Category: Media

Juan Cole had a generally good commentary on the column that T-Fed wrote yesterday calling for an end to the GWOT. Juan zeroed in on the “bad for business” aspects of the GWOT that Tom had focused on.
Juan did not, however, mention an intriguing little two-word insertion in Tom’s text that imho we should seek much more clarification of.
Tom was writing of (I think) Americans in general– though speaking for myself and for everyone else who agitated strongly against the post-9/11 warmaking, I say, “Count me out!”. He wrote this:

our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

Is this the beginning of the mea culpa I have been seeking for so long now– from Tom, as from all the rest of those liberal hawks whose voice was so important in both strengthening and legitimizing the Bushites’ pre-March 2003 push to invade Iraq?
I don’t know. Tom doesn’t give any further clarification of his views on Iraq. We can note, though, that if the US’s reaction to 9/11 “knocked America completely out of balance”, then it had an impact on the 26 million people of Iraq that was far, far worse than that.
So I think we do need to have clarity from Tom regarding how he feels now about the pro-invasion position he energetically espoused prior to March 2003. (It would be good to have that conversation with Juan, too, at some point, though I think the support he gave to the invasion was somewhat less energetic than that of T-Fed, Jim-Boy Hoagland, and numerous other wellpaid heavyweights in the so-called “liberal” wing of the commentatoriat. And it goes without saying the neo-con wing was, in general, far worse.)
What Tom did write about, to illustrate the ways he thought the US had been “knocked completely out of balance”, was mainly Guantanamo– or perhaps I should say, those perceptions of Guantanamo that non-Americans have, that make them less happy to do business with the US as a result. He wrote, too, about those intrusive aspects of US border-control ops that dissuade non-US business execs and tourists from visiting our lovely country.
I should note that his column does raise one interesting possibility regarding how this thing called the “GWOT” might be expected to end. Many people have worried about this. In the traditional history of war, a war is first declared, by the competent arm of any given government, against one or more other named governments. It is then waged, using army-versus-army force, until either (a) one side is completely obliterated, in which case the victor becomes the “occupying power” in the other guy’s country and assumed the responsibilities associated with that status, or (b) a surrender is negotiated between the governments concerned; and then the two sides implement the terms of that surrender, which may or may not include a limited-term occupation by the stronger side of the terrain of the weaker side.
But at least, in traditional warfare, everyone understood their rights and responsibilities– and most importantly of all, there were clear criteria that marked off the situation of “at war” from the situation of “at peace.” (In WW2, the victory over Germany took form “a” above, while that over Japan took form “b”.)
But with this amorphous thing that Bush announced in late 2001, called the “Global War on Terror”, there were no clear limits at all– either spatially or temporally. One had no idea when the GWOT could be declared “over”, since there was no clearly identified opponent whose vanquishing would constitute victory. Indeed, we were never given a definition of victory. We were just asked for hundreds of billions of dollars to carry on waging this thing.
So now, T-Fed has done us the service of suggesting some actual criteria for when the GWOT can be declared over. In his argument, it could be considered over when Microsoft, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Association of US Travel Agents tell us it is “time to move on.”
Under international law, you will note, this all looks most unusual and irregular.
Well, the whole GWOT has looked quite irregular under international law, all along.
It is time, indeed, for a new paradigm. (Amazing! That’s what my new book will be about! Hint: It’s called “Global Inclusion” and involves returning to and strengthening the long-established structures of international law…)
But as we all– US citizens and the other 95% of the world’s people– work together to build and work for this new paradigm, I think we still need to hold to transparent account all those, both inside and outside the US government, who bear some responsibility (including the responsibility of public incitement) for having taken the US into its illegal and extremely harmful invasion of Iraq. Please, let’s not simply sweep that historical record under the carpet.
This is not a question of schadenfreude or personal vindication. It is important that we learn from this whole experience… about the nature of war; about the need for caution and conservatism in the use of force; about the possibility of fatal mismatches between intentions and effects; about the need to listen carefully to others inside and outside the country who have differing views; and about the fact that warmaking is actually, these days, not very good at– or quite possibly even harmful for– the attainment of moral goals of real and lasting substance.
So Tom Friedman (and the rest of you onetime “liberal hawks”) please tell us a lot more about how exactly you think it was that the US went “completely out of balance” after 9/11. And in particular, whether you now think it is possible that your own views and writings on Iraq in the lead-up to March 2003 might have been a part of that.

