skippy the bush kangaroo: hardly-ever-right blunders in saying lara logan blunders

Monday, March 27, 2006

hardly-ever-right blunders in saying lara logan blunders

we're grateful to get hits from any source, but following one link back this morning, we came upon the gateway pundit, who tried to prove that lara logan's piece on realiable sources yesterday was not trustworthy, because she implied that there was a quagmire, when in fact, there were only 4 deaths:

liberal blogs and their fans were atwitter on sunday to hear cnn reporter lara logan defending her company's gloomy defeatist reporting on iraq.

the liberals love that bad news from iraq but sadly the segment itself was only an added piece of evidence to the original argument…

but, the most incriminating statement by lara logan was this comment about...

"all the american soldiers that died this week that you didn't see on our screens".

uh,... it looks like there were four, lara.

four fatalities does not a quagmire make!

we read gateway pundit's piece, and wondered aloud to ourselves, where did lara make the statement that dead american soldiers are the watermark defining a quagmire? in fact, reading through the transcript, we tried to find where lara used the word quagmire in the first place? uh, the answer is...nowhere. she said "who says things aren't falling apart in iraq?"

[ed. note: apparently gateway pundit says, as well as strategy page]

our point is that gateway set up a strawman, ascribing a point to lara that she didn't make or even imply, and then tore it down. what lara did say was:

...our own editors back in new york are asking us the same things. they read the same comments. you know, are there positive stories? can't you find them? you don't think that i haven't been to the u.s. military and the state department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on tv, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

[emphasis ours]

that situation, we believe, is what lara was talking about when she said "who said things weren't falling apart in iraq?" this, along with 40 dead today by suicide bomber, 69 dead yesterday, a cache of headless bodies found north of baghdad, etc. etc. etc. is what lara was referring to.

it's fine to try to make the case that things aren't falling apart in iraq. but to aruge the validity of only one reason, when the original statement included several different points of why things are going badly, is incomplete at best, and disengenuous, at worst.

one other note about gateway pundit's piece: we ourselves checked the icasualty site to find the 4 dead soldiers that the pundit insists does not make a quagmire, and found something interesting. there were not 4 casualties, but 7.

there was no week in march, no matter how you configure it (even with artificial parameters, ie, tuesday through tuesday) in which there were 4 or fewer american casualites.

this is not a big point, but we relish the irony that the hardly-ever-right wing makes something as simple as a counting error in their attempt to discredit lara logan's reporting.

that, along with the newly-minted neocon meme accusing reporters of working "on a balcony" (hey, guys, if a reporting working on a balcony in baghdad is cowardly, don't you find it telling that you're on a whole different continent?) undermines the whole premise.

in other words, if your piece has the headline that says someone else made a blunder in reporting, don't make a blunder in reporting.

addendum: we didn't even notice this one till our 8th or 9th reading of this post. gateway pundit starts out by saying

liberal blogs and their fans were atwitter on sunday to hear cnn reporter lara logan defending her company's gloomy defeatist reporting on iraq.

except, gp, lara works for cbs. tell us again about how she blunders?

posted by skippy at 9:41 AM |