Taken with a Grain of Salt: Another Example of the MSM Cocoon

Many have commented here on Winds and elsewhere on the extremely bad coverage of the war in the Main Stream Media (MSM for short) that is driven by their professional/political cultural cocoon. Members of the MSM assume their common myths are actual reality until they are slapped in the face repeatedly by reality. Even then, they sometimes still deny reality because it hits to close to their identity issues for them to admit it.

I just tripped across another example of that cocoon effect which literally glows in the dark given where it comes from, namely from a Senior Managing Editor for the Military Times news group. In my opinion, this example bodes ill for the continued existence of the MSM.

To begin with, somehow, I got on an e-mailing list for the Village Voice. I decided to keep the media-spam in order to see what is spinning up the anti-war left. The latest I have seen is this piece by Jarret Murphy called War Scores, in which he knocks an Army Times poll showing that the Active Duty military fighting the war overwhelmingly supports it. This poll is a deadly blow to the self-image of the ‘Anti-War Left' who are trying to rationalize cutting and running from Iraq as "supporting the troops." The poll results make charges from the Right that "Supporting the Troops" means "Supporting Their Mission" something the Anti-War Left cannot deal with even in their own minds, let alone in public debate.

This is what Murphy says:

"…But the fact is, all the results need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Since it is hard to get a list of active-duty military members for polling, the Military Times group (independent from the Pentagon, it publishes the Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, and Marine Corps Times) uses a mail survey of subscribers for its annual poll. Robert Hodierne, senior managing editor of the group's parent company, says this method was suggested by the Gallup Organization, and said this year's 33 percent response rate was "pretty good."

But since the poll's target audience consists of subscribers to military newspapers, the respondents tend to be "older and more career-oriented than the military as a whole," Hodierne tells the Voice. "There's value in that. But it should not be confused with a poll that consists of the entire military." The 21-year-old private, he says, is unlikely to subscribe. Most of those killed in Iraq so far have been younger than 25 and held ranks of corporal or lower."

The problem here is that the person Murphy quotes, Robert Hodierne, is flat wrong in a field he should know as a senior manager of a group of military specialty media weeklies.

The following was posted over on James Dunnigan's Strategypage.com, and I read it before I got the Village Voice newsletter:

ATTRITION: Odd Casualty Patterns in Iraq

January 7, 2005: American casualties in Iraq have demonstrated some unusual patterns, at least compared to previous wars. Accidents account for 18 percent of the deaths. However, the number of accidental deaths has been steadily declining, from a peak of 31 in May, 2003. Ten percent of all deaths have been caused by vehicle accidents, and 71 percent of those were single vehicle accidents. Iraqi drivers are particularly aggressive, and traffic rules are rarely obeyed. Rollovers accounted for 54 percent of vehicle deaths. The poor condition of the roads was a major factor in 30 percent of the traffic accidents. Blast injuries (from roadside bombs and shells) was the major cause of 40 percent of all deaths, while bullets and shell fragments were the major cause for another 29 percent.

Four percent of deaths were caused by drowning. Central Iraq is a very wet place.

This was also the first war were the lowest ranking troops did not account for the largest share of the deaths. In Iraq, junior NCOs (ranks E-4 to E-6) accounted for 56 percent of deaths, while the lowest ranks (E-1 to E-3) accounted for 28 percent. Officers accounted for 11 percent of all deaths. This pattern reflects the demographics of the all-volunteer armed forces, which is an older force (average age of the dead was 26, and 43 percent were married.) The reservists, who comprise 22 percent of the dead, also tend to be older.

This difference in reporting struck me as wrong in a number of different ways that are all symptoms of the "MSM cocoon."

The first is my displeasure at Murphy. Quoting a senior professional journalist as an "expert" on anything other than journalism is bad journalism, even if the journalist is a former military correspondent. Correspondents who are not ex-military cannot have generated the kind of subject matter expertise on the military except on things they have seen with their own eyes. Quoting Rick Atkinson on what he saw and put in his book IN THE COMPANY OF SOLDIERS during Operation Iraqi Freedom is a valid use of a journalist rolodex. Quoting a senior managing editor in Washington DC on the demographics of American military casualties in Iraq is not.