The editorial team of the New York Times finally, today, wrote this (text also here):

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

I could say this is long overdue… But more to the point, it is huge and significant.
This editorial is a long one, taking up an entire broad column in the paper. It went on to say:

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.
At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.
While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.
The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.
Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.
A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.
That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.
The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

I should note how very, very similar some of these editorialists’ thinking is to the argument about the need for a speedy and orderly withdrawal that I have been writing about since July 2005. (E.g., 1, 2, and 3.) Over these past two years some 2,000 US service members and many scores of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives.
One important point where the editorial– unlike the ISG report and much current thinking in the US political elite– mirrors the thinking I have always articulated about the diplomacy required to negotiate this speedy and orderly withdrawal is that it calls explicitly for a UN role. Not only in the section excerpted above, but also later on where it says:

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

It also, like the ISG, myself, and all informed realists, recognizes that Iran and Syria must be fully engaged in this diplomatic effort.
Where the editorial differs from my position is that it makes no explicit mention of the withdrawal being one that is generous to all the Iraqi people— i.e., that it not be a peevish, punitive withdrawal like the one from Vietnam that was followed by many long years of economic sanctions. The editorial does say that the US has an obligation to take in “many more” Iraqi refugees for permanent resettlement– and “The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will — translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers — whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.” But how about the 26 million Iraqis who do not seek resettlement outside their country but who want, rather, to be able to live decent, hopeful lives within it? The US “owes” them just as much consideration, aid, and goodwill as those who seek resettlement.
(The editorialists show that they share the “migrationist” bias of much of the US’s culture when they say that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia “must share the burden of hosting refugees.” That seems to assume that most of the Iraqi refugees want to stay as refugees, which I am convinced is not the case. UN norms regarding the options offered refugees rightly stress that the highest priority of all should be given to creating the conditions that will allow them to return safely home.)
The editorial also does not come down unequivocally in favor of the policy that the withdrawal should be total. It says, quite worryingly:

the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self- inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.
The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.
There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy — and too tempting — to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington’s real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations’ governments.
The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

This implies, of course, that as the result of a negotiated agreement that allows the safe withdrawal of the US forces from all or most of Iraq, the other parties to that negotiation– including both the Iraqis and all their neighbors– would be quite happy for the US still to have a very broad mandate for unilateral action “to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies” within Iraq “for the foreseeable future.”
Why should we expect that all the other parties to the withdrawal negotiation would be prepared to give the US military this kind of broad leeway for continued action inside Iraq?
No, it is just not politically feasible. Either an intra-Iraqi political entente will emerge that is strong enough to take on the anti-terrorist function inside the Iraqis’ own country, or the Iraqis and a new coalition of perhaps UN-backed supporters will find a way to do it. But to have US Special Forces continuing to run around like bulls in china stores inside Iraq even after the supposed conclusion of a “withdrawal” agreement? No, it’s not going to happen.
Also, quite honestly, once the US commits to a firm date for a total withdrawal, the entire political dynamics within Iraq will change. The motivation for Iraqis to give any sustained support to the rootless agitators of Al-Qaeda would be diminished considerably, if not completely. This whole idea of the US needing continuing permission to operate inside Iraq “to combat the terrorist forces” is a dangerous canard.
Nevertheless, the appearance of this editorial today is a really, really welcome sign that the US elite is shifting significantly in the right direction!

Belatedly, a serious hat-tip to Salon’s Gary Kamiya for the very thoughtful analysis he wrote last week on the topic of Iraq: Why the [U.S.] media failed.
His contention– based on a well-organized survey of the ample evidence plainly available on this subject– is firstly that, “perhaps the press’s most notable failure was its inability to determine just why this disastrous war was ever launched.” In this connection, he cites Kristina Borjesson, the author of a collection of interviews with 21 journalists about why the press collapsed, recently published under the title Feet to the Fire as saying,

The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation’s top messengers about why we went to war… [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren’t clear about it, that means the public wasn’t necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don’t think the American people are clear about it.

