Dissecting Trudy Rubin

I personally think that Philadelphia Inquirer op/ed writer Trudy Rubin writes well. I don't think she intentionally slants her work to the liberal side. I truly think she believes what she writes and to me, that is the inherent problem with the media.

Trudy's column from earlier this week shows exactly what I mean:

I've recently traveled to Iraq and China, where many journalists are paying a very high price for trying to inform their publics.

These are societies with no experience of a free press. Yet I met many Iraqi and Chinese reporters who intuitively grasp the Jeffersonian notion that freedom requires an informed public and a press that serves as a check on official power.

How ironic that, in the United States, the very idea of the Fourth Estate as a guard against abuse of power is under attack.

This irony becomes even more pronounced when one observes the risks many journalists from Iraq, China, and other developing countries take to uncover their stories.

This is classic Rubin. She throws out a statement with zero backup. What evidence does Trudy give us that the Fourth Estate is under attack?

Consider Yasser Salihee, a 30-year-old Iraqi doctor who doubled as reporter and translator for Knight Ridder newspapers in Baghdad. Yasser braved tremendous dangers as a Sunni who dared to work with Americans and to investigate the killings of Sunni civilians by Shiite militias. Yasser translated for me. He, like other Iraqi journalists I met, was full of enthusiasm about covering a society struggling to build a representative government. This was the kind of journalism that was never possible under Saddam.

Yasser was shot dead by a U.S. soldier as he drove home from the barber one June day on a street where no roadblock warned of an American military presence.

I, as I imagine most Americans have not heard this story. I googled "Yasser Salihee" and found that the most prevalent purveyor of this story is the sister paper of the Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News. The more I read of the story, the more I think it was an unfortunate accident as seems to be made clear when all the stories are read.

The problem is how Rubin describes the story. If Yasser was a reporter, wouldn't he be aware that the lack of a roadblock means nothing? This seems to be a cause for the Inquirer and Rubin should disclose that.

Back to the essay:

Death comes from all sides for members of Iraq's aspiring Fourth Estate. Firas Maadidi, the Mosul bureau chief of the independent pro-democracy Baghdad newspaper As-Saffir, which criticizes insurgent attacks on civilians, was gunned down on Sept. 20. His killers were probably Sunni insurgents.

Gutsy New York Times stringer Fakher Haider was kidnapped and killed on Sept. 19 in Basra, probably by radical Shiite militiamen who have infiltrated the police force. Maadidi was helping report important stories about the actions of these militias.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 37 Iraqi journalists have been killed on duty since March 2003. That doesn't include journalists killed on their day off such as Yasser Salihee.

Meanwhile, in China, journalists are struggling with how to report on crime, corruption and other misdeeds by government officials, in an era of breathtaking change. I met young journalists who grasp the concept that a major part of their role should be to unmask unlawful government behavior.

How true. They strive to report the truth. The difference is that Rubin is notorious for reporting her version of the truth. Two different concepts.

...Yet, in the United States, a confluence of forces is acting to undermine the legitimacy of a press that questions those in power.

On the right, radio and TV talk shows promote the notion that the media should be openly partisan. On the left, critics accuse the "mainstream press" of being a lapdog for the administration. The very idea of an independent press is widely derided.

This is an interesting insight. Rubin blames the right-wing radio and TV talk shows for preaching open partisanship. While in Trudy's view, the left believes that the media is slanted right.

Does Ms. Rubin read anything in her paper? They are the same paper that ran a 21-day endorsement of John Kerry. Lapdogs for whom, Ms. Rubin?

She continues:

Meantime, the blogosphere - which leans on links to articles in the major papers - promotes opinion as fact. Wall Street fears about the print media's future viability lead fearful corporate newspaper owners to slash the staffs that can provide genuine facts.

I would be remiss if I neglected to point out to Ms. Rubin this sentence from the beginning of the essay:

How ironic that, in the United States, the very idea of the Fourth Estate as a guard against abuse of power is under attack.

Is that not reporting opinion as fact? Hypocrisy does not suit you, Trudy.