something nice about the media

JON CARROLL ~ SF CHRONICLE

Back in the day, it seemed as if newspapers would be a fun profession to get into. Excitement, camaraderie, occasional access to glamour, daily discussions of important issues, plus a chance to write and get paid for it. And maybe: hats at a rakish angle.

Well, lordy. Now apparently we are all untrustworthy hacks under the influence of vile outdated philosophies, rushing to judgment, sensationalizing the news (although: How exactly do you sensationalize the Michael Jackson story? It's hard enough just to report the damn thing without writing kiddie porn), making errors, lying on expense accounts, and none of it really matters anyway because newspapers are dead dead dead because of that Internet thing. I've probably left a few things out.

Well, I don't believe a word of it. I do not think newspapers are dead, I do not think newspapers are filled with errors, I do not think the press is "liberal" -- a word that has in any event lost its meaning to all but a fringe group of chat-show morons -- and ... OK, maybe people are lying on expense accounts. I wouldn't know; I work at home. What am I going to expense? Purina cat chow?

The word "liberal" has come to imply wild, outside-the-mainstream ideas and beliefs. Let's see whether the American press can fairly be described that way: The American press supports the idea that democracy is the superior system of government, and if all the nations in the world were democracies, it would be a better place. The American press supports the stock market and believes that it is vital to the continued functioning of the free enterprise system, which it also supports. The American press believes that religion is an important part of American life. The American press supports members of the U.S. military and believes that they are necessary for the maintenance of freedom, which it also supports.

The American press was and is anti-communist. The American press was and is opposed to terrorism. The American press is owned by corporations, mostly large corporations, and supports the continued consolidation of media power. The American press does not use dirty words, does not support sex among underage citizens, does not support illegal drug use and does not support the desecration of any religious institution, building or icon.

It does often give a platform to, and sometimes supports, people who advocate the right to abortion, gay rights, free expression and safe sex. These are not minority or radical opinions. In order to "prove" that the American press is "liberal," you have to select a very few trees from a very large forest.

And yet, a lot of American newspapers and broadcasters are going out of their way to prove that they are not liberal. They are accepting the premise. They are being bullied by zealots and by a few powerful operatives who have slithered into positions of power in the Republican Party. They are not standing firm. Perhaps they are afraid of declining revenues. If they are changing their positions because they fear declining revenues, they are not run by ideologues -- they are run by businessmen. Of course they are run by businessmen. Get a damn grip.

So what's going on? I think it's possible that any discussion of race, religion or class is considered "liberal." I think the idea that there are two Americas, one rich and one poor, and that in a democracy things should be done that improve the lives of all Americans -- I think that's a "liberal" idea. I think the idea that race is at times an insurmountable handicap in American life is a "liberal" idea. I think that the idea that what class you belong to largely determines your economic future is a "liberal" idea.

I think when the new president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, detects liberal bias in public television, he is talking about reports on environmental damage, government cover-ups and inadequately supplied U.S. soldiers. These things are not "liberal" any more than a rock is "liberal," but reporting on them is.

Tomlinson wants balance, and the media scramble to say, "Oh yes, we want more balance, yes, balance, we are for it." And yet if toxic chemicals are spilling into San Francisco Bay, it would not be journalistically ethical to produce a report that says that toxic chemicals are not spilling into San Francisco Bay. If soldiers are using improvised sheet-metal shields on their vehicles in Iraq, it would not be journalistically ethical to say that they were not using sheet-metal shields.

Truth is probably not knowable, but facts are knowable. It is either 72 degrees outside my window or it isn't. You can't balance the report on 72 degrees with one that says it's 58 degrees -- that's stupid. And all of the journalists I have known in, oh God, 44 years in the business have wanted to get the facts right. All of them.

And yet, of course, they don't succeed. The media make mistakes every day. There are incorrect things in every newspaper and on every news broadcast. These are fallible human institutions. They get stuff wrong. Let's talk about that on Thursday.

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Maybe what we need is a magazine about the media that talk about the media, a sort of meta-magazine that prints pre-apologies for sins yet to be committed.

Who can take tomorrow, dip it in a dream, separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream? jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

------------------------------------pt. II--------------------------------------

Long ago in another galaxy, this paper ran a front-page story with the headline: "A Great City's People Forced to Drink Swill." It was about the bad coffee served in many fine San Francisco cafes, and I believe undercover urn inspections were part of the investigative procedure.

