Empire of the Iguanadons

Attention liberal press: Your headlines and soundbyte stories have left something out: http://www.militaryreporters.org/sanchez_101207.html

Here, just on the off chance you simply forgot to mention this:

Today, i will attempt to do two things - first i will give you my assessment of the military and press relationship and then i will provide you some thoughts on the current state of our war effort. As all of you know i have a wide range of relationships and experiences with our nations military writers and editors. There are some in your ranks who I consider to be the epitome of journalistic professionalism - Joe Galloway, Thom Shanker, Sig Christensen, and John Burns immediately come to mind. They exemplify what America should demand of our journalists - tough reporting that relies upon integrity, objectivity and fairness to give accurate and thorough accounts that strengthen our freedom of the press and in turn our democracy. On the other hand, unfortunately, I have issued ultimatums to some of you for unscrupulous reporting that was solely focused on supporting your agenda and preconcieved notions of what our military had done. I also refused to talk to the European stars and stripes for the last two years of my command in Germany for their extreme bias and single minded focus on Abu Gharaib.

Let me review some of the descriptive phrases that have been used by some of you that have made my personal interfaces with the press corps difficult:

"Dictatorial and somewhat dense",

"Not a strategic thought",

Liar,

"Does not get it" and

The most inexperienced ltg.

In some cases I have never even met you, yet you feel qualified to make character judgments that are communicated to the world. My experience is not unique and we can find other examples such as the treatment of secretary Brown during Katrina. This is the worst display of journalism imaginable by those of us that are bound by a strict value system of selfless service, honor and integrity. Almost invariably, my perception is that the sensationalistic value of these assessments is what provided the edge that you seek for self agrandizement or to advance your individual quest for getting on the front page with your stories! As I understand it, your measure of worth is how many front page stories you have written and unfortunately some of you will compromise your integrity and display questionable ethics as you seek to keep America informed. This is much like the intelligence analysts whose effectiveness was measured by the number of intelligence reports he produced. For some, it seems that as long as you get a front page story there is little or no regard for the "collateral damage" you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct.

Given the near instantaneous ability to report actions on the ground, the responsibility to accurately and truthfully report takes on an unprecedented importance. The speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry. An Arab proverb states - "Four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past, the neglected opportunity." Once reported, your assessments become conventional wisdom and nearly impossible to change. Other major challenges are your willingness to be manipulated by "high level officials" who leak stories and by lawyers who use hyperbole to strenghten their arguments. Your unwillingness to accurately and prominently correct your mistakes and your agenda driven biases contribute to this corrosive environment. All of these challenges combined create a media environment that does a tremendous disservice to America. Over the course of this war tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats for America because of the tremendous power and impact of the media and by extension you the journalist. In many cases the media has unjustly destroyed the individual reputations and careers of those involved. We realize that because of the near real time reporting environment that you face it is difficult to report accurately. In my business one of our fundamental truths is that "the first report is always wrong." Unfortunately, in your business "the first report" gives Americans who rely on the snippets of CNN, if you will, their "truths" and perspectives on an issue. As a corollary to this deadline driven need to publish "initial impressions or observations" versus objective facts there is an additional challenge for us who are the subject of your reporting. When you assume that you are correct and on the moral high ground on a story because we have not respond to questions you provided is the ultimate arrogance and distortion of ethics. One of your highly repected fellow journalists once told me that there are some amongst you who "feed from a pig's trough." If that is who I am dealing with then I will never respond otherwise we will both get dirty and the pig will love it. This does not mean that your story is accurate.

I do not believe that this is what our forefathers intended. The code of ethics for the society of professional journalists states:
...public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility

The basic ethics of a journalist that calls for:

1. Seeking truth,

2. Providing fair and comprehensive account of events and issues

3. Thoroughness and honesty

All are victims of the massive agenda driven competition for economic or political supremacy. The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our servicemembers who are at war.

