All too often the mainstream press will take a long, dryly written report and then distort it beyond belief. Sadly, this is exactly what happened with mainstream reporting on the National Intelligence Council’s 123-page Mapping the Global Future, which looked at world trends and tried to peer into the next fifteen years. The predominant meme that the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times took from the report was that Iraq is a training ground for terrorists. OK. Let’s test their hypothesis.
If we want to find out the importants bits in the NIC report, the best place to start is the executive summary. The summary even helpfully highlights in red letters what the NIC thinks are the most important issues. None of thirty red-colored sentences in the summary contain the word "Iraq". There is only one reference to Iraq in the whole summary: "This revival [of Muslim identity] has been accompanied by a deepening solidarity among Muslims caught up in national or regional separatist struggles, such as Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir, Mindanao, and southern Thailand, and has emerged in response to government repression, corruption, and ineffectiveness." That’s it.
The two most relevant references to terrorism in Iraq don’t appear until page 94 of the report, as follows:
The al-Qa’ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq.
Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are “professionalized” and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself.
Note the tenses in the above two sentences:
- "al-Qa’ida membership….will gradually dissipate, to be replaced…" Not "has replaced", but "to be replaced".
- "Iraq and other possible conflicts could…" Not "is", but "could", meaning that Iraq is not now a training ground for a new class of terrorists, but it could happen.
How did the Washington Post report this? First, the editors titled the article Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground, contradicting the NIC report by implying that Iraq is a "terror breeding ground" right now. Also, the title left out the "other possible conflicts" part. How did Dana Priest cover it?
Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank.
Ms. Priest misrepresented what was in the report, perhaps because she was listening to David Low.
Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats.
Low or Priest further misrepresented what was in the NIC report by saying "Iraq provides" instead of "Iraq could provide". Now, it may be true that Iraq is a training ground for a new class of terrorists, but the NIC report didn’t arrive at that conclusion. NIC Chairman Robert Hutchings also chimed in by saying that Iraq "is a magnet for terrorist activity." Again, the problem is that there is no language in the NIC report to support Hutchings’ statement.
Dana Priest accepted, without question, the contradictory statements made by Low and Hutchings, just as a three-year old would accept that there is a Santa Claus from well-meaning but fibbing parents. My conclusion is this. Either Priest didn’t read the report–which is lazy journalism–and was thereby unable to take a critical eye to their statements, or she did read the NIC report and dishonestly inserted her own bias into the story. In either case, Dana Priest was highly irresponsible.
What else did the NIC report say about Iraq? Page 75:
Success in establishing a working democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan—and democratic consolidation in Indonesia—would set an example for other Muslim and Arab states, creating pressures for change.
But you see, that reference is a favorable scenario, but since it doesn’t fit Priest’s meme, she ignored and excluded it. As for the actual red-colored sentences in the NIC executive summary, Priest didn’t address any of them until the thirteenth paragraph of her hit piece: "But NIC officials said their greatest concern remains the possibility that terrorists may acquire biological weapons and, although less likely, a nuclear device." Well thank you very much.
How about the Los Angeles Times? At least their title, Iraq War May Incite Terror, CIA Study Say, is more accurate. The narrative is misleading but less so.
The war in Iraq is creating a training and recruitment ground for a new generation of "professionalized" Islamic terrorists, and the risk of a terrorist attack involving a germ weapon is steadily growing, an in-house CIA think tank said in a report released Thursday.
Like with Priest, reporter Bob Drogin mixed up the tenses, thereby misleading readers about the what the report actually said. But give him credit for addressing more of the red colors in the executive summary. Also, New York Times’ reporter Douglas Jehl covered the NIC report fairly evenhandedly.
Wow. I stand in stunned awe. And here I though Sebastian was the king of semantic parsing.
Top marks.
Reporters cherry pick government report for enticing headline! Film at 11.
The report focussed on global trends which it perceived to be important. It was not a report on terrorism or Iraq. Nonetheless, security is an issue. So, looking at the full context of the report’s executive summary on Iraq, rather than taking individual sentences (emphases from original text):
Inasmuch as it made no statement about Iraq now, you are correct. A report that makes its task to analyse and extrapolate current trends into the future, however, would not give anything but the briefest overview of Iraq. It was therefore incorrect and misleading of the reporters to state that the report showed Iraq was, at present, a new breeding ground for terrorists based solely on this report.
If they had wanted to make the case for Iraq being a breeding ground for terrorism, or for the more general case that Iraq, contrary to White House Press releases, isn’t going as well as they hoped way back in 2003, there are more and better sources they could use.
However, the correct way for journalists to summarise this report will not show the administration in a positive light either. The security issues raised in this report would have been better reported under the banner headline “CIA Thinks War On Terror Will Be Ineffective At Reducing Terrorism Over The Next 20 Years”
Your DeLong point, Why Oh Why can’t we have a better Press Corps, is noted. The implied point, Main Stream Media have to distort the facts to put over the idea that Iraq and the WoT in general are going badly, is not really credible though. They don’t have to distort anything, they distort it because they’re crap at their job.
or for the more general case that Iraq, contrary to White House Press releases, isn’t going as well as they hoped way back in 2003…
The cynic in me notes that that date is far too generous…
Missing from your analysis, Charles, is a very important definition of a “training ground”?
Is it an organized camp, where drills and classes are held? Or is it an environment, loosely organized, where networking and information sharing take place?
You should back up and start there before diving into the tenses used.
So the Chair of NIC and the national intelligence officer for transnational threats comment on the record about the report, and they don’t count? Good grief.
Missing from your analysis, Charles, is a very important definition of a “training ground”?
Did the NIC report define “training ground”? In either event, the language was clear that it could happen, not that it has. I didn’t choose this topic lightly because I know Katherine is a fan of Priest. But this was just too much.
