[NYTr] FAIR: Reality of Military Atrocities Less Newsworthy than Rightwing Fantasies

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

FAIR - Aug 6, 2007
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3155

Media Advisory

Military Atrocities Less Newsworthy Than Right-Wing Fantasies:

Press follows smears of New Republic; 
Ignores The Nation's evidence of abuse

The Nation's investigation into the U.S. occupation's impact on Iraqi
civilians (7/30/07) and a series of columns by a U.S. soldier published
in the New Republic (2/5/07, 6/4/07, 7/23/07) have given media access
to compelling new documentation of egregious behavior by U.S. troops in
Iraq. The New York Times and Washington Post have responded by paying
much less attention to the scrupulously documented evidence of these
abuses in the Nation and focusing on right-wing bloggers'
unsubstantiated criticisms of the New Republic columns.

The Nation's article was based on interviews with 50 combat veterans of
the Iraq War, whose accounts were recorded in thousands of pages of
transcripts. According to the report's authors, Chris Hedges and Laila
Al-Arian, their "investigation marks the first time so many
on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the U.S. military have
been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions."
Meanwhile, the New Republic series was based on eyewitness accounts by
a single soldier, Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who wrote under the
pseudonym Thomas Scott for fear of reprisals by his superiors.
Beauchamp later explained (New Republic, 7/26/07) that his columns were
intended merely to offer "one soldier's view of events in Iraq."

Despite the New Republic columns' more modest scope, the series has
garnered much more extensive media coverage over the past three weeks
than the Nation's report. It has been mentioned in six Washington Post
articles and has been the topic of two New York Times news articles,
while the Nation article has been covered only in one column by Bob
Herbert (New York Times, 7/10/07) since it was published online on July
9.

The Weekly Standard (7/19/07) responded to the New Republic series by
openly challenging the authenticity of the columnist's accounts, and
was soon joined in this effort by the U.S. military public affairs
department. A U.S. military public affairs officer confirmed to blogger
Matt Sanchez (American Spectator blog, 7/21/07) the military's "intent
to engage the CENTCOM blog team." (According to the Department of
Defense's publication DefenseLink--3/2/06--the U.S. Armed Forces'
Central Command "blog team" was formed to "work with more than 250
bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by
U.S. forces in the global war on terror," and to correct online
information about the U.S. military that is, in the view of U.S.
military public affairs personnel, "inaccurate" and "incomplete.")

In the midst of these efforts, hundreds of bloggers weighed in with
their evaluations of the New Republic series. Their efforts were given
standing in the mainstream media by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz,
who wrote an account of the criticism on July 21.

As Kurtz wrote, the columnist "recounts soldiers getting their kicks by
running over dogs with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and playing with Iraqi
children's skulls taken from a mass grave." The Weekly Standard called
these stories doubtful, and Kurtz offered one reason for giving the
doubts such a prominent hearing: "The issue of veracity is especially
sensitive for the New Republic, which fired associate editor Stephen
Glass in 1998 for fabrications that editors concluded had appeared in
two-thirds of his 41 articles."

While this is true, Kurtz should have also taken into account the
Weekly Standard's own track record: The magazine relentlessly advocated
for the Iraq invasion, and were among the most prominent outlets that
alleged serious links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda (see Extra!, 1?2/04)

After Kurtz's piece came the Times' first story on the topic, published
under the headline "Doubts Raised on Magazine's 'Baghdad
Diarist'" (7/24/07). However, the actual "doubts" hardly warranted the
attention granted them through the article's headline. The only example
the Times furnished of the New Republic columnist's dubiousness was a
quote from an editor at the Weekly Standard, who noted that in response
to a call by the Standard for knowledgeable people to help discredit
the New Republic series, "There's not a single person that has come
forward and said, 'It sounds plausible.'"

On August 2, the New Republic posted an online response to the
criticism, declaring that the magazine had found one minor discrepancy:
An incident Beauchamp reported happening at a base in Iraq seems to
have happened at a base in neighboring Kuwait. The Washington Post and
New York Times (8/3/07) printed short updates based on the New
Republic's investigation.

On one of the disputed counts - the bloggers claimed that Bradley
vehicles could not possibly be used to kill dogs - the Post noted, "A
spokesman for the vehicle's manufacturer confirmed to the New Republic
that it can be maneuvered in the way Beauchamp depicted." Why the Post
failed to investigate this matter themselves before airing the
unfounded criticism is hard to fathom.

The disparity in media treatment is striking - when right-wing bloggers
make unfounded criticisms of reporting that portrays U.S. soldiers in
Iraq in a bad light, the "controversy" makes it into papers like the
Post and the New York Times, and becomes fodder for cable news. But the
Nation's thorough and meticulous investigation of the U.S. military's
mistreatment of Iraqi civilians is all but ignored. Apparently critical
war reporting is more useful to the mainstream media when specious
right-wing doubts can be cast on it.