Annabelle de St. MauriceProfessors Paul Rothstein and Victor Le Vine are part of Student Life’s War in Iraq Panel. Rothstein is a professor of economics at Washington University, where he teaches public finance and public economics. He is also the Associate Director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at WU. Le Vine has been a professor of political science at WU since 1961. He specializes in Comparative Politics, with a particular focus on African and Middle East Politics, Guerrilla War and Terrorism, International Law and Politics, Political Corruption and Ethnic Politics.
Has the media been adequately covering the war in Iraq? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the coverage?
Victor LeVine:
Who knows? In part, it may depend on with whom you’re embedded, or where you sit. In the Middle East, for example, people get Iraqi TV, al-Jazeera, various small independent stations, plus their own national channel(s), and if they have dishes or their government permits it, CNN, MSNBC and BBC. The Arab stations tend to be partial to the Iraqi side of the story and certainly highly condemnatory of the US’s role in the war. They also showed the US POWs and gruesome pictures of coalition dead and lots of images of children and other civilians purportedly injured by coalition bombs. Here in Turkey we get cable and the major Western sources, and a bit of everything else. You know what we get in the US. Who provides the more accurate picture? My guess is that we probably do, but that may not be saying much about the truth, whatever that is. Stay tuned.
Paul Rothstein:
I am not an expert on the media, so all I can offer is a personal impression. I do not expect to learn much on a day by day basis about what is happening. War is chaotic, information is tightly controlled and little can be independently verified. We expect a constant stream of reporting, however, so the content really suffers. Listen to the typical story, ask yourself what you learned and then ask whether you really have time for this. I think reporters for serious newspapers have the right incentives, but they can’t really find out who is killing whom, so instead they needle the generals at the press conferences.
To suggest a question for the panel, please e-mail [email protected].
-Compiled by Stacie Driebusch