Bloggasm

Earlier this year, The New Republic published first-person accounts from an anonymous U.S. soldier in Iraq. The articles recounted gruesome — often crude — behavior from American service members, including the brutal killing of dogs and one instance of soldiers openly mocking a disfigured girl.

In July, a few media outlets — The Weekly Standard chief among them — began to doubt the veracity of the anonymous soldier’s claims. Editors from The New Republic, including Franklin Foer, initiated an aggressive investigation to test the accuracy of the stories. After several conservative bloggers raised doubts of the anonymous soldier’s existence, TNR managed to convince him to come out in the open, and he revealed himself to be Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a private in the United States Army and a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.

After several months of investigating, TNR published a 14-page article detailing their findings. Many within the conservative blogosphere claimed immediately afterwards that the article admitted that Beauchamp had lied. “The maxi-mea culpa runs more than 10 pages and thousands and thousands of words (self-pitying, rationalizing, messenger-blaming),” wrote conservative Michelle Malkin, “but this is the belated bottom line: The Beauchamp stories are bullcrap.”

But is the article an admission of untruth? After reading it in its entirety, I can conclude that it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, Foer managed to find several soldiers to corroborate Beauchamp’s claims, and the editors only really unearthed one definite factual error.

This is not to say that all their questions were answered; there are several mysteries surrounding the soldier’s claims. But this is not because of TNR or Beauchamp — rather it’s the obfuscation by the U.S. Army that blocked the editors from fully investigating the articles.

While TNR tried continuously to get access to Beauchamp and others who could speak authoritatively on his situation, officials from the Army, many under the cloak of anonymity, began to leak carefully-selected information to highly partisan bloggers in order to smear the soldier’s character. The most notorious incidence of this was when excerpts of an interview transcript between TNR and Beauchamp were leaked to Matt Drudge. It was a very deliberate attempt to undermine the magazine’s investigation while at the same time defaming the soldier’s character.

Many bloggers — typically on the right — have accused TNR from stonewalling the public and not issuing an immediate retraction. But after reading that 14-page document, I can only wonder: “What choice did they have?” How can you release an immediate retraction if you have to go a full month just to speak to the writer in question? By pointing out how long it took TNR to publish this article from the time they were first alerted to the problem without at least acknowledging the magazine’s lack of access to information is engaging in intellectual dishonesty.

Did The New Republic make horrible editorial decisions in this matter? With the revelation that the person assigned to fact check Beauchamp’s work was his own wife, there’s no doubt in my mind that their was some shoddy journalism. But because of the questionable media tactics of the U.S. Army and the highly-partisan echo chamber of those rooting for TNR to be proven wrong, we may never know to what extent.

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SLIGHTLY RELATED: Compare TNR’s attempts to aggressively investigate Beauchamp’s articles to the terrible journalism practices of The National Review when they published outright falsehoods and then refused to investigate them after it was pointed out.

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4. Interview with Thomas P.M. Barnett, contributing editor for Esquire Magazine
5. Why David Letterman is an excellent interviewer
6. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals

I’m coming late to the party by just now reading Howard Kurtz’s Spin Cycle, a book that went behind the scenes of the Clinton administration and analyzed how they tried to influence the media. I don’t know if this was the book’s desired effect, but it has given me sympathy for the White House press office and their daily struggles to get real policy stories in media outlets that only want to focus on political scandal.

So I was especially interested in this item I found today about White House press secretary Tony Snow taking a swipe at a journalist during the press briefing. It seems that Snow had a bone to pick with a story the journalist had filed, but didn’t specify what story he was referring to. It shows how even seasoned veterans like Snow can let the press get under their skin.

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3. Cool piece of journalism: Infiltrating the neocons

See the part circled in red:

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We’ve all seen them. A ridiculously-exaggerated metaphor is used to amplify the propaganda-tactics of the tobacco industry. The commercials are always heavy-handed and you can feel the self-righteousness just oozing out of the actors’ mouths as they project from their loud speakers to a group of curious New Yorkers about something a tobacco company did to (gasp!) increase profits.

The irony is that as they simultaneously pat themselves on the backs while trying to create the facade of mock outrage at tobacco company propaganda, they are using propaganda tactics of their own. As you may have noticed, they always make a reference to what “a tobacco company” did to mislead its customers. You can’t help but wonder, “Why don’t they name the company who said this?” It seems like they could really add some credence to their accusation if specific targets were named, and at first I thought that perhaps they were afraid of some kind of libel lawsuit from a tobacco company if TRUTH launched an attack directly at them. But then it occured to me that by generalizing their reference as “the tobacco industry,” they’re allowed to attribute the crime to the entire industry rather than just the company who perpetrated it. So now, instead of Camel being the company who sat around a table, trying to figure out ways to market cigarettes to kids, Marlboro and American Spirit and Newport and every other tabacco company are also included in the crime, even if they did no such thing.

This type of propaganda mirrors tactics used regularly by pundits trying to cloud the political discussion by merely attacking the opposite side with anecdotal examples which have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Watch any episode of Hannity and Colmes and you’ll see Sean Hannity set himself up for the pounce: first he affirms that the person sitting across from him is a Democrat, and then he reaches into his repertoire of out-of-context quotes and begins his attack: “Do you agree with Howard Dean when he says ‘All Republicans are evil?’ Do you agree with Murtha when he accuses American soldiers of eating babies,” etc… The anecdotal out-of-context quotes have nothing to do with the causes at hands, and merely distract from the main focus.

