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DSM Register: beneath contempt

Okay, so I open my Sunday NY Times and find this piece of actual reporting:

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final

Then I open my DSM Register the next morning, and this is how the newspaper Iowa Depends on covers the story:

Dems jump on report linking war to terrorism
WASHINGTON – Democrats yesterday seized on an intelligence assessment that said the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat, saying it was further evidence that Americans should choose new leadership in the November elections.

The Democrats hoped the report would undermine the GOP’s image as the party more capable of handing terrorism as the campaign enters its final six-week stretch.

That’s the way the Des Moines Register works. They don’t cover the story; they cover the spin. After all, what Democrats say about the report is far more important than, um, national security.

$%#@*&!

Not that I am accusing the Register of bias. I certainly wouldn’t do that after the paper lead last Saturday with the results of a mock poll that had McCain and Guiliani outpolling John Edwards by a few meaningless mock points over two years before the election. And that’s LEAD, as in this completely non-news story is the most important thing of the day. And I certainly wouldn’t accuse the paper of spinning instead of reporting when last week it LEAD with a poll showing Iowans had upped their approval ratings of Bush by a few meaningless percentage points (which were well within the poll’s margin of error).

That’s LEAD, mind you; that’s splash a poll result all over the front page and call it news. That’s report a story of national importance as if it were so much partisan squabbling while elsewhere the paper’s editors hypocritically dole out a rose to an Iowa candidate who resigned his party rather than engage in partisan squabbling.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: you can learn a lot from a newspaper if you read it with the proper contempt, but the Register is sadly beneath contempt anymore. It’s now just a hack paper floundering to get suburbanites to read it by covering football tailgating parties, drunken bike rides, and Oprah-esque abuse stories.

Yeesh.

  • profo

This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Politics, Media, Iowa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “DSM Register: beneath contempt”

  1. pdx Says:
    September 25th, 2006 at 7:43 pm

    Alterman has a related post on this via his new blog on Media Matters here.

    A brief excerpt:

    There are too many problems with the mainstream media to say the sentence “The problem with the MSM is…” If you ask me what its biggest problem is, however, I would say it is its ahistoricism. Here we have three stories in which the CIA concludes that the invasion of Iraq has increased the danger to America from terrorism, here, here, and here.

    Not one of these articles highlights the key point that the CIA reported to Bush that this would be the case before we went to war. For instance, in the Times story—which led the pack on this—you need to wade in pretty deeply to learn that “The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives. In other words, the CIA —not The Nation, not Media Matters, not George Soros—warned the president that he would be increasing, not decreasing the threat of terrorism to the United States by invading Iraq. That story appeared above the fold in the right corner of The New York Times as well. Bush ignored the warnings and purposely misled the United States into the most ruinous war in its history. Liberal hawks cheered. And there’s no good way out. All of that belongs in the story, too. The degree of both incompetence and dishonesty involved in the selling and conduct of this war is literally criminal. And it’s all happening right before our eyes.

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