(For my part, I’m not so sure that what was needed was either a consensus from the nation’s leading journalists or their own ability to reach a clear determination of what the war was about… But I think what was needed, much more, was the clear-eyed readiness of these journos to cast into question all the assertions made by all sides– but most especially, by the administration– about the reasons for going to war, and to aggressively test these assertions against the facts. It was that failure to stand aside from the Bushites’ circle and subject it to rigorous reality testing that was the MSM journos’ biggest professional failing. I also feel distinctly uncomfortable with the definition of journalists as being “this nation’s top messengers”, which sounds far too “official-sounding” for my ears. I think I would prefer a tag like “the nation’s leading (and very handsomely paid) truth-seekers”. Ah, but that’s not what most of them were, was it… “Chroniclers and amanuenses of the administration in power” might be more accurate… Anyway, I evidently need to buy Borjesson’s book when I get back to the US next week.)
But back to Kamiya. He introduces the real meat of his article within this frame:

Why did the media fail so disastrously in its response to the biggest issue of a generation? To answer this, we need to look at three broad, interrelated areas, which I have called psychological, institutional and ideological. The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm…

Under the “psychological” rubric, he produces a small vignette from his own experience with cautious editors:

A personal example: In a Salon piece I wrote before the 2004 elections, when the worst of the patriotic fervor had long subsided, I wrote, “Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact — more specifically, to react foolishly — to an attack that left 3,000 dead.” The idea that we had “overreacted” to this sacred event was so explosive, even then, that my editor flagged the line and questioned me about it. In the end the line stayed, but I write for Salon — one of the few major media outlets that were consistently against the war from the beginning, one that has no corporate owner and is aggressively independent. How many such sentiments ended up on cutting-room floors across the country — or were never even typed? As Mark Hertsgaard noted in his important study of the media’s weakness during the Reagan years, “On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,” the most effective censorship is self-censorship.

He also notes this:

Not all was lost. Some of the best breaking commentary was on the Internet, on blogs like Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment” and Helena Cobban’s “Just World News,” but these sites had a limited readership. There were some notable exceptions on the print side, like the superb reporting of Knight Ridder’s Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who aggressively reported out the Bush administration’s bogus claims about the “threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus also questioned Bush administration claims about WMD (his big pre-war story on this subject, after almost being killed, was relegated to page A-17). And the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner, writing for the New York Review of Books, also distinguished themselves with excellent coverage of Abu Ghraib, following the thread that led directly from the blood-spattered rooms outside Baghdad to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But such authors and journalists were few and far between, and they were almost never seen on TV. Long into the Iraq war, much of the mainstream media continued to fixate on Saddam Hussein’s missing WMD and bloviate about the challenges of “reshaping the Middle East,” ignoring these deeper arguments. It was a stark illustration of the difference between journalism and scholarship.

I certainly second the plaudits he gives to Landay and Strobel, in particular (since I don’t think their work has received nearly enough general recognition.)
And I thank Gary for what he wrote about me there. On the last page under “ideology”– and specifically the ideology of entrenched pro-Israelism that pervades the vast majority of the US MSM– he notes this:

the U.S. media works within a tiny ideological spectrum on the Middle East, using the same center-right and right-wing sources again and again. To take just one specific example, the New York Times, when it needs comment on Israeli affairs, often relies on experts from the Washington Institute on Near East Affairs (WINEP), a center-right, pro-Israel think tank. The Times rarely asks center-left or left-wing Middle East experts like Cobban or M.J. Rosenberg to comment on Israel. There is no evidence that the Iraq debacle, which these right-wing pundits almost universally supported, has led the media to rethink its sources or its ideological orientation.

I think he’s generally correct there. But I live in hope that further constructive change in the attitudes of the MSM-meisters is still possible!
His conclusion:

So has the media learned its lesson? And what does the future hold? In many ways, the media has definitely improved. After the war turned south and the WMD failed to appear, most news organizations began to get much tougher on the Bush administration. The New York Times, in particular, has found its backbone, roasting the administration for its incompetence and duplicity and turning an increasingly skeptical eye on its claims of progress in Iraq. And from the beginning of the war, the media’s reporting from the field in Iraq has been far better than its analysis.
The problem, of course, is that the press only really turned on Bush when his ratings began to fall — another indication that the Fourth Estate has become more of a weathervane than a truth teller.
The final verdict is not yet in. The media has improved, without question, but it has a lot of making up to do. The structural problems — psychological, institutional, ideological — that played so big a role in its collapse have not gone away, and there is no reason to think they will. And then there’s war, which reduced so much of the media to flag-waving courtiers. If the media has learned that a bugle blast can be sounded by a fool, that not every war the United States launches is wise or necessary, and that self-righteousness is not an argument, maybe something can be salvaged from this sorry chapter after all.

