Two ears, a tail and a hoof go to Tim Blair for his witty deconstruction of a Washington Post article by Jackie Spinner (yes, that’s her real name–not a parody, as it should be in this case). Spinner’s report is about the claims of one “educated Iraqi” about the behavior by American soldiers who discovered his porno collection. They did nothing (other than allegedly–no corroboration–juxtapose the porn with the Koran). The Iraqi hit his mother, obviously for the “crime” of learning about his activities.
This article would seem to be another exercise in conscious/unconscious self-destruction by the mainstream media. Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post in which he sees it as evidence for the proposal for “open sourcing” in reporting (i. e. you can see the reporters raw notes online and evaluate them). I’m all for that, but I think there’s something deeper at play here…
Pace all the money being spent by the NYT, WaPo, etc., what we are witnessing is the decline or even demise of the “Foreign Correspondent,” so romanticized by us Hollywood scriptwriters (see under Hitchcock). A great example of this was the recent Ukrainian revolution. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I learned a great deal more about what was going on from blogs like this one than from any newspaper. The reasons were obvious–the people on the ground knew more. Why wouldn’t they? They had been there all their lives. The Jackie Spinners of the world arrive to be told what’s going on (in a language they quite frequently don’t know). Yes, these “blog correspondents” are biased, but who isn’t? We, the consumers of news, are always left to deal with the writer’s prejudices. Even the best of the MSM reporters carry bias with them. They acknowledge it themselves. And no, I don’t think they’re all as bad as this man in a foreign correspondent’s trench coat. But I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon they go on the “endangered species” list. I’ll be too busy reading foreign “blog correspondents” like this one and this one to worry about it.
UPDATE: Dept. of Spinning the Spinner. Charlotte in the comments (ain’t the blogosphere grand!) has done a little research on Journalist Jackie, who is apparently a recent grad of the Berkeley “J” School. What do the students learn in these places, je me demande…
MORE: Iowahawk should take this all a bit more seriously. Oh, well…
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57 Comments
1. PeterUK:Journalists are always looking for a spokesman or community leader,it saves having to talk to the people involved.This results in them interviewing those who want to be interviewed,the exhibitionists,the pushy,the credit stealers and the out and out nut cases.
The other problem is that nobody at head office knows the difference,thus we end up with the tale of the lonely onanist and his long suffering mother.Make a good B film “The Revenge of the Onanists”
Jan 23, 2005 - 10:37 am 2. chuck:I gave up on the NYTimes back in 1999 precisely because it was evident that they didn’t have any foriegn correspondents on the ground. Consequently, they didn’t have anything to report. I also concur with you as to the utter ignorance and lack of local experience that correspondents carry with them into the field. It is striking what few research skills they seem to have and the plain old common sense and experience. I would argue that the crisis in the MSM is as much due to the lack of competent reporters as anything else. The profession has lost its way and become amateurish in the worst sense.
Jan 23, 2005 - 10:47 am 3. Clio:I think it’s important to distinguish between the two basic types of foreign correspondents that have prevailed to date. On the one hand, you had the war correspondent (he of the flak jacket, stiff drink, exotic sex before it was cool fame) who covered military and diplomatic stuff centering around his OWN country’s policies and personnel. On the other hand, you had the journalist who spent five, ten or more years learning a country/region first hand, reporting back home with an authoritative, analytical voice. Think Alistair Cooke explaining America for a British audience, then returning the favor for us from a comfy chair for 30 years.
It seems to me that both of these foreign correspondent types are now endangered species, having been replaced with the one-size fits all writer who jets into a region with little knowledge of its past or present and not much more insight into his/her own culture or government. They know nothing, and they fear being suckered into reporting a falsehood, but they fear still more being “duped” their own government into serving as a “stooge.” Because it has been next to impossible for anyone to question the veracity of “native” voices in their pieces, they tend to report these as assumed facts. US sources get no such benefit of the doubt.
Blogs and first person reporting from all around the world have enabled locals for the first time to question the veracity of these reporters’ sources (hey, you’re a real sucker!) which makes said reporters very resentful of these new commentators (hence the attack on Iraq the Model). At the same time, military and civilian sources are not sitting by as their integrity is called into question either. Result: the foreign correspondent feels beseiged from several directions and neither they nor their editors seem quite to know what to do in response.
