Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Juan Cole reports on Baghdad from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is a professor. His blog, called Informed Comment, is must-reading for anyone who's interested in what's going on in Iraq, even reporters who are already there. He is on the line from Ann Arbor. Welcome back to the show.
JUAN COLE: Well, thank you so much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You comb reports coming out of Iraq, in order to write your blog. Have you had to reduce your reliance on Western media?
JUAN COLE: Well, actually the media situation is deteriorating on all fronts. For instance, you used to get very good reporting in the Arabic press based in London. They would send smart Lebanese reporters to Iraq who would do reports from oh, Basra or Nasiriyah. But you don't see nearly as much of that kind of from-the-field reporting in the Arabic press. They seem to be more and more reliant on stringers inside Iraq of varying quality.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what sources now do you use most frequently?
JUAN COLE: Well, I still use the same sources. I comb the Arabic press and the Western wire services. I think all along, Agence France-Presse has been among the more comprehensive, and it obviously went to the system of using local stringers a long time ago. But then, a lot of people in the professional news side have complained to me that AFP doesn't always have the highest standards for accuracy and that they're a little chary of depending solely on it. So now I think the rest of the news-gathering organizations are really going to the AFP model, which then, you know, you become dependent on the local stringers or on, on embedded reporters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So then what part of the story do you feel like you're not getting that you used to get?
JUAN COLE: Oh, well, you can't figure out what's going on. For instance, beginning in early summer of this year, it was clear that the City of Samarra had fallen into the hands of some sort of insurgency or guerrilla group, and the question then becomes, well who are these people that have taken over the city, and who are they fighting against, exactly? And it all remains, to this day, from my point of view, very shadowy. I don't, I've never seen a name, I've never seen a party mentioned; it's - you know - "Americans went in and fought guerrillas." Who, who? What exactly is going on here? And, and this is the kind of thing that in the old days you used to be able to find out, and now I, I just don't see it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what is the impact, then, for commentators and analysts like yourself of the dearth of details?
JUAN COLE: Well, not knowing the street level of detail affects how we should think about our success or failure in Iraq. If the recent U.S. operation against guerrillas in Samarra has caused the people of Samarra to now resent the United States more, to dislike it more, then it was a political failure -- even if it was a military success against the guerrillas. Well, unless you can have a lot of journalists in there, talking to people and getting that word out, it's very hard even to have a metric for knowing whether we've succeeded or failed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that, with this lack of detail, this lack of color, this lack of specifics that the viewer, the listener, the reader is likely to experience a kind of Iraq-fatigue because of a series of car bombs that all sound the same?
JUAN COLE: I, I think that is a great danger, and I think that very frequently the passive tense is used - "a car bomb was set off; it caused such and such number of casualties" - there's no context for it, and I think that kind of news is very difficult to evaluate. The mainstream media have often fallen into that trap, even back in the days when we could do better. A movement towards more and more of that kind of superficial reporting is certainly bad for our ability to understand the situation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Thank you very much.
JUAN COLE: You're very welcome.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and writes the blog Informed Comment.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, feeding good news to the troops, Ahh-nold's administration is one year old, and Howard Stern goes up on the bird.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.