But ‘could be,’ ‘could happen’ and ‘could have’ were good enough to start a war over?
Hume’s circle argument continues. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Charles: I would have agreed with you had you complained that a tiny bit of the report got all the play. Personally, I found the parts about increasing Chinese and Indian economic power much more interesting; the bit about Iraq was just the tiniest snippet. But i don’t agree with you about the tenses, or that that tiny bit was misreported. The main passage, I think, is one of the two you cite above:
“The al-Qa’ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq.”
Now: what’s in the future tense is the claim that the current al Qaeda leadership ‘will dissipate (and) be replaced’ by ‘experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq.’ It’s the dissipation and the replacement that take place in the future. The gaining of experience in Iraq, by contrast, is not said to have taken place in the future, just during ‘the conflict’, which of course includes the present.
As for the second quote, one can read it in either of two ways: (a) Iraq currently provides, and other conflicts could provide…, or (b) Iraq could provide, and other conflicts cold provide…. (Why the first? Because they can’t say ‘Iraq and future conflicts will provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists, since they don’t know whether that’s true of future conflicts; and a sentence like ‘Iraq is currently providing, and other future conflicts might provide…’ is awkward and graceless. The sentence as written seems to me an obvious way around this gracelessness.)
And I have no problem at all taking the chairman of the committee that wrote the report as a source of insight into what they meant.
Bird Dog, I enjoy your posts as well as the following comments. There is nothing unusual with the MSM misrepresenting a report. I wonder, where do the terrorists get their funding and “basic training” which is the real story.
More full disclosure: one of my relatives seems to have consulted on this report. (Who knew?) I haven’t spoken to her about it, and wouldn’t presume to speak for her if I had.
I certainly don’t read “could provide” as excluding the possibility that they are already. Moreover, it seems like the NIC chairman and the national intelligence officer for transnational threats are perfectly good sources for interpreting the (no doubt carefully bland) language in the report.
Whatever distortion exists here, it’s not particularly egregious. You can quibble over semantics all you want, but does this reporting mislead readers into thinking the situation is worse than it is? Not really. On the topic of MSM distortions, I suspect there are worse examples.
“On the topic of MSM distortions, I suspect there are worse examples.”
Here’s one now.
jez hilzoy, I’m surprised you didn’t mention this
It’s Sunday here, so our reading from the Good Book today will be Matthew 7:1-5…
I never liked TF1 anyways, and I don’t keep up with the trials and tribulations of its anchors. Thanks for the opportunity to brush up on my French, though.
News Flash — another BD distortion about mainstream media.
The articles lead with the hottest tidbit and do not pretend that the tidbit is the primary focus of the report, nor do they claim that the news article is about summarizing the overall contents of this report. They simply lead with the hot point, and cite to the report as a source for the story.
This is no different than a reporter reading a police blotter, and picking out the juiciest crime story to report — leaving the rest out of his story. No one would call this a distortion because everyone understands that the reporter is not trying to write about all crime in the blotter, but simply what the reporter thinks is the hottest story from the blotter.
What is misleading is for BD to structure a post around the false premise that these are stories about the report, and that allegedly the Iraq point is therefore the primary focus of the report. These are instead stories about what the reporters thought were the most newsworthy points in a long report, with the report being cited as the source.
So the Chair of NIC and the national intelligence officer for transnational threats comment on the record about the report, and they don’t count?
Sure they count. But why didn’t Priest ask a follow-up question? Why didn’t Low/Hutchings explain why their statements contradict their report? Of all the things written in that 123-page report, why did Low/Hutchings put their emphasis on matters that weren’t even in the report? Did you gloss over when I wrote “it may be true that Iraq is a training ground for a new class of terrorists”?
The articles lead with the hottest tidbit and do not pretend that the tidbit is the primary focus of the report
What a torturedly wrong opinion. The substance of the report is buried in the article, and you don’t get to any of the report’s salient points until the 13th paragraph. The whole point of the article was the release of the NIC report. No NIC report, no article.
I’m not seeing how the report doesn’t make the assertion that Iraq is becoming a terrorist training ground, primary focus or no. This is pretty much picking nits.
As for why the “MSM” should focus on the Iraq angle, well, it could be because Iraq is the biggest foreign policy project the US has going on right now. The United States has spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives on a manifest disaster there, and Americans deserve to know just how much of a disaster it’s going to be.
I never liked TF1 anyways, and I don’t keep up with the trials and tribulations of its anchors. Thanks for the opportunity to brush up on my French, though.
So hilsoy, you didn’t enjoy the story then? Just asking.
Why didn’t Low/Hutchings explain why their statements contradict their report?
Wait, are you blaming the media for what Low and Hutchings didn’t say? Unless you’re arguing some kind of conspiracy, that point belongs in a separate post.
“I wonder, where do the terrorists get their funding and ‘basic training’ which is the real story.”
In Afghanistan in the 80s, Timmy, they got it from the CIA.
Ew, Timmy speaks French! Why do you hate America, Timmy?
To Charles Bird:
The articles lead with the hottest tidbit and do not pretend that the tidbit is the primary focus of the report.
What a torturedly wrong opinion.
Sorry, but you’re starting to transpose fact and opinion.
Re-read the articles for the facts. They do not purport to be a summary of the government report. They do not claim that the Iraq terrorists point to be the focus of the report. You have made up those assertions from thin air.
They are articles about a condition in Iraq, for which the report is a government document that supports what the newswriters thought was a hot news item.
They were obviously right, since it made you so hot that you had to deflect attention from the substance of the articles. Instead, we here a nonsensical analysis about how the articles “distorted” the reports.
Next, we’ll hear from you how you “discredited” the articles that indicated that the “war on terror” in Iraq happens to be breeding more terrorism than it is quelching.