Iatribe

Friday, July 25, 2003

 
For the summary of the NYMag/Guardian/New School "Media at War" event, see Jarvis' posts here, here, here, here and here.
There's a hilarious episode I missed that Nick Denton has here.
What I have will just add nuance or whatever to what Jarvis already has; his notes are far more detailed, as I was, in theory, trying to finish my Rushkoff piece.
Jarvis quotes the New School flack who opened the event:

: The session starts with an agenda-dripping intro from a provost of the New School: "I have never been more concern and indeed angry about where the republic is headed today." That set the course.

My notes have, and this is how I recall it, "Where the Republicans are headed today." I could be wrong. Irrespective, it was a weird -- really, really weird -- way for someone to open a conference on how the media dealt with the war. How should the media deal with this guy? What was more disturbing to me was the smattering of applause for the comment -- who applauds such obnoxious stupidity?
It's not clear in my notes whether it was the flack or Caroline Miller, NYM's E-i-C, who then noted that Bush is being hurt "by the widening credibility gap" and that "President Bush appears vulnerable for the first time since 9/11." As though all this time, journalists should have been chiseling away, hoping to finally etch the final chapter in Bush the Younger's history.
Michael Wolff -- for whom the conference was staged, and staged well by Serena Torrey (formerly of the NYSDems and the McCall campaign) -- got into his main thesis early, asking if (but really suggesting that) "the war was staged on our behalf". None of the journalists bit on this one. Later in the conference, Wolff had a restatement of this thesis, "we don’t have that old-fashioned role of just reporting the facts, we are part of the war machine now." You kind of get the sense, though, that Wolff isn't the kind of guy who wants just the facts reported. His main contention throughout, I'd say, was with journalists who let themselves get shoved around, and he's right. Thing is, to add some context, US journalists weren't the only ones who got shoved around, and it wasn't only the Bush administration and its allies that did the shoving. Eason Jordan's Op-Ed hung in the air throughout for me, and I was waiting for it to come up. When it didn't, I raised my hand at the last panel and Eric Alterman took the mic instead.
I was troubled when, in the first panel, Hafez Al-Mirazi claimed that Paul Wolfowitz is "a man as powerful as Uday or Qusay" were under their father. Wolfowitz was a deputy, and Saddam's sons were, well, his sons. They were like Twin Cheneys, really. Is there really any rational belief behind the idea that Wolfowitz is that powerful? This seemed like perpetuation of the anti-Wolfowitz-but-really-anti-Semitic meme. One bit of context that was cute that Al-Mirazi added was that apparently the average Arab viewer used to think of Al Jazeera as "The secret Israeli/CIA network," because it broadcast Israeli and American politicians, to give balance to its reporting. Nifty.
Supreme Jackass of the Conference Award goes to Rick MacArthur of Harper's, who probably left there thinking of himself just as highly as when he came in, but what a loser. He immediately launched into this idea of how the French press was so much better, blah blah blah. Mike Elliott of Time said he reads the same French papers and didn't see all that much difference. Then Elliott mentioned the real heart of the matter -- that Chirac himself maintained that the WMDs were there; it isn't that some people got taken for a ride, it's that every intelligence agency in the world thought that Saddam had chem/bio -- consequently, there wasn't a newspaper in the world that could contradict, and none really did. MacArthur repeatedly cited Judith Miller's reporting as evidence of the crap we were being fed; sure, Miller's reporting sucked, but she's just one reporter at one paper. MacArthur ran Picasso's Guernica on his cover -- does he think that's supposed to be a serious statement about war? I read Lewis Lapham leading up to the war, and it was crap. MacArthur also complained that there wasn't enough reporting leading up to the Congressional resolution, but I remember plenty. He wasn't satisfied with the reporting on Ed Kennedy's and Robert Byrd's anti-war stances -- only by being willfully blind can one cite those two senators as the leading voices of a mass movement. Tom Daschle didn't speak out against the war -- that would have been news. Throughout his whole tirade about the foreign newspapers and foreign opinion, I kept recalling this Jarvis post about Germans thinking America was complicit in 9/11. No stats of this kind were brought up at the conference, but one other was -- that a large number of Americans think Iraq was involved in 9/11; thing is, thinking the former is pretty damned crazy, while thinking the latter makes sense even if it's not true, especially as more evidence is uncovered in Iraq indicating some form of cooperation between Saddam and certain terrorist groups, probably including Al Qaeda. A guy like MacArthur reminds me a lot of Sydney Schanberg; these old guys hate the Bush administration for lying, but they're also too afraid of the truth to honestly deal with it. Sure, the media should catch Bush in his lies, but they should also put forward a message of what is really going on -- something MacArthur and those guys don't seem interested in. Poignant matter: Later on, Mark Whitaker of Newsweek said "We knew this intelligence was flimsy before the war," and, "I think most people understood that we were going to war because the Bush administration wanted us to go to war," not because of a nuclear threat or what have you -- thing is, he's right about some people being aware of the truth, but certainly not most Americans. Odd bias was belied by many at the event -- take the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg, who said that John Wilson was sent to check into the uranium documents "by the insistence of Dick Cheney," something I'm pretty sure no one has proved yet. Oh, and there was the BBC story about Jessica Lynch, wherein panelists tried to defend the reporting, but Eric Umansky of Slate spoke up from the audience.
And so did Jonathan Foreman, an embed with the New York Post, who was fantastic. At one point on the panel, he criticized some war reporters for not knowing the basics of war. He said some were, "ludicrously ignorant," describing a single bomb as carpet bombing or heavy bombardment. Another stupid-lefty moment came soon after, when ABC reporter John Donvan just mentioned in passing (when asked whether he'd like to do war reporting again) "I have very small children and I want there to be peace in the world," followed by perhaps the most uproarious applause of the entire conference.
The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger keynoted the conference, and I'll point out three key quotes: In reference to the big fake stories propagated by government about the war, "None of those glaringly wrong or manipulative stories came out of Baghdad"; Re: Brits' apprehension about the war, "It would have been extraordinary to have a national press which didn’t reflect that unease"; Re: the inspectors, (this one's a paraphrase) "When the Bush administration shut down UNMOVIC, it was an attack on journalists, it was an affront to independent institutions."
Overall, the event accomplished its main goal, which was to have the media world pay homage to Michael Wolff. It was cool to see all these people basically worshipping him. Cooler yet, though, was meeting all these people I'd only corresponded with. Like, I couldn't really tell from the picture, but: Nick Denton tall, Elizabeth Spiers small. Jeff Jarvis, tall too. Simon Dumenco very reminiscent of Benji Joffe -- he had a great comment about watching Elizabeth watching Jeff watching Alterman. Joanna Coles looks American. Serena Torrey -- peppy.
It was weird being the young kid there, but I think I made out alright.
Steven I. Weiss 11:42:00 AM