Misestimating the Enemy

UPDATED BELOW

"The Bush administration's recent shift toward calling the enemy in Iraq "al Qaida" rather than an insurgency may reflect the difficulty in maintaining support for the war at home more than it does the nature of the enemy in Iraq."

-- Media Matters, July 25, 2007

Glenn nailed it more than two weeks ago:

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term "Al Qaeda" to designate "anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq" is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda."

John F. Burns, sadly, was one of the most egregious offenders in print on June 23 (now discretely hidden behind Times Select) and on the increasingly unreliable News Hour two days later. But he had lots of imitators in the media who dutifully transcribed George Bush's fantasies and called it reporting.

Now, the Times' ombudsman acknowledges we were misled when its reporters mindlessly repeated agitprop from Bush administration military leaders.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.

The paper now is circulating to its reporters "a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda."

It's a start. But what they really need is Glenn Greenwald's bullshit detector.

UPDATE
July 9 am

Glenn has follow-up here and here:

The Times is still doing exactly what it did before the invasion of Iraq -- the activities that supposedly brought it such "shame" -- and in many cases, it is exactly the same people who are doing it.

Just consider what Hoyt's criticisms yesterday mean. These criticisms apply not only to one article, but rather, to a whole series of articles. The criticisms concern not some obscure topic or isolated special report, but rather, the single most important political and journalistic issue of this decade -- the war in Iraq and the American media's coverage of government claims about that war.

And most significantly of all, Hoyt's criticisms are grounded not in a technical violation of some petty rule or failure to adhere to some debatable journalistic custom, but rather, involves the worst journalistic sin of all: namely, a failure to treat government claims with skepticism and a willingness mindlessly to recite such claims without scrutiny. If a newspaper simply prints government claims without skepticism, what remote value does it have other than as a propaganda amplifier? None. And yet, as Hoyt's column potently demonstrates, that is exactly what the NYT is doing in Iraq -- yet again.