Salon (Premium) has an excellent story today by Trevor Butterworth on the quality of reporting in the British press. I can’t tell you how many utterly fascinating stories I’ve seen on the Web sites of various British papers since the 9/11 attack that I haven’t linked to because they’re poorly sourced and can’t be corroberated in other publications. Butterworth’s article explains that the journalistic standards in the British press are, for the most part, much lower than they are at major US papers and that the journalistic culture there is much different than it is in the US. Here’s one quote that provides some of the gist of the story:
The problem is primarily economic. Britain is the most competitive news market in the world, and news reporting – especially international reporting – is pretty darned expensive compared to columns about the travails of gaining or losing weight (step forward “Bridget Jones’s Diary”). “Executives did sums,” wrote former Independent Sunday editor Ian Jack in his 1998 introduction to “The Granta Book of Reportage.” And their cost-benefit analysis was ultimately driven by what Jack called “the specter of the reader’s boredom, the viewer’s lassitude.”
“‘Stories are important because they sell newspapers; therefore they will be bought, stolen, distorted, spun, sentimentalized, over-dramatized and should all else fail invented to woo a public which has 10 national dailies to choose from, and another nine on a Sunday,” he wrote. Only the Financial Times has kept faith with the kind of straight reporting that gave the New York Times its chill authority. Otherwise, Britain has succumbed to a media culture that “places a high premium on excitement, controversy and sentimentality, in which information takes second place to the opinions it arouses.” Even the BBC has suffered, according to a critical Atlantic Monthly assessment by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who argued that a decade of bad management and a fragmented British television market have contributed to a decline in standards and resources.
Eric Margolis reports that it was the United States and Britain who supplied Iraq with Anthrax – in order to give them more weapons in their war against Iran in the eighties. That certainly explains why we weren’t willing to give up on the weapons inspections, we knew for sure that they had the goods and that if they used them, we’d be to blame. His reporting on Abdul Haq leads me to a few questions, though. From what I understood, Haq was not on a CIA-sponsored mission and he wasn’t even on good terms with the CIA. Haq’s problems with the CIA stemmed from the fact that Haq wanted what was best for Afghanistan and the CIA didn’t. (Link from Interesting People.)
Various news sources are reporting claims that Mazar-i-Sharif (the northern city where most of the fighting between the Northern Alliance and Taliban has taken place) has fallen to the Northern Alliance. If the city comes under the control of the Northern Alliance, I would expect US forces to move in and set up a base of operations at the airport there. It looks like our insistence on bombing through Ramadan (which starts really soon) is making us unwelcome in Pakistan, and we can certainly operate with impunity if our forces are within Afghanistan. That’s a luxury that we don’t have when we’re operating out of Pakistan or the Central Asian countries that border Afghanistan. At this point, I’m in favor of getting this war over with as rapidly as possible so we can hopefully start helping Afghanistan rebuild, and kicking the Taliban out of Mazar-i-Sharif is a big step toward the end of the war. I think it will also make it easier to woo Pushtuns over to the side that favors a new government for Afghanistan.