# Posted 11:58 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

NYT VS. WaPo: WHO'S TELLING THE TRUTH? Seven American soldiers are dead. That is a fact. But why has violence broken out across Iraq? Is this what radical Shi'ites want? Is the violence an accidental byproduct of the challenges of occupation? Or has the incompetence of the Coalition-led reconstruction effort provoked otherwise passive Iraqis to take up arms?

If you read the WaPo, you will conclude that there is no clear answer to the questions posed above. Coalition forces' discomfort in a foreign environment is just as likely to have been the cause of the violence as are radical Shi'ite provocations. If you read the NYT, there is no doubt that today's events were planned. The first sentence of John Burns' article on the subject reads:

A coordinated Shiite militia uprising against the American-led occupation rippled across Iraq on Sunday, reaching into the heart of Baghdad and the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City on the capital's outskirts and racking the holy city of Najaf and at least two other cities in southern Iraq.

Burns' use of the words 'coordinated' and 'uprising' were no accident. Lower down in the same article he writes that

On Sunday, [Moqtada] Sadr's veiled threats to stir public disorder erupted into carefully orchestrated violence, with potentially dire implications over the long term for the Americans, and for Iraq.

Furthermore, Burns lets us know exactly what we should think of Mr. Sadr's efforts. He reports that

Mr. Sadr, the son of a powerful Shiite ayatollah who was assassinated by agents of Mr. Hussein in Najaf in 1999, has been a menacing presence in the shadows of the American occupation. He has refused to involve his organization with the American attempt to construct democratic institutions, calling them a ruse intended to place the country under permanent American control. He has threatened to establish an alternative government, and to send his militia, known as the Mahdi Army, into battle with American troops...

Mr. Sadr issued a statement early Sunday from the mosque in Kufa where he had barricaded himself telling his followers, in effect, to turn to violence.

"There is no use for demonstrations, as your enemy loves to terrify and suppress opinions, and despises peoples," he said, referring to the Americans. "Terrorize your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over his violations."

In contrast to Burns' conviction, the WaPo correspondents responsible for this story have used all of the standard conventions of the journalistic trade to convey their unsurety about the cause of the violence. For example, explanations for the violence offered by Sadr's disciples are juxtaposed with explanations from American officials, implying that the credibility of both explanations is roughly equivalent and that the truth lies somewhere in between:

Sadr, 30, delivered a sermon in Kufa on Friday calling on supporters to challenge the occupation.

Abu Haider Ghalib Garawi, a leader of the Mahdi Army -- a self-styled militia Sadr formed last year -- said the cleric had not called for violence in his sermon and attributed the violent protests in Kufa to frustration with the U.S.-led occupation.

"There is no more patience," he said. "We cannot guarantee the behavior of the wise people and of the ordinary people."

At a news conference in the Iraqi capital on Sunday, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, said U.S.-led forces and Iraqi security would respond strongly to any violent challenge.

Toward the end of the WaPo article, however, there are some more tangible hints that today's violence was not intentional but rather a product of unfortunate coincidences:

Sunday's protests were sparked by reports that Mustapha Yacoubi, an aide to Sadr, had been arrested...Protests and violence involving Sadr's supporters have been increasing since the closing of the cleric's newspaper a week ago.

These same events are explained very differently by the NYT, however:

The scene for the uprising was set a week ago, when American troops raided the Baghdad offices of a popular newspaper, Al Hawza, that was the mouthpiece for Mr. Sadr, and chained its doors under an order by Mr. Bremer closing the paper for 60 days. American officials said Mr. Bremer had acted because of inaccurate reporting in the paper that incited hatred for the Americans, including a February dispatch that an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile.

For days, demonstrators in the thousands marched through the streets of Baghdad and Najaf, hoisting portraits of Mr. Sadr and vowing retaliation against the Americans. But what appeared to have pushed Mr. Sadr into insurrection was the arrest by allied troops on Saturday -- by probably Americans, although the American command did not say -- of a cleric who was a senior aide to Mr. Sadr, Mustafa al-Yaqubi. A statement on Sunday from Iraq's interior ministry said Mr. Yaqubi was wanted in connection with the killing at a Najaf mosque last April of Ayatollah Sayyed Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a cleric the Americans brought back from exile in London in the hope of shifting the Shiite clerical establishment into a pro-American stance.

Some reports, unconfirmed by the Americans, have said Mr. Sadr himself is on a list of 25 people who are wanted by the interior ministry in connection with the killing, and that he, too, is likely to be arrested.

The differences between the NYT and WaPo could not be more stark. The former describes an intentional assault on Coalition forces organized by a radical Shi'ite cleric who associates with murderers and may be one himself. The WaPo describes confusing events for which no one in particular was responsible.

Why are these accounts so different? Politics don't seem to be the issue, since the NYT tends to be far more critical of the occupation than the WaPo. My hunch is that John Burns is simply far superior to his counterparts at the WaPo. He sees what they do not. Moreover, I suspect that the WaPo will soon revise its account in order to reflect what was written by Mr. Burns.

The broader lesson to be taken away from this episode is one that this third of OxBlog never tires of repeating: That correspondents routinely employ the conventions of journalistic objectivity in order to convey subjective interpretations of the events that they witness. While subjectivity is an integral part of the human condition, the American media have the potential to dramatically improve their coverage by admitting to both themselves and their audience that they are not nearly as objective as they like to pretend.

To critics of the 'liberal media', such accusations are nothing new. Yet moderate liberals, including OxBlog favorites such as Drum and Yglesias, still tend to dismiss charges of media bias as little more than the carping of conservatives unwilling to face the truth. However, the example described above has nothing to do with politics. My criticism has nothing to do with the fact that I like one newspaper's political preferences more than I like the other. That is why this episode is such a powerful demonstration of how journalistic conventions create the illusion of objectivity.

CLARIFICATION: Seven American soldiers were killed in Baghdad. An eighth American soldier died elsehwere, as did a Salvadoran.

UPDATE: The AP report on today's violence resembles that of the WaPo. USA Today splits the difference while Reuters and CNN come across as relatively agnostic about the cause of the violence. The Guardian subtly implies that the heavy-handedness of the occupation was to blame. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion