davidsteven.com
¦connections¦
world bank presidentdaily summit
whose agenda? (pdf)
a long peace?
slugger o'toole
developments
blame the government
bookslut
photoblogs
gizmodo
eurosavant
science blog
arts and letters
bbc news
talking points
kausfiles
instapundit
andrew sullivan
matt welch
hit and run
taxing matters
intel dump
econ log
portadown news
neal pollack
future pundit
google compute
touchgraph
slate
digital clock
dr html
independent kittens
penguin abuse
convert me
geographic names
¦etcetera - miscellaneous and irregular¦
An interesting example of BBC distortion pops out when you compare one of Philippa Thomas's entries in the BBC Reporters' Log, with what really seems to have happened.On 1 April, Thomas attended a US press conference in Washington and wrote:
"That was one of the most animated Pentagon briefings I've seen in a long while. Donald Rumsfeld talking about his 'excellent, superb plan', saying that no one's backing away from the plan."
However, the transcript clearly records Rumsfeld denying that it was ‘his’ plan (“I'm not the person who designs war plans”), but a plan controlled by General Tommie Franks to which he made a contribution (“The task was Tom Franks'. He did superbly, and he has then gotten us to all agree to it”).
It seems a fairly cut and dried case of Thomas writing what she wanted to be true - rather than what was actually said. More on this below...
Whose Agenda? Way back when, I ran a few pieces on Andrew Gilligan's war-time blogging (1, 2, 3). These caused a bit of a stir. Few people remembered that Gilligan had blogged from Baghdad during the war, while the stream-of-consciousness nature of the blog format allowed an interesting insight into his stance, attitudes and assumptions.
So cue an instalanche - and various other downpourings of new traffic (thanks to Chris Bertram, Tim Blair, Jeff Jarvis, Brian Micklethwait, Natalie Solent, Andrew Sullivan, among many others).
Of course, Andrew Gilligan was only one contributor to a much more extensive blog. 141 correspondents posted to the BBC Reporters' Log a total of 1343 times - with other senior reporters such as John Simpson and Rageh Omaar chipping in. The complete blog runs to 140,000 words, with posts coming in from Iraq, a large number of allied bases, and from capital cities around the world. And it's all still sitting there - freely available and waiting for a more detailed analysis.
So, working with the ever-resourceful Mark Weston, I have just released "Whose Agenda?", a report which asks whether it supports accusations from some commentators that the BBC's war reporting was biased and unreliable.
Such claims are strenuously resisted by the BBC. Its Director General, Greg Dyke, for example, contrasted the BBC's absolute commitment to 'independence and impartiality' with the 'unquestioning' approach of the US media. "In the area of impartiality, as in many other areas, we must ensure we don't become Americanised," he said.
He told the Hutton Inquiry last week that the BBC defended the Gilligan report on WMD so strenuously, because it felt that it was under extreme pressure from the government. " It seemed to me a much more general attack... on the BBC...[Alistair Campbell] was saying that we had run an agenda against the war... These are very serious charges to make against a broadcasting organisation."
So can these serious charge be substantiated? According to our analysis, there's good news and bad news for the BBC. On the one hand, the Reporters Log is generally of a very high quality. It offered an interesting and innovative perspective on the Iraq war, giving the reader a window on events as they developed. The blog format really worked out for them - allowing reporters to tell a story from multiple perspective and with minimum intervention from editors (a timely lesson given the current Sac Bee controversy).
However, quantitative analysis of blog posts found that:
- 76% of all posts that were sceptical of claims made about progress by either side raised doubts about Coalition progress.
- 58% of reports on Coalition progress focused on setbacks, which were also reported in greater details than the 42% of posts that dealt with Coalition successes.
- 60% of posts that analysed Iraqi strategy were positive and 40% negative, 69% of all posts that focused on Coalition strategy were critical and 31% positive.
- BBC reporters seemed much more sceptical about Coalition claims, than they were about what the Iraqis were telling them.