Good piece. If JWN readers haven’t yet read it all, you should.

Sometimes– today, for example,– when I read Dan Froomkin’s online digest of the day’s major US news coverage, I think, “Oh my G-d, why did I spend two hours this morning pulling together my own pathetic and very limited version of that?”
Froomkin does a fabulous job of what he calls “accountability journalism.” I’m imagining he has two or three news aides, helping him read through six or seven huge newspapers and a bunch of transcripts and other materials there, and pulling out all those great quotes and links…
But he maintained that same, generally excellent standard even back when many of the “bigwigs” of the WaPo’s dead-tree edition were all still on the pro-war, bamboozled-by-Bush bandwagon.
Today, he offers us a particularly rich feast. Read especially the section sub-titled “Eyes on Iran.”
The one problem? He doesn’t get his offerings up onto Wapo.com until sometime after 12:30 p.m. or 1:00 p.m. each day. Which usually doesn’t work for my schedule. (Any chance you could start working a night-shift?)
Anyway, today is the third anniversary of his online-only column there. Huge thanks, Dan, and carry on for many more years with your great work!

I am not going to spend very much longer hanging around the dank confines of the IraqSlogger site. Today, they put up a post with the embedded video of a short and extremely crude YouTube production portraying ISG head James Baker as a latter-day Neville Chamberlain. Here is the text intro they give it:

Filmmaker David Zucker makes, posts video lambasting James Baker and the Iraq Study Group’s call for negotiations with Iran. Must-see.

This can only be read as a strong endorsement of the message of this slimy piece of propaganda.
Who is David Zucker, anyway?
He’s a film director who sometime around 2004 had a serious political change of heart. The Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal reported in early October that,

Once a liberal activist and campaign adviser to President Bill Clinton, he made a low-budget anti-Kerry ad that ran mostly in Ohio…
Zucker sees threats to America and Israel mounting, and he believes the Democrats are unable or unwilling to confront those challenges, so he has decided to go public with his belief that the Democrats have lost their way. Starting Oct. 9, the first of two ads Zucker directed and co-wrote will begin running on the Internet in hopes of helping the Republicans retain control of the House in the November elections.

One of those ads was probably the one described by the Drudge Report in these terms:

Zucker….recreates former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s 2000 visit to North Korea. During the visit, Secretary Albright presented North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il with a basketball autographed by former NBA superstar Michael Jordan.
The actress, Adele Stasilli-Fernandez, playing Secretary Albright is shown presenting Kim Jong Il with the Michael Jordan basketball, painting the walls of Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan cave and turning a blind eye to suicide bombers. In one scene, her skirt rips as she changes the tire of a Middle Eastern dictator’s limousine…

In IraqSlogger’s ever-evolving “About us” page, they have now added some FAQs. One of them goes like this:

Does the site have a political slant?
We think and hope not. We strive to ensure we’re even-handed. Bluntness should not be confused with a political slant. If we call a spade a spade — that’s our intention — that’s not a political statement. We report on, and link to, outlets and observations of the right, the left, and the center with equal vigor.

Calling Zucker’s latest piece of slime about J. Baker a “must-see” is not just reporting on it. It is a warm endorsement.
A catastrophe now looms in Iraq. 26 million Iraqis and the families of 150,000 deployed US troops urgently need the US citizenry and leadership to engage in the most serious form of nationwide discussion over our country’s policy there. Zucker’s so-called “contribution” to this discussion considerably and perhaps even libellously coarsens the tone of this debate. (If it is intended to be “humor”, it fails in the most tasteless of all possible ways.)
By endorsing this piece of slime the people at IraqSlogger reveal that their ability to exercise good editorial judgment or to make any serious and considered contribution to our national debate is just about zero.

