Glenn Reynolds: Instant punditry on culture, politics, and the law



The Instapundit puts together an article on 1) The ways of journalism and it is not pretty, bribes and more for the Iraq officials from the media! 2) The big gap in media and non media reports coming from Iraq. The difference between the 2 is huge. Part of this is that "news" tends to not be "things are getting better" but "lookout here comes some sh*t" if you know what I mean.



I live in Oakland. Full of crime death drugs and murder? No. But that is the impression from the media. I work in the entertainment part of the media. What I do is try to present a program that people will listen to. The more the better you know ratings and all. In the news part of the media it is the same thing. Gloom and doom, and oh I know there is some in Oakland, Iraq, everywhere, seems to draw ratings over things are getting better.



The web, bloggers, it all adds a voice to the mix that doesn't do it for the ratings, which eventually leads to reporters bribing Iraq officials for various reasons. I say let's name names on reporters who did this. That would be the good stuff. Instapundit quotes The New York Times reporter John Burns on how it went down.





There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.



In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories, mine included, specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.



The article is a great read.



I'll quote a little more.



We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away. I cannot tell you with what fury I listened to people tell me throughout the autumn that I must be on a kamikaze mission. They said it with a great deal of glee, over the years, that this was not a place like the others.



I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.



For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone.



Yep.