As a longtime reader of The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer, and someone who has known and dealt with Observer and N&O reporters and editors countless times over the years, I can’t say that I agree with some critics who contend that the acquisition of North Carolina’s largest papers by the Sacramento-based McClatchy chain has been some sort of catastrophe. The truly unwelcome changes at the Observer and N&O are really going on throughout print journalism, due to changes in the business model. But recent years have also brought new online products and a continued commitment to solid investigative reporting at these papers.
However, there is one clear downside from the McClatchy purchase: North Carolina newspaper readers are now presented daily with some of the worst, most-biased reporting on military and international affairs in American journalism. The McClatchy Washington bureau is, to put it mildly, atrocious. Two recent examples help illustrate the point. First, as I noted a while back in a CJO column about “government by executive summary,” McClatchy totally misreported the findings of a recent study of pre-war documents from Iraq revealing Saddam Hussein’s extensive dealings with Islamist terror groups, including al Qaeda leaders and affiliates. Second, today’s story about the Petraeus and Crocker testimony before the Senate yesterday was way off the mark, and written much like an opinion or analysis piece that the straight-news piece it was supposed to be. Look at this passage, for example:
Throughout their daylong testimony before the Senate Armed Services
and Foreign Relations committees, Petraeus and Crocker tried to
highlight recent security gains while asking lawmakers for more time to
ensure those gains are sustainable.They boasted that civilian
casualties had fallen, that al-Qaida was weakened, that the Iraqi army
was stronger and that more than 91,000 Iraqi citizens were armed and
working with the U.S., mostly in Iraq’s Sunni communities.But
they also were forced to acknowledge that the flawed Iraqi-led
offensive in the mostly Shiite city of Basrah showed that the
Shiite-dominated south is on the precipice of an intra-sectarian war.The
Iraqi military all but collapsed within days of fighting rebel groups
there, quashing hopes that the forces could soon take over security of
their communities.
The two “boasted”? But were then “forced to acknowledge” that southern Iraq is “on the precipice of an intra-sectarian war”? That’s not a fair or accurate account of what happened yesterday. And as for the notion that the Iraqi military “all but collapsed” last week, it is ludicrous and clearly contradicted by real reporting from other mainstream news sources and milbloggers who know what they’re talking about.
Can the editors in Charlotte and Raleigh just fire these clowns in D.C.? It’s warranted.
