The Father of the Aardvark bangs his head against the wall:
Posted by DeLong at May 3, 2004 06:32 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postAbu Aardvark: Iraqi editor quits: Yet another example of the disaster which is the Bush administration's approach to the Arab media: "The head of a U.S.-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and said Monday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication. On a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were ''celebrating the end of a nightmare we have suffered from for months ... We want independence. They (the Americans) refuse.'' Al-Sabah was set up by U.S. officials with funding from the Pentagon soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. Since its first issue in July, many Iraqis have considered it the mouthpiece of the U.S.-led coalition, along with the U.S.-funded television station Al-Iraqiya."
What can an aardvark say here that Zayer didn't say better? Media independence and controlling the media just don't mix. Americans really shouldn't need Iraqis to explain the basics of press freedom to us.
They don't need anything explained to them in the first place. They never valued press freedom - see the way they continually distort and manipulate the press process back home. Trying to control the press, and being utterly oblivious to the consequences of the loss of credibility are completely characteristic steps of this Administration.
They don't understand that people being able to trust your word all the time is more important even if you look in a bad light some of the time is better than trying to look good all the time and people not being able to trust you none of the time.
Posted by: Oldman on May 3, 2004 07:56 PMThe trick is to get incentives to align, like occurred so powerfully, in the US after 9/11. Then the government doesn't have to actively control the media.
Telling people what they want to hear sells like candy. I guess the problem is the people in Iraq don't want to hear what we're selling yet. But if their society is ever sufficiently "capitalized", everyone invested in the system, then the same interests own the majority of the institutions, like the media and the politicians.
Incentives can align, rather than two functions being served by the media - the market function and the propaganda function - become one. Politicians and the media can then be tools of the same master, capital.
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