This is delicious. My suggestion: make journalists actually learn something about the places they are sent to cover. This is almost as bad as teachers who don’t know any subject matter. Maybe worse. Get a clue guys.
Jan 23, 2005 - 10:55 am 4. Terrye:I laughed my ass off when I read Tim Blair’s post on this socalled story. Can’t you just imagine Edward Murrow doing a story like this.
It is stupid and silly and I agree with the CO it is just plain odd.
Sometimes I wonder if they just make this s*** up.
Jan 23, 2005 - 10:56 am 5. PeterUK:But how does a correspondent manage to travel all the way to Iraq and out of millions of stories all around her manage to pick up on the one story that belongs on the front page of the Psychiatric Times.Takes talent.
Jan 23, 2005 - 11:19 am 6. richard mcenroe:Terrye ó In many cases, yes. For example, after Michael Herr made his rep with his Vietnam book “Dispatches” he later admitted that most of the material he presented as fact was actually fiction, at best tall tales impossible to verify and in many cases simply made up out of whole cloth. Of course, he remains a darling of the left and got a nice deal writing the voice-overs for Apocalypse Now out of it…
This time around, we have reporters in Baghdad actually filing interviews with their hotel manager as “man in the street” interviews without ever leaving the hotel…
Jan 23, 2005 - 11:25 am 7. algibson:The Jackie Spinner piece is simply not believable.
Jan 23, 2005 - 11:26 am 8. Lola:I’m not surprised. This is what happens when the management cuts their budget for foreign correspondents to the bare bones. And you end up with the garbage like this. Where have all the best correspondents gone?
Jan 23, 2005 - 11:39 am 9. DennisThePeasant:I can understand where Spinner is coming from.
Aren’t 32 year old, live-at-home college students with serious impulse control issues the heart of The Left these days?
She was probably reminded of home in Berkeley…
Jan 23, 2005 - 1:13 pm 10. citizensteve:In the Hitchcock movie, they pulled an ace street smart crime beat reporter and gave him the Foreign/war beat because the regular correspondants were not getting to heart of the matter. Sound like a good idea for 2005.
Jan 23, 2005 - 1:37 pm 11. thibaud:AMEN, Roger. Foreign correspondents are notoriously dense, especially when they lack even basic language skills. Can anyone imagine the quality of the coverage by, say, a Japanese correspondent based in the US who lacks a decent grasp of English? Yet such is the case for the majority of western correspondents in Russia, with the result that dispatches almost always rely heavily on local newspapers and local representatives of western think tanks.
A good bar game would be to assemble twenty Moscow dispatches from the NYT and WaPo and ask everyone to drink each time a Carnegie Foundation staffer is quoted within the first four paragraphs of the article. And drink again if the Carnegie thinktanker’s angle is the same as the angle chosen by the NY/WaPo reporter. Pretty soon you’d all be under the table.
At least in Russia, the reason for this deaf-and-dumb, herd-mentality-squared approach is obvious to anyone who’s lived and worked there: western reporters in Russia do not have any good sources within the groups that actually drive events in that country. That is, the security services, corrupt ministry officials, and clannish, more or less mafioso-style business groups: all of these are a black box to the average western correspondent in Moscow.
Your typical NYT or WaPo reporter parachutes into Moscow after having taken a crash course in Russian and immediately seeks out English-speaking Smart Guys who, he thinks, know what’s going on. Carnegie Foundation’s man on the scene. Stanford Prof Michael McFaul. Liberal Russian journalists with excellent English and pro-western tendencies. Analysts from western investment banks. A few feminists and environmentalists. NONE of these individuals has any real contacts in or insight into decisions made in the Kremlin or the government ministries or (except perhaps in teh case of the bankers) in the shadowy resource-trading groups that drive most of Russia’s economy.
This is why reporting from Russia is always weeks behind the curve: “OOPS! Russia Defaults and Devalues– Who’d-a-thunk it?” Or [soon to come, by end of 2007 at the latest] “WHOA!! Putin Ousted from Power!! Well did you eva??”
It’s as if our non-English-speaking Japanese correspondent in DC were locked inside the Georgetown Hilton with nothing to guide his reportage but the occasional translated copy of Le Monde Diplomatique.
And yet this is what passes for elite, NYT adn WaPo coverage! I can only imagine how dreadful and tone-deaf their coverage of China or Japan must be.
