1782 Duration: 6.14 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
All right. Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself, and your role here at IPS.
1783 Duration: 14.01 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I’m Jim Lobe. I’m Bureau Chief for Inter Press Service, which is an international wire service that deals mainly with issues and events of interest to developing countries and people who are interested in developing countries.
1784 Duration: 11.14 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
So, in other words, your main audience are countries -- like super -- like big countries, or those small, developing countries?
1785 Duration: 45.95 seconds
Jim Lobe:
My main audience is very difficult to define. But in general I write for media -- subscriber media, in developing countries and also in northern Europe and some parts of southern Europe as well which subscribe. But our basic audience are -- is found in -- Sorry, let’s do that again. -- Our basic audience is found in -- among English anglophone papers in East Asia and a number of native language papers in South Asia, in particular, and to some extent Indonesia, in anglophone Africa, and in virtually all of Latin America.
1786 Duration: 7.27 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
Alright so -- During the buildup to the war in Iraq what kind of stories were you covering for your audience then?
1787 Duration: 17.92 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Well, I would say that my audience broadened after 9/11 because I was particularly interested in the rise of neo-conservatives within the administration and the campaign I felt that they were waging outside the administration.
1788 Duration: 9.24 seconds
Jim Lobe:
So I started writing about the neo-conservative Project For The New American Century and so on within just a few weeks of 9/11 itself.
1790 Duration: 17.95 seconds
Jim Lobe:
What the administration was doing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 had very little to do with the war on Bin Laden or the Taliban, but was part of a much broader strategy. And a little research kind of confirmed my instincts about that.
1791 Duration: 19.55 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And so I started writing about The Project For The New American Century, for example, and neo-conservative thinking, and tilt toward Israel and so on. And as a result of that my audience expanded beyond my normal Inter Press Service kind of constituency.
1792 Duration: 31 seconds
Jim Lobe:
So I began writing for a number of different web sites, some in the United States, others abroad -- And at a certain moment for the Daily Star, which is an English paper in Beirut which has a large readership in the Middle East as well. Inter Press has never been very strong in that region, so it wasn’t really competitive -- I mean, I wasn’t traducing my responsibilities toward Inter Press. So --
1793 Duration: 6.87 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I found that there was a much bigger audience for the kind of writing I was doing after 9/11.
1794 Duration: 47.31 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
So when you started to hear in late August Dick Cheney speaking about this threat from Iraq. And then the public relations campaign that launched in September -- What was your perception of what was happening? Did you trust a lot of what was going on? What were you reporting on? [Well, --] I felt that they were going to go to war -- that to the extent that neo-conservatives -- [Interruption.] ...
1795 Duration: 7.67 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I had felt that just by reading back before 9/11, into the 90s --
1796 Duration: 29.43 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I mean, I’d already looked at what a lot of key people who were obviously very influential within the administration were writing. It was pretty clear to me that Iraq was indeed probably already conceived of as the major target of the quote War on Terror back in late 2001 already. So, by August of 2002 it was very, very clear indeed.
1797 Duration: 23.06 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And I was writing essentially at that time on the conflict that had broken out within the administration as to whether there should be a war waged against Iraq. And if so, how it should be waged and how it should be prepared for -- That is, do you go through the UN or, you know, "What are the ways of preparing the ground for the war? "
1798 Duration: 21.89 seconds
Jim Lobe:
So a lot of what I was writing in the summer of 2002 -- or in the late summer of 2002 -- was about how clear it had become that you had Cheney and Rumsfeld and neo-cons around both of them are going for war. And how clear it was that Powell was dragging his feet.
1799 Duration: 35.67 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Now I think in early August, I think around August 3, that was 3 days I think before Powell finally got a private audience with Bush to persuade him to go through the UN, I wrote an article that actually got some notice that said that I couldn’t understand why Powell remained Secretary of State. That I thought that, I mean, he really was being used as a fig leaf, a reasonable and trusted fig leaf, for really a group of extremists who were determined to take the United States to war.
1800 Duration: 14.98 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
So when you read the mainstream print media, such as the Washington Post or New York Times, do you see that they didn’t kind of see the same perspective as you, that the war in a sense was going to happen, that it was inevitable? [Well -- ]
1801 Duration: 8.48 seconds
Jim Lobe:
You know, when you talk about the mainstream media you’re really talking about a kind of entity that’s larger than specific reporters or specific editors.
1803 Duration: 12.98 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And I’m certain that reporters, certainly for the Times or the Post or whatever, had as much information, or more, as I did about what was going on.
1805 Duration: 13.95 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I think the issue is that mainstream journalism, as practiced within a certain political framework or cultural framework, in which some things can be said and some things cannot be said.
1806 Duration: 5.97 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Or some dots can be connected and other dots cannot be connected.
1808 Duration: 39.11 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I -- working for essentially an international new agency -- have much greater freedom to connect dots. Whereas, I think people who work for the Times and the Post, particularly those because they are kind of court newspapers, and as a result their relationship with people in power is a much more delicate kind of proposition. They cannot write things that may, on an individual basis, be pretty obvious to them after covering these people for a long period of time.
1809 Duration: 12.65 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
And you see the reason -- Is that kind of the constraints of the objectivity standard that the journalists here have? Or what do you attribute that to? Why don’t they connect those dots more? [Well, I think -- I think --]
1810 Duration: 19.22 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I think because there are political realities that are opposed to that kind of dot connection. That is just -- you just can’t say certain kinds of things in certain kinds of atmosphere and expect that your editors are going to let it pass and it’s going to be printed in a newspaper.
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