Nieman Watchdog

and Dan Froomkin, on McClennan:

Here’s what McClellan wrote, in excerpts from his new book:

In the fall of 2002, Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We'd done much the same on other issues--tax cuts and education--to great success. But war with Iraq was different. Beyond the irreversible human costs and substantial financial price, the decision to go to war and the way we went about selling it would ultimately lead to increased polarization and intensified partisan warfare...

And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth--about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict--would get largely left behind…

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere--on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.

In this case, the “liberal media” didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

That’s actually only one part of McClellan’s media critique. There’s more in these excerpts:

The permanent campaign … ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who's winning, who's losing, and why…

The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation. Finally, it becomes much more difficult for the general public to decipher the more important truths amid all the conflict, controversy and negativity. For some partisans, that is fine because they believe they can maneuver better in such a highly politicized environment to accomplish their objectives. But the destructive potential of such excessively partisan warfare would later crystallize my thinking.

This second part of McClellan’s critique is at least somewhat controversial. The first part, by now, certainly shouldn’t be. A flurry of self-examinations by the media have all reached pretty much the same conclusion McClellan did.

Yet because many of the cable-TV pundits talking about McClellan’s book were themselves members of the White House press corps during the time in question, some of them have been responding with unseemly defensiveness.

The Rest is Here

"Under Enormous Pressure"

The AJR Weighs In

On the decline in war coverage. . . . .

Documentary or Satire?

h/t Ezra Klein
NB: Crude language warning. . . . . .

Unified Field Theory, Media Edition

From the new mag, Miller-McCune:

Why has the U.S. political press found a possibly imprecise use of the word "bitter" fascinating for weeks on end? Why does a search of significant English-language news sources turn up 985 articles in the last year that include the words "Britney" and "underwear"? And why, oh why, do news organizations all follow the same stories almost all the time, moving in such complete lockstep that they might as well be Groucho Marx in the Duck Soup mirror scene?

Because I've been a journalist for decades, I've been asked why the news media seem so repetitive and, yes, dumb at least several hundr ed times now, usually at cocktail parties. (Three drinks, I've learned, turn anyone into a journalistic expert.) When I was young, the questions would rile me, and I'd spout First Amendment bromides. The longer I worked in journalism, though, the more I sensed that a systemic disorder had infected the news business. It was a malady that led newspapers and television news organizations to copy one another often, while pretending never to. And to quote from the most self-serving of business and government press releases as though they were Moses' tablets. And to rely on official sources, even when the sources were obviously wrong or lying. And to commit many resources to coverage of transitory and trivial events and very few to investigative or other enterprise reporting that would result in stories of lasting import.

So, when faced with questions about the failings of my chosen trade, I began to evade. No, I'd say, most reporters aren't secretly trying to sneak their own views into the news pages. And no, although it happens sometimes, the owners of large news organizations don't generally reach down into the newsroom nowadays to bludgeon enemies and help friends. And no, I'd say, the mayor (or the governor, or the president) can't usually threaten news executives with anything that would make them kill a story. It's not that simple, I'd say; the problem's more complicated than that. But I never could come up with an overarching explanation, the Unified Field Theory of General Media Banality.

British journalist Nick Davies offers just that with his book Flat Earth News, a much-discussed best-seller since its U.K. publication earlier this year. Emend that: It's been much talked about in England but gone largely unnoticed in the U.S., in no small part because it has yet to pick up a U.S. publisher. It should, and quickly. The book is sophisticated and not just engagingly written, but hilarious in all the right places.

There's more. . . . .

They're not There Either

More on photographs. This from Moyra. Go see and read the rest. Go on, now.

The recording of the homeless scene and of homeless people is regarded as “victim” photography by contemporary photography theorists. For the documentary photographer such a criticism, if taken as gospel, prevents the bearing of witness to social conditions, and assists in the elimination of particular pieces of visual social history. A vacuum is thus created into which a new interpretation is possible, based on whatever brand of political ideology is being proposed.

How then is the antipathy to the descriptive photograph to be overcome, in relation to the depiction of street-homelessness? With the Identity Kit series shown here, I have attempted to portray the gross poverty of the dispossessed by inviting some of the homeless men on London's streets to display their belongings - those carried in their pockets, or in a bag. The individuals' participation in the arrangement of their possessions, and their willingness to lay them open for external scrutiny, is a statement from the heart of their perilous and impecunious position. (As one young man, Darren, stated: These are all my worldly goods.)