During the war, a persistent theme was that Coalition strategy had failed to meet expectations, with military planners surprised by the nature or strength of Iraqi resistance:
"The Pentagon has never seriously doubted that it would win this war, but central to the US strategy is the manner of victory - swift, decisive and relatively bloodless. That may not be how things turn out." (Jonathan Marcus, 27 March)The veracity of the Coalition is frequently called into question, while the Iraqi Information Minister (remember him) gets an easy ride:
"They didn't expect the level of harassment they are experiencing, nor did they expect the Fedayeen to fight so hard. They certainly didn't expect this kind of campaign with its hit and run tactics." (Gavin Hewitt, 29 March)
"The clear message from the coalition to the Iraqi people is: "You are not the enemy. We want regime change and are not here to harm the Iraqi people". But if you start plunging the city into darkness, cutting off the water, bringing down the telephone exchanges and generally making life difficult for people, then I think the nature of the struggle will start to change." (Paul Wood, 30 March)
"That has been the story of Nasiriya, American over-confidence unravelling day by day as they struggle to get to grips with Iraqi guerrilla tactics." (Andrew North, 31 March)
"This mad dash towards Baghdad seems to be forgotten about now it is all about moving slowly and cautiously towards the capital." (David Willis, 1 April)
"I know there's been a lot of wishful thinking in the Coalition in all sorts of ways." (Andrew Gilligan, 2 April)
"There is simply no truth in the claims that American troops are surrounding [the airport]." (Andrew Gilligan, 3 April)Some correspondents also seem to have a near-magical ability to judge the mood of the Iraqi people:
"The US has a history of premature claims in this conflict." (Andrew Gilligan, 5 April)
"In a sense it's quite crude propaganda - of course there is propaganda going on everywhere - but it's particularly crude on Iraqi television." (Mike Baker, 2 April).
"The Iraqis are saying [the dust storm] has been sent by God to save them. They may not like Saddam a whole lot, but they dislike the Americans even more." (Andrew Gilligan, 27 March)At its best, this ability is comical. Andrew Gilligan, on 3 April, tells us that "we went down to the market yesterday and people said they thought it was more of the same from Centcom." Does make you wonder, though, about a man accused of putting words in other people's mouths...
"What the crowds are saying is, 'We are glad that Saddam Hussein is gone or going - but we don't like the Americans, and what we want is to be able to rule our own lives'." (Paul Wood, 9 April)
What it costs... Joel Cohen and Nancy Krauss have estimated what various diseases cost the US and its citzens:
Heart disease, $58 billion, 17 million people
Cancer, $46 billion, 9 million people
Trauma, $44 billion, 44 million people
Mental disorders, $30 billion, 20 million people
Lung disorders, $29 billion, 41 million people
Diabetes, $20 billion, 10 million people
Hypertension, $18 billion, 27 million people
Cerebrovascular disease, $16 billion, 2 million people
Osteoarthritis, $16 billion, 16 million people
Pneumonia, $16 billion, 4 million people
Back problems, $13 billion, 13 million people
Kidney disease, $10 billion, 2 million people
Endocrine disorders, $10 billion, 18 million people
Skin disorders, $9 billion, 20 million people
Infectious diseases, $6 billion, 16 million people
Aspirin: the unstoppable march. In 1998, Charles H. Hennekens, of the University of Miami School of Medicine, demonstrated that aspirin reduced the risk of heart attack.
His latest study underlines the importance of this cheap - and consistently surprising - drug:
"We found that the current totality of evidence strongly supports our initial findings from the Physicians' Health Study that aspirin significantly reduces the risk of a first heart attack in apparently healthy individuals. This data, along with the findings that aspirin reduces the risk of death by 23 percent if given during a heart attack and by 15 percent in a wide range of people who have survived prior cardiovascular events, demonstrate the need for wider utilization of aspirin.
"Yet despite the clearly demonstrated cardio-protective benefits of aspirin, this medication remains alarmingly underutilized among survivors of prior events, those having a heart attack and apparently healthy men and women, whose 10-year risk is 10 percent or more," Hennekens continued. "We hope the latest findings result in greater awareness on the part of healthcare providers and the general public and motivate increased aspirin utilization, which could result in significant reductions of premature cardiovascular deaths and first heart attacks."
Confused of Cancun. There seemed to be two good reasons for wanting the WTO talks in Cancun to succeed.
First, economists think free trade is good for ordinary consumers (though bad for some producer lobbies) and good for growth more generally. Second, developmentalists have convinced themselves that poor countries will benefit massively from more open agriculture markets.
So what's confusing about the collapse of the talks is how happy many on the left and in the developing world seem to be.
According to Alternet, Cancun "was the biggest triumph for anti-WTO critics since Seattle four years ago, and marked the emergence of a permanent new power bloc of once-powerless nations defending the rights of hundreds of millions of small farmers." As the talks collapsed, protestors were singing: "Our world is not for sale, my friend!"
