Mediag: New page: (Notes by [http://newshare.typepad.com/about.html Bill Densmore]) An afternoon set of two panels tackled, "Media gullibility regarding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror." Fir...

2009-03-07T22:04:20Z

New page: (Notes by [http://newshare.typepad.com/about.html Bill Densmore]) An afternoon set of two panels tackled, "Media gullibility regarding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror." Fir...

New page

(Notes by [http://newshare.typepad.com/about.html Bill Densmore])

An afternoon set of two panels tackled, "Media gullibility regarding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror."

First panelists:

*Russ Baker, free-lance investigative journalist
*Michael Parks, former journalism program direct at Univ. of Southern California and former L.A. Times editor.
*Tyler Marshall, former Los Angeles Times foreign corespondent in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
*Chris Hedges, Truthdig web columnist and former foreign correspondent with NPR, Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News.
*Lou Ureneck, dean of the journalism program at Boston University, former Philadelphia Inquirer deputy managing editor.

URENECK: Holds up the Iraq War coverage work of the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau as a model for other news organizations.

PARKS: He covered multiple wars as a foreign correspondent for 28 years. "The only thing they have in common is people die and most of the people who get killed are not the combatants . . . Foreign correspondents need new skillsets," added Park. "They need new multimedia skills . . . and also they needed to understand the power of collaboration." Problems for foreign correspondents include:

*Captive of sources
*Prisoners of group think

Also, "We need new questions . . . journalism is asking good questions of the right people or asking good quests of the right people, understanding the answers in context and explaining them well to others. What are the questions of the day? Here is one: 'Why are the kids in Singapore the best in the world in mathematics and what does that mean?' That story may require an education reporter not a foreign correspondent." Parks offers another big question: Globalization and how it is going to change our lives. "We just don't see enough of that."

MARSHALL -- "I think you always have to be on one side or the other." It is hard to go between sides. "I tried that once and it is the stupidest thing I ever did. I'm just glad I got out alive." If someone gives you the chance to write what you want and say what you want, in Vietnam you could file in real time and there were no military censors and you were unrestricted in what you could write. But embeds are only useful in telling one part of the story because you are dependent on the military unit for your survival.

BAKER: Least experience with war coverage. Sometimes war coverage promotes myopia. But it bothers him that in all the coverage of conflict, we still haven't nailed down a definitive narrative about why were were there in the first place -- why were we there? Why does the war exist in the first place? He talks about the Obama administration decision to lift a ban on shooting pictures of returning caskets from the war, but only if it is OK with the families of the fallen soldiers. "What issue could there possibly be with a picture of an anonymous casket, who could that possibly be an issue?" He says the main stream media should be paying more attention to stories that come out in small publications. He cites a story he wrote in 2004 in which he quoted a former Houston Post reporter. The reporter said that in 1999, former President Bush, while running for election, told the reporter he would invade Iraq if president. Baker said he couldn't get that story in main stream media because the Houston reporter didn't have Bush on tape saying that.

URENEcK: Regarding the atmosphere surrounding the war: It was when the newspaper industry started to get in tough financial shape. "My intuition is that at some level the newspaper business lost some of its confidence because it wasn't on firm financial ground. And I think that bodes really badly for the future because the situation has only gotten worse." He said also that too much war coverage is like covering a sports event -- as entertainment -- like observation of plays and scores and with no sense of analysis of what is really happening.

MARSHALL: Both Marshall and Ureneck talked about the "rubricks" that networks use to identify the story of the day as trivializing coverage.

==Q-and-A: Kristine Borgesson==

She interviews for Feet to the Fire, (her 2006 book) all the major correspondents. She asked them all: "Why did we go to war?" And she found there was no consensus. "I can ask you now, why did we go to war and I bet you would have different consensuses on that. I think that says something profound about the media and about the message machine."

MARSHALL: "The administration sold the cause of the war on 'weapons of mass destruction.' "

DEAN VELVEL: He is under the impression that the news media has no sense of basic first principle. The first principle for Iraq should be: Why did we go to war and what follows from that. His question: Do you think the news media ignores first principle?

BORGESSON: "If you are The Associated Press, you are the first draft of history and you have to give leeway to them . . . but after all this time . . . the Knight Ridder guys asked questions that the other journalists did not.

HEDGES: The administration was ignorant about the country they were about to take over. They believed they would be liberators, the oil money would pay for the war and that democracy would radiate out into the region from Iraq. People who told them otherwise were not listened to. "We know the motives. Those were the motives . . . unfortunately the government was hijacked by people who were self delusional."

BAKER: "Power in the world runs on resource extraction . . . and that's why we went in there."

PARKS: There's a lot of stuff we don't know yet. That's for history. It's OK.

BAKER: Disagrees. It's not OK.

[[Category:Masslaw]]

Masslaw-war-terrorism-coverage - Revision history

Mediag: New page: (Notes by [http://newshare.typepad.com/about.html Bill Densmore]) An afternoon set of two panels tackled, "Media gullibility regarding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror." Fir...