Jan 23, 2005 - 1:48 pm 12. thibaud:If Pinch SUlzberger and his ilk truly believe that their foreign reporting is a major source of high value add to their readers, they’re cruising for a very rough landing.
As soon as someone figures out a process for quickly translating and dispersing high-quality local blogs from Moscow, Tokyo, Cairo etc, these bloggers will blow away any of the western suitcase journalists who land in their backyards for a two year sojourn. The gap between the shit ladled out by the western MSM and the reality on the ground is at least as great, if not greater, in this realm as in any other.
Jan 23, 2005 - 1:52 pm 13. Terrye:richard:
Maybe she was scared shitless to go out on the streets of Baghdad and she picked up this tale hanging out in the hotel bar.
I am sure the Americans could find someone for her to talk to that would not be anymore suspect than this guy.
And I bet they would just love talking to the American woman.
Jan 23, 2005 - 1:57 pm 14. thibaud:Folks, I’m willing to bet that the reporting in Edward R Murrow’s day was just as bad as it is today, perhaps worse. The essential problem is that most societies and polities around the world are not anywhere near so open as ours. The press has much less power than in Anglo-American countries. Press conferences are stage managed and rare; courts give little power to the media; government often works hand in hand with powerful economic elites to limit transparency in all kinds of business and political dealings.
Any journalist who tries to report on events without a rich network of intimate contacts inside the government, including the all-important security services, is simply relaying others’ reporting or gossip. Any reader who has access to local information sources has no real need for the always late and more than a dollar short secondhand reporting that you get from foreign correspondents. 99% of them are useless.
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:01 pm 15. chuck:thibaud,
Simple access to local newspapers and media is a start. In many ways they provide better coverage than the big national/international franchises. For instance, I have seen perfectly decent interviews with veterans back from Iraq in local papers. The small time reporters seem to have less of a stake in promoting the big story line and are more likely to confine themselves to getting the information out.
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:04 pm 16. charlotte:Maybe this story was written as a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the press and its leftist, brainless complaining about our efforts in Iraq. Maybe she snuck it past an editor who didn’t realize he and his institution were being mocked for their unseriousness, abysmal reporting and anti-US perspective. Good on her… maybe…
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:22 pm 17. Roger:I thought of the same possibility, Charlotte, as others undoubtedly have. Let’s keep our eyes peeled. Who knows?
In any case, the editor who let this one slip by ought to have his/her head examined.
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:26 pm 18. charlotte:Oh, dear. She’s serious. Here’s what I found, and it’s rather prescient:
Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism/ My Story: Jackie Spinner
Here is my postcard from the edge. Dateline: the Washington Post. Summer 1997. I spent three weeks in Army boot camp and fired my first M-16. I even led the troops on a morning run. I met with sources in the back rooms of dark restaurants. I camped out in a hotel for weeks and weeks. My mission: a seven-month assignment to write about one of the most sensational military trials in history and help put my paper out front on a national story about drill sergeants, sex and abuse in the Army. When one of my stories led the front page of the Washington Post for the first time, I actually cried…
…Maybe one day they’ll let me go overseas. Maybe one day I’ll have an editor as good as Neil Henry. Maybe one day I’ll be an editor…
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:53 pm 19. Barbara Skolaut:algibson says: “The Jackie Spinner piece is simply not believable.”
I’ll believe the part about the guy beating his mother.
Assume for a moment the story is true. Do we really give a rat’s ass if a loser like this doesn’t like us? Strikes me that would be a badge of honor.
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:54 pm 20. chuck:Charlotte,
She seems to be a very serious young lady. Too serious. Tim Blair was the perfect guy to handle this.
Jan 23, 2005 - 2:59 pm 21. Ron:NY Times correspondent Walter Duranty always knew what was going on while he was Moscow Bureau Chief. It was thought later that he worked for the KGB. He knew. The people in the United States who read his Stalinist propaganda didn’t, he suckered whole generations about how benign the Communist thugs were, won a Pulitzer for it also in the 30’s. 10 million Ukrainians were starved to death on purpose and he covered it up and the New York Times covered for him and still does to this day. Just this year the Ukrainian Government asked the Times to nullify Duranty’s Pulitzer because of the cover up of the Genocide; the Times refused. Google has it all, look it up if you don’t know the story. The Times is bad, they were complicit and still are.
