COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

A reader writes in with this critical email:

splashheads? you know, you're cultivating a nice little right-wing radio program. i'm a moderate conservative, so theoretically i should be lapping
all this up, but i'm not. i dislike extremist conservatives more than moderate liberals. i've been reading your blog for a while now. in recent weeks
its content seems to have taken a hard right.

Yeah, I've noticed that, too, and was wondering why that is. Maybe I need to switch my homepage from the NY Times to the Washington Post.

I don't regularly read conservative news sources, except maybe when Instapundit or Ranting Profs links to them. I usually get my news from NPR, or the New York Times' website. And for national roundups I'll hit Drudge (center-right, but tougher to pigeonhole than the New York Times will admit), and Buzzflash (unabashedly Anti-Bush).

There was always a strong media emphasis in the blog content, and my intent from day one was to differentiate myself from other warbloggers by focusing not so much on the war as the way the media covers it. This is partly because I wanted to attract an audience of journalists more than a military audience, but also because I was thinking ahead 5 months and I wanted to have a niche I could keep up when I was no longer in Iraq.

My intent was never to become partisan, and I was careful to avoid any hint of it in Iraq. The tone and content of the blog has certainly become so in recent weeks. I'm not entirely comfortable about that. This is not a "Blog for Bush."

But Gore's meltdown was impossible for any satirist worth his salt to ignore.

the biting, sardonic analysis of the war was what hooked me in the first place, but the comparison of al gore to ted bundy, the chops against jesse jackson (too easy),

I don't think I ever took a chop against Jesse Jackson. Easy though it may be. The Gore-Bundy comparison was maybe over the top. I mean, after all, Bundy wasn't crazy!

and all of these amber alerts about missing headlines are, quite frankly, lame. you seem to confuse editorial restraint with a media blackout. some of the so-called missing headlines, such as the possible al qaeda attack this summer, appeared the day after your alert. good journalists and editors resist pressure to be the first, when the facts are still unclear. case in point: CNN.com is this comment under its front page story:
"After two days of conflicting assessments and mixed signals on the urgency of the terrorist threat within the United States, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge late Friday issued a joint statement citing "credible intelligence" of a threat to the nation."

I don't think that's such a great example at all. There might have been a minor internecine turf war between Homeland Security and the Justice Department about who ought to be the controlling authority for public warnings. But to focus on the interbureaucracy tiff at the expense of the BOLO itself is a failure of proportionality.

I never saw any mixed message at all. Justice wanted these people, based on suspected Al Qaeda connections and multiple sources of intelligence warning of an unspecific intent to attach the US this summer.

Nothing Tom Ridge ever said undercut that.

under such conditions, do you really think there is a massive conspiracy involving the new york and los angeles times to keep the public uninformed about a potential repeat of 9-11, especially since such headlines would undoubtedly sell lots of papers?

Nope. I never ever suggested a massive conspiracy involving the New York or Los Angeles Times. Rather, I have merely argued that our major market news outlets, having located themselves in New York and Los Angeles, are simply reflecting the cultural biases of the demographics of those communities. And so their news coverage is slanted for that reason.

or is it more plausible that the nation's newspaper editors, having been burned big time by one fiasco after another (WMD, jessica lynch), are taking extra time to corroborate the info they're getting from the government?

Apparently they're not taking the time to corroborate much of anything. Otherwise they wouldn't be publishing inflated body count numbers and attributing them to US and British arms, they wouldn't have let a Green party city councilman get away with distributing obviously bogus photos from a porn site and pass them off as depicting American soldiers engaged in rape. And they wouldn't have systematically misquoted General Mattis on the wedding party incident.

I don't particularly blame the press for falling for Chalabi, because everybody fell for Chalabi. A reasonable journalist would get a tip from Chalabi, and try to corroborate it with sources in some intelligence service, and a source or two on the ground. If it checked out there, I don't blame the NY Times or anyone else for going with it.

In hindsight we know that the reasoning was circular. Reporters were verifying Chalabi's claims by checking them against intelligence services that also relied on Chalabi's claims. And then checking them against foreign agencies that also relied on shared intelligence from the US.

It is not realistic to expect reporters and editors to be omniscient. Only careful and thorough.

don't you think these newspapers would love to publish that story about the marine winning the navy cross?

Nope. Because the story's available, verifiable, well-sourced, and independently checked out by Snopes, among others, and yet they haven't published the story. QED.

Well, the Wall Street Journal published it. But they're obviously in league with Satan.

war heroes and war stories sell papers. from what i've read, this guy sounds like he's the real deal, but so did jessica lynch, and she turned out to be manufactured by the pentagon.

No. She was born. Flesh and blood. To a West Virginia couple. Her story was largely manufactured. But not by the Pentagon. It was manufactured by reporters.

i would expect journalists and editors to do some hardcore fact-checking this time around...

Me, too. When do you think they'll start?

and if the story could not be corroborated I would expect them not to report it.

Well, that would be nice. I think someone will report it, though, because everybody wants to break news. And once someone reports it, everybody has to go with it, whether it's corroborated or not. I.e., the fraudulent Mirror photos of British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners.

I don't blame the Mirror, particularly, though, either. Those pics would have fooled me, although I'm sure I would have traced their provenance as far as I could.

p.s. i don't disagree with all your media analysis. the stuff about the san francisco chronicle and howard zinn was right on. just please be more careful about "calling out" respected newspapers.

Thanks for writing. And the criticisms are well taken.

Jason