Quick: agenda-driven news reporting is (a) biased; or (b) “agendaless”
From the great Newsbusters.org blog yesterday:
NBC’s Baghdad Reporter: I’m A Pacifist, War Should Be Outlawed
Posted by Tim Graham on October 26, 2006 – 15:48.
Thursday’s Howard Kurtz profile of NBC Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel in the Washington Post has a real clash of perspectives. First, NBC anchor Brian Williams claimed Engel “is the most agenda-less person I’ve met in our business.” Then Engel declared “I think war should be illegal…I’m basically a pacifist.” The story included no critics of Engel’s reporting, but praise from Williams and CBS colleague Lara Logan, and Engel’s mother.
Williams asserted that Engel’s reporting was fearless against annoying media critics: “In an era of instant media criticism, he calls balls and strikes in the middle of a war zone,” says NBC anchor Brian Williams. “He is completely unbothered by any Web site that may have problems with his reporting while he’s over in Iraq dodging bullets….He is the most agenda-less person I’ve met in our business, I think, in the past 20 years.”
Does it sound a little like Williams is saying Internet media critics should shut up and go fight in Iraq before they can have an authoritative opinion? It’s certainly easy for Engel to seem unbothered by critics in a Post story that never asks a media critic of any stripe for an opinion. Here’s the context for Engel’s declaration of pacifism:
Why does he stay? When NBC made Engel its Middle East bureau chief over the summer, he agreed to a new contract and moved to the relative calm of Beirut. Days later he found himself covering a fierce war between Israel and Hezbollah—and was suddenly reenergized. This, for better or worse, is what he does. Not that Engel necessarily approves of military conflict.
“I think war should be illegal,” he says. “I’m basically a pacifist.”
Kurtz washes over that philosophy by stressing how Engel feels the pain of the troops:
He has little patience for the notion that the media are suffering from Iraq fatigue because the story—day after day of death and destruction—has gotten so repetitive…
No word on how the pacifist feels the “illegal wars” should be policed—nor who should police this and how they should do it; and whether they should wear combat helmets and fatigues and carry guns, or just wear a bonnet and carry a basket of tea and buns to the battlefield in the style of many liberal-leftist pantywaists including Jack Layton and the you’ve got to be kidding party.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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