December 06, 2005
A Word from Ward Churchill
My girlfriend, Heather Smith, is a producer at the Laura Ingraham radio show, the fourth most-listened to program in the country. Recently she invited Ward Churchill, a Colorado University professor who is infamous for his remarks about the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks (calling them "little Eichmans" who "deserved to die"), to appear on the program along with Ian, a Colorado University Young Republican leader who showed Churchill a list of the 9-11 victims and asked him to circle the names of the ones that deserve to die. Very clever. Churchill, who believes in protest but not debate, declined to appear. What he wrote in declining is noteworthy. It is reproduced below, in full. There is more over at DCHeathersmith.com.
There was/is no "controversy" with Ian and his awesome force of 11 other overindulged brats. I will, however, be happy to speak with these sunshine patriots when they return, as I did in my day, from their tours of duty in the current generation’s combat zone.Until then, a simple thank you, not only from CU Young Republicans, but from other such pro-war avoiders of military service in their party as Bill Owens, Bob Beauprez, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will be sufficient. Beyond that, they’ve nothing to say, either to me or to anyone else used as fodder in one of this country’s endless wars against peoples of color.
As to Laura Ingram herself, the very fact that she’d seek to dignify Young Republicans’ pitiful little imitation of SDS-style action with "nationally syndicated coverage" while ignoring the far larger showing made to protest Rocky Mountain News editor Vincent Carroll’'s racist comments regarding the late Vine Deloria Jr. on the very day of the man’s funeral says all that needs saying.
Your hood and sheets are showing, sweetie.
With all due respect,
Ward Churchill
Posted by Richard Miniter at 07:35 PM
November 30, 2005
LGF’s Foul Ball
Little Green Footballs scores more editorial touchdowns than The New York Times, but it recently dropped the ball. In Nov. 18 post, a Duke University professor for "demonstrating once again that special moral obtuseness that marks so many of America’s college professors." What was the professor’s offense? Praising bin Laden’s prose style in Arabic. (Prof. Bruce Lawerence reads Arabic and recently translated a collection of bin Laden’s speeches and recordings.) So how did LGF step out of bounds? It turns that Prof. Lawerence’s remarks, printed in a student newspaper (!), were taken out of context. In a recent radio interview I read from LGF’s post and questioned Lawerence about his praise of bin Laden’s prose style. He pointed that Che Guevara and other human monsters can speak beautifully, while doing evil. He made it quite clear that he is not pro-bin Laden, referring to him as "evil" and his message as "poison" among other things. The professor’s anti-bin Laden statements seemed genuine, not a mere rhetorical flourishes. And, while Lawerence is a man of the left, he is an unusual one: he repeatedly described himself as a "24-7 Christian," later adding that he an ordained minister who reveres the orthodox 1928 Book of Common Prayer. LGF could have done better...
Posted by Richard Miniter at 08:48 AM
November 14, 2005
Time’s Decline
Time magazine still has some fine reporters, but the editorial standards of the newsweekly seem to have declined in lock-step with its circulation. But, as this story makes plain, Time is now relying on enemy spokesmen in Iraq (calling them insurgents, not anti-democratic terrorists) as if they are simply another interest group. In an otherwise vanilla story about the Amman wedding attack, Time cites an enemy propagandist (oh sorry, there I go speakly directly, I mean, "insurgent source") saying that he and they had no foreknowledge of the attack. Do the editors not realize that al Qaeda and Ba’athist enemy forces have entire propaganda units to fight the media war and that that is the only war the enemy is winning? Where do they think those al Jazeera video tapes come from and why do they think that they are produced? Why play into the enemy’s hands by quoting them as if they are simply one point of view among many?
Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 11:45 AM
September 17, 2005
The Art of Interviewing
Despite itself, this is actually an interesting interview. An editor at FrontPagemag.com interviewed Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of his new collection of essays Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.
