|
Faithful husband, soccer dad,
basset owner, and former cowboy
Return to TboggHomePage
FELLOW TRAITORS
*The Nether-Count*
100 Monkeys Typing
Ain't No Bad Dude
Alicublog
Americablog
American Leftist
Attytood (Will Bunch)
Bad Attitudes
Balloon Juice
Better Inhale Deeply
Bitch Ph.D
Bloggy
Bob Harris
Brilliant At Breakfast
BusyBusyBusy
Byzantium's Shores
Creek Running North
Crooked Timber
Crooks and Liars
Cursor
Daily Kos
Dependable Renegade
David Ehrenstein
Democratic Veteran
Dohiyi Mir
Down With Tyranny
Echidne of the Snakes
Edicts of Nancy
Elayne Riggs
Eschaton (Atrios)
Ezra Klein
Failure Is Impossible
Feministe
Feministing
Firedoglake
First Draft
Freewayblogger
The Garance
The Group News Blog
Guano Island
Hairy Fish Nuts
Hammer of the Blogs
Hullabaloo(Digby)
I Am TRex
If I Ran the Zoo
I'm Not One To Blog
Interesting Times
James Wolcott
Jesus' General
Jon Swift
Juan Cole
King of Zembla
Kung Fu Monkey
Lance Mannion
Lawyers Guns and Money
Lean Left
Liberal Oasis
Main & Central
Majikthise
Making Light (Nielsen Hayden)
Mark Kleiman
Martini Revolution
MaxSpeak
MF Blog
MyDD
Needlenose
The Next Hurrah
Nitpicker
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Norbizness
Norwegianity
Oliver Willis
One Good Move
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Political Animal(K.Drum)
The Poorman
Progressive Gold
Right Hand Thief
Rising Hegemon
Roger Ailes
Rude Pundit
Rumproast
Sadly, No
Seeing The Forest
Shakesville
Sisyphus Shrugged
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Slacktivist
SteveAudio
Suburban Guerilla
TalkLeft
The American Street
The Left Coaster
The Road To Surfdom
The Sideshow
The Talking Dog
The Talent Show
Tom Tomorrow
Tom Watson
Whiskeyfire
UggaBugga
Wampum
Wonkette
World O'Crap
TOSS ME
A BONE
Amazon Wish List
SOURCES
MSNBC
CNN
The Washington Post
Media Matters
The New York Times
The Guardian
Yahoo News
Salon
The Raw Story
Common Dreams
Media Transparency
The Nation
Alternet
Joe Conason
Talking Points Memo
THE VAST WASTELAND
Captain Corndog & Friends
Cheerleaders Gone Spazzy
80% True
Corner of Mediocrity and Banality
Village Idiots Central
Darwin's Waiting Room
News for Mouthbreathers
Mailbox
Your e-mail may be reprinted sans name and e-mail address. Think about how stupid you want to appear.
Blogroll Me!
Site Feed
|
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Meanwhile, back on Planet 4 of the 892 System...
The Commander of the good ship Clueless writes:
Rule number one for all reporters in Iraq and their editors back home:
Thou shalt not report any good news without also including bad news. Thus shalt thou maintain balance. (However, reporting bad news without any offsetting good news is perfectly acceptable.)
Case in point: a report to the effect that the rate of insurgent attacks against our troops has declined by half in the month since Saddam was captured. That's really important, don't you think? Tends to suggest "success", maybe, just a little bit?
And that's the problem. It's impermissible to write a news article that suggests that things might be going well. It might give people the impression that Iraq isn't a quagmire; can't have that, can we?
So this article mentions the reduction in the rate of attacks in its first sentence, and never mentions it again. The entire rest of the article drags in as many other things as it can which suggest that everything is going to hell in a hand-basket, even though they have nothing whatever to do with the reduction.
And even the good news in the first sentence isn't reported quite straight.
The Pentagon says the reduction in individual attacks against Americans is dramatic - down by 50 percent since the capture of Saddam Hussein.
See, it isn't that the number of attacks is down, it's that the Pentagon claims that the number of attacks is down. One can almost see the exchange of knowing looks between the reporter and her non-stupid readers: We all know that the Pentagon is probably lying about this, right? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge?
Actually the way we read the first line is as follows:
The Pentagon says the reduction in individual attacks against Americans is dramatic - down by 50 percent since the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Not
The Pentagon claims the reduction in individual attacks against Americans is dramatic - down by 50 percent since the capture of Saddam Hussein
...which kind of blows Steven's little origami boat right out of the gutter meaning that you don't have to read about how he once took a journalism class in college and how he learned to write "straight news reports" but those rules don't apply when you're blogging and trying to make a point that doesn't exist.
Of course the part that really harshes Steven's mellow is the fact that Martha Raddatz is reporting that, although the number of attacks are down, the number of casualties is staying about the same mainly because the attacks are being directed towards US aircraft that are apparently not using their Cloak of Invisibility, Deflector Shields, or Tractor Beams as they bring peace and the good wishes of the Federation to the good people of Eminiar VII.
Or something like that....
|
|