My assessment is that your profession, to some extent, has strayed from these ethical standards and allowed external agendas to manipulate what the American public sees on tv, what they read in our newspapers and what they see on the web. For some of you, just like some of our politicians, the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconcieved notions, biases and agendas.

It is astounding to me when I hear the vehement disagreement with the military's forays into information operations that seek to disseminate the truth and inform the Iraqi people in order to counter our enemy's blatant propaganda. As I assess various media entities, some are unquestionably engaged in political propaganda that is uncontrolled. There is no question in my mind that the strength our democracy and our freedoms remain linked to your ability to exercise freedom of the press - I adamantly support this basic foundation of our democracy and completely supported the embedding of media into our formations up until my last day in uniform. The issue is one of maintaining professional ethics and standards from within your institution. Military leaders must accept that these injustices will happen and whether they like what you print or not they must deal with you and enable you, if you are an ethical journalist.

Finally, I will leave this subject with a question that we must ask ourselves--who is responsible for maintaining the ethical standards of the profession in order to ensure that our democracy does not continue to be threatened by this dangerous shift away from your sacred duty of public enlightenment?

Posted as found, sans the all caps mess. I mean, we wouldn't want you to be accused of being biased or anything....
.........................
"It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well. I guess that's that then.

And you concluded that he meant the entire left-leaning media. If you're going to insist so much that he called out CNN by name, then you should stick with what that entails: he meant CNN.


This argument doesn't really work. It means that you are in no capacity to criticize something unless you have active and direct experience. So I expect somebody who holds such a position to never criticize films unless s/he is/was a filmmaker; to never criticize music unless s/he was a songwriter; to never criticize musical performance unless s/he was a musician, and so forth. Oh -- and never criticize laws until you've been a lawmaker... But clearly this is not reasonable, so it makes you wonder if it's reasonable in the first place to require somebody to have direct experience before being able to criticize.

We've reached a sad day indeed then when someone with an opinion can't cite as evidence in the argument, the speech of someone else. You're hung up on the semantics of what was said instead of reading what he clearly meant. I don't think it's unfair in any way to do so.

CNN doesn't hold a candle to Fox's ratings. Go look up the nightly ratings figures for yourself and you'll see that Fox News is outpacing all others COMBINED in the nightlies. These are the figures the advertisers all go by to determine where they want to spend their dollars so they carry a significant amount of weight.

And one more time, in case you've missed it, he was calling out the dishonest, corrupt, and distortionist media that's been attacking the military. Since you refuse to accept that this isn't being done by the conservative media, we're at an impasse. The target of his words is clear, you're just hung up on the fact that he was good enough to get all that off his chest without assigning blame to anyone other than CNN by name.

You know, Samson, I took you up on your challenge to look up ratings. I found things like this report (and others), explaining why Fox's ratings appear to be higher. Basically it has to do with how you count the statistics: you count viewers per minute, not number of people viewing per day. So, fewer viewers who view longer will let you count more than more people who tune in for brief periods of time. In fact, the same report goes on to claim that ads are more expensive on CNN than on Fox.

What are your sources for your claim? The report I cited is from 2004, so perhaps a little outdated (even if it shows why it's not good to trust straight averages) and you might have more recent data on hand, in which case I think it would be good to show it.

Averages are fickle beasts. Saying that a tax cut will save the average American x dollars is basically meaningless, unless you also talk about standard deviation. If it saves 5 people billions of dollars, and then you average those billions over everybody, well, clearly you're not really saving most people any money. (The median is a better measure for this kind of thing than straight average as it gives you more of an idea of where the bulk of people are. I still prefer average + std dev.)

First off, you're not seriously going to quote me 4 year old manipulated stats as evidence are you?

Secondly, your source is clearly biased:


That right there is enough to disqualify them as a serious research and watchdog agency. Fox positions themselves as "Fair and Balanced" because they are - both sides get represented, yet it alway seems to be people on the left who go out of their way to try and discredit them at the least, and some who advocate kicking them off the air entirely.