"This is a great development for people and small businesses,'' said Friends of the Earth International Trade Coordinator Ronnie Hall said. Protest leader Rafael Alegria described it as "a victory for the people. We expected it, we planned for it, and now we're celebrating it."
Some poor country delegates were pleased too. Tom Turner, from Earthjustice, reports that "The delegates I happened to hear -- from Uganda, Malaysia, Indonesia, Guinea -- were happy, explaining that they had been ignored for far too long and that maybe now the rich countries would take them seriously."
The Telegraph, meanwhile, reports: "scenes of chaos as trade ministers and delegates from African nations stormed into the conference press centre in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun, whooping that the talks were over."
George Yeo, Singapore's trade minister, reports also noticed that "delegates from some poor countries applauded and hooted with delight after the talks collapsed."
Others are not so sure it's all good news for the poor.
Oxfam's verdict was that: "There are things to be pleased about, namely the rise of the 'southern voice' in resisting being bullied into a deal by rich countries, [but] although they've avoided getting a bad deal they're not getting a good deal [either]. The failure is nothing to celebrate, although the strength of the developing country voice is something to be pleased about."
Adriano Campolina Soares from ActionAid Brazil wrote that "Protestors partied in Cancun last night celebrating the collapse of the WTO trade talks - but it's not all good news for poor countries. It's a crying shame rich countries missed a chance to put the needs of the world's poorest at the heart of global trade."
Wolfgang Clement, German Economics And Labour Minister, was critical of protestors: “In Cancun, slogans have defeated common sense... Whoever is celebrating now, will not be celebrating for long.”
Ron Bailey, meanwhile, described it as "a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face, the trade negotiators from the poor countries are tonight celebrating what they will all too soon realize is a Pyrrhic victory over the rich WTO countries. The fact that the lobbyists for American cotton farmers, European sugar beet growers, and American textile manufacturers are also celebrating the collapse should really frighten the poor countries who forced the talks into collapse."
The Guardian's farm subsidy blog, finally, airs a "counter-conspiracy theory" as to why the talks collapsed:
"Everyone presumed that the talks would go on into the night beyond the 4pm deadline. Why? Because they always do. Everyone that is, except the chairman of the summit who being Mexican and knowing it was Mexico’s National Day the following day was determined to keep to the original deadline.
Had the talks ran on into the night then it would have given developing countries, particular those from Africa, more time to consider the crucial concessions that EC Commissioner Pascal Lamy made on Sunday effectively taking investment and two other "Singapore" conditions (which had been the chief stumbling block for developing countries) out of the negotiations."
Richard Posner uses "academic" as a term of abuse. He's also getting stuck into deliberative democracy:
"Deliberative democrats think that what democracy involves is not the messy, noisy, winner-take-all of the electoral process, but a collective and cooperative search for the right answer to our common problems -- the sort of thing that Dewey wrote about for more than half a century. Posner's take on the matter is that the enthusiasts for deliberative democracy want to substitute the moral prejudices of professors for the wishes of the plain man or the slightly less plain politician."
He's also thought-provoking on why the American republic is what it is:
"The founding fathers, Posner says, did not want to set up a democracy but a mixed government. That is in fact what they created -- with monarchical elements in the presidency, aristocratic elements in the Senate and Supreme Court and democratic elements in the lower house. The whole thing was intended to be a balance of interests in the way Cicero said successful republics must be."
Via the ever reliable Arts and Letters Daily.
Passive saboteurs. Martin Peretz, editor of the left leaning New Republic, is savage in his critique of NGO policy towards Iraq.
"It is the departure of NGOs, with their relentless pretense to be the conscience of humanity amidst all its depravity, that truly rankles...
"Many of the NGOs that are on their way out of Iraq from fear--if we believe them--maintain elaborate operations in Liberia, where their employees were until recently probably more at risk than in Iraq. After all, Liberia has been plagued by wanton, random killing. And yet the relief workers soldiered on...
"I do not wish to demean the value of relief workers and their contributions. But let's face the truth: Any success in rebuilding Iraq would undermine the widely diffused ideological presumption of relief organizations and many international agencies that powerful nation-states cannot provide the impetus for decent change or even real relief among suffering pre-industrial and pre-modern populations. That is a task, the humanitarian professionals argue, for the practitioners of the post-sovereign ideal--for them, that is.