Within contemporary theory these photographs are an acceptable portrayal of poverty, with no direct visible indicator to the disadvantaged human subject. The photographs' contents become the vehicle through which the viewer can attempt to understand the bleakness of a human existence deprived of material objects and possessions.

“Yeah, you can see them, but they’re not there.”

A biography of a photograph, via filmmaker Errol Morris.

ERROL MORRIS: I’ve just finished this movie on the Abu Ghraib photographs. And I believe that many of the photographs have been misunderstood – for many reasons and in many different ways. The picture of Sabrina Harman smiling with her thumb up above the body of an Iraqi prisoner — we know his name, Manadel al-Jamadi. People saw this picture and were horrified. They took her smile as a smile of enjoyment, a smile of pleasure.

PAUL EKMAN: So what’s the explanation of why she has the smile and the thumbs up?

ERROL MORRIS: Her explanation is that she did it all the time. People took her picture and she would have the same goofy smile and the same thumbs-up, again and again and again and again and again.

PAUL EKMAN: Well, there are a lot of them.

ERROL MORRIS: I often think about Sabrina being a woman, a gay woman in the military, trying to show that she is in command, a master of her emotions – not cowed by her experiences but in control. Of course, when people see that photograph, they do not see Sabrina. They see the smile.

PAUL EKMAN: Well, here’s what I think happens when the typical viewer looks at this picture. One, you’re horrified by the sight of this dead person. Most of us haven’t seen a dead person. Certainly not in that state. If you’ve seen a dead person, you’ve seen them in an open casket where they’re made to look like they’re alive. Do you know how “horror” is defined?

ERROL MORRIS: Tell me.

PAUL EKMAN: “Horror,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the combination of disgust and terror. So I think “horror” is the right word. It’s a horrible sight, and it instills horror. And then you see, right next to that, someone having a good time. Most people will not realize that’s a “say cheese” smile. They’ll think, because of the broadness of the smile and the thumbs-up gesture, they’re having a good time. That’s what makes this a damning picture to the typical viewer.

I’ll add one more thing. When we see someone smile, it is almost irresistible that we smile back at them. Advertisers know that. That’s why they link products to smiling faces. And when we smile back, we begin to actually experience some enjoyment. So this photograph makes us complicit in enjoying the horrible. And that’s revolting to us.

So why it is such an upsetting photograph is not just because we see someone smiling in the context of the horrible, but that when we look at her, we begin to have to resist smiling ourselves. So it’s a terrible, terrible picture for that reason alone.

. . . . . . .

[Morris:] There are many photographs of al-Jamadi’s body, but it is the photograph of Harman with his body that stands out among them, the photograph of a pretty American girl who is alive and a battered Iraqi man who is dead. The photograph misdirects us. We become angry at Harman, rather than angry at the killer.

We see al-Jamadi’s body, but we don’t see the act that turned him from a human being into a corpse. We don’t understand what the photograph means, nor what it is about.

Instead of asking: Who is that man? Who killed him? The question becomes, Why is this woman smiling? It becomes the important thing — if not the only thing. The viewer assumes that Harman is in some way responsible — or if not responsible, in some way connected to the murder — and is gloating over the body. How dare she? Isn’t she in the same photograph as the body? Looming over the corpse? And even if she is not guilty, she stands in (in the viewer’s imagination) for those who are.

And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile.

When we look at photographs used to illustrate the news, or even video, how do we know that what we are seeing is what's really there? How can we gauge what is being revealed, and what is being concealed?

YouTube Says No

to Senator's censorship request.

There's Only a War in Iraq

on the Radio. From the terrific Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Rich Campaign Goodness

From the Council on Foreign Relations, overviews of Obama's and McCain's foreign policy advisors. h/t Ezra

News Flash!

The Daily Show satirical comedy program, not news broadcast. . . . . .

What are You Doing Online?

From Business Week:

Internet Journalism

Sports Blogs Edition

A Swimmingly Good Question

And one I only have the inklings of an answer to.  Add to big list of "how to we study this"? From Atrios:

In the Swampland comments, Karen's saying that how can you suggest that the mainstream media ignored this story [Pentagon propagandists] when it was front page of the Washington Post.

It is a mystery, though, isn't it. Some stories land front page of the Washington Post and then just sort of disappear, never to be heard from again. Some light up the Drudge siren, get talked about nonstop on cable news, breathless Politico reports, follow up stories, editorials, coverage in weekly news magazines.

And no one in the press quite understands how this happens. Some stories magically take flight, and some don't. It's all very strange.