The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.
By Jeff
According to Agence France-Presse
“October 15, 2006 — Iraq and Iran have agreed to form a working group to forge closer security and intelligence ties.
Iraq’s cabinet said in a statement today that an agreement had been reached by Iraqi National Security Advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubay’i and Iranian Intelligence and Security Minister Gholam Hussein Mohseni-Ejei.
The United States has expressed concern over what it describes as Iran’s role in fuelling violence in Iraq.”
No comment.
By Jeff
Francis Kukuyama raised an important issue in an Op Ed piece in the October 8 issue of the NY Times. For some time now the administration has been back backfiring on information by reclassifying previously open information to secret information. There is of course no good reason for this. There is much in our history as a country that we would regret later; that is not terribly surprising given everyone’s ability to make mistakes. But this is an administration obsessed with admitting no mistakes – not only by them, but also of any American administration (well- except perhaps the Clinton administration). Some of this back=fired reclassification is simply ludicrous: it makes secret information that has been widely published here and abroad for years. Fukuyama makes the salient point that the better informed we are the better decision we can make as an informed population.  Maybe that’s the point…
By Jeff
The editor of Editor and Publisher, Greg Mitchell, considers the recently reported estimate of 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 in the magazine’s current issue. He is particularly interested in the issue of the press’s failure to adequately look at and do the hard work to adequately account for Iraq’s civilian deaths.
He considers the credibility of the estimate of 600,000 that came from work carried out by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, compares it to the credibility of President Bush’s response, looks at the different ways the press dealt with the report, from the AP’s immediate “can’t be right†response to the Washington Post’s more thoughtful consideration, provides some data speculating on what would be comparable numbers in the U.S. and leaves the reader numbed with the reality of what we have created in Iraq. President Bush’s response in a press conference was:
“I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”
Read the article at the Editor and Publisher website.
By Jeff
I.F. Stone was one of the truly great American journalists of the 20th century. He was resolutely independent, admitted his biases, but went where the documents, his instincts for the truth and the interviews took him. He refused to spend time at press conferences where people would lie to him, and did not read press releases so he could lazily reprint them. He did what few working journalists do today – he dug into the research and thought about things. Then he wrote about them. Over the years he embarrassed leaders, politicians and other journalists and got labeled a fellow-traveler for his efforts. He was fearless, honest, sometimes wrong, but mostly right.
Christopher Hitchens may be the perfect reviewer of Stones’ work and biography and he does a wonderful job of it in the current Vanity Fair. I have to believe that the good “fit†here of reviewer and subject is not accidental. Both are independent thinkers, wonderful writers, ideologically committed, and Hitchens could be talking about himself when he writes that “Izzy could be as interesting when he was ‘wrong’ as when he was ‘right'”. Which is to say that it is possible to read Hitchens when disagreeing with him and still feel to have been forced to think.
But more important is the value of the independent voice, the willingness to take on the establishment, the absolute commitment to personal integrity, and the unwillingness to suck up to power that Stone personified. Stone is often vilified by what Hitchens refers to as the “crackpot Ann Coulterish right, of his having been on the K.B. G. payrollâ€.
Hitchens’ response to that kind of crackpot, on-the-sleeve stupidity is that he “…once had the honor of being the I.F. Stone fellow at Berkeley (where [Stone’s] old typewriter is enclosed in a glass case: probably the most hagiography he could have stood), and [he]
told [his] students to read him and reread him to get an idea of the relationship between clean and muscular prose and moral and intellectual honesty.â€
Hitchens’ piece is available on the Vanity Fair website.
By Jeff
Thanks to our Kiwi correspondent for alerting us to the above titled article in the October Atlantic Monthly by Robert Kaplan.
Kaplan is always interesting writing about soldiers and soldiering and his insights into the military provide a particular prism through which to view the situation in North Korea. Note that it is titled “When†North Korea Falls, not “If†North Korea Falls. He is persuasive in concluding that the winner when N. Korea falls will likely be China and that the U.S.’s influence in the region will be diminished. The article provides some fresh insight into a situation which seems burdened in the press with relatively unsophisticated – even jingoistic – perspectives. Read it at the Atlantic Monthly’s website.
By Jeff
A recent interview with Christine Amanpour describes the challenges of reporting in Iraq in 2006. The challenges come from two directions: the Bush administration constantly calling reality into question and the insurgents threatening death on reporters. The interview appeared on the website for Campus Progress and was carried out at Harvard. An interesting discussion by one of our best journalists.
By Jeff
On today’s NY Times Op Ed page David Frum gives us a terrific example of the nuttiness that gave us the Iraq War. Frum is the former White House speechwriter who helped to coin the phrase “Axis of Evil†a phrase that nicely captures the areas where the Bush foreign policy strategy has so miserably failed. No need to remind anyone of the Iraq fiasco, but Iran and North Korea remain to be totally screwed up and Frum is the right guy to advise on just how to continue doing that.
