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| Iraq |
| NY Times tries to sex up another routine story |
| 2008-04-14 |
| The opinion of Nibras Kazimi, Visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute Here we go again: the New York Times tries to sex-up an already interesting story to score political points on its front-page. .... The story, written by Solomon Moore, makes its first mistake by sensationalizing the arms deal between Iraq and Serbia as a “secret” sale in its headline. How can something be kept “secret” if the Iraqi Ministry of Defense put out two press releases -— with pictures —- about the Defense Minister’s two visits to Serbia during September and November of last year; then the Defense Minister held a press conference on December 9 announcing specifics about the deal; then the ministry put out a third press release announcing the formal signature of the deal and its total sum (230 million dollars) on December 24? All this was amply reported on by the Iraqi press, and some of this coverage found its way into the Arab press. I’m sure that the Serbian media also covered it in some detail. But the NYTimes still maintains that it was all hush-hush .... .... why was Moore able to ask the Iraqi Defense Minister about the deal during “an interview in February in his office”? .... The timing of this February interview is very revealing, for it tells us that the NYTimes has been working on this story for some time now, but had decided to sit on it. I think they did so because there wasn’t much of a story to tell: the NYTimes wanted to use the Serbian deal to paint the Iraqi government as corrupt and inept, and there wasn’t enough meat on this skeletal narrative. So what changed? Standards did, of course. The NYTimes reporting on Iraq can be best described as “anything goes” as of late, so a story heavy on innuendo and factually meager can still go to press if it serves the editorial policy of this paper in painting everything about Iraq in dark hues. .... The NYTimes itself tells us that there’s no evidence of corruption or wrongdoing, yet it reserves six whole paragraphs to insinuate that there may be something “inappropriate” anyway. .... This could have been a great story had it been an expose of how some pencil-necked paper-pushers over at the Pentagon are hampering the procurement and distribution of weapons to the Iraqi military by pedantically conforming to the “protocols spanning hundreds of pages” that shape the Foreign Military Sales program, or FMS. Two years ago, Iraq put up billions of dollars of its own money to buy U.S.-made weapons, but these weapons have yet to reach those Iraqi soldiers battling it out on the frontlines of the insurgency. That’s why al-Obeidi turned to other, more expedient sources for arms like Serbia. The reason that this story failed to be great was that it was leaked and spun by those same DoD pencil-necked paper-pushers that were worried that their failings would be exposed. So they did what many in Washington and the Green Zone have turned into a literal blood sport: Operation Blame It on the Iraqis. ..... So there you have it, the New York Times rushes yet another sexed-up yet leaky story to its front-page and further damages the reputation of its Iraq reporting. It is simply ridiculous to claim in the piece’s opening paragraphs that anonymous American commanders had said that the Serbian equipment had “turned out to be either shoddy or inappropriate for the military’s mission” without fully fleshing out this accusation of ‘shoddiness’ later in the piece. Not only was the arms deal not “secret”, not only was there no evidence of “corruption”, not only does it seem that al-Obeidi acted appropriately and with the backing of his government while the NYTimes’ sources over at the Pentagon had dropped the ball during a time of war, .... not only is there no elaboration of the tensions that have arisen between Iraq’s executive branch and infantilizing American bureaucrats who are bristling at their fading ability to unilaterally command the situation, not only of so many other things that could have given this story more context; the NYTimes chose to mutilate an interesting story that could have taught us all about the myriad challenges being faced in Iraq into a badly-conceived and hastily-conjectured smear. .... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #3 "They are amazingly bitter" I didn't realize they lived in Middle America, Steve. Helluva commute.... ;-p |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2008-04-14 20:30 |
| #2 When I become King of the Forest, pennies will be outlawed and you can hunt NYT reporters for sport - as long as you have a Small Game & Varmit license, of course. Just don't eat them. They are amazingly bitter. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2008-04-14 16:47 |
| #1 One could almost feel for those poor New York Times reporters, forced to comply with the company line regardless of reality, were so many of them not such self-rightous, pompously ignorant fabulists. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-04-14 12:55 |