Now on to what you wanted. Here's a breakdown of the Q3 ratings for 2007 in cable news. It's pretty clear to me that Fox is kicking the crap out of everyone. I'd much rather source this from Nielsen themselves but their website is a maze and this data wasn't accessible there so I grabbed the first one I found on Google - ironically enough linked to by an O'Reilly sucks page.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/original/Total%20Viewers%20Top%20Programs.pdf

I don't know the first thing about mediabistro.com so draw your own conclusions there. The link into it came from: http://www.oreilly-sucks.com/politics/cablenewsratings.htm where he has links going back 2 years which prove solidly that Fox's ratings are quite consistent.

David, Think about it like this.

You're in the military, I doubt that would ever be true but still, and you've just returned to the barracks after spending the day policing the streets looking for insurgents, and you turn on the TV, which is playing yesterdays news (for the US, current news for deployed troops) and all the stories talk about are how the military shouldn't be doing what they're doing, and that it is wrong of the US to interfere in the business of another country through the use of military force. When you yourself know damn good and well that most of these people are thanking you when they see you in the streets.

Imagine for me this, that while your out on patrol, a little child runs up to you, and tugs on your jacket, and motions for you to bend down. And when you do, she places a kiss on your cheeks, and hands you a small handmade artwork. And thanks you for everything you've done. And then two days later, be responding to a call about insurgent violence, and seeing that same little girl, shot to hell because she happened to be thanking another soldier the same way she did you when insurgents opened fire.

This is the shit that the media doesn't cover, because the American people can't handle it. These are the things that those of us that joined the service see everyday while we're deployed. You picture that. You live through that. And you tell me if you could still look at American media the same way. Like I said in my first comment. I'm not a political person. I don't have a party. I don't have any affiliations. I vote for whoever strikes me as the best candidate. When I read General Sanchez' speech, I didn't see it as an attack on either type of media. I saw it as an attack on all the self-centered journalists who care about nothing but their own careers. The ones that don't give a damn about the after effects that what they write, say or report have. The ones who are just out to make a buck the only way they think they can, by lying, distorting, and corrupting the news to make the best story out of it. I'm sick of it.

I would still be in the service had I not gotten hurt. I'd still be out there risking my life for the people in the world less fortunate than those in the US. I'd still be out there fighting for what I believe in. Had I not injured my hip to the point that some days, I can't even get out of bed, I'd gladly take on a tour to Iraq. I'd go as a civilian. You weren't there. You didn't see what it was like. And neither has most of the media. All they see are the edited videos the Military releases. And maybe the military shouldn't edit them. Maybe they should just show it. Maybe they should just let everyone see the shit that goes on over there. Because I guarantee you, that had that little girl been on the news, we wouldn't have all this bullshit about the war not being worth it.

My point was that you need to look at how exactly the statistics are computed to know exactly what they represent. If indeed the other site, biased as it may or may not be, is correct that ratings are based on continuous viewers, not numbers of viewers, the ratings need to be interpreted differently. Incidentally, just because a site has an agenda doesn't automatically mean that all of their facts are wrong. They might not give all the facts, but they're probably not blatantly lying about factual statements. (It seems to me that the burden of proof is on you to show that they are wrong about how ratings are computed. So far, you've said they're wrong just because they don't like Fox.)


Look, Kayle, I wasn't defending the media's coverage of the war. I was saying that it's not entirely reasonable to demand that only those who have done something have the right to criticize it.

Most people who criticize the war, at least most I know personally, have nothing against the soldiers -- quite the contrary, actually. The problem isn't with the soldiers, it's with the people who got the war started in the first place. And with the people who managed to alienate nearly the entire world despite coming out of a period of the most goodwill for the USA since WW II. That is what people are criticizing: not the soldiers.

Here's something to think about: maybe if the war hadn't started in the first place, that little girl wouldn't have been shot. Your reasoning is somewhat intriguing: there is a war going on that is killing civilians, therefore we should continue the war in order to save civilians.

I guarantee you. That because of the other things I saw while I was there, that that little girl probably would have suffered a far worse fate at the hands of Saddam then being shot. Nerve Agents, and Biological testing come to mind.

