Booked Up

Stacks and stacks of new media-related books piled up around me.

First, there's the obvious, including Mary Mapes' Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power, the account of last year's disastrous CBS's 60 Minutes II story about U.S. President George W. Bush's getting preferential treatment in the National Guard duty during Vietnam.

Which reminds me. On last Sunday's Reliable Sources, which focused on the New York Times' Judith Miller and had Mapes on as a guest, George Washington University's Steve Roberts had this to say to host Howard Kurtz:

ROBERTS: You know, I think there is a parallel between Judith Miller and Mary Mapes, your guest on the first half-hour here, Howard. Both of them are convinced that they were right and everybody else was wrong.

And I think that Miller -- the single biggest mistake Judy Miller made was the same mistake Mary Mapes made. She wanted this story to be true true.

KURTZ: This being the WMD story.

ROBERTS: The WMD story. I think she protected Scooter Miller -- Scooter Libby not just as a confidential source, but as part of a group of people who were arguing the same line that she favored and wanted to defend.

I think she made the exact same mistake as Mary Mapes. She ran through the stop signs because she in her heart wanted this story to be true.

Except the Bush story is true. The trouble is, that Mapes relied on evidence that could not be verified. But I digress.

Also on my reading list are:

* Gwynne Dyer's With Every Mistake, a collection of his post 9/11 columns with notes on what he was thinking at the time and what he thinks now. It also examines how the media shape fact and opinion, and the role they played in marching the U.S. population into a warmongering mode.

* Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson and Rita Leistner. This high-quality, full-colour picture book is not exactly the most appetizing coffee table material. But it boasts important and arresting images that never made it into the mainstream.

* Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model, edited by Jeffrey Klaehn. This one looks at everything from "Israeli propaganda'' in CanWest papers to how the media cover, or don't cover, the the environment.

Finally, not quite a media book, but one with a chapter on the media that I have already read and plan to frum sentence by drivelly sentence:

* Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution by Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah. Lord knows it needs rescuing. Not that I want to help but Lord knows we can use stronger opposition from this end of the spectrum as well. Otherwise, the Liberals will occupy that space. Not good for anybody.

Now the challenge is to find the time for all this reading between all this writing.

Comments

[Diana-Marie]

Great book list. Here's one more for the Christmas list, just released:
Robert Fisk: The Great War for Civilization -The Conquest of the Middle East.

[tombo]

Hi,

I came through around the 13th on topic and hope this is not too misplaced here and now, but today's news - the star and the beeb have it as breaking - re white phosphorus use in Iraq is both welcome and shocking in respect of US cavalier attitudes toward civilian population/s. Some interesting follow up informed comments in addition to your own. For those who would like the BBC link - here tis: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4440664.stm
ps: regarding Iraq we all heard a good deal about "dual use" components and so on. What's now the strong possibility is that dual use can be made to apply to targets/civilians. By errant users. So a good case for banning them on inhumane grounds may exist. If you run this comment I'd be interested to know what your other readers think..

thanks very much.. tombo