Last Thursday I published this short post about the new website IraqSlogger. I noted that while some of the site’s content seemed interesting, other portions did not… But more importantly, I expressed strong concern about the plans of the parent company– which somewhat pretentiously and certainly misleadingly is named “Praedict”– to establish a business that would openly mix the practice of online journalism with the provision of for-pay, intelligence type of information.
I also complained about the lack of transparency on the site, including on its “About us” page, and about some other, less important shortcomings including the annoying flashing of an element just below the main headline and a silly mistake they’d made in titling one front-page piece there.
Within a couple of hours of me publishing that post, the publishers of IraqSlogger had corrected the incorrect headline, added the names of the owners of “Praedict” onto the “About us” page for the first time, and taken out the fclaim they had prominently made there that the people running the site included some from an “intelligence” background.
Oh, and Praedict president Robert Young Pelton had put a comment onto my post in which he said, “I … have no interest in intrigue and am easily the most ‘open source’ conflict author and filmmaker that I know of.” He also made this interesting comment about Praedict CEO Eason Jordan and himself:

Eason and I know the media, intel and communications business very well. He was on the inside, I was on the outside…
Intelligence is actually a compliment not an insult in my world 🙂

I don’t know, either the guy is very stupid or he thinks the rest of us are very stupid?
Later that day, the “About us” page got further revised. They removed all mentions of the word “intelligence” except in these two sentences:

Stay tuned for the announcement of our limited offer of 300 customer slots available… for much less than the price of a single seasoned intelligence analyst.
Praedict delivers the information not currently available from traditional open source or even intellgence sources…

So yes, they clearly do see their for-pay service as being in the “intelligence” world. I guess the (free) online news-publishing part of their business is supposed to act as free publicity– a sort of come-on to customers whom they will tempt to cross over onto the fee-paying (intel) side.
Personally, I don’t know why any reputable journalists would work with such a dank and sleazy operation.
Plus, they didn’t even fix that flashing thingy at the top of each page. Migraine sufferers and epileptics of the world are not happy about such wanton disregard of their (our) reading comfort.

IraqSlogger is a new website, about to be officially “launched” next week, but already doing lots of outreach and promo. I was told about it by Nir Rosen, a feisty and fearless journo who’s a contributor to it, so I’ve spent a bit of time poking around it… A short while ago I put his latest piece there and another by Zeyad of ‘Healing Iraq’ onto my JWN ‘Delicious’ ticker, so you can find links to them in the right sidebar (until they fall off the bottom of that eight-slot place there.)
IraqSlogger has some interesting material, certainly. They also have a bunch of material that looks very uninteresting, to me. And their design has, at the top, one of those really irritating “flashing” type things that is guaranteed to give me– and doubtless many others– a migraine. Turn it off, guys, please! (Those things also needlessly use up bandwidth and are a pain for people with slow connections.)
Also, they could use some better informed editors. The very top piece on the site right now was for a while titled “Iraq’s Sunni VP Denounces ISG”– and it turns out it refers to Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who is a prominent figure in the Shiite UIA. (This got corrected shortly after I first posted this. Good fast work, guys!)
So I was eager to find out who’s behind this new site. The “About us” page they have is notably nontransparent and in other ways not reassuring to me. It seems IraqSlogger is published by something called “Praedict”:

We are a group of well known professionals who have come together from media, marketing, intelligence, and military backgrounds. [Note: no names offered here.]
We offer a synthesis of real-time news dissemination, customized content, and intelligence analysis distributed through web-based technology. The business is designed to meet the demanding requirements of companies, governments, and NGOs operating in high-risk environments.

(Update at 10:27 p.m. Thursday: I just checked the “About us” page again and the top bit of it has changed significantly since I cut-n-pasted the above excerpt from it this morning. Now: No mention of “intel” backgrounds and E. Jordan’s and R. Pelton’s names are right up at the top there. Power of the JWN pen, huh? Next stop: suppress that annoying flashing thingy?? And then, more info on this “About us” page to tell us where your company is registered, etc., would be nice… )
That page describes the company’s two main “products”: the free IraqSlogger, and then this:

Our first premium [i.e. for-pay] product offering is called IraqSafetyNet, targeted to meet the urgent need in Iraq for useful intelligence, security information, insightful advice, news, and independent analysis. With security conditions continually fluctuating, reliable information and advice on risk is at a premium. Our intelligence is gathered from a exclusive intelligence network, open source, and carefully developed personal contacts…
Praedict will will soon offer a monthly subscription model combined with custom reports, content sales, and consulting. We stringently maintain our independence from political, special interest, and other sources. Praedict Limited is an ethical, secular, non-denominational and independent minded for-profit organization. Stay tuned for the announcement of our limited offer of 300 customer slots available on a monthly subscription for much less than the price of a single seasoned intelligence analyst…