Besides, that just shows me you're just another one of those people that wave their flags for the troops, and sport those "Support our troops" stickers and what not, but really don't care one way or another.

The fact that the site is displaying that agenda while supposedly reporting on something that's factual calls into question their motives, and instantly makes me suspicious that the data has been manipulated to achieve that agenda. The O'Reilly sucks page clearly has an agenda too, they hate Bill O'Reilly. But the data they linked to is presented raw, with no agenda whatsoever surrounding it as far as I can tell. So I have no reason to be suspicious of it other than the fact that it's not coming directly from Nielsen itself.

Your opinion of the war disgusts me. Kayle hit it right on the head. You're one of those "I support the troops. I don't support their mission" people. Your opinion clearly communicates this with your subtle stab at the reason behind going to war. But I can't accept that you or anyone with an opinion similar to yours can possibly support the troops when you don't support the mission they believe in.

I don't know that it was truly about the mission for myself, and many of my unit. We were more there for the Iraqi people, we followed orders, don't get me wrong, but we were, in the end of the day, more concerned about the people.

Just because you don't see the subtlety in my statement doesn't mean there is none. Just because everything is black and white and simple for you doesn't mean it is for everybody else. I don't feel the need to explain it further because anything I say will simply continue to disgust you. *shrug* You have decided that I am wrong already, are solidly entrenched in your position without any openness to others, and nothing I do will possibly change that. It's just how you seem to be, as other people have already commented.

I'm thinking that it will be healthier to let go of this topic, and in fact most topics here in general, and just focus on the 'professional' aspect of MUDs and so forth. (At least those are technical and, for the most part, technical questions do have black and white answers.) For instance, Kayle has already decided to be pissed at me personally, so I see no need to worsen or reproduce that. :-) I brought myself here out of curiosity, I learned what I wanted to learn and got the exposure to other ideas that I wanted to get; now that that is done I'm not sure I see much point in prolonged, bitter arguments that in the end of the day don't serve much purpose.

David,

Sometimes things are black and white. Good and evil. Right and wrong. I believe very strongly, as you've seen, that the liberal press is wrong. Sometimes even evil. I also believe very strongly that in order to be able to honestly say you support the troops, you also need to support the mission they believe in. Otherwise it rings hollow to anyone hearing it.

Your efforts to attempt to sway me from my position have all been based on feeling, emotion, and in some cases severely biased evidence. Anytime I try to bring facts into the picture it gets twisted and turned into something I didn't say at which point you start getting upset and accusing people of doing the same to you. I find anyone who tries to argue their position that way to be, put bluntly, a slimebag.

I suspect you knew coming into this that I wouldn't sugar coat my responses, but now you know this for certain. It's always been my experience that most liberals hate dealing with anyone who's not afraid to say what they mean, present facts to back it up, and be politically incorrect when the situation calls for it.

Apparently you've chosen to dismiss me out of hand because you don't agree. Which is an amusing irony to me since you've been more or less saying all along that I was doing the same to you. Your choice. It's a free country. I'm not going to change my ways for you or anyone else.

All too true... Most soldiers can see right through it when they come home...

If I had truly done that, I wouldn't have spent so much time on all of this trying to reason with you. You've made the decision yourself, by your own admission: "I'm not going to change my ways for anyone". You're basically saying that arguing with you is useless, doomed to failure.

As I said, I feel it has come to the point where there is more to lose than to gain by continuing a debate that is likely to turn bitter. For instance, I see no use in getting angry at or even dealing with the stream of insults and name-calling I get from you (I can add 'slimebag' to the list... I should hang them on the wall or something); instead, the best solution appears to be to just let it go since there is nothing to be gained here, by your own words. I don't mind a lack of sugar-coating, but I do mind a lack of civility.

Still, I learned a lot, so I hardly consider it a failed endeavor.

Spin it however you like but some of us can't be made to compromise our principles so easily. I'll leave it at that.