Mike O’Hanlon pays well deserved tribute to Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin, who has just stepped down as the No. 2 U.S. military commander in Iraq. During his tenure running Multinational Corps-Iraq since February 2008, Austin oversaw the defeat of Shiite militants in Basra and Sadr City and a continuing fall in the overall level of violence. His role was not as dramatic as that of his predecessor (and subsequent boss), Gen. Ray Odierno, because the situation in Iraq was not as dire when Austin arrived. And of course he will never get the same attention as Gen. David Petraeus, the most successful American general since Matthew Ridgway. But he nevertheless gets considerable credit for building on the gains made during the first year of the surge. I thought Mike’s final paragraph makes a particularly important point, one that I have raised repeatedly since my visit to Afghanistan in February/March:
Finally, we now know unequivocally that with a challenge as daunting as pre-surge Iraq, or Afghanistan today, the No. 2 person is as critical to operational success as the person in charge. In Iraq during the surge, first Odierno and then Austin played crucial roles as operational commanders. No such person, no such command, exists in Afghanistan today. As effective as Petraeus is, he needed a strong No. 2 to succeed. And as good as Gen. David McKiernan is today in Afghanistan, he is being asked to do too much himself. He needs a similar operational commander – and soon.
It’s all well and good that we are sending more troops to Afghanistan. But as Mike notes we also need to have the correct command structure in place to make the best use of them. And that will require having a strong corps headquarters in Kabul led by a gifted operational commander like Lloyd Austin.
This is the second time I’ve read a columnist decry the loss of city council and other dry “somebody’s gotta do it” coverage. Any decent college kid can cover city council meetings for the purpose of saying “here’s what happened.” Hell I interned on Capital Hill and when I wasn’t stuffing envelopes, I covered committee hearings that were of interest to the Congressman but there wasn’t paid staff available to cover. I did it for free.
It’s patently absurd to argue that what is being lost in a dying business is the lowest cost product. Put another way, the lowest employees on the newspaper food chain get those beats. If the coverage is so valuable, why aren’t the most expensive people covering city council meetings?
Let me beat the trolls:
It’s the fault of the Neo-cons & the Israel Lobby
Point is as newspapers close, more government actions go unreported. With luck, you might hear about it later, but probably not. What you won’t get is what leads up to decisions and what are the results downstream when nobody’s looking. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to have someone watching who isn’t a civil servant — usually, as Churchill observed, they are neither — or employed by a lobbying firm. Democracy isn’t the commonest form of government, as history will tell you. Reliable information is its lifeblood. Would you trust an opinion blogger for an objective account of something. In the first place, they’d gave to get up from the keyboard, walk out the door and get to whatever’s happening. Time and money are involved here. I don’t see the internet crowd making the commitment.
Banjo has a really good point, although I do think there’s a way ahead to keep local government accountable. I don’t see that having multiple reporters physically attend council or commission deliberations is a necessity. Video is so cheap and ubiquitous in modern life, it seems like localities could simply make it law that deliberations have to be broadcast live via streaming video. I’ve lived in places where that is already done for various functions of city government.
Typically, there are interested citizens in attendance at all such sessions whose presence would help guarantee observance of the law. If that seems like a permissive rather than a positive guarantee, I would say that relying on journalism is as well. For all they like to proclaim their public mission, journalists and news organizations are private actors. They do not act on our behalf, they act on theirs — and hope we will pay money for what they do.
Banjo makes the same mistake as Parker. Namely that there is some value to having coverage of government and that this value can only be determined by a newspaper. You can hire a college student to cover these meetings for 10 bucks an hour. If there is the value you ascribe to it, you can sell the student’s coverage to like minded people and make yourself a profit.
A whole lot of stories have been broken on the internet such as Dan Rather’s fake Bush memo. Certainly printed newspapers are obsolete as a business model. Marc Andreesen suggested every paper should stop the hard copy today. After the hard copy is dead, you try to reinvent the subscription online. If the hard copy costs 75 cents the e copy should be available for a quarter. Maybe less.
