Boss Tweed, Iraq & Good News Realism (Sept. 15) contained a link to a post by frequent commenter Praktike, criticizing Arthur Chrenkoff for his "Good News from Iraq" series.
- Praktike's Chrenkoff Syndrome post has been updated.
- ...and Arthur Chrenkoff replies to his critics:
"I'm not in the business of providing any "assessment" at all... My readers can... give each set of information the weight they consider appropriate, and then make up their mind..."
Which makes a lot of sense to me. We hope that's what you'll do, too, starting with these 2 posts. Given them a read, and make up your mind.
I personally don't find this "Chrenkoff's reports are too optimistic" criticism very useful or compelling. Or valid.
Every attempt to explain what a place is "like" is necessarily biased and incomplete. Media reports, quite obviously, are biased in the negative direction; this is easy to verify by comparing with emails sent home by the troops themselves.
So without these emails, or Chrenkoff, who admits that he purposely seeks out the good just as the media purposely seeks out the bad, how would it be possible for us back here to get any kind of clue what the real situation is?
The days are long gone when any news consumer can read just the New York Times, or just the Washington Post, etc., and have a balanced and accurate view of events around the world. If that was EVER possible. So people who really want to know what is going on simply must seek out multiple news sources. Including, by definition, those who either have no apparent agenda (emails from boots-on-the-ground) or those who purposely look for good news.
I should add that I didn't read those posts ... my comment above is general in nature.