Stardate 20040113.2026

(On Screen): Rule number one for all reporters in Iraq and their editors back home:

Thou shalt not report any good news without also including bad news. Thus shalt thou maintain balance. (However, reporting bad news without any offsetting good news is perfectly acceptable.)

Case in point: a report to the effect that the rate of insurgent attacks against our troops has declined by half in the month since Saddam was captured. That's really important, don't you think? Tends to suggest "success", maybe, just a little bit?

And that's the problem. It's impermissible to write a news article that suggests that things might be going well. It might give people the impression that Iraq isn't a quagmire; can't have that, can we?

So this article mentions the reduction in the rate of attacks in its first sentence, and never mentions it again. The entire rest of the article drags in as many other things as it can which suggest that everything is going to hell in a hand-basket, even though they have nothing whatever to do with the reduction.

And even the good news in the first sentence isn't reported quite straight.

The Pentagon says the reduction in individual attacks against Americans is dramatic — down by 50 percent since the capture of Saddam Hussein.

See, it isn't that the number of attacks is down, it's that the Pentagon claims that the number of attacks is down. One can almost see the exchange of knowing looks between the reporter and her non-stupid readers: We all know that the Pentagon is probably lying about this, right? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge?

And then the entire rest of the article tries to make sure we all know that American soldiers are still dying, and that the entire US Army is made up exclusively of war criminals. (I mean, Human Rights Watch wouldn't lie about something like that, would they?)

I took a journalism class in college (because I was curious and because it helped fulfill my academic requirement for humanities courses), and it was impressively down-to-earth. Among other things, we studied how to write straight news reports, and one of the things we learned was that the most important point in the article came first, and the rest of the article then filled in more and more details about that most important point. Apparently Martha Raddatz didn't take the same class I did. (Or maybe it was that what I studied was how to write for newspapers, not for other media.) Was there nothing else that could be said about the reduction in the rate of attacks? No reason to inquire why the rate might be down so much? Nothing else at all? Was it such an uninteresting item that it didn't merit any further exploration?

This article isn't really all that long, and I suspect that enough material about the reduction could have been found to fill out such a small space. But if the entire article had been about the reduction in the rate of attacks, it would have violated rule number one.

Update 20040114: Aziz writes to say:

That same article you reference is an example of a positive spin on the news, not a negative one. The headline is "Attacks down 22%" but if you look at the actual facts reported in the article, the number of casualties has increased (by 29%).

No, it is good news. Aziz quotes from an article which states that insurgent attacks are down but American casualties are about the same. But American casualties arise not only from insurgent attacks, but also from American attacks, and during the last monght there has a major increase in American offensive operations against the insurgency resulting from the intelligence windfall captured along with Saddam.

But it's also good news because we can much more easily deal with the effectiveness of enemy attacks than with number of attacks. Our troops can change their own behavior in order to reduce their vulnerability to insurgent operations. But the only way to reduce insurgent activity is to reduce the insurgency, and that's much more difficult because you have to find them first. The fact that the rate of attacks is down strongly suggests that the insurgency has been badly hurt, because we have been finding them. And that is extremely good news.

Edward writes:

It seems that the reader needs to know two pieces of information: what the claim about the reduction in casualities is, and what the source is. It wouldn't be enough to simply say "Casualties are down 50% since the capture of Saddam Hussein"- the reader wouldn't know if the news item came from the White House, the Pentagon, or Lyndon LaRouche. The journalist _can't_ say the statement is simply objectively true without independently ve