It was an essay and I wrote to Dawkins himself. Your opinion is of no consequence to me. I peeked in at that endless thread; cosmosdan’s got all the bases covered and said exactly what I did; that we don’t know at this point in time what we don’t know. Someday we will. Now let the thread be.
I think Ware just had it up to here with all the gladtalk and happy-making on the part of US politicians while he’s off ducking bombs and bullets. So give dude a break. McCain needed to be called out. He’s backpedalling furiously today.
Senators don’t have to pay their air fare out of pocket if they’re out on official business…
Anyway, let’s be serious. There’s no way a city of Baghdad’s size is a prison, where no one but armed gangs ever leaves home for even a second.
Considering the number of deaths and the people who are dying in Baghdad, it’s a lot more dangerous to be an Iraqi there, and they certainly aren’t barricaded in their homes.
Could you walk down a street in Baghdad without anything bad happening? Definitely, Western reporters have traveled all over the city without incident. But to be equally serious, it’s a much more dangerous place than say, New Olreans or even Baltimore, and by many degrees, so just because you can walk down a street without incident doesn’t mean it’s something you’d want to do if you had the resources to live somewhere else and had no good reason to be in Baghdad (like the vast majority of Americans, especially Senators.)
I disagree. I think that a reporter’s opinion and experience are going to be a necessary and essential part of the reporting. Fact of the matter is, that’s why they have started embedding reporters, isn’t it? So we can see what our heroic troopers are doing at eye-level.
So, what you’ve got is a guy at ground level whose ass is in danger every day in a very personal way. Then you have a guy who is thousands of miles away from any danger who is insisting that things are going swimmingly. I think it showed great restraint that the reporter didn’t say, “Of course Senator McCain said that - he’s hitched his election hopes on the public believing him that the war is going well. He’s lying, and will continue to lie until he is crushed in the primaries. Maybe once he realizes that he’s not going to get any benefit out of lying he’ll start to find a more realistic view.”
And to be truly professional, he’d have to give competing views, probably from some army flack. Boom Iraq is perfectly safe. Boom
If the reporter is standing in the open, and some pol says the sky is pink with yellow polka dots, the reporter doesn’t have to call NOAA to contradict him.
People weren’t saying that nobody can leave home, but that westerners can’t.
It’s relatively well-known that western reporters don’t travel all over the city. They rely for the most part on local reporters/cameramen, etc…to do the job while they usually stay in protected areas, and if they do leave these areas they do so with armed bodyguards, or military protection, etc…
Agreed, especially after reading this CNN.com story. How can you ask a reporter who’s lived through the daily hell these guys have to listen to some safely distant yammerhead trying to sell a puppies and rainbows view of the situation and not lose it? At least Ware didn’t close with “What the fuck is he smoking?”
I’m often too lazy to dig up cites, but this time it was so easy to find one (first page by just ggogling “reporters in Baghdad”) that you’ll get one.
Fromhere :
You did mean “child,” here, right? Not “somebody who has changed” or “doppleganger” or something? Because changeling means the former and not the latter. Just wondering because it wasn’t clear from context.
Also makes a difference that when he made the “neverland” comment, the reporter was taking from personal experience, as a westerner living in Baghdad, rather then as someone who was gathering interviews/statistics/etc from experts, locals and so forth. I think that makes his stating of his own opinion of McCain in a more colorful way then he might have otherwise more understandable.
No, I recall it quite vividly. In fact, you can see a still shot and description here. It was Novak and Carville, and a host. Pure he said, she said type shit. Whatever it was, it can hardly be cited as an example of CNN showing a critical attitude toward a conservative, which it was brought up to do.
I don’t think the reporter should be in the story, but it’s a valid form of journalism, and I’m not contracting that. I have issues with the “Neverland” comment, which to me was editorializing.
I don’t know. I thought it was more for the government to keep track of people and stories being reported, call me cynical.
We don’t need embedding for that. The war correspondents that I’ve known would just go and find the store, and not need a government source to spoon feed it to them.
I’m not disagreeing here. I still think that professionalism would call for a more restrained response than the Neverland reference. Even a simple, “I don’t know what neighborhoods Senator McCain is talking about, but from my experience…” rather than the mocking “I don’t know what part of Neverland” line. It gives me great joy to hear a reporter say that, however, I do not think it’s professional.
And what do I know? I’m a (photo)journalist and I believe journalists need to be kept to a standard and an ideal. I don’t think what he did was grossly unprofessional, but I do think it crossed the line of reporting and editorializing.
Oh really? Cite, please. Because every reporter I’ve heard speaking about the Iraq experience speaks about how they are so hampered by security concerns that they can pretty much never leave the safety of their hotels.
What’s getting overlooked is how stupid McCain’s statement is if it were true. I mean, whoo-hoo! there are some (not many, not most, not all…just some) neighborhoods in Bagdad it is safe to walk in.