I can only imagine if that headline were to run today. The next day, the following correction would appear:

"The Chronicle erred when it said that residents of San Francisco were forced to drink a beverage. All residents did so voluntarily; any implication that unlawful detention or extortion took place is incorrect, and The Chronicle regrets the implication. 'Swill' is defined as 'kitchen refuse given to swine,' and at no time were any coffee urns filled with kitchen refuse given to swine. The Chronicle regrets the error. The population of San Francisco is approximately 786,000, and thus is not 'great' in the sense of 'wonderfully large or sprawling.' If readers inferred that, we regret the error. In fact, The Chronicle regrets the whole thing and wants to lie down on the daybed."

Look: Newspapers are a human enterprise run by fallible beings. Surgeons make mistakes; accountants make mistakes; journalists make mistakes. As Steven Winn pointed out last week, we apologize too darn much for making mistakes. Of course we're sorry, but the quest for perfection is just that, a quest. We never get there. You never get there. We hate hate hate it when we get facts wrong, but we are actually after bigger game.

Look: Last week I wrote that the town of Cordova in Alaska is east of the town of Cordova in Alaska, which is very Zen, but I meant Anchorage. It was an artifact of rewrite, and I'm sorry, but it was a good column anyway. On Monday I wrote that 100,000 people were killed in the flu pandemic of 1918-19; actually, it was 100 million people. Sloppy sloppy sloppy.

Mitch Albom, a columnist in Detroit, was almost fired because he said two basketball players attended a game that they had not, in fact, attended. It was wrong, but -- who was hurt? What damage was done? The United States is hiring untrained teenagers and making them prison guards in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mitch Albom is the problem? Come bloody on.

The media are under attack because we try to find stuff out. We are under attack because we say what we believe to be true. (Even more annoyingly, we are protected by the Constitution.) We are a reality-based institution in a faith-based culture, and we are paying for it. Journalists die doing their jobs, which is more than you can say for lobbyists, TV commentators or corporate lawyers.

The problem is that we are fair-minded. We know that we make mistakes. We want to get better. The fair-minded have no chance against zealots. Zealots lie because the ends justify the means, and we say, "Oh, gosh, we're going to investigate and strive and improve." Are the zealots going to investigate and strive and improve? Of course not: They have an agenda, and the agenda does not include self-assessment. The zealots are working out of the Che Guevara handbook, friends.

Do the media do awful stuff? You bet they do. Should the media strive to get better? You bet they should. Should they stop cravenly caving in to every hack with a megaphone? Absolutely -- we do our best, and without us, citizens would really be in trouble. We're a goddamn bastion, and it would be nice if we acted proud of that once in a while.

And also, if I could say, what we do is very hard. Not me; I just sit at home in my bunny slippers woolgathering about red-necked phalaropes. But I respect the actual folks who go get the news, find the sources who know what the news means, find other people with different interpretations, read documents of unparalleled tedium, and then produce 800 words formed into sentences and paragraphs that tell readers something they did not know already, by 5 o'clock, with a jackhammer going off outside and a kid down with the flu.

People are forever writing me: "How come the media isn't covering blah." Well, if you even know about blah, it's probably because you read about it in the media. Sometimes maybe it was KPFA or thesmokinggun.com or "7 on Your Side, " but the media covered it.

And if we don't cover it initially, we cover it eventually, and we cover why we didn't cover it initially. Reporters get lazy and editors get distracted and total horse droppings get into the paper, but literal horse droppings occasionally show up in our fresh vegetables and spinach is still good for you. It is so easy to slag the media; such an abdication of responsibility. Officer, the media made me do it; I am but putty in their hands.

You should not believe everything you read, but you should be grateful that there's stuff to read at all, and that people care about whether that stuff is right, and that they will keep caring next week and next month and next year. Be different, be revolutionary -- say something nice about the media.

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I even collect newspaper errors. The New York Times spoke recently of "towing the line," which is not right unless you're writing about the Volga boatmen.