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:00 pm 22. trendsurfer:Hmm, a possible rebellion within the journalist ranks. I like Charlotte’s theory best.
I can see it perfectly. The reporter hears from on high that she is to find and report on Iraqis who have since turned against the United States. Without breaking the template she manages to find an unemployed 32 year old who lives with his mom, beats her as often as he beats to his porno mags, and yet is a devoted Moslem. The editors got their story but are exposed by their myopic view of the war. Maybe Spinner isn’t as dumb as first thought.
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:02 pm 23. thibaud:I’m not sure the story’s on the level. It really does sound like an entry from Breadloaf or another creative writing summer school, with all the usual postmodern New Yorker-ish themes thrown in: the angry male loser, lame porn fetishes, mother hatred, jibes at the US military-industrial complex, etc.
The only thing needed for inclusion in the New Yorker is a present tense narrative and a a trendy gerundic (”-ing…”) title with a sly pomo wink. Perhaps “Smacking Mama” or “Spanking the Monkey [Men]” or …
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:07 pm 24. Yehudit:Sarah Boxer, meet Jackie Spinner. Hell, I bet they are old friends already. . . .
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:09 pm 25. thibaud:“Onan the Barbarian”?
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:26 pm 26. Sisyphus:My addition to Tim Blair’s “The Night the Soldiers Came“
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:45 pm 27. charlotte:What do the students learn in these places, je me demande…
Perhaps how to do effective fieldwork and have your gin and tonics, too. From the above citation:
In ‘97 Spinner had to “meet sources in the back rooms of dark restaurants” and “camp out in a hotel for weeks and weeks” for her “mission” “to write about… abuse in the Army”. This must be the grueling procedure she used in trying to find a little dirt on the troops in Iraq, as well. Aspiring journalists seem to be taught in school that they should rough it in food and hospitality establishments to get the story.
One only hopes our military appreciates the extraordinary exertions and deprivations our dedicated press members undergo to tell one on them.
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:46 pm 28. Terrye:It just seems so ridiculous.
I can see a bunch of soldiers knocking on the door and then pointing a gun at some guy’s head just so they can look at his girly magazines and he is oh so humiliated he beats up Mom and goes and prays.
too weird.
I say she was too scared to leave the hotel bar and made it up. Maybe a bartender told her the tale.
Jan 23, 2005 - 3:47 pm 29. ambisinistral:Poor Ms Skinner. It must be a terrible feeling to be watching the opening night of your terribly tragic drama only to hear the audiance giggling and snorting back guffaws.
What a ridiculous piece of reporting. Porno collection? Slapping him mother? Red pills are joooo pills? What was she, and her editor for that matter, thinking?
Jan 23, 2005 - 4:19 pm 30. chuck:And then there is this trackback at IowaHawk.
Jan 23, 2005 - 4:29 pm 31. PeterUK:“Onan the Librarian”
Jan 23, 2005 - 4:48 pm 32. Terrye:Iowahawk is so funny. I laughed so hard I was ashamed of myself.
Jan 23, 2005 - 4:53 pm 33. rgvdh:It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a story about an Iraqi going nutso after he’s humiliated by having his porno stash revealed is going to get mocked.
I can understand that the Times’ foreign correspondents might not be the highest caliber. But that only explains how a story like this gets submitted, not how it gets printed.
Who’s the idiot editor who approved this thing for publication?
Jan 23, 2005 - 5:03 pm 34. windowlicker:Before you guys lay into Ms Spinner too much, you should check out her work. It’s pretty ironic that you’re attacking one of the few fair-minded reporters the WP has. (BTW, the report everyone is laughing at was back on p. A20, a small human interest story that gives an insight into the Iraqi mind that more than a few could benefit from reading.)
As for her getting out of the hotel bar – she was an embed with the 101st as they went into Fallujah. That’s plenty brave enough for me.
Jan 23, 2005 - 5:27 pm 35. trendsurfer:Windowlicker, regardless of how accomplished the reporter may or may not be, the story was agenda driven. The WP had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with that to place under the story title, “… Iraqi Turns From Friend to Foe.” The reason for the story is just as transparent as ABC News trolling for a funeral on inauguration day.
