'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Iraq's Battle of the Ayatollahs

Ayatollah Sistani says he wants the commission that decides on his country's new constitution to be elected. Ayatollah Bremer says he wants the commission that decides on Sistani's country's new constitution to be sorta-kinda-well-- not exactly elected.

Who will decide between these two views?

Unlike Ayatollah Tom Friedman, I happen to think it should be the Iraqi people who decide. Which makes the results of a recent survey on Iraqi opinion released by a group called Oxford Research International particularly relevant.

The survey sampled the views of 3,244 Iraqis picked out by random sampling, who were interviewed in their homes in October and early November. They were asked to rate their confidence in 11 different organizations including the Interim Governing Council, the rebuilding Iraqi Army, the UN, etc etc.

Of the eleven different bodies, Ayatollah Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority won the laurels for "most distrusted": some 57% of those questioned said they had zero trust in the CPA and 22% said they had "very little" trust in it (for a total distrust index of 79%). A resounding eight percent said they had "a great deal" of trust in the CPA.

As for the (slightly general) category of religious leaders, they reportedly won the laurels for "most trusted". 42% of respondents said they had a great deal of trust in the RLs, and another 28% expressed "quite a lot" of trust in them (for a total trust index of 70%). Around 11% said they had "no trust at all" in the RLs.

... By the way, I got the above info from a story that Reuters posted yesterday. I tried to go to the website of Oxford Research International and find the whole report, but they seemed like a very proprietary outfit that didn't post that important info on their site. They did, however, say people could request a press release outlining their results, so I did that and am awaiting a response.

From the way Reuters presented the story, it appeared the respondents were asked to rank each of the eleven organizations into one of four categories: "No trust", "Very little trust", ""Quite a lot of trust", and "A great deal of trust." (Was there a fifth category of "I don't know"? I don't know.)

Barnaby Mason of the Beeb seemed to have been working closely from the same ORI press release as Reuters when he posted this story on the ORI report. But he completely ignored the significant distrust figures won by the CPA! And he blurred over the issue of the trust expressed in RLs by writing:

In contrast with all other Iraqi institutions, religious leaders command the trust of the people - though when asked to suggest the best thing that could happen in the next year, fewer than 1% said an Islamic government.

In his story, Mason did note a significant apparent contradiction/irony in what the questioners found:

Asked to come up with the best and worst things over the past year, Iraqis overwhelmingly said the end of Saddam Hussein's regime on the one hand; and the war, bombings and defeat on the other.

But he buried the second part of that finding ways down in the fifth para of his story...

His lead, which set the main tone for the story, was about how happy Iraqis had been with the demise of Saddam, and how they wanted peace, stability, and democracy, etc etc... Mush, mush, mush. And then, as noted, he totally left out the whole part about the deep distrust of Bremer.

By contrast, Reuters' Gideon Long, writing like Mason out of London, led his story as follows:

Nearly 80 percent of Iraqis have little or no trust in U.S.-led occupying forces and most place their faith in religious leaders instead, according to a major survey published in Britain on Monday.

Nearly half regard the removal of former president Saddam Hussein as the best thing to have happened in the last 12 months while a
third said the war, bombings and defeat of the Iraqi army in April was the
worst.

All the textual evidence points to the fact that both hacks were essentially just rewriting the same press release from ORI. Which rewrite job looks better from the journalistic point of view? You decide!