content, your essay is extraordinarily fine and easily a match for his. I'm jealous. We're lucky to have you.
Anne Garrils is an outstanding reporter!
Why would we think that the offical line would change?
It's been a lie from the Day One!
Just found this, maybe you all have seen it.
"Wilson Adds Amo to Hit War Credibility Gap", by Paul Bedard, US News & World Report, says Wilson to circulate Sam Gardiners text that the White House and The Pentagon made up and distorted 50 war stories - is to the right in PDF file, 56 pages.
This is the link,(I usually mess the linked text up), www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1017-02.htm, or go to commondreams.org and click "Wilson Adds, etc.
Keep telling myself that I am over reacacting, but it is so terrible------Think it's time to go get the 6 pack and get drunk.
Brought to you by the same people that say (with a straight face)
1) There is no Al Quada - Sadam link
2) Iraq is because of 9/11
We need to define a new corollary of Godwin's Law: whenever World War II combat is brought up as a comparison, the discussion goes out the window.
Of course, CNN was already out the window and heading for orbit.
I am sick of the invocation of World War II as a kind of Eternal Archetype of Cosmic War, a war of Good vs. Evil. It's become completely unreal, via Hollywood et al. It might as well be Lord of the Rings by this point.
The argument "We took large casualties in World War II battles, hence we should accept them now" is such a cliche that it can be misapplied by Fund to the postwar occupation period.
Why nostalgia for the greatest hate fest, on all sides, and orgy of destruction, on all sides, in twentieth-century world civilization?
P.S. The above is not meant to insult actual World War II veterans, but I very much doubt that Fund is one, or most of the people who use the blood and the glory to bash us degenerate epigones.
Billmon for Editor In Chief of the Free World.
Rock on.
Compare Hemmer's comments to the GOP's line (courtesy of
James Pinkerton, in Newsday):
> Kay Granger (R-Texas) had just returned home
> from a government-sponsored tour of Iraq when
> she appeared on Fox News to comment on
> Sunday's car bombing in Baghdad. Proving
> she's a good listener, she insisted that the
> suicide attack was actually good news. How's
> that? Speaking of the American
> nation-building effort, she explained,
> "As it's working, there are more incidents
> like this, from people who don't want it to
> work."
But CNN is too fucking timid to show its true stripes (and nobody wants to look at those bland corporate pastels anyway.) So instead we get the television equivalent of near beer -- watered down Fox News.
Tastes fake; less thrilling.
Billmon: Bravo! Thank you for putting into some very explicit words what I've often felt about CNN's idea of news "analysis".
As for Bush's lame pretenses that 'things aren't really all that bad in Iraq', well, I suppose there hasn't been an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague or any *major* nuclear disaster ... yet. But give 'em time. ;-)
This regime seems to have the absolute knack for screwing up even the proverbial "wet dream".
The only people who remind me of cut-off Japanese soldiers are neo-cons who still continue to believe we are winning this war.
As I watched segments on Iraq on a Coalition News Network's "news" program last night, I got the distinct impression that they were towing the "only good news" line coming out of the Bush malAdministration.
This was on Newsnight last night, anchored by Anderson "Mini" Cooper, substituting for Aaron Brown.
More from the The War on Terror is Getting Better In Every Way Dept:
Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet police state on the strategically important border with Afghanistan, was another potential political minefield. Uzbek security services use "torture as a routine investigation technique", according to the US State Department. But Washington's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led them to finance much of the regime's security apparatus. In exchange the US gets a military base in Khanabad as a centre for operations in Afghanistan. Last year Washington gave the government $500m (£298m) in aid, $79m of which was specifically for the same "law enforcement and security services" they accused of routine torture.
That's $79m of our tax dollars a year, folks, for a torture squad.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,1065839,00.html
I think it is more subtle that this. I think you are right that Hemmer was told to push this story. But if you think that the thrust of the anchor's questions are the determining factor of the result of the piece, I think you are wrong, It has to do with the quality and the views of the people who the anchor is asking the questions of. If they are articulate and have the facts, they are being given an opportunity to rebut the current spin point. The host or anchors sets them up by repeating the spin and then it is up to the guest to demolish it. So the slant of the piece is all in who they choose to represent the opposition to the CQ. If the guest is good and knows his stuff, what a fat target a guy like Hemmer makes!
I realise cable as Tower of Babel has not been around always, however thinking back, the debate has been largely fake most of my life.
One could find the real debate, with a part of the debate putting finis in the mix, a conclusion, but one had to search.
yeah Hemmer is a cartoon, who knows what is animation anymore?
sigh. Remarkable post, with an absolutely stellar finish.
Meteor Blades: "Michael Kinsley does turn a few nice phrases in that linked piece - "unfilterish" is a good touch. But Billmon, line for line, in style and content, your essay is extraordinarily fine and easily a match for his. I'm jealous. We're lucky to have you."
Agree completely. My first visit to DailyKos was last winter, the day Guest Host Billmon posted his "2003: Year in Review". I busted a gut multiple times ("the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince"), and was helplessly hooked on blogdom from that day forward.
Billmon, you used to have a link to a collection of your satirical bits and truer-than-reality dialogues. (hint, hint :^) )
Outstanding analysis -- and that line, "Tastes fake. Less thrilling." is sheer brilliance.
Billmon, you used to have a link to a collection of your satirical bits and truer-than-reality dialogues. (hint, hint :^) )
Ask and ye shall receive.
The Play's the Thing
My playwrighting muse has been silent of late, but maybe someday soon she'll pay me another visit.
Thanks very much! :>)
I also fondly recall when you imagined Cheney plotting to cut off the N Koreans' supply of edible grass (that being all they had left)... Though I hope no one within the WH ever read it.
Hi,
I just discovered your site and really like it. I wanted to comment on an issue that was raised in the post -- the schools in Iraq being opened in October.
I am an American who has lived in the Middle East for the past decade (Tunisia, Riyadh and Cairo) and I am really, really confused about the American media focusing on how positive it is that the kids in Iraq are starting school in the fall.
There were schools in Iraq under Saddam, and kids went to them, starting in the fall.
In every middle eastern country, just like in the US, schools start in the fall after vacations in the summer. Just in the ME they start a bit later (because there is no AC in most schools and it is hot in desert countries).
This has nothing to do with the American occupation. They did not open the schools. The schools were already there and opened on schedule (even if many of them had been bombed and looted beyond recognition and kids were requested to bring chalk with them to help out teachers, as per some Iraqi blogs I read).
I do not understand the point of focusing on it. I do not see what the hell it has to do with whether or not Bush & Team are doing anything in Iraq at all. Do people think that Iraqi kids never went to school before? Do people think anyone else on the planet buys groceries at the store and rides in cars? How stupid are Americans anyhow? Especially these overpaid media commentators. God. Next they will announce that thanks to the US, Iraq now has taxi drivers.
Bill, excellent analysis of CNN's tiresome groveling. Perhaps Hemmer can't be faulted for towing the party line; he is, after all, just a reader. But CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux can be faulted: her bias is so obvious it's thoroughly unprofessional. And Fund's ridiculous analogy with WWII Japanese soldiers is way off the scale. One would hope a Japanese diplomat would jump into the fray and defend his compatriots.