"It is for this reason that these professionals actually engage in what one might call passive sabotage in Iraq, a mean-spirited version of what Thorstein Veblen called 'the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.' They do not want the water to flow if the tap is turned by Paul Bremer."
Via Instapundit.
PJ O'Rourke interview in the Onion:
"About 20 years ago, Michael Kinsley from Slate was editor of Harper's, and he sent me to Russia right at the butt-end of the Brezhnev years, to go along on a riverboat tour with a bunch of leftists. The tour had been organized by The Nation, so it was a bunch of old Nation readers who were still having huge fights with each other over Trotsky.
"They were hilarious. I always thought there was some romance to that '30s leftist stuff, even though I'm a Republican. You know, like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about Trotsky.
"Anyway, I had such a ball on that trip. I had really not been out of the United States much, except for Mexico. I thought, "Jesus Christ, this is like a whole new world." Instead of writing Michael Jackson one-glove jokes, all I had to do was go to these weird places and keep my eyes and ears open."
The New Foreign Correspondence. John Maxwell Hamilton and Eric Jenner have a weighty, if slightly ponderous, piece on the impact of technology on foreign correspondents in this month's Foreign Affairs.
"Technology-driven changes are reshaping international news flows by lowering the economic barriers of entry to publishing and broadcasting and encouraging the proliferation of non-traditional international news sources. The audience – now fragmented and active – is far better able to choose and even shape the news…
"Blogs have become the most recognized electronic evolution in news: from highly personalized and niche journals…to mass audience chronicles… The ability of the public to get international news for itself may compensate for dwindling international reporting by the traditional media."
What blogging needs, I think, is its Ryszard Kapuscinski. As an agency reporter (“pure slavery”), not only could Kapuscinski go wherever he wanted, it was his job to go wherever he wanted. “I was full of stories,” he says.
In comparison, other reporters, with their occasional deadlines, occupy what Granta editor Ian Jack describes as a “luxurious and relatively torpid vantage point.” It doesn’t make sense for them to be too interested in what is going on around them.
“My responsibility was always to cover an event: to locate the geopolitical story, and as quickly as possible send a cable down the line with its details,” Kapuscinski writes.
But “a press cable is a very conservative medium for conveying news. We are always limited: by the number of words, by the time we can get on the machine, by the money, by the information that the newspapers back home want to receive. But the realities we face, especially in the Third World, are so much richer, more complicated, than a newspaper will ever allow us to report.”
What’s missing is “what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town, the smell; the thousand, thousand elements of reality that are part of the event you read about in 600 words in your morning paper.”
A web log would have removed Kapuscinski’s “feeling of inadequacy”. He’d still have had the immediacy, but he’d also have had the space to digress, embroider, and speculate. His story-telling could have been cumulative, rather than a series of discreet bulletins. Themes would have emerged over time. And he could have used back links to reawaken a story that new developments proved prescient, poignant or even foolish.
Another Israel Story. "Another Palestinian has committed suicide after watching a report by BBC middle east correspondent Orla Guerin. 'Another day, another body, another depressing cliché lent false weight by the heavy, ever-sinking tones of my glum half Dublin accent,' said Ms Guerin yesterday."
From the ever-excellent Portadown News.
No Surrender at the BBC. Fabian Monds is Northern Ireland's representative on the BBC board of governors. Documents recently released to the Hutton inquiry by the Beeb showing him relying on his Ulster experience to bolster the resolve of BBC Director General, Greg Dyke.
Emailing Dyke, Monds advocates an uncompromising approach, even though the BBC cannot be sure of its ground:
"Your 'no surrender' approach to this very difficult situation is a very familiar Ulster strategy. You are of course absolutely correct, this is indeed a time for the Governors to stand up and be counted… There does appear to be some uncertainty over the claim by Andrew Gilligan’s source. But this is less important than responding vigorously to the extravagant accusations of lying from Alistair Campbell and others. So I fully support your determination not to buckle to Government pressure, whilst also contemplating the possible consequences for the Corporation of such a principled stand. But the consequences of giving in would be greater.
"I suppose that it may be possible to reach a settlement with No 10 which both sides can live with at some stage – you and some of our colleagues are much better placed then me to assess this. But that is for another day."
He few days later, he emails again. The hardline, he believes, has worked:
"Your leadership made it possible for our 'senousness and toughness' to be translated into better than
an 'away draw'"
"Thnaks [sic] Fabian," Dyke responds. "Very kind - and thanks for your steadfastness throughout."