Jan 23, 2005 - 5:56 pm 36. richard mcenroe:Windowlicker ó If that’s true, then twice the shame on her. The command in Baghdad has already said that no raids took place on that date, so to believe her story, we have to believe that US troops are aimlessly driving around the city like Uday and Qusay looking for a wedding… “Hey, sarge, ya wanna raid that house over there?” “Nah, let’s do the one on the corner, I bet an arts major lives there…”
She should know better and if she does, she’s been sitting on an even bigger story…. so she’s either dishonest or profoundly incompetent…
Jan 23, 2005 - 6:58 pm 37. DennisThePeasant:Before you guys lay into Ms Spinner too much, you should check out her work. It’s pretty ironic that you’re attacking one of the few fair-minded reporters the WP has.
Windowlicker-
LOL.
Fairminded by what standards? Washington Post standards? All that means is that she isn’t ready to send 51% of the electorate to reeducation camps. Yet.
And besides, what good is being fairminded when you’re dumber than a ballpeen hammer? Sure, just another human interest story about those typical horny, mother-beating 32 year old Iraqi students still sponging off the family.
If she the same story about a Muslim African-American living in Cleveland being harassed by the cops, Ms. Spinner would have been hounded out of the profession for her racist stereotyping for suggesting such a man was ‘typical’ of his race or nationality…
Jan 23, 2005 - 7:01 pm 38. charlotte:It took a few minutes to look at her work.
Jackie Spinner was an embedded journo for the recent Falluja assault (that had to be tough) and before and since then has been assigned to Baghdad. Spinner seems to have done some straightforward reporting, although she does call the terrorist/fascistic criminals we’re fighting “the resistance”. She has filed a variety of stories on rebuilding and contractors (Halliburton), Abu Ghraib and prisons, military news and the Fallujah campaign, the shock of war to our soldiers, insecurity of the locals, and other human interest vignettes from Iraq, much like the article Roger has posted about. Some articles appear to be opinion neutral, while others are more colored and defeatist in tone and detail. She wrote up a nice profile of the Warrior Monk in Iraq.
Here are some articles that are less optimistic:
For Iraqis, Not Much to Celebrate in 2004; Fallujah Residents Emerge, Find ‘City of Mosques’ in Ruins; Anxious Iraqis Are Leaving Before Elections; For One Contractor, a Road Too Hard; As 19 Die in Attacks, Allawi Faults Security; Head Scarves Now a Protective Accessory in Iraq; Fear Dims Christmas Eve in Baghdad; U.S. Tries to Corner Fallujah Insurgents; Rebuilding What the Assault Turns to Rubble; and Ominous Calm Settles Over Baghdad.
(I told Roger I didn’t know how to link, and now I’ve inflicted too many on him. Apologies!)
Jan 23, 2005 - 8:06 pm 39. augolden:A great parody/satire of the foreign correspondent is a novel by Evelyn Waugh called SCOOP.
He is right on the money and this was 50 years ago!
Has anybody read it?
Jan 23, 2005 - 8:08 pm 40. someone:Clio: Get journalists to learn things? Are you kidding? PC is barring even our soldiers from getting a clue.
Jan 23, 2005 - 8:33 pm 41. chuck:SCOOP….Has anybody read it?
No, but my understanding is that Waugh was in Abyssinia as a war reporter at time and the characters are based on real people. Link.
Jan 23, 2005 - 9:02 pm 42. ossian:I think everyone is missing the point and I am, quite unexpectedly, going to have to speak up for Ms Spinner. I am a retired newspaper editor, known as being one of the more conservative members of the staff. I have a graduate degree from a Jesuit university in history of religion, though my specialty is Judaeo-Christian and East Asian traditions. (I’m a Chinese speaker and worked for the Japanese department in grad school.) I also speak a half dozen European languages and passed most of the time in those countries as a local. The bio is solely to suggest that I have some qualification and sensibility in this area, though I lack scholarly expertise in Islam.
The soldier in the story was guilty of what a Muslim would view as sacrilege. The Koran always receives special treatment, far beyond what a Christian Bible would receive in a “fundamentalist” church. You must even be careful when packing it in a suitcase.
Throwing it on the girlie magazines (”porn” in bathing suits? come on, guys, get real) was a profanation of his Scripture. The comparable Christian act might be Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, not what most of us view as acceptable. Thus, his spending the night in the mosque and his praying. I don’t have enough of a handle on Iraqi psychology to understand his slapping his mother unless it was what we call in ethology displacement: he has facilitated this blasphemy in a certain sense, grows furious at it but dare not strike the soldiers, so he strikes out at the woman, an acceptable act in a Muslim culture. [At least it would be with one's wife or daughter. I don't know if one's mother comes under a special rubric.] Not pleasant, but one needn’t be a shrink to understand this.
