Riding home from work Wednesday, I listened to a National Public Radio report from Baghdad on the fighting underway between coalition forces and Sunni and Shiite extremists in several Iraqi cities. NPR reporter Anne Garrels led off her story by suggesting that contrary to the spin put out by administration sources, the uprising on behalf of extremist cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army was being embraced by a wide swatch of Iraq Shiite society.
Speaking to worshippers at a mosque in Baghdad not affiliated with Al-Sadr, Garrels reported approval of the radical’s goals, opposition to the American effort to arrest him, and a general sense that the “street” as it were had turned on the coalition.
But then I got home and opened up my Christian Science Monitor — I get it in the daily mail, so it basically serves as my evening newspaper — to find this front-page headline: “No wide Shiite rally to Sadr’s forces.” Reporter Dan Murphy talked to Shiite residents of Baghdad who were afraid of Al-Sadr and thankful to the American-led coalition for liberating them from Saddam Hussein.
So which is it? I wish all the hyperventilating commentators on the 24-hour news channels would just admit what to the rest of us would seem to be obvious: it’s impossible to know for sure. Talking to a couple of guys at a mosque or a couple of other guys on a street corner is not a sensible way to drawn confident conclusions about the sentiments of tens of millions of people. There have been some polls in Iraq over the past few months, offering interesting and mostly hopeful but also conflicting signals, but even they have to be greeted with some degree of skepticism given the fact that Iraqis have lived in a police state for decades and thus have little experience expressing their true feelings to strangers in person or over the phone.
My thesis today isn’t really about the resurgence of deadly violence in Iraq, though I’m inclined to believe that recent events are largely the desperate acts of extremist elements backed by Syria and Iran rather than a popular groundswell of anti-American and anti-coalition feeling. Also, as retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney told a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon audience Wednesday, this campaign is likely to be more like World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, where the German army staged an impressive showing that turned out to be its last gasp, or like Vietnamese communists’ Tet Offensive, which was a colossal failure as a military operation but influenced public opinion about the war back home due to misleading and uninformed reporting by the press.
My point is really that all of us should realize how difficult it is to be a good consumer of the news media. With some many different sources of information, coming at a variety of issues from many different vantage points and ideological assumptions, it’s important not to trust any one source or take any single report at face value. NPR may truly believe that the report it aired Wednesday suggesting a widespread Shiite uprising is the truth. The Monitor may well consider its report dismissing that idea to be the truth. Realistically, they are reporting what truth their reporters were able to glean in a few hours, in a war-torn country where emotions are running high, confusion and rumor reign, and access to the people who really know what’s going on in real time is necessarily limited.
The passage of time is a valuable asset to rely on. As the days and weeks pass, we’ll start to get a better idea of what has been happening in Iraq. The same dynamic happens with regard to issues closer to home, such as the passage of a state budget (often state legislators don’t realize what they voted into law until much later) or the release of new economic data (which are often revised and re-revised in subsequent months, without any notice of the fact).
I’m not making the standard argument that the news media can’t be trusted because of their left-wing bias, though that bias is frequently present. More important, really, is that the old notion of journalism as a first draft of history is on the mark. Reporters are often trying to hit a moving target, which can be hard for even skilled and patient marksmen.
Unfortunately, sometimes these problematic first drafts of history never get adequately revised for public consumption. Consider this familiar quote from the Vietnam era: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” It was reported by, you guessed, Peter Arnett. He attributed it to an unnamed U.S. Army officer. It has never been corraborated, and many knowledgeable veterans, reporters, and historians doubt it was ever said. But most Americans continue to believe it was.
Patience, skepticism, and an open mind — all are needed by the judicious media consumer.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.