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Debate of the dinosaurs

14 comments on Debate of the dinosaurs

Debate of the dinosaurs

Romenesko captures a pissing match between Greg Mitchell, editor of the failing newspaper trade rag E&P, and Abe Rosenthal, aged ex-editor of the NY Times.

Mitchell wrote a numbnutty column in E&P calling on newspapers to call for a withdrawl from Iraq. Rosenthal wrote a column in the NY Sun taking him to task. And Mitchell responded with a sputtering and misspelled response to Romenesko.

Be that all as it may, Rosenthal attacks newspapers for their coverage of Abu Ghraib that now ignores Saddam’s atrocities. Rosenthal never was known for writing a clear column but he has some clear things to say on this:

I do not know if the Iraqis regularly used leashes on prisoners. But they did use poison gas on civilians they wanted to eliminate, like the Kurds.

Strangely, we are uneasy even at the very idea of bringing up the mass Iraqi torture and murder.That is an insult to all those murdered masses of Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Jews, and Iranians.

It is essential that we remember, ourselves, and the young members of the American armed forces know that they are fighting a government that is fascist in organization and in its slavering sadism.

To remember the sufferings of Saddam

14 responses to “Debate of the dinosaurs”

  1. shark Avatar
    shark

    I agree. CNN, in particular, should be absolutely ashamed of themselves and cease running ANY stories on Abu Ghraib. After all, that is the network that deliberately withheld news of Iraqi suffering so they could maintain their cushy access to Saddam.
    And they wonder why FNC beats the snot out of them…

  2. Lola Avatar
    Lola

    Indeed. My husband and I are now watching FNC. It’s really refreshing to see these folks be honest as to where they’re coming from, admitting upfront just where they stand politically. The only time I see CNN is when I’m at the local deli ordering breakfast food.

  3. jakob Avatar
    jakob

    News flash! Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. Yes, his regime was responsible for terrible crimes and abuses against humanity. But he was toppled over a year ago. Mission accomplished! (Or so we were told.)
    Mitchell’s column was looking ahead, not back. Why is it so unthinkable that, at some point, the U.S. presence in Iraq might be doing more harm than good?
    I believe that many of us who survive this debacle will look back years from now and say that the war was lost with the publication of photos documenting torture and abuse of Iraqis at the hands of Americans. And the Bush administration set the stage for these abuses with the position that widely accepted rules of human decency didn’t apply to our treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
    Apologists for the abusers can rationalize all they want, but from now on a large majority of Muslims in the Middle East will see the U.S. as an unwelcome occupying force. The images they have seen of Americans humiliating their people are not going to fade. We have lost any claim we had to the moral high ground.
    Whether and how long we should remain there are questions that need to be asked.

  4. egger Avatar
    egger

    Numbnutty? What, are we back in high school?
    I read both columns and Mitchell’s response, and would have to agree with Mitchell that Rosenthal grossly misrepresented what he said.

  5. Yehudit Avatar
    Yehudit

    “Why is it so unthinkable that, at some point, the U.S. presence in Iraq might be doing more harm than good?”
    It’s not unthinkable, it just doesn’t happen to be true. The facts don’t support that conclusion. But if you just read the NYTimes and CNN, you wouldn’t know that.
    “I believe that many of us who survive this debacle will look back years from now and say that the war was lost with the publication of photos documenting torture and abuse of Iraqis at the hands of Americans.”
    And you really want that to be true don’t know? So you are going to keep saying that in an effort to make it true. Even though there is tons of evidence that the war isn’t “lost.”
    “And the Bush administration set the stage for these abuses with the position that widely accepted rules of human decency didn’t apply to our treatment of Iraqi prisoners.”
    That is not the position of the Bush admin, nor is it “our treatment” of Iraqi prisoners, except for a few in a few cellblocks, who were already identified as Baathists or terrorists. The abuse was not visited on the vast majority of Iraqi prisoners. Which doesn’t excuse the abuse, but you are making a sweeping statement, making the part stand for the whole. Which is bigotry and slander.
    “Apologists for the abusers can rationalize all they want, but from now on a large majority of Muslims in the Middle East will see the U.S. as an unwelcome occupying force. The images they have seen of Americans humiliating their people are not going to fade. We have lost any claim we had to the moral high ground.”
    Yeah, you know what all the Muslims in the ME think and what they are going to think a year from now. I would love to have that mind-reading capability – how do you do it?
    Anyway, what matters is what Iraqis think, not the rest of the Arab world. Iraqis are already unhappy with their fellow Arabs for standing by while Saddam abused them, now they see the Arab crowing over these abuses as the height of hypocrisy. so why dont’ you support them, instead of the rest of the Arabs?

  6. Lex Avatar
    Lex

    Sigh. Abe Rosenthal couldn’t write worth a damn when he was working, and retirement clearly hasn’t helped him any.

  7. paladin Avatar
    paladin

    Do we really want a hand full of Eastern media elites dictating national policy? Remember, these people were not elected, and they cannot be voted out of office or fired. They have too much power and too little accountability.

  8. blaster Avatar
    blaster

    Even better than ignoring a story – Tell an outright lie about it!

  9. shark Avatar
    shark

    From Mitchells’ column:
    As with Vietnam, one brave voice (remember Walter Cronkite on Feb. 27, 1968) may inspire others.
    He means one unhinged a-hole may inspire the rest of the lemmings….
    What a despicable piece of writing.