Nothing in this story would have sent up a red flag to me had I been editing it, and Lord knows, I saw lots of those crimson banners in my time. I would have asked Spinner to make the above explicit, since it looks as if she has been immersed in that atmosphere long enough to have picked up on that sensibility but shouldn’t rely on the reader’s knowing it. And who knows what the copy desk did to this?
I took up the link and read Spinner’s “Warrior Monk.” It happens that my early training was with Benedictines, and I saw no false notes there, though I have to tell you that the monks running my prep quite deliberately used fairly racy language (though not obscene) to accustom the boys to the fact that they were no longer in a female domain.
So I may eventually have to do some stiff penance for speaking on behalf of a WaPo reporter, but as far as this hardass is concerned, Spinner’s A-OK and is taking grief for the wrong reasons.
Jan 23, 2005 - 9:42 pm 43. richard mcenroe:Ossian ó So you would have thought a “human-interest” story about an unemployed 32-year-old bachelor who lives at home and slaps his mother around because she saw him allegedly being embarrassed by US troops was worth printing? That’s not a news story, that’s an episode of “Cops.”
And again, since the command has denied any such raid took place, where is the slightest bit of corroborating evidence for this story, which as I understand, was relayed to Spinner ex post facto? Are we to assume that this squad of soldiers was just swanning around Baghdad out of sheer boredom, without orders, looking for someone to harass?
And some of the comments the soldiers are alleged to have made (”You look poor, why?”) strike me as peculiar and unconvincing choices of insult, to say the least, for an American grunt. From what I have heard (admittedly hearsay) from people who have been there, the whole country looks poor, because pretty everyone outside of Saddam’s palaces is. Did Imaad somehow look really, really poor? An Iraqi family with an intact home, video player and the electricity to run it is doing pretty good by local standards. It does, however, strike me as the sort of insult an Iraqi trying to put words in a “rich” American’s mouth might invent, because it seems insulting to him.
Jan 23, 2005 - 9:59 pm 44. chuck:ossian,
I would expect that some respect for one’s mother is fairly universal, although I have read of cases where a recent convert to fanatical Islamism has abused his sisters and mother. I could be wrong, but I think it may be a bit too relativist to pass this off as normal behaviour in another culture. The pill incident is also suggestive. I would guess the man is somewhat unusual in temperament, and probably fanatical before the incident. Would that the reporter had done this investigation, spoken to friends and acquantices of the fellow. But if she doesn’t speak the language and know the ways of the place, how could she do that? But we might know more if she had done. As is, the piece strikes me as a naive vignette. Of course, that doesn’t disqualify it as a work of cultural significance: Margaret Meade got a Ph’D for being made a fool of, but became famous nevertheless for Coming of Age in Samoa.
Jan 23, 2005 - 10:05 pm 45. windowlicker:Charlotte,
I can’t find a case where Spinner calls insurgents “the resistance.” This sets her apart from her WaPo colleagues, never mind my own blessed BBC. And exactly what kind of stories do you expect to hear from Iraq: puppies saved from burning buildings?
As for no raid having taken place, the story is corroborated by more than one neighbour and there is no denial from the military, just statements that their group (Task Force Baghdad) didn’t do it. “He said other U.S. units, including military police, operate in Baghdad.”
As the military are extremely smart people and don’t want to make life any harder for themselves than it has to be, I’m sure that their Iraqi Culture 101 already warns soldiers how not to offend/humiliate people and that this article has been digested and included.
The blogosphere is in danger of turning the awesome fact-checking ability that was so important in Rathergate into slack-minded journo baiting for the hell of it. Time for y’all to get as serious as Ms Spinner.
Jan 23, 2005 - 11:56 pm 46. DennisThePeasant:The blogosphere is in danger of turning the awesome fact-checking ability that was so important in Rathergate into slack-minded journo baiting for the hell of it. Time for y’all to get as serious as Ms Spinner.
Are you nuturing a second career in stand-up comedy?
Our MSM has already turned the theoretically awesome fact-checking ability of objective journalism into slack-minded Administration baiting…for the hell of it.
