Semi-Daily Journal Archive

The Blogspot archive of the weblog of J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and Chair of the PEIS major at U.C. Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Dan Froomkin Watches Journamalism in Action...

He writes:

Dan Froomkin - Bush vs. Reality - washingtonpost.com: Bush vs. RealityBy Dan FroomkinSpecial to washingtonpost.comThursday, September 21, 2006; 12:34 PMOn the dominant issue of our time, the president is in denial.By most reliable accounts, three and a half years into the U.S. occupation, Iraq is in chaos -- if not in a state of civil war, then awfully close. But President Bush insists it's not so.He says the people he talks to assure him that the press coverage about how bad things are in Iraq is not to be trusted.You might think that the enormous gulf between Bush's perceptions and reality on such a life-and-death topic would be, well, newsworthy. But if members of the Washington press corps consider it news at all, apparently it's old news. They report Bush's assertions about Iraq without noting that his fundamental assessment of the situation is dramatically contradicted by the reporting from their own colleagues on the ground. And in the rare circumstances when they directly confront the president with observations that conflict with his own, they let it drop too quickly...

Today's example: Wolf Blitzer.

Dan notes some pushback from CNN Iraq correspondent Michael Ware--who is fast moving up the ranks of the Shrill:

Soledad O'Brien: O'Brien: "You heard what the president had to say, which is, essentially, the good news that out there is not getting reported. Have you found that to be true on the ground where you have been?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: "Oh, look, really, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, the fact that, when President Bush talks about those living on the ground, and he cites General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad, I mean, these are men who could not be more divorced from the Iraqi reality. They very much live within a bubble, be it physically within the Green Zone or be it within the bubble of heavy U.S. protection. And this is true even for their advisers and for the commanders and the American soldiers. I mean, they never take the uniform off. The Iraqi people can never talk to them unless through a filter. It's very different than living amongst them. And when people say not enough good news stories are being told, you ask an Iraqi family what it is that they're experiencing when their street -- the bodies of their neighbors are showing up on their streets. Their kids can't go to school, for fear of crossing sectarian lines. And the kidnapping and killings are just going on around them...

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

And fire Wolf Blitzer. If he can't be a reporter, he shouldn't try.

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