#3
When was the day that newspapers produced reliable information? Where is newspaper analysis of what the government is doing now and the probable results in the future? As a lifetime newspaper junkie, I can say that for most of that time they’ve failed miserably at both those tasks. How about some random samples: Two stories, side by side, one about Princess Diana, the other about some German politician. Which one has a photo attached? Of course, it’s the royal in-law article, no picture for the other. Everybody knows what Princess Di looks like but the papers would use any excuse to get her in there. The unknown, well, he can stay unknown.
Another; the intensely irritating practice of recording foreign cities and countries in by-lines and stories in the following manner: Toronto, Canada; rather than Toronto, Ontario, Canada; or Monterrey, Mexico; rather than Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, like we’re too stupid or careless to know in what state some newsworthy event has occurred.
Banjo:
I disagree on so many fronts …
First, Addisonst has it right about who is covering city council, etc. (when it’s covered at all). I’ve had experience with those people – they’re not skilled & they don’t dig … they were little more than glorified press agents (“What do you have to say? What do you have to say about what he had to say?”).
Second, you don’t get ‘what leads up to decisions and what are the results downstream when nobody’s looking’ from traditional media (if you did, they wouldn’t be in so much trouble). They want controversy and they take a side – - – believing the traditional media will fairly describe the controversy, etc. is foolish (understatement). I’ve dealt with the reporter who doesn’t understand the issue (and isn’t interested in learning) and I’ve dealt with the editor who has a dog in the fight and isn’t interested in getting ‘the other side of the issue’ out there.
Blogging & the like is relatively new. It already fact-checks the national stage & disseminates that information better than “major media”. If there’s a market for “local coverage”, it’ll get covered, newspapers or no newspapers.
Parker is pathetic. She and Frum should ditch their spouses and get hitched. If the NY Times promised they’d cover the nuptials in the wedding announcements, they’d probably do it.
Banjo,
You must know that this is an issue that has been debated for a long time, and we’re not going to resolve it here. It all started when Joe Klein shot an elephant before breakfast, in his pyjamas. (What the elephant was doing in Joe Klein’s pyjamas we’ll never know.)
P.S. Since he writes for Time, I guess I should have called him “fearless journalist Joe Klein.”
Has there ever been another industry that so relentlessly bashed its customers as not getting it? Even the auto industry doesn’t bash its customers. What’s truly amazing is this snobbish group of elites in the press think they have a skill that cannot be replicated. Anybody with good writing skills can be a journalist. That means lawyers playrights pr or a plain old punch press operator with no training but the abilit to write. Most journalists should make less than a chilis manager. I can ask questions and write. I can’t manage a chilis
I’ll have to give some credit to the Dallas Morning News for doing a good job at covering local issues. They stay on top of City Council and the school district. In fact, they’ve done some very good investigative reporting on local issues.
11–”Most journalists should make less than a chilis manager. I can ask questions and write. I can’t manage a chilis”
good point. As newspapers close, many of the pedigreed idiots from the newsroom and editorial boards will be forced to roll up their sleeves at Chilis or elsewhere and learn a real job. NOt a bad developmet.
“Ever try looking for coverage of the Los Angeles City Council in the Los Angeles Times?”
I have now.
http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=source%3A%22los+angeles+times%22+%22los+angeles+City+Council%22
At the risk of sounding sexist, there is only one thing that could have caused Ms. Parker’s sudden desertion to the dark side–she is getting laid by a Liberal, and is coming on strong for the first time in her career!
In other words she’s fu*king her brains out!
Re:Addison: You sure could do that, and you could call the resulting business a “newspaper” to coin a phrase
I find it funny that people fall back on local political coverage to justify the traditional media. Fine, if that’s what justifies the traditional media then how about it focus on that and see if that brings it back? Instead of, for instance, wasting precious space on syndicated columnists, most of which I don’t want to read anyway and even if I did they are readily available online for free.