Pitting the National Review over 'reporter' W. Thomas "Moving Car" Smith, Jr.

[Mr.Moto]

@RTFirefly

This has not “certainly has affected lots of Middle East reporting in general, where access to not only government officials but even neighborhoods is controlled by translators and fixers who can indeed steer stories.”

Of course it has.

“Journalism by Remote Control” by Jack Shafer in Slate:

To keep routine trips from morphing into suicide missions, most Western reporters have cut back on travel. Reporters who might have been out and about constantly last year reduced daily outings to three or so in the early summer in the name of security. Now, they may venture out just once a day in Baghdad, but not before carefully plotting their excursions. Many of them feel “stalked” and hunted. Chandrasekaran says the Post bureau put a halt to all non-essential travel, parties, and dinners on the town by September.

To compensate for their loss of mobility, most Western reporters have increasingly turned to their Iraqi news stringers in the provinces and trusted Iraqi staffers—translators, drivers, fixers—to collect first-hand information from news scenes and conduct interviews with Iraqis.

Chandrasekaran calls this kind of reporting “journalism by remote control.” Although he says no Western journalist is happy about having to cover the Iraq news from a remove—“No question about it, it affects the quality of reporting”—he and his colleagues say the work-around is better than no reporting at all.

…Translators act as linguistic go-betweens and advisers on customs, culture, and the trustworthiness of interview subjects for many a foreign correspondent. But converting a translator into a journalist requires coaching, says Cox Newspapers Baghdad correspondent Larry Kaplow, who has reported from Iraq since March 2003. He finds himself reminding his Iraqi helper to remember to take out his notebook when at the scene of a bombing or other news location, and write down all he sees.

“You have to get the [Iraqi staffer] to know what the people across the ocean are interested in,” Kaplow says. “And you’ve get to get them in the habit of asking for examples when they interview people.” Sounds like lessons from Combat Journalism 101, doesn’t it? Rubin says she finds herself teaching some of her Iraqi understudies the art of skepticism.

…What is lost, says Kaplow, is “the feel” he and other reporters had for the country and its people when they did their own reporting alongside their translators.

“We now speak with a little less authority,” says Kaplow. “We work off of fewer interviews.”

“We’re deprived of detail, intimacy. Deprived of a degree of reporting depth and on-the-ground observation seen through the eyes of a foreign correspondent,” Chandrasekaran says.

And this needn’t be confined to Iraq, obviously. I remind you that the Reutersgate incident involved photos taken by a Lebanese freelancer.

[RTFirefly]

Hey, that explains it - Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, etc., etc. - they’re all Arabs!

I mean, they clearly exhibit the Arab racial tendency towards lying and exaggerating about their enemies.

Just in case anyone misses the smiley and the sarcasm, I’m ridiculing (among other things) the (quite racist) notion that Arabs are any more prone to such behavior than anyone else.

ETA: I was responding here to 'luc, not Mr. Moto.

[RTFirefly]

@RTFirefly

As pointed out (repeatedly) above, he didn’t just fail to make their identities known. He failed to make their existence known, writing as if he were the firsthand witness who had personally ascertained the ‘facts’ his sources fed him.

This has not “certainly has affected lots of Middle East reporting in general, where access to not only government officials but even neighborhoods is controlled by translators and fixers who can indeed steer stories.”

@Mr. Moto

Of course it has.

“Journalism by Remote Control” by Jack Shafer in Slate:

1. I hope you don’t mind my including the entire quote that you were responding to, just to show that you’re every bit the fabulist as “Moving Car” Smith. No wonder you have such sympathy for him.

What I said was that the failure to make known that one was relying on sources, rather than one’s own observations, had not affected lots of Middle East reporting.

Your willingness to knock off the first part of my quote, to give the impression that I meant that the necessity of relying on sources had affected Middle East reporting, cannot be construed as other than a deliberate attempt to twist the plain meaning of my words into the very thing I’d just emphatically made clear they didn’t mean.

Not only is that duplicitous, it’s incredibly stupid. You don’t think others can look just a few posts upthread, and see what you’re doing?

