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Wed. Jan 02, 2002

QuoteLog, 1/3

QuoteLog, 1/3 – ”Rose offers us the faulty predictions of the New York Times’ R.W. Apple and Maureen Dowd, the Los Angeles Times’ Jacob Heilbrunn, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the New Republic’s editorial page, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, the Nation’s Katha Pollitt, and others. In retrospect, we shouldn’t be surprised that none of them had anything useful to say. In his still-relevant critique of the news media, Breaking the News (1996), James Fallows noted that the game of punditocracy had become one of being as negative and sneering as possible. He quoted an ABC reporter as saying, ’You can be wrong, as long as you’re negative and skeptical. But if you’re going to say something remotely positive, you’d better be 150 percent right or you’re going to be accused of rolling over.’ ”

Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix

”In the weekly New York Observer, freelance columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote a 1,500-word critique of the U.S. effort entitled, ’Why Are We in Afghanistan?’ The Nov. 19 piece said, ’We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking,’ to believe Afghans would switch sides so easily. ’Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we’ve been trying to make common cause.’ The week the column appeared, gleeful Kabul residents shaved their beards and displayed posters of Indian movie stars to show their delight in being rid of the Taliban. Mr. von Hoffman says he still thinks declaring war was a bad idea—because ’there is by definition no way to say you’ve won’—but also pleads ignorance. ’Nobody knew anything about Afghanistan, myself included,’ Mr. von Hoffman says. ’It turns out there really wasn’t an army there. Turns out we probably still are clueless.’ He conceded that ’in the prediction business, ... you almost never get it right.’ ”

Matthew Rose, Wall Street Journal

”Last year, Gwinnett County’s property insurance included terrorism coverage as a freebie. Not any more, not after Sept. 11. ’The insurance companies didn’t perceive terrorism as a likely event in the continental U.S.,’ said Chuck Huckleberry, the county’s risk management director. ’After Sept. 11, as we began to look at things, the insurance companies were painting a very different picture post 9/11. It became very evident it was going to cost us.’ The increase was significant. ’This year [2002], insurance just for terrorism costs more than we paid for all of our total property insurance last year,’ said Dash Roberts, the county’s budget division director. ’It’s a big difference.’ The county paid $305,000 to Factory Mutual Insurance Co. for $300 million in property insurance for county buildings and structures for 2001. The policy covered such usual disasters as fire, tornadoes and equipment failures. For the coming year, Gwinnett will fork over $390,000 for a mere $50 million in terrorism coverage, and it had to go to Lloyd’s of London to get it. ’Our regular carrier wanted to offer $1 million,’ Huckleberry said. ’That wouldn’t cover any building we have, so we knew we would have to go farther afield. It took a lot of work.’ ”

Doug Nurse, Atlanta Constitution

”The militia commanders, who took control of the city after the Taliban fled Dec. 7, said they had planned their own assault on Baghran this week, but the effort was called off Sunday night at a meeting of U.S. Special Forces and anti-Taliban officials here. At the meeting, convened in the Governor’s Palace in downtown Kandahar, the U.S. military officials presented an enlarged aerial photograph showing the Taliban presence in Baghran. The photo showed troop and weapon positions, according to Afghan commanders present. ’If you want to go there and destroy this, we will support you,’ one commander quoted a U.S. officer as saying. ’If you don’t want to go, we will go and bombard it.’ [...] An attempt at capturing Omar in Helmand would represent one of the biggest challenges that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies have faced in the military campaign. Many Taliban fighters fleeing Kandahar after its fall sought refuge in the mountains and valleys of Helmand’s northern reaches [...] ’Helmand is different than Kandahar,’ said Mohammed, the militia commander from Helmand. ’All of them are Taliban.’ ”

Karl Vick, Washington Post

”Border Affairs Minister Amanullah Zadran said bombing was the only way to destroy a large cache of weapons stored in a house in the village guarded by Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathisers. The Afghan Islamic Press said Monday that at least 92 people whom it described as civilians were killed in the raid on Nizai Qala in Paktia province. ’I’m not supporting the bombing (of innocent people) but there was no other choice,’ Zadran said. ’By land it would have been risky. It was a very insecure situation. There is still some opposition in the area.’ He added: ’There was no intention to kill innocent people. In Afghanistan we have a proverb: when dry wood burns you can also burn wet wood.’ ”

Times of India

”Afghan feminist Deba Usefzai heeded a weekend radio appeal by women’s movement leader Amina Afzali for women en masse to shed their all-covering burqas. She wishes she had not, after being treated with unbridled hostility in the streets of Kabul. ’Everyone was pointing at me and staring at me,’ said Usefzai, 30. ’Some men began pushing me while I was waiting for a bus. There was a lot of bad feeling towards me. I felt really scared.’ Usefzai, an official in the ministry of higher education, has decided to resume her former practice of wearing the burqa in public and only removing it in her office or home. ’It seems Afghans aren’t ready for such freedoms yet.’ Her colleague, 32-year-old Azima Majed, said she had not even bothered going out in public without a burqa. ’It’s going to take a call from the new government, not Amina Afzali, to convince women it’s safe to walk around without a burqa,’ she said.”

Times of India

”In case you missed it, last Friday the Saudi-led cartel cut production by 6.5 percent to boost oil prices, while the world is struggling to get out of a recession induced in part by the terrorism of Osama bin Laden and 15 Saudi hijackers. Frankly, the thought that U.S. taxpayers, who have had to bail out the airline industry (which was devastated by Sept. 11 and by higher gas prices) and to finance the $1 billion-a- month war against bin Laden, will now have to pay more for oil because the Middle East regimes we’re protecting want to hike the price, is an outrage. You’d think maybe the king of Saudi Arabia would say: ’America, we’re as upset as you that Osama bin Laden and 15 Saudi youth were involved in the terrible attack on your shores. So we want to help America the engine of the global economy recover, as well as the developing world. As such, we’re going to keep oil prices extremely low for the next six months, then we’ll slowly lift them back to the $24-$28 range. It will cost us, but that’s our tax cut for the world.’ ”

Thomas Friedman, NY Times

”The first non-terror, non-war information to be dropped into Fox’s crawl was the official announcement on Sept. 25 that basketball great Michael Jordan would return to play. In the weeks since, the crawls have become an often eclectic, sometimes inane mix of visual news bites, typically with minor happenings squeezed in between updates on major global events. Whether the crawls are here to stay, though, is up for debate among experts. ’I believe the informational crawls-and the goofy concept of giving stories titles similar to motion picture titles-will begin to disappear as the networks begin getting negative feedback from viewers through their own research or from media consultants,’ said Joseph Angotti, a former NBC News vice president and now a professor of journalism at Northwestern University. Angotti is no fan of the crawl, saying that he has never seen research that viewers want or need the crawls. Though people have told him the use of the Internet may have changed that, Angotti said, ’Just because a Web site has multiple blocks of information spread across a screen does not mean a similar concept can or should be translated to a television screen.’ ”

Robert Straus, LA Times