Just because it's subtle doesn't mean it's not effective

VW, over at his own blog, wrote a piece criticizing media coverage of the CF in Afghanistan that, taken on its own, seems like a bit of nitpicking. But to those of us who are careful observers of both the CF and the national media, it's just another example of a clear trend - one that was part of the reason I started this blog in the first place.

Take this headline, for example, from today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Forces heading toward ‘failure’ in Afghanistan

The thing is, most readers of the Citizen who see “Forces” and “Afghanistan” in the same headline will assume that what’s being talked about are the Canadian Forces, which happens to be the official English-language name for our military. But if you read the article by Richard Foot, you’ll see that he’s talking about an article in the American Interest which discusses NATO forces currently deployed in Afghanistan. (A brief excerpt of the article itself can be found here, and excerpts from an in-journal rebuttal are available here; full text is apparently behind a subscriber firewall.)

Is the headline misleading? Perhaps that’s not the right word; disingenous probably would be more accurate. But it’s a subtle, almost subconscious way to advance the idea that Canada isn’t doing well in Afghanistan, even though the content doesn’t really talk about Canada-specific activities at all.

Now it should be possible to write a more accurate headline: “NATO could still fail Afghanistan,” for example. But whoever does headlines for the Citizen on that page obviously chose not to do it that way, and as a result my respect for and trust in print media drops just that much more.

As Time magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel said himself not a week ago:

...this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me - because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don't know that there is as such a thing as objectivity.

Journalistic objectivity is a fairy-tale. Fairness may be possible, but objectivity in reporting simply isn't. And the more you watch the media, like we here at The Torch do, the more you'll realize that the vast majority of the Canadian media establishment have neither the understanding of military matters, nor the ideological predisposition to learn about them, that would be required to offer fair defence-related journalism to the public. Oh, they're getting better, thanks largely to the Afghan mission, and especially the embed program. But those who work in the newsrooms back in Canada are still pushing an agenda, whether they intend to or acknowledge it or not.

So why play whack-a-mole with a headline that twists perception so subtly? Because like a trickle of water left unchecked for long enough can produce a canyon in the rock, a trickle of misinformation and spin left uncountered for long enough can produce a chasm of understanding. The CF and the country simply can't afford to let that happen any longer.