To what lengths won’t you go, just to continue giving yourself the impression that you’re holding your own in a debate? Good Lord, how completely worthless you are.

[Mr.Moto]

C’mon. Sometimes in extreme examples we can spot a more general problem.

Did Smith disclose his sources? Nope. Did he get spun by them while he was there? That seems likely, although other factors may be in play here as well. Were all of these things violations of his trust with readers? No question.

However, if a reporter relies on stringers and translators for a good proportion of their information, and this isn’t disclosed either, we run into similar problems. And I don’t think just mentioning that Mr. So-and-so assisted with the story, per Western-style attribution, goes far enough.

A name isn’t the whole of a person’s identity, and in the Mideast other loyalties do matter. Also, the concept of unbiased reporting isn’t well established anywhere in the region from what I can see. People tend to tell stories based on their strong loyalties.

Now, the fact is that other organizations have been burned in reporting the Mideast. Happened to Reuters, happened to CNN. Adding NR to the list would be unfortunate, in my view, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented and it won’t cause the magazine long term harm if they fix this problem the right way.

National Review is conducting a thorough check of this guy. I’m going to wait and see whether this was due to extreme sloppiness or an outright desire to fabricate.

[RTFirefly]

@Mr. Moto

C’mon. Sometimes in extreme examples we can spot a more general problem.

If you want to start a thread about that more general problem, go right ahead. Nobody’s stopping you. This thread is not about that.

Did Smith disclose his sources? Nope.

Oh, fuck off. He didn’t disclose their existence, not their identities.

However, if a reporter relies on stringers and translators for a good proportion of their information, and this isn’t disclosed either, we run into similar problems. And I don’t think just mentioning that Mr. So-and-so assisted with the story, per Western-style attribution, goes far enough.

A name isn’t the whole of a person’s identity, and in the Mideast other loyalties do matter. Also, the concept of unbiased reporting isn’t well established anywhere in the region from what I can see. People tend to tell stories based on their strong loyalties.

Maybe not. But you don’t even get to those questions *if the reporter is pretending to be the source. *

It’s like saying that a student cheated on a paper, but we shouldn’t worry about that because even if he hadn’t, he’d still have gotten an F, so what we really need to do is be sure he can pass, next time. Fuck that shit.

National Review is conducting a thorough check of this guy. I’m going to wait and see whether this was due to extreme sloppiness or an outright desire to fabricate.

a) Linky? K-Lo said they’d done their due diligence.

b) What’s to investigate? He’s owned up to only glimpsing from a moving car, all that stuff he so movingly wrote about. What’s the unresolved issue?

Now go fuck off some more.

[RTFirefly]

Not to mention, none of the above justifies your repeated twisting of my words to make them mean the exact opposite of the things I said with great emphasis.

You’re a liar. What more is there to say about you? I can’t even trust you to tell the truth about what’s plainly visible in the same page of this thread, let alone anything that actually requires checking.

Now kindly take your Christmas tree and shove it up your ass until it comes out your nostrils.

[Mr.Moto]

(removed due to double post.)

[Mr.Moto]

@RTFirefly

a) Linky? K-Lo said they’d done their due diligence.

Not quite.

If I had it all to do over again I would have just gone live when we knew we had a handle on the posts in question and not waited another minute to apologize and let everyone know what was happening here.

While I knew something was wrong before last week, I did not know about it six weeks ago, as some have reported, and while you can question all the calls I made, there was never any intention here to make excuses or hide anything.

I wish this hadn’t happened. I still think Smith is a well-intentioned reporter. We post him on a submission-by-submission basis and will continue to do so unless we have reason to decide otherwise. (And we are currently doing a more thorough review of all his work.)

[wring]

@RTFirefly

Now kindly take your Christmas tree and shove it up your ass until it comes out your nostrils.

:eek: WOuldn’t that hurt??

[RTFirefly]

@wring

:eek: WOuldn’t that hurt??

Well, that was sort of the idea. I wasn’t exactly wishing him well.
Mr. Moto:

@RTFirefly

b) What’s to investigate? He’s owned up to only glimpsing from a moving car, all that stuff he so movingly wrote about. What’s the unresolved issue?