Media – Page 4 – Wis[s]e Words

The Iranian elections

Published on June 14, 20092 Comments

Like Jamie I don’t share the Foreign Policy magazine’s experts certainty that the Iranian elections were rigged. Iran has a reasonable reputation for holding honest elections, even if they are, as Jamie puts it “engineered to produce the right results from the outset through candidate selection and so on”. Western experts and expat Iranians may have been convinced that Ahmadinejad was to be wiped from the pages of time and see the failure of this as evidence of voting fraud, but that doesn’t mean reality has to conform to their wishes.

The reason expert opinion has gotten it so wrong it seems to me is not fraud, but the myopia with which western news media and experts approach Iran: through the prism of US foreign policy. Iran is only in the news whenever its supposed nuclear weapons programme is brought to our attention again, or it’s accused of meddling in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the same way Ahmadinejad is only quoted when he says something stupid about the Holocaust or is supposed to threaten Israel with extinction again. We only get to see Iran as a menace and Ahmadinejad as a clown, with nobody really covering the reality of Iran’s internal politics.

So we get an incredible distorted view of Iran and Ahmadinejad and because we don’t like him we automatically assume this is the default view in Iran as well. But as Splinty points out, in the country itself he has a quite different reputation; he may not be liked by the western-orientated middle class, but he’s a friend of the poor and the peasants and they vote too.

And of course, expecting Iranians to vote according to our views of their foreign policy is as absurd as to have expected the last Dutch elections to have been decided on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Iraq.

Reporting War — Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

Published on August 20, 2008

Cover of Reporting War

Reporting War
Stuart Allan & Barbie Zelizer (editors)
374 pages including index
published in 2004

Having kept a politically orientated weblog the past half decade or so I’ve become acutely aware of the limitations of journalism, particularly during wartime. The current war for South Ossetia provides a good example of these limitations, were we’re seeing live how difficult it is for journalists to even get to the combat zone, not to mention how dangerous, as the death of a Dutch camera man proved. Perhaps more worrying, as the conflict continued the reporting on it which started off fairly neutral has become more and more partisan, especially once the United States and the European Union got involved in its resolution, with Russia pictured as the agressor when in fact it was Georgia who started the war. Russian statements are treated with skepticism while quotes from approved official sources, like the Pentagon or NATO are quoted
verbatim. In general the war is treated through an American or European lens, rarely from the point of view of the Russians or Georgians, let alone the Ossetians…

All these problems are described in Reporting War, a collection of essays on the role of journalism in wartime, its difficulties and dillemas. Published a year after the American invasion of Iraq, a lot of attention is of course paid to the problems of that particular war. The book doesn’t just look at the role of the journalists themselves, but also how they are dealt with by armies and governments involved in war, with a specific focus on the US army’s management of journalist during the first and second Gulf War. What’s more, several essays look beyond the physical reaity of reporting wars to the role the media plays in general in covering wars. Not every conflict is covered equally after all.

The Washington Post and Monica Lewinsky

Published on January 3, 2007

Just before the year ended,WashingtonPost article that perfectly encapsulated the ingrained sexism, stupidity and sheer spite of the Beltway establishmenttaking on its favourite target, Monica Lewinsky:

There are moments that make you question your fundamental assumptions about the world. One of them took place a few days ago, when news emerged that Monica Lewinsky had just graduated from the London School of Economics.

She did not!!

Lewinsky, 33, is known more for her audacious coquetry than for her intellectual heft, and the notion of her earning a master of science degree in social psychology at the prestigious London university is jarring, akin to finding a rip in the time-space continuum, or discovering that Kim Jong Il is a natural blond.

Even more staggering, the same bubbly gal who once described the act of flashing her thong at the president as a “small, subtle, flirtatious gesture” has now written a lofty-sounding thesis. Its title, according to Reuters: “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”

Monica! We hardly knew ye!

The rest of the article is a lameoid attempt at justifying this childish sneer by Boboing some sort of pathetic social commentary out of it. It isn’t important. What is important is the view this article gives of Lewinsky:that of a stupid, sluttly little girl who cannot possible have enough brains to attend the LSE, never mind graduating. This has of course been the view the press always had of Lewinsky, portraying her either as a simple little girl caught up in a drama too big for her, the victim of Bill Clinton the Masher, or the homewrecking slut who set out to fuck herself a president.

None of them considered that actually, to become a White House intern you must have some brains, that it’s slightly different from interning at some well meaning local business, nor was any willing to admit she was actually a young woman who wanted and got a mature sexual relationshipwith a man she admired, liked and perhaps even loved. That’s just not possible in their world. The Great Unwashed for their part did see that once the details of their affair became known, but then they’ve always been more insightful than their alleged superiors inside the Beltway…

There’s also the insane jealosy of Bill Clinton, the Man they had Snubbed, of all people “bagging” a young pretty intern, something that neverhappened to any Republicans; they always had to buy their sex. It all added to Clinton’s undeserved to them popstar image, so that’s why they trashtalked and kept on trash talking Lewinsky. Look at that picture of her in the article: not very flattering, but fitting the image of “Lewinsky the dog”, the triplebagger they want us to believe she is. Reality is, quite a few of us would not mind having such an obviously intelligent, pretty young woman attracted to us…