As always, Dalrymple is bursting with interesting things to say. But the interviewer makes that all too typical mistake of simply having a list of questions and going on ruthlessly to the next one. It is as if the editor believes that an interview is simply a series of command performances, with the question employed solely as a set of key words to cue the interview subject. Of course, this is how many television interviews are done—and, yes, I do blame cable (partly) for the dumbing down what 1980s liberals used to call "the national conversation." It is too bad that this young editor does not listen to the best of talk radio, in which questions are followed up and a discussion emerges. Read the interview and ask yourself how many interesting follow-up questions that you might have asked. (The other cardinal error the interviewer commits: he inserts himself into questions, e.g., "I have long thought..." without first establishing that his opinion should carry any weight with the reader. If he has any expertise, then his thoughts and experiences might well be worthwhile. If he simply someone who has lived life, that is no distinction. After all, that is something he has in common with all of his readers—and many of them have probably lived more of it.) Television is not the sole culprit. Listening to people talk to each other these days, you often hear one person talk about himself while another responds by relaying a similar life experience of his own. More elevated conversation occurs when one person explores the well-developed thoughts of another. And, yes, I mean thoughts, not feelings or experiences. So is the art of conversation dying? Let's talk about it.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 06:05 PM
August 18, 2005
Defending Novak, Fisking Gandelman
Joe Gandelman, a blogger who calls himself "the moderate voice," is going after syndicated columnist Robert Novak. He faults Novak for famously walking off a CNN set. Here's Gandelman's view:
"Some folks will make excuses for Novak, but just think about it: how many young journalists, young opinion-makers, bloggers of all ages, and columnists would give their left arm to be on CNN?"Would they walk off the set for any reason?
At the best, it shows strain; at the worst, an amazing sense of confidence that there are no consequences for his actions....which may be why Novak is at the center of the Plame case to begin with."
Okay, let's look at these remarks closely. 1) A lot of young people and bloggers would give their left arm to be on CNN. So? Unknown but ambitous people always want a shot at the small screen. Why would CNN put them on, if they can't draw ratings like Novak? By the way, being a proven TV commodity is no small achievement. TV ratings are broken in 15-minute increments and all of three of the major cable networks actually watch the ratings of their guests; imagine how zealously they scrutinize the ratings of their on-air talent. If these unknowns rated better than Novak, they would be on and he would off.
2) These unknowns wouldn't walk off the set. Again, so what? Novak's little stunt drew more attention to CNN than anything that network has done in years. Brit Hume played the clip, thereby doubling the viewership. I mean, if it wasn't for CNN International in overseas hotel rooms, I wouldn't even know the network was still on the air. Oh, and seeing Wolf Blitzer at Café Milano. Without those two data points, CNN would be well on its way to be a freshman philosophy problem—if a tree falls in the forest, and only CNN covers it, does it make a sound?
As for walking off the set, I was tempted to do that once. I had already ripped the microphone off. I had been set up and wasn't even allowed to respond to a series of attacks, which were not even based on my work. And I've talked to others who are regularly on TV. Everyone has had that moment, at least in my limited sample. But few actually do it.
3) Then Gandelman moves on to the Plame business. I never understood why Novak is supposed to be the villian here. He was simply reporting what his sources told him, which turned out be, ahem, true. You want to blame the sources, fine. They may have committed a crime. But let's not forget the elephant in the pantry here: The CIA, driven by Plame, sent Wilson to Niger with the express purpose of getting back a report to undermine a statement the president had made in the State of the Union. Why is the CIA playing politics? And why this coy, you-exposed-a-secret-agent tripe when they got caught? Why is no one talking about the CIA? I still remember when "moderates" were skeptical of that agency...
Posted by Richard Miniter at 06:25 PM
August 06, 2005
Aid and Comfort?
Mark Eichenlaub, one of my e-mail with a very close eye for War on Terror detail, ask an interesting question: Is the Associated Press making U.S. military operations just a little too public for the enemy to know?
He cites this recent AP wire story: "As the operation unfolds, Marines would continue to hold the region south of the Euphrates, while the Stryker Brigade, which has been based in Mosul, pushes south, putting insurgents in a "vice," a senior U.S. military strategist said." Ultimately, I'd leave this decision up to the commanders on the ground (after all, they work with this reporter)—but a little bit of caution about operational details wouldn't be a bad idea.