These are what these TRUTH commercials are: distractions from the main focus. Pointing out tobacco company propaganda certainly plays a part of that focus by disintegrating disinformation, but by using propaganda tactics of your own you shred your own credence. The goal shouldn’t be to attack the tobacco industry through smear tactics, but to attack its psuedo-science while alerting potential smokers of the dangers that are inherent with smoking. Then viewers can make an educated decision as to whether or not they want to smoke.

Trying to educate while at the same time being misleading with the information you have at hand can only lead to distrust for your own cause. So do us a favor TRUTH commercials, tell us the truth and don’t engage in hypocrisy in your plight. And tone down your self-righteousness by a factor of ten.

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Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker essayist and author of the book The Tipping Point, has a wonderful essay on his website about possible conflicts of interests for journalists and how he confronts and works with these conflicts of interest. An excerpt from his opening paragraphs:

As a writer I wear two hats. I am a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where I have been under contract more or less continuously since 1996. I also do public speaking, based on my second career as the author of two books—The Tipping Point and Blink. Over the past four or five years, I have given talks to corporations, trade associations, conventions of one sort or another, colleges, think tanks, charitable groups, public lecture series and, on one occasion (arranged by my mother) my old high school. For some of those engagements, I have been paid. For those given to academic and charitable organizations, I generally have not.

Most of the time, these two hats complement each other. It was because of my work as a New Yorker writer that I was able to get a contract to write my books. It is because of my books that I have gotten speaking engagements, and it is, in part, because of my books and my speaking that some people have discovered me in the New Yorker. But I recognize that there is also the possibility that these two roles can come into conflict, as is always the case when someone has to serve two different constituencies. This note is an attempt to talk about that possibility, and to think through its implications. I will warn you that what follows is quite long. It is long because the question of potential conflicts of interest is a fraught and difficult subject for journalists, and I think it is worth taking seriously.

In the essay, Gladwell makes several good points:

1. Journalists usually tend to be liberal, and it’s silly to pretend that they aren’t or that they have no political leanings, as the editor for the Washington Post does (he doesn’t even vote, and claims that he doesn’t even think about who he’d vote for if he did).

2. Having a political opinion is not the same as having a political bias. Opinions can change while a bias tends to stay the same. So this means that a journalist can be liberal without having a liberal bias, though if there is going to be a bias, it tends to be liberal.

3. There is no vast recruiting system in journalism to get liberals. It’s just something they’re naturally drawn to, just as people in the arts tend to be liberal.

4. Most pundits seem to claim that a lot of bias is caused by money being exchanged between journalist and another party, and he points out that there are more powerful relationships that don’t involve money which can cause bias.

5. His methods for trying to decrease his own bias to a very minimal amount.

It’s a wonderful essay, one of those pieces that keep you glued to every word until the very end and leaves you with that warm feeling in your stomach when you finish reading it.

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It seems that perhaps Jesus doesn’t love everyone after all, or at least The American Bible Society just thinks he doesn’t. They’ve refused to print bibles with the phrase “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” written on the cover:

According to the Associated Press and UPI, the American Bible Society has refused to print an order of Bibles with “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” emblazoned across the cover to be handed out to adult film stars by XXXchurch.com at locations across the country.

The American Bible Society contends that such a statement was inappropriate for a New Testament cover. As a ministry to those so trapped by this filth as to seek it out in public, one cannot blame the outreach for trying though, as frankly up until now there was little the American Bible Society would not allow on the covers of their Bibles.

I especially love the rant the article writer goes on later on in the article, about the other things the Society has managed to print:

And this is one of the more sedate editions. Back in 2003, I wrote a column exposing the American Bible Society’s Celebrating Jubilee New Testament that depicted Black radicals such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (hardly a Biblical inerrantist despite whatever else commendable that might be said about the man), W.E.B. Dubois (a confirmed Communist), and the Olympic athletes that raised their clenched fists in protest in a disrespectful gesture against the Star Spangled Banner. Other questionable editions included the CEV Kwanzaa New Testament and The CEV Jubilee Bible made up to look like the black, green, and red Pan-African flag.

Oh no, not a Communist! I almost forgot about the 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Embrace Capitalism.

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A few days ago, I posted an interview with the Agitator, and in response to the way I asked a certain question, the blog To the People described it as a turd question. When asked why the question was crap, the blogger had this to say:

Simon,

As Minerva notes, Mexicans are not a race any more than “Americans” or “Chinese” are a race. No “Mexican”, to the best of my knowledge, has ever voted in the United States.

I responded that the term “Mexican” can be used as a racial term, and provided several points as to why this is. So in response, he put up a post in which he offered $100 to the organization of my choice, and a public apology if I were to prove him wrong:

So here’s my offer, Simon: Find a legitimate, scholarly source that supports your claim of one Mexican race. (For example, a university professor who does not belong to the Aryan Brotherhood would suffice.) Then send me information in the form of a paper or link. If you can find such a source, not only will I publish the link and admit I was wrong, but I will immediately donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

Of course, if you look in the comments field of that post, I provided several sources (including one he linked to himself, apparently without even reading it), including one from a professor who “does not belong to the Aryan Brotherhood” (as he put it).

Since then, his readers have engaged in multiple semantics games, but I’ve clearly found several sources that actually used the term “Mexican Race,” and pointed out that Mexicans were labeled as an ethnic group in the Wikipedia article he linked to (and if you look in any thesaurus, a synonym for “race” is “ethnic” group).

So, that was on the 23rd. Has he issued an apology to me yet and sent that $100 check to the ACLU like I requested? Nope! Did I ever think he actually would? No. At best, he’ll either pretend like he never posted that offer and ignore it completely, delete the post, or just run to google in search of a single web-page that argues that Mexicans aren’t a race, and say that this discounts all my sources, even though that wasn’t part of the deal.

Business as usual.