  10. Kimberly Avatar
    Kimberly

    “Numbnutty” is not a high school term here. It’s a perfectly acceptable synonym for “idiotic” and “asinine,” and all three terms apply to Mitchell’s comments.
    As for the commenter who praised Mitchell for “looking ahead”, I have news for them. Mitchell is requesting that every single journalist in the country share his anti-war views and use their journalistic power to inflict those views on the public. That’s not looking ahead – hell, it’s no longer even journalism. It’s dishonest demagoguery at that point, and Mitchell should be deeply ashamed of himself for suggesting it.
    Funny how those who so vehemently oppose Bush and the Iraq War don’t trust anyone else to independently view the facts and reach similar conclusions. No, that view must be unilaterally (ha) forced on everyone – for their own good, don’t you know. Journalists must abandon all pretense of objectivity and cram their biases down the throats of their presumably-thick readers.
    Pathetic.

  11. AST Avatar
    AST

    Mitchell:
    After a month of uprisings in Iraq, an unexpected hike in U.S. casualties, and a prison abuse scandal that shattered goodwill in the Arab street, what do American newspapers have to say?
    So far, not very much, at least in terms of advising our leaders how to clean up or get out of this mess.
    This is the first time I’ve heard this new theory of journalism where newspapers are supposed to “advise our leaders.” I thought they were supposed to report the news and furnish a debate on public issues, so that Americans can decide for themselves. Mitchell is entitled to his own opinion, but the suggestion that other newspapers should be “advising our leaders how to clean up or get out of this mess” contains some disturbing assumptions.
    It assumes that Iraq is a “mess” because of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Talk about keyhole vision! There is a lot going right in Iraq, but the only thing that matters is the treatment of prisioners? I guess we should have called off WWII, because some U.S. soldiers shot German prisoners.
    Worse, it assumes that newspaper editors are qualified to advise the president on foreign policy merely because they write about it.
    The arrogance is amazing. “The Republicans are cackling,” Kerry is foundering! What are the nation’s newspapers doing to rectify this? And if they’re supporting the president, “are they willing to accept responsibility . . . for the coming carnage and unmentionable expense?”
    That’s a novel idea, accepting responsibility for the positions you advocate. So what will Mitchell do if we pull out and Iraq is overrun by Ba’athists who promptly return to Saddam’s methods and murder everybody accused of supporting the U.S. presence?

  12. rivlax Avatar
    rivlax

    Greg Mitchell has turned E&P in to a joke. Its sole purpose seems to be to confirm leftist bias in the media. This once-fine trade publication (I’ve read it since I was in journalism school 35 years ago) is on its last legs. It is an embarrassment to our industry. It was a weekly when Mitchell took over. Now it’s a monthly. Ink-stained wretches don’t even read it anymore. Mitchell lost me when he wrote a column blithely admitting that he made up a story once while a young reporter. He blamed it on deadline pressure and seems to think every young reporter resorts to fraud when taxed by the clock. Just pitiful. The E&P management needs to change things.

  13. Dexter Westbrook Avatar
    Dexter Westbrook

    Using the term “bravery” to describe the writing of newspaper editorials is a crock.

  14. Doctor Slack Avatar
    Doctor Slack

    Abu Ghraib has clarified for me who’s serious and who isn’t in the pro-war sector of online opinion, so I’ve ceased finding Buzzmachine a worthwhile forum for this kind of debate. But I’ll take one final kick at the can, because dammit, I want to be able to respect people like Jeff Jarvis.
    To Jeff, and other regulars here with whom I’ve talked and sometimes exchanged flames in the past: there was a point when I sympathized at a certain level with the “humanitarian” agrument for the Iraq war. Many of us anti-wars didn’t buy it — I, for one, thought the war would be too expensive in human terms and would deliver no real justifying change once the Americans eventually left — but even most of us never envisaged the US pressing Abu Ghraib back into service as a torture chamber. We didn’t really understand why the insurgency was happening and why it was growing. In that sense, we were almost as wrong as you were.
    Here’s a newsflash: using Saddam as a distraction was dubious then. That tactic is dead now. Completely and utterly. Rosenthal looks craven, absurd and frankly immoral trying to pretend that smaller mass graves and slightly-less-bad-torture-chambers-depending-on-whom-who-you-ask are some kind of humanitarian achievement, and you look no better in peddling this view. Many of you have been fond of pinning the downward spiral in Iraq on “the anti-war press,” but this kind of fatuous ethical hairsplitting, this cowardly use of a now-powerless Saddam as a human criticism-shield, goes beyond clueless and into cowardly and irresponsible. And you had better believe it’s adversely affecting America’s reputation and the safety of its troops on the ground a hell of a lot more than any of the reporters who have had the temerity to simply report other bad news when it happened.
    Pro-wars need to make a decision now; this is a point-of-no-return situation. How seriously do you see yourselves as an adjunct to the war effort? Do you believe your words and actions affect the troops and the mission, just as you were so often fond of complaining about the Beeb’s supposed effect? If you do, the downplayers and weaselers and “let’s-just-remember-Saddam-was-somewhat-worse” brigade should be completely and utterly anathema to you.
    Or, you know, you can retreat ever-further into the “everything-is-okay” bubble with likeminded delusionals like Glenn Reynolds or Yehudit. Up to you. But don’t be surprised if this irrevocably loses you the respect of others. It will be hard even to see you as being honestly and sincerely “pro-“anything but salvaging your own ego.