I don’t know about other people, but sometimes I find it really difficult to really know what is going on in Iraq. A good example of this is the recent fighting in Basra and other places, including Baghdad, between Iraqi government forces and various Shiite militias. I try to read news and opinion articles from different publications and websites and from different points of view. The reports in this case have had totally different conclusions. Some said it was a disaster for the Iraqi government, others said the government did pretty well, and still others said it was a stalemate. I do not know if any of the articles were right, but given the different conclusions, at least some of them had to be wrong.
So what do you do in these cases? How do you know what and who to believe? In situations such as this, I try to look at the articles in several ways:
Where is the writer and where is he getting his information from? Is he near the fighting or hundreds of miles away, just reporting what he is told by others (whether government spokespeople or somebody else)? Sometimes a reporter can’t get the big picture if he is too close, but if the reporter is holed up in the Green Zone in Baghdad and the fighting is in Basra, I question the report a little more.
When it comes to fighting, does the reporter have any special expertise or experience on military matters? I don’t mean service in the military; I just mean some real knowledge about things military. Many regular reporters do not have the knowledge to be able to understand and report what battles really mean, as opposed to what they might appear to be on the surface at first glance.
What is the editorial position of the publication in which the article appears? News articles do not always follow the editorial policy, but the more extreme the editorial positions, the more careful you should be about the news reports in that publication – at least until you have more experience with that reporter yourself,
How much of the article seems to be based on quoting people? When I see a reporter trying to explain things by quoting this person or that, I sometimes wonder how those people got picked. How do we know that the people quoted are representative? Sometimes I wonder whether reporters aren’t just passing on their own opinions by the quotations they pick to give us. In other cases, the people willing to talk to a reporter may not be representative of the people as a whole.
Finally, at least when it comes to battles and things like that, I always figure the quicker and earlier the report or the article is, the less likely it is to be accurate. Military operations take a while. You cannot properly evaluate them at the beginning or in the middle – or sometimes even right after they are over. A little time for evaluation and review increases the chances the report is accurate.
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