We’re at least as serious as Ms. Spinner, and far more serious than her editors, which is part of the problem. Their problem.
Jan 24, 2005 - 3:41 am 47. Munir Umrani:Roger,
Maybe bloggers should go to Baghdad and do the reporting. What do you think?
Jan 24, 2005 - 6:32 am 48. JJay:Jackie Spinner appears to be typical of the people drawn to elite journalism. A graduate of Berkeley with an interest in identity politics and ethnic grievance — what kind of shape would you expect her to give to that malleable perception, reality?
Jan 24, 2005 - 6:51 am 49. Fausta:That’s not a news story, that’s an episode of “Cops.”
I first thought of Dog the Bounty Hunter, but Dog’s MO is a lot tougher than the GIs’ (and Cops’). First, Dog kicks the door in. Dog cuffs you before he asks questions. If there’s nothing amiss, he might let you go. Then Mrs. Dog would come back and kick Imaad’s butt from here to tarnation if she found out he’d been beating up his mom.
Jan 24, 2005 - 7:13 am 50. charlotte:I can’t find a case where Spinner calls insurgents “the resistance.”
Windowlicker (??), You bring up a fair point about Spinner’s terminology, because she nearly always uses “insurgents” to tag those whom we’re still fighting. But, in a Hardball interview with Chris Matthews she did say, “I think that they believe very fervently that those foreign resistance fighters are in there and are controlling the city.” She also called them “thieves and foreign fighters”, as well as insurgents.
Here is an instance of her using the resistance” in the article, Fallujah ‘has been seized’ (note the sneer quotes): “Heavy artillery fire and air power seemed to knock the punch out of the resistance, which steadily pulled back from the main U.S. advance…”. That’s a debatable usage, though, and she does use “insurgents” throughout the rest of the story.
In another article, Spinner wrote, “Qais Khazali, did not say whether al-Sadr also intends to disband his militia, the Mahdi Army, and abandon his military resistance to the U.S. occupation.” She contributed to Scott Wilson’s WaPo article Sadr Tells Iraqis to Sustain Resistance that refers to “a hotbed of Sunni resistance“.
Here’s a headline to a story she co-wrote with Khalid Saffar (found on almuajaha.com): “Resistance” Criminals Massacre Three Iraqi Families…with Massive Bomb.
Ossian, I don’t understand why you’d look for “false notes” in Warrior Monk. I thought it a good piece when I called it “nice”. You can see that many other of her up close and personal journo observations are fairly negative, though, if you checked out the other linked stories. Here’s another one: In Fallujah, Marines Feel Shock of War. Maybe we don’t need a lot of “puppies saved from burning building” reports, but do we really need to read the obvious “Wow- our bombs blow up things and we get shot at- bummer” stories about our brave and sacrificing soldiers and Marines who are there to do their military thing?
Jan 24, 2005 - 7:35 am 51. richard mcenroe:Ossian ó “Slack-minded?” You can’t make bricks out of spaghetti; and this sorry story is about that limp.
And let’s face it, it’s not as if the Washington Post hasn’t had A few small problems with bogus human interest stories in the past…
You’re an editor, so what do you think of this question that this story never answers: What were the US troops doing at Imaad’s door? Did they have a tip? Did they see something on the property? Did they see the glow from the TV and want to catch the Patriots game? Are they simply roaming the city, bursting into homes at random?
And I notice you didn’t answer my question ó would you, as a professional editor, have run this story?
Jan 24, 2005 - 7:36 am 52. chuck:Dunno Charlotte,
The examples you quote don’t particularly bother me, and resistance can be used be used with its traditional meaning: “…punch out of the resistance,” strikes me as falling in that category.
I am in fact not particularly bothered by the story of Imaad; you can see how much sympathy it has aroused everywhere. But there is missing information and context to the story, that’s what bothers me. That’s what hard for a correspondent to track down and what separates the professional from the “I was there.”
Jan 24, 2005 - 8:12 am 53. charlotte:Chuck,
Sorry if I wasn’t clear that those examples aren’t too egregious to me, either. I couldn’t find the instance that stood out to me yesterday, and tried to note above that Spinner nearly always uses the term “insurgents”. Still, she and WaPo on occasion have used “resistance” in characterizing people fighting us in Iraq, and I cited one for someone who said he was unaware of any (”the foreign resistance fighters”). I also included a few others that describe the fighting against us as “resistance”. I carefully avoided any references to “pockets of resistance” and such, of which there were many.