In a typically dishonest maneuver Frum comments in his opening paragraph that over the past dozen years of American policy Pakistan and North Korea have developed nuclear weapons. That would put the timeframe solidly in the Clinton years while N. Korea’s nuclear plans reached its current level entirely during Bush Junior’s tenure. Pakistan developed its program beginning in the mid 1970’s and in October 1990, then-President Bush (senior) announced that he could no longer provide Congress with Pressler Amendment certification that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear weapon. Also on today’s Times Op Ed page Nicholas Kristof reminds us that N. Korea obtained zero plutonium during Clinton’s presidency while under the current administration they obtained “…enough plutonium for about eight nuclear weaponsâ€. For background information on the development of weapons of mass destruction around the world see the Federation of American Scientists website.
Frum’s recommendations avoid placing any responsibility for the current state with the Bush administration and outlines a series of “four swift†actions for the U.S. to take that are uniformly unrealistic.
One: “Step up the development and deployment of existing missile defense systemsâ€. He admits that these systems “are not perfect – but they are something.†What they are is unreliable.
Two: “End humanitarian aid to N. Korea and pressure S. Korea to do the same.†Frum says that this would serve to punish both N. Korea and China and perhaps he is right. But S. Korea is highly unlikely to “swiftly†agree to move away from its “sunshine†policy simply because we tell them to do so. End of the day S. Korea is the country most immediately at risk and China, after all, can return any favor of punishment we might choose to give to them via its economic clout.
Three: “Invite Japan, S. Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to join NATO…†I am hoping that our Kiwi correspondent will comment on the likelihood of New Zealand running to join NATO. I will simply comment that anyone thinking that NATO would do that “swiftly†lives on a different planet.
Four: “Encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.†He likes this idea partially because it would also punish those evil Chinese. (who would not respond in any way, like cashing in their U.S. debt chips, for instance).
There is much that is striking in Frum’s piece but perhaps most striking is its resolute inability to place any responsibility on the administration within which he once served. The Bush administration has resolutely refused to negotiate directly with N. Korea or Iran so Frum’s comment to the effect that diplomacy has not worked ignores the fact that real diplomacy has not been tried. A very good piece on the lack of a coherent U.S. policy towards N. Korea by Stephen Bosworth and Morton Abramowitz, published in the Financial Times in February 2005, is available on Bosworth’s website.
What seems apparent is that the world has become significantly more dangerious on the watch of Mr. Frum’s former employers.
By Jeff
There is an active effort to put pressure on Sudan over its policies in Darfur which is exemplified by California’s passing laws limiting investment with Sudan’s government.
I have always been concerned that sanctions end up punishing the people who most need help but this effort to reduce investment in Sudan – investment that never finds its way to the people – is worthwhile.
Governor Schwarzenegger of California signed the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act last week; the bill requires the state’s pension funds to sell their investments in companies trading with Sudan. The Governor urged President Bush to follow the same path.
“With a stroke of your pen, you can do far more than any one state to ease the suffering of millions in this war-torn region,” he wrote.
To learn more about how you might influence investment go to this link.
By Jeff
Our Kiwi correspondent forwards this story that is at the heart of the relationship of politics and the press in Russia:
As the url for this blog suggests, the focus here is often the intersection of policy and journalism. In some parts of the world that intersection too frequently produces carnage. This is surely case with the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the woman who the head of Russia’s journalism union has “described as the conscience of the country’s journalism.†It seems appropriate to draw readers’ attention to this report from the NY Times on her life and death.
Anne Applebaum has published a remembrance and an analysis of the situation for independent journalists in Russia for Slate. It is not pretty, but is worth reading to remind us of the courage that many journalists have and the price that some of them pay. And we are certainly not talking about Bill O’Reilly.
By Jeff
See NY Times
This comment from our Kiwi Correspondent:
Foreign journalists will be particularly charmed to learn that their sentiments about the US are being computer-synthesized into simple positive or negative digitized conclusions. A thing observed is a thing changed, as the axiom has it. The thing in this case is infinitesimal : high opinion of America. It is likely to be changed. Negatively.
Admitting at the outset that this initiative —if focused on the US press— would be of questionable legality and unquestioned impropriety, the project’s leaders have announced that it is only the foreign media that will be monitored. The demeaning arrogance in that may be lost only on those doing the study. The rest of the world
will be understandably offended. Might not that offense reasonably be expected to adversely affect the opinions held of the US?
But, ok, say the project produces a sort of relief map of global regard for America, what does the existence of that mapping data imply? One implication of quantifying and locating low opinion is that corrective action could be targeted. If that meant Congress and US politicians responded by considering the substance and rationale
behind the opinion, then maybe some positive response could be fashioned. US policy could be informed and shaped to take account of other potentially useful perspectives. Alternatively the way policies were being presented could be adjusted to address perceived
short comings. By design, however, this project appears to eliminate those possibilities by cutting out of the equation any rationale supporting the opinion. The initiative is structured only to measure opinion not substance, conclusion not argument. So what sort of “corrective action” will flow from the compilation of that data?
As it creates data that identifies and claims to quantify “a problem “it will also create pressures to “solve” that alleged problem. The methodology of the initiative actually precludes development of internal solutions and thereby makes “external” solutions more likely. Fashioning external solutions here means finding ways of silencing critics rather than refuting them. Defeating them rather than considering them. Reacting rather than listening.
The foreseeable result of this un-needed, self-defeating, and divisive initiative will include pressures for disinformation campaigns, for buying off corruptible journalists and interdicting a free press in the very places we are urging policies of enlightened democratic transformation.