Justified or not, Murphy's doing so left me with the strong suspicion he was flattering the ego of a possible future employer.

My initial impression of Hodierne as an "military expert," given that wide disparity in reality -- AKA 67% of the dead being officers of Junior NCOs vice 28% for lower ranks and the majority of the dead being older than 21 – versus his "informed opinion" was that we had someone who was projecting his experience with the Vietnam era military on today's volunteer Army. His cutting down of the credibility of his own paper's polling data also screamed "bi-coastal media liberal." Too confirm these suspicions I googled him using this phrase as my search terms "Robert Hodierne senior managing editor."

The result was my finding his resume posted on the web here. Sure enough, he was a Vietnam era photographer and correspondent. This is part of what his resume says on that time:

"The chief spokesman for the U.S. Army in Vietnam said my story about troops refusing to fight gave aid and comfort to the enemy and "was treason.""

This confirmed my suspicions on Hodierne's politics.

Further in his career you find that he worked as a general reporter at the Minneapolis Star (now the Star-Tribune of Powerline infamy), Washington DC bureau chief for the Charlotte Observer, city editor for the San Jose Mercury News, Associate news director for San Francisco's KRON-TV 4, a Newhouse News Service national editor and deputy bureau chief in Washington DC, and later, finally, as the number two senior managing editor for the Military Times media group for Gannett.

This confirmed my impression as to Hodierne's professional background. This guy is a bi-coastal MSM "suit."

Hodierne's final resume entry makes much of the six weeks he put in Iraq and the stories he filed there. The "framing," to use the ‘In-Vogue' term of art, of each of these stories was of horror, waste, and the victimization of soldiers by high command via giving them impossible missions.

In other words, Hodierne's "angle" in each of the three stories was "Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam." He went in with a story line in mind and took the facts he wanted and packaged them together to get the results that fitted to his preconceptions.

The real lesson of this exercise isn't that there is a MSM conspiracy to undercut the War on Terrorism. It is a matter of the combination of unprofessional conduct via lack of outside audit and professional promotion incentives. Until the coming of Blogs and internet search engine like Google.com, MSM types could get away with "shaping events" based on their preconceptions. There was just no one else out there who could report what was happening because of the high barriers to entry costs of really reporting as well as doing the necessary library background research to frame events in their proper perspective. The MSM had no real competition for far too long - and like any other large bureaucratic organization that has been unchallenged, they got fat, dumb and lazy.

What is further, I just don't see the MSM dinosaur changing. Reporters are not stupid, at least regards their own career advancement. If they work under or want to work under a man like Hodierne, who writes the kinds of stories he has, and has the resume that Hodierne does. Just exactly what kind of stories are they going to write in order to get their by-lines published? The answer is these fast track reporters will write to cater for their editor's preconceptions rather than reality in order to get promoted. Iraq will be Vietnam whether it has anything to do with the truth at all or not.

Today there is immediate on-the-spot reporting from hundreds of people with lap tops, wireless devices and digital camera's connected to the world wide web "flooding the zone" -- to borrow a ill-used phrase from CNN -- before the MSM 5-Star hotel brigades of the American broadcast networks, CNN or the BBC can arrive. These on-the-spot amateur reporters are more often than not subject matter experts in things like military operations, relief operations, engineering, diplomacy, etc. The wider field of people involved in blogging makes for a larger pool of information and smart people to draw on in reporting than any single news organization can match.

This more than makes up for any lack of media training, which frankly is geared to simplify messages to fit everything into a 10-30 second sound bite at the expense of everything else, including reality if it conflicted with preconceptions. That was a useful industrial age skill in a world of highly expensive telecommunications and pay per second broadcast advertising. It is a redundant one in the 21st century.

To use the network model for a moment, lower cost telecommunications are allowing more accurate, higher bandwidth, information to rapidly route around slower, news filtering, organizations and expose exactly how those filters operate. If those filters don't add value to attract eyes, they will be ignored. As a result, I don't think any of the current MSM will survive the change brought on by this new worldwide information environment. The incentives of those inside the MSM cocoon are just too strong against change.

Sometimes butterflies die because they never break out of their cocoons, and you don't need a grain of salt to know that.