I also said that “punch out of the resistance” was debatable. She probably is referring to the state and activity of resistance, as opposed to the doers. Technically, semantically, the bad guys ARE resisting us in our efforts to stop their unlawful and terrorist activity and subdue them. The military uses the term for its purposes, irrespective of other implications. At some point, though, if journos keep calling their fighting and shooting at us “resistance” and terming what they do as “resisting” and forming “pockets of resistance”, as opposed to committing terrorist acts, setting up gang strongholds, and trying to kill and intimidate the police, troops and civilian population and elude capture, then it’s not a huge leap for readers to perceive them as “resistance” fighters in a war against invading aggressors. Enough people do see it this way. Anyway, much ado about a perfectly acceptable word, Chuck, and you are more than welcome to resist this nonsense!
(What about “pockets of perfidious persistence”, instead?)
One problem with Spinner’s Imaad shame-story is that the Arab press might be keen to pick up on it and amplify its significance to a vastly different audience than Americans. An incident and story that seem silly to us could resonate more deeply with the Muslim faithful. Not exactly what our troops and a struggling free Iraq need just now.
Jan 24, 2005 - 10:22 am 54. windowlicker:charlotte,
Thanks for the research. None of the examples you give uses “the resistance” in the weaselly way so favoured by journalists that implies a parallel to the Maquis. I think we can agree on that.
It doesn’t really bother me in the end whether a particular blog copies this story or not. I’ll stop reading the ones that continue trashing decent journalists, just like I stopped reading MSM that were trashing decent pols. Survival of the most honest.
Jan 24, 2005 - 11:15 am 55. Katherine:ìSCOOP….Has anybody read it?î
I always considered it a textbook on journalistic ethics and accuracyÖ. lately summarized for us as ìfake but accurate reportingî.
I have no doubt that Jackie Spinner got her facts right: undoubtedly there are unemployed liberal arts majors with little porno collections in Baghdad, some of them slap their mothers at the least provocation, some of them turned more religious in the recent months, some of them refuse to take Joo-pills for their medical conditions and some of them feel humiliated by the presence of Americans in their country. It is also quite true that American troops are currently in Baghdad and conduct house searches when occasion arises. Some of the soldiers may consider the fact that a Muslim would keep girlie-mags next to the Koran funny.
The only problem is how and if at all the above facts connect with one another. But why bother about such trifling details. Fact-checking cannot and will not stand between us and the publishing deadline. Especially if the story fits into the all important narrative: American imperialist pigs keep oppressing the natives.
Jan 24, 2005 - 11:26 am 56. charlotte:Windowlicker,
Let’s agree to slightly disagree on one point, because Spinner’s use of “those foreign resistance fighters” qualifies as an unfortunate choice of terms to me. Jihadists/terrorists/the criminally insane/or imported suckers and dead-enders would be more accurate and less politically loaded for some of us Americans AND Iraqis.
You seem not to have any problem with the tone of Spinner’s dire-and-desperate human interest stories in Iraq. Are you not troubled by the paucity of liberated-and-happy stories by her and her fellow press? Do you think they’re not often reported because they don’t exist in any number, or that bad news trumps the good in wartime and all’s fair…? Is this little tempest really a matter of a decent journo getting trashed, or an understandable reaction to stories that hyper-criticize even the trivial things the administration or our troops may (or may not) do in Iraq?
Troops: Conduct a war, face death, liberate a country from the Butcher of Baghdad, face death, rebuild the infrastructure, face death, keep trying to achieve a high level of security against homocidal fascist criminals, face death, AND remember not to place a Koran you find amidst any girlie mags you retrieve from a hiding spot, else all is lost and “Americans are devils” for your thoughtless act.
Jan 24, 2005 - 1:20 pm 57. JK Ribera:Troops: Conduct a war, face death, liberate a country from the Butcher of Baghdad, face death, rebuild the infrastructure, face death, keep trying to achieve a high level of security against homocidal fascist criminals, face death, AND remember not to place a Koran you find amidst any girlie mags you retrieve from a hiding spot, else all is lost and “Americans are devils” for your thoughtless act.
Superbly stated.
Jan 24, 2005 - 1:39 pm