Power Line has a post on the New York Times' failure to review or even mention an important new book on the Iraq war. Not surprisingly, it is a conservative book. In the Times' world, it is convenient to pretend this book does not exist.
I thought it would be interesting to follow up by looking at the Times' treatment of other books on the Iraq war. I did a search on Amazon for the top books on the Iraq war. Here are the first five books that came up. All five were about the most recent Iraq war. I classified the books as liberal/antiwar, conservative/pro-US, or neither.
1. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks. Liberal.
2. War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Douglas J. Feith. Conservative.
3. Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New 'Greatest Generation of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope by Michael Yon. Conservative.
4. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. Liberal.
5. House to House: an Epic Memoire of War by David Bellavia. Conservative.
I then used searches on the Times' site to determine how the Times covered each book. Here is what came up:
Liberal Books:
Fiasco
The NYT published two separate reviews of Fiasco:
One
Two
A search came up with approximately fifteen articles that mentioned Fiasco. I say "approximately" because with 32 hits from the search (some of which are not articles), it takes a fair amount of work to determine exactly which hits correspond to articles.
Some quotations from the reviews give an idea of the NYT's attitude towards the book:
devastating new book about the American war in Iraq
absolutely essential reading
gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic [war] that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope.
offers a comprehensive and illuminating portrait of the willful blindness of the Bush administration to Iraqi realities
Ricks has done his homework
In general, the Times' coverage of Fiasco was extensive and approving.
The Three Trillion Dollar War
The NYT has mentioned this book twice. In an editorial entitled The Suffering of Soldiers, the Times mentioned the book in the following sentence:
As the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes made clear in “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” their analysis of Iraq, the medical toll of a war rises in a swelling curve for many decades after the shooting stops.
An opinion piece about the war entitled The $2 Trillion Nightmare extensively quoted the author to make the point that the war was costly. One example:
Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”
Conservative Books:
War and Decision:
An opinion piece about a speech by Feith mentioned the existence of the book. The piece described the author, the speech, and the audience
The dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet
The dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet
Former Rummy gopher
wooly-headed hawks
an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss
The NYT also published a brief opinion piece by Feith and mentioned the book's existence in its description of Feith. The piece, which is entitled "Legislation's Limits", makes the point that Congress should examine more than just legislation when deciding how effective or ineffective the Iraqi government has been. The timing is interesting -- earlier, the Times had extensively criticized the Iraqi government for failing to pass important legislation. Now that the Iraqi government has started to pass such legislation, the NYT needs to shift focus in order to maintain its criticism.
As for the other two conservative books, the NYT has not mentioned their existence at all.
Analysis
The contrast is interesting, isn't it? The NYT made approving use of both liberal books. In one case, the use was extensive; in the other, it was minimal. As for the conservative books, the NYT completely ignored two of them. The third (War and Decision) was mentioned in one lengthy piece mocking its author, and mentioned neutrally in once opinion piece which the Times was using to shift the focus away from an area which it had criticized in the past, now that successes were being had in that area.
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2 comments:
While Bellavia is now running for office as a pro-war Republican, *House to House* is not conservative in any meaningful sense. (Did you actually read it? I'm guessing not.) Yon has often criticized the Bush administration's war policy pre-Petraeus, and his book has a blurb from... Thomas Ricks, author of *Fiasco*. Moreover, Yon did indeed get a respectful profile in the Times, and his book is plugged there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/business/21iraqblogger.html
You're making the same mistake anti-war liberals make, assuming that pro-military is the same as conservative. It is not. Moreover, you fail to mention Maureen Dowd's description of Feith as the dumbest fucking guy on the planet comes from that notable raging left winger... General Tommy Franks, who Bush recently gave a Medal of Freedom. (No doubt for being a flaming liberal.)
First of all, thank you for being the first person to comment on my blog! At this point I have so few readers that I'm delighted just to be noticed.
Secondly, in response to your specific concerns --
I agree with you that House to House is difficult to classify along the conservative/liberal axis. Since the point of view is that of US soldiers, I felt it made more sense to put it in the conservative/pro US group. But if you want to say it should go in neither group, I won't argue with you. I believe my fundamental point would still stand.
Secondly, the profile of Michael Yon you mention is a profile of Yon, not of his book. It does not mention the book at all. It was published three months before the book, so I don't know if it would have been possible for the NYT to mention the upcoming book at that time or not. So this was a respectful profile of Yon at a time when, as you correctly say, he had repeatedly criticized several aspects of the US handling of the war. Yon's book came out in April, and the NYT still hasn't mentioned it at all.
Lastly, as for the Tommy Franks quote, I don't think the source of that quote affects the validity of my point one way or the other. If the NYT had wanted to, I imagine some digging would have found negative quotes from liberal sources about the authors of the liberal books. The point is that the NYT publishes this type of quote about the authors of the conservative books, but not about the authors of the liberal books.
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