This looks like a job for me, so everybody just follow me, 'cause we need a little controversy, 'cause it feels so empty without jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

get your minds around it

Reports of Quran desecration are nothing new
By Molly Ivins / Fort Worth Star-Telegram

AUSTIN, Texas - As Riley used to say on an ancient television sitcom, ''This is a revoltin' development.'' There seems to be a bit of a campaign on the right to blame Newsweek and its since-retracted story for the anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamic countries.
Uh, people, I hate to tell you this, but the story about Americans abusing the Quran in order to enrage prisoners has been out there for quite some time. The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004, when the Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten, but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Quran. The strike was ended by force-feeding.
Then came the report, widely covered in American media last December, by the International Red Cross concerning torture at Gitmo. I wrote at the time: ''In the name of Jesus Christ Almighty, why are people representing our government, paid by us, writing filth on the Qurans of helpless prisoners? Is this American? Is this Christian? What are our moral values? Where are the clergymen on this? Speak up, speak out.''
The reports kept coming: Dec. 30, 2004, ''Released Moroccan Guantanamo Detainee Tells Islamist Paper of His Ordeal,'' reported the Financial Times. ''They watched you each time you went to the toilet; the American soldiers used to tear up copies of Quran and throw them in the toilet," said the released prisoner.
On Jan. 9, 2005, Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Sunday Times of London, said: ''We now know a great deal about what has gone on in U.S. detention facilities under the Bush administration. Several government and Red Cross reports detail the way many detainees have been treated. We know for certain that the United States has tortured five inmates to death. We know that 23 others have died in U.S. custody under suspicious circumstances. We know that torture has been practiced by almost every branch of the U.S. military in sites all over the world - from Abu Ghraib to Tikrit, Mosul, Basra, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.''
We know that no incidents of abuse have been reported in regular internment facilities and that hundreds have occurred in prisons geared to getting intelligence. We know that thousands of men, women and children were grabbed almost at random from their homes in Baghdad, taken to Saddam's former torture palace and subjected to abuse, murder, beatings, semi-crucifixions and rape.
All of this is detailed in the official reports. What has been perpetrated in secret prisons to 'ghost detainees' hidden from Red Cross inspection, we do not know. We may never know.
This is America? While White House lawyers were arguing about what separates torture from legitimate 'coercive interrogation techniques,' the following was taking place: Prisoners were hanged for hours or days from bars or doors in semi-crucifixions; they were repeatedly beaten unconscious, woken and then beaten again for days on end; they were sodomized; they were urinated on, kicked in the head, had their ribs broken, and were subjected to electric shocks.
''Some Muslims had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Quran; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families. It was routine for the abuses to be photographed in order to threaten the showing of the humiliating footage to family members.''
The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by ''guards'' handling copies of the Quran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. A senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology. A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Qurans.
So where does all this leave us? With a story that is not only true, but previously reported numerous times. So let's drop the ''Lynch Newsweek'' bull. Seventeen people have died in these riots. They didn't die because of anything Newsweek did - the riots were caused by what our government has done.
Get your minds around it. Our country is guilty of torture. To quote myself once more: ''What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own this country, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elected to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them.''

our heads in the sand

Staying What Course?
By PAUL KRUGMAN / NY TIMES

Is there any point, now that November's election is behind us, in revisiting the history of the Iraq war? Yes: any path out of the quagmire will be blocked by people who call their opponents weak on national security, and portray themselves as tough guys who will keep America safe. So it's important to understand how the tough guys made America weak.

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.

Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

(You can read the whole thing at www.downingstreetmemo.com.)

Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.

But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can't even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?

At this point, the echoes of Vietnam are unmistakable. Reports from the recent offensive near the Syrian border sound just like those from a 1960's search-and-destroy mission, body count and all. Stories filed by reporters actually with the troops suggest that the insurgents, forewarned, mostly melted away, accepting battle only where and when they chose.

Meanwhile, America's strategic position is steadily deteriorating.

Next year, reports Jane's Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam's Iraq, might pose a real threat.

In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.

So what's the plan?

The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January's election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn't.

Yet it's very hard to discuss getting out. Even most of those who vehemently opposed the war say that we have to stay on in Iraq now that we're there.

In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we're there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people's patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.

But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker.

So we need to get beyond the clichés - please, no more "pottery barn principles" or "staying the course." I'm not advocating an immediate pullout, but we have to tell the Iraqi government that our stay is time-limited, and that it has to find a way to take care of itself. The point is that something has to give. We either need a much bigger army - which means a draft - or we need to find a way out of Iraq.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

not surprising

OP-ED COLUMNIST
From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'
By BOB HERBERT / NY TIMES

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.

"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."

The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "

"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.

Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.

He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.

Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.' "

He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would expect."

In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.

Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.

Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com