The media is aflutter about a videoconference the President had with some soldiers serving in Iraq.
The buzz being perpetrated is that the affair was scripted and not true reflections of what soldiers believe. Or at least I think that's the message being memed across the ideaosphere.
A local media blogger, Cathy Resmer concludes
I think most people — whether they like Bush or hate him — are fed up with the way politicians feed us the "news."
Is that so.... Actually, I for one am fed up with the media's contorting the flow of events into scripts they predetermine. In a lucid first hand account, blogger Laura Lee Donoho recalls one such event.
One day as my husband and part of his battalion was out in a convoy he saw a CNN newscrew near a group of Somalis. The crew and the Somalis were blocking the road that my husband's convoy was attempting to go down so my husband checked into what was going on.
What he saw upset him so much that he called me that very day the first chance he got. He was livid.
He told me that blonde haired white people who were obviously working for CNN were making and handing out signs to the poor Somali people and having them pose for the camera with the signs which said stuff like, "Go home U.S. military."
Now that's scripted. And to what end? What was the point of creating this event and reporting it as spontaneous? Perhaps it was a "false but true" Dan Rather moment?
But what about the "staged" event that the President had with the troops? One participant who is also a blogger informs us
First of all, we were told that we would be speaking with the President of the United States, our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, so I believe that it would have been totally irresponsible for us NOT to prepare some ideas, facts or comments that we wanted to share with the President.
We were given an idea as to what topics he may discuss with us, but it's the President of the United States; He will choose which way his conversation with us may go.We practiced passing the microphone around to one another, so we wouldn't choke someone on live TV. We had an idea as to who we thought should answer what types of questions, unless President Bush called on one of us specifically.
Hmmm. Doesn't sound so staged to me. And a commenter to Cathy's blog noted:
NPR.org has the audio the rehearsal. Take One: President Bush via Satellite
It comes across as run of the mill advance work. It doesn't appear that the soldiers were coached on how to answer the questions but rather given a run through of the questions that would be asked by the President.
Again, it appears to me that events are often reported in such a way as to tell the story the way the media wants it told. To tell the story the media believes regardless of whether or not the totality of the facts supports that story.
The question is, where are the reports about how the people serving in the sandbox are fed up with the media reports about what they are doing and what is really going on in Iraq?
It makes my stomach ache to think that we are helping to preserve free speech in the US, while the media uses that freedom to try to RIP DOWN the President and our morale, as US Soldiers. They seem to be enjoying the fact that they are tearing the country apart. Worthless!
Greyhawk of Mudville Gazette alerted us to a reporter, Pamela Hess, who made this very same observation
it is true that most soldiers do not recognize the Iraq they read about in the newspaper or see on TV, and it is deepening a gulf they feel with the media and with a large sector of America.
The same goes for their family, friends and strangers who read soldiers' many blogs about their war experience.
The two realities just don't track.
Now why would that be?
Reporters in Baghdad receive reports of violence around the country every day, increasingly aware of the risks they take to cover the war, even if they spend much of their time in their hotel offices.
Each death they cover, each car bomb they watch burning in a street bathed in innocent blood, confirms the view of Iraq they serve up daily.
It is a fundamentally different view of the war seen by soldiers in the field, and for good reason. Soldiers see the counter-insurgency campaign, and they know they are making progress. It is measurable in the number of people they catch who lead insurgent cells, in the number of IEDs they find before they explode, in the number of tips they get from locals.
But the counter-insurgent fight is not the entire war. It is an important piece, but not the end result. The war is a much broader struggle, the battle to create a legitimate, functioning government that both serves and protects the people of Iraq, thereby winning their consent to be governed.Once that consent is conferred, the worst of the war will be over.
I'm not sure how many reporters recognize that consciously, but it is a reality they respond to instinctively. They hear "good" news from the military, but what is before their eyes is chaos.
What few in the media or the U.S. government seem to realize is that these two contradictory things can be true at the same time, but they are truths that glide past each other.
The fact of the matter is reporters are supposed to be looking for the truth. They are supposed to dig for it. Yes, they may have their beliefs about a situation, but they should use those beliefs the way a scientist does: they should be trying to disprove them. And to the extent that they can disprove them, they should form new beliefs. To the extent that they can't disprove them, it strengthens their beliefs.
This is how you approach the truth of a situation.
What we see instead are reporters who mostly spend their time collecting stories that reinforce their beliefs and ignore stories that contradict them. This is pseudo-science: psuedo-reporting.
This is scripting that leads to staging: the pseudo-reporter knows what's going on, they just don't have the time to find the right event to represent it.
This ultimately leads to a Dan Rather moment.
When a reporters view of the situation gets upstaged by events, as will happen today in the Constitutional plebiscite, the reporter should act like a good scientist and recalibrate. Because, as Pamala says
There should only be true stories, accurately told.
But truth requires more than plugging selected events into a predefined script.
It requires intellectual honesty.
(hat tip to Instapundit)