So basically, this company is mixing up the job of making available a free news-reporting service with that of hiring themselves out as private intel consultants/providers, offering themselves to the highest bidders. Very disquieting. In my experience, there is quite enough suspicion out there in the world about the role of journalists and the media without a company coming along that explicitly seeks to mix the role of journalists with that of intelligence collectors and analysts.
There are (or were until recently, as noted above ) no names there on the “About us” page… But a moment or two of searching revealed that Praedict was founded by CNN’s former chief executive for news, Eason Jordan, who is the new company’s CEO. And Robert Pelton is Praedict’s co-founder and President. I guess that would be this Robert Pelton.
As for Eason Jordan, he became briefly famous in early 2005 for remarks he made to the Davos Forum about the US military’s killings of large numbers of journalists in Iraq. After those remarks caused a big controversy, he resigned from CNN, and now describes himself as “an entrepreneur, a news executive, and a working journalist.”

Writing for Truthout yesterday, Norman Solomon had an interesting different take on the Michael Gordon/Mark Mazzetti article in yesterday’s NYT that I posted about here, yesterday.
Solomon’s argument– by looking at that Gordon/Mazzetti piece alongside another one Gordon had in the NYT on Wednesday, under the title Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say, and an appearance Gordon made on CNN later Wednesday– was to claim that:

The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing US troops from Iraq.

Personally, I think this may be overstating the case a little. Michael Gordon is, after all, only one reporter– though evidently his work at the NYT, and the way it is presented, in terms of headlines, placement, etc, is supported by colleagues there with significant editorial clout.
Still, Michael Gordon and the paper that pays his very handsome salary are not insignificant players; and regarding that group of journalists, Solomon has an excellent point.
He writes:

If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of US troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his November 15 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded – and probably would be taken off the beat – by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.
That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.

I think, though, that the diagnosis that the NYT’s news department “eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state” may only be part of the story. I mean, I don’t necessarily see this as a consciously adopted position on behalf of the managing editor for news and his/her staff, but more a case of intellectual and moral laziness toward the eager-beaver, source-cultivating work of one already very well-connected reporter…. Actually, very analogous to the way the WaPo’s news editors have treated Bob Woodward over the past 30 years– allowing him to do all kinds of things they would never let a “regular” reporter get away with, simply because of the guy’s good connections and personal celebrity value.
Since I grew up in England and have worked in both the British and the US media, I have often been struck by the different self-images and self-definitions that journalists seem to have within the two different national cultures. In the UK, as I understood matters, a “good” journalist was always expected to keep some distance from, and a huge degree of skepticism towards, the holders of or aspirants to political power. But in the US a “good” journalist was seen as one with good connections with the holders of power… The norm of US officials anonymously “leaking” tidbits of newsworthy information to favored journalists only strengthened this tendency of these journos– Tom Friedman comes to mind here for some reason– increasingly seeing themselves as part of the power structure, judiciously giving their advice to power wielders while helping the powerful to frame the image they presented to the voting public…
Of course, this is not an absolute division between the two bodies of journalism. There are some fine, independent-minded journos in the US MSM, and there are doubtless many bootlickers in the UK MSM by now, as well.
There is, however, also a keen structural difference between the two systems in that in the US, an entirely new body of top-level administration officials comes to Washington every four years or every eight years, and they desperately need some help in understanding how the levers of policy work in the capital, as well as in the world at large… A guy like Michael Gordon, Tom Friedman, or Jim Hoagland (or earlier, Judith Miller, as well) has been in DC for decades, and knows all the issues and all the players quite intimately. In one sense, these people are– and too frequently come to see themselves as– a non-trivial part of the “institutional memory” of the US governing class. In the UK, by contrast, by the tyime someone gets to be Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Forteign Secretary, or whetever, she or he will have spent years in parliament deliberating and bearing the responsibility of voting on all the weightiest national issues.
So does the US system tend to foster an elitist view of “journalism”? You bet! (And a very seductive one, too. The rewards are generous: not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of being taken “seriously”, and being kowtowed to by others as a well-connected person… )
Solomon has a great vignette at the end of his Truthout piece, that really captures this elitism. He recalls some footage from the CBS show “Face the Nation”, from the period in 1964 when the US involvement in Vietnam was mounting in a serious way. He writes:

The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”
“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Senator Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”
Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”
Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back – and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”
The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? … I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”

(Hat-tip to Jane C. for the Solomon piece.)