A number of military sources have been asking me "just whose side is the media on, anyway?" For a while, I wrote it off as the usual griping. But I've also been thinking about Olivier Roy's book Globalized Islam (Check out this review). Bear with me as a stretch out a tangent (don't worry, it will snap back into place at the end). If read enough of the militant Islamic literature—and I mean the recent stuff, not Milestones or In the Shade of the Koran)—it is surprising how many Marxist ideas and concepts one runs across. If Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri's Knight Under the Prophet's Banner, the no. 2 man in al Qaeda's cri de coeur, one finds multiple citations from the Iranian Communist Party and a frankly Marxist critique of the West. And of course all of that "crusaders" and "imperialist" name-calling is old-school Left chic too. Roy argues essentially that Islamism is not a ideological offshoot of Islam, but a Western proto-Communist ideology which hides itself in the mosque the way a London terrorist hides himself among commuters on the Tube. For many in the media, who grew up in campuses controlled by the irresponsible Left, the Islamists do not seem so foreign but oddly familiar. Rather than seeing Islamism as a civilizational threat, they see those who fear it as the same squares who thought the radical vegetarian "die in" on the quad was the end of life as we know it. Of course, they are not making careful distinctions (between peaceful protestors and bomb builders)—and maybe I am not either. But I know a lot of center-left press and I know they don't feel about the war the same way I do and I wonder why. Maybe Roy is on to something...
Posted by Richard Miniter at 11:56 PM
July 27, 2005
This is Your Spokesman?
"Who is Larry Johnson?" asks a writer at the Daily Standard. While he loomed large at the CIA in the Clinton era, he made a few boneheaded public pronouncements: telling PBS in 1999 was bin Laden was "all talk" and writing in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, less than two months before 9-11, that Americans tend to exaggerate the threat posed by terrorism. More die in bath tubs, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Anyway, I am prepared to give Johnson a pass and suggest that maybe these are cheap shots. Johnson (and Clarke) was one of the few insiders calling for a tougher line on bin Laden before it was fashionable. Of course, he didn't do much about it.
But the Standard writer too easily glides over something that is harder to forgive: Why is a former CIA official giving the official Democratic party response? What happened to the tradition of intelligence officers and military leaders being non-partisan? What happened to the old ideal in which registering to vote and actually voting made one appear to be "a bit political"—and that wasn't seen as a good thing by peers. Now it is perfectly normal for intelligence officials like Michael Scheurer to write books attacking the current Administration, while it is at war, and for others to act as spokesmen for a political party? Sure, you might say, they are citizens and entitled to their free speech. True. But consider what happens when the intelligence or military establishment takes on a partisan viewpoint (even if it is a conservative Republican one). If it shares the view of the White House, it doesn't provide the kind of intellectual tension that sharpens analysis and sees ahead of the curve. Alternatively, if it opposes government policy, then it leaks to the press and to the opposition as many early drafts of damaging documents as it can in the hopes of either defeating the Administration in the next election or ruining the careers of its best-known members. The Valerie Plame episode is just one of several recent CIA-related scandals that in some way was set in motion by the agency. (Who asked them to send Amb. Wilson to Niger anyway?) In the worst case, you get something akin to Madrid, in which the intelligence service leaked information to the opposition Socialist party—hours or days before it was seen by the sitting prime minister. As a result, Aznar went public with outdated information and could be successfully attacked for "lying" about or "covering up" things he was not told yet. (See the last chapter of my book Shadow War for more details.) Somehow CIA director Porter Goss and other intel chiefs have to depoliticize the services or else the intelligence community really will become the secretive cabal against democracy that its most left-wing critics fear it is.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 11:00 PM
June 09, 2005
Press Bias, Fisk and Thucydides
This article by Keith Windschuttle is very interesting. He comes close to asking a question that has been on my mind ever since my first trip to Iraq in 2003. Why are reporters reporting the last war? It used to be generals who were accused of fighting the last war, but campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were utterly new and weren't even similar to each other, let alone Vietnam. Windschuttle also makes some interesting points comparing Fisk's descriptions of bin Laden to British colonial descriptions of Arab leaders and details how press coverage has been skewed.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 02:07 PM