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September 22, 2005

Blog Interview: Arthur Chrenkoff

Arthur Chrenkoff is a man who needs no introduction. He is an Australian blogger who pioneered the Good News From Iraq series. Just today, The Boston Globe did a great story on the success of this series. Arthur has now had to hang up his keyboard for professional reasons, but his series has spawned a new website altogether, Good News from the Front, which aims to carry the torch.

I wanted to know more about him, and Arthur was kind enough to agree to an interview with me. So here it is, conducted by email from Texas to Australia:

CHESTER: First, the basics: how old are you, and in what industry do you work?

CHRENKOFF: 33, politics (if politics can be called an industry!).

CHESTER: What was it like to grow up in Poland?

CHRENKOFF: Interesting. As P J O’Rourke wrote about Eastern European communism when he visited Poland in 1986, a year before I left: “Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death.” So my childhood was not one of gulags and mass graves, but more of decay and frustration. Still, living in a country where telling a joke can lose you a job, and where you have to queue up for hours to buy toilet paper, has been an invaluable learning experience – it made me deeply appreciate democracy, freedom and free market; things that too many people in the West take for granted.

CHESTER: Where were you educated, in Poland, Australia, or elsewhere? What did you study and why?

CHRENKOFF: I went to primary school in Krakow, Poland – it has a Pol Potesque name Primary School Number 1. Then I went to high school and university in Brisbane, Australia. I’ve done Batchelor of Arts, majoring in Government (International Relations), Bachelor of Laws, and then, for the fun of it, PhD in law. Still asking myself that “why?” question.

CHESTER: When did you learn English? Growing up in Poland, or since moving to Australia?

CHRENKOFF: Before I came to Australia I knew maybe 100 English words and some very basic grammar. It was a steep learning curve for the first few months Down Under. It helped – immensely – that I have always loved reading, so I just switched from Polish to English language books. It did wonders for my vocabulary, but nothing for my accent.

CHESTER: Before starting blogging, had you written a lot? For newspapers, or opinion pieces or other stuff?

CHRENKOFF: Not really – at least nothing mainstream. I have written a lot for various small party political publications. Blogging was a revelation, because it suddenly allowed me to write to the whole world, not just to a handful of people in Queensland.

CHESTER: Are you a “man of letters” or maybe as a blogger, a “man of emails?”

CHRENKOFF: I would be, if I had time. I’m amazed at all the famous people in the past, including famous politicians, who somehow managed, on top of their very busy schedules, to leave us volumes upon volumes of private correspondence. How did they manage? All my emails consist of single sentences.

CHESTER: You’ve posted links to your fiction on your blog. Do you see a future in writing?

CHRENKOFF: It would be nice, but the odds of an unknown having his or her first novel published are similar to those of being struck by lightning. Maybe not quite, but in the United States for every one thousand manuscripts, only two ever end up as books. So unless you’re already quite famous in another field and have sufficient name recognition (like, for example, Newt Gingrich or Tara Moss), the publishers are very reluctant to risk touching you.

CHESTER: Why did you move to Australia? Have you had other significant experiences overseas?

CHRENKOFF: My family left Poland in 1987, two years “before the wall came down”, but to us on the inside it certainly did not look like anything would change anytime soon, so my parents, like millions before them, made the decision to seek a better future elsewhere. We lived for sixteen months in Italy while waiting to come to Australia, which was a great experience.

CHESTER: Any observations on life in Australia? Why is it good, or not good, or different than you imagined it would be, for better or worse?

CHRENKOFF: Great. We’ve had family in Australia, so I must have been the only child in Poland who could draw the map of Australia, divide it into states and put all the capital cities in correct places. So, I knew what the expect. I love my hometown Brisbane, and the whole south east corner of Queensland. It’s a bit of a cross between California and Florida, undergoing a huge population growth (Brisbane will triple in size over the next twenty years, from 1 to 3 million people) and a related growth in opportunities.

CHESTER: You’ve written about “post-totalitarianism disorder” in its relation to Afghanistan and Iraq. What is this and did you ever suffer from this same disorder in Poland?

CHRENKOFF: Post-totalitarian stress disorder is a mental and spiritual condition afflicting most if not all of those who had to live under a dictatorship and now have to adjust themselves to a free society. Totalitarian life engenders certain habits and thought processes, such as hostility to the state and the authorities, distrust and lack of cooperation with fellow citizens, loss of personal initiative, etc. All this means that even once you change the society’s hardware – the institutions - the software obstinately remaining inside people’s heads and hearts will make the transition a difficult and frustrating process. And it’s the same the world over, whether it’s Iraq and Afghanistan, or Poland and Cambodia – so yes, even I am not immune in some respects.

CHESTER: Do you return to Poland frequently? What is life like there now as opposed to when you were there last?

CHRENKOFF: I’ve only been back twice, ten years after I left for about a month, and more recently for a few days. I try to keep in touch with the family though. There is no doubt that the transition to democracy and free market was quite painful, and that it will take decades before Poland catches up to Western European living standards, but the changes have been immense and largely for the better. Still, there is a lot of impatience and frustration among the people right now, but unfortunately there aren’t any magic solutions.

CHESTER: How did you become a conservative?

CHRENKOFF: I was always a conservative to the extent of being strongly anti-totalitarian, but way back in 1993, three books made me a “movement” conservative: P J O’Rourke’s “Holidays in Hell”, Michael Medved’s “Hollywood versus America” and William A Rusher’s “The Rise of the Right”. I read them and I thought: this is my home, these are my people.

CHESTER: Let’s talk about the war for a bit. How do you see it progressing? What’s your opinion? Are you optimistic?

CHRENKOFF: Overall, the war is going well, but it’s going to be a long one, which is why all the people who think it’s a disaster because four years on Osama is still at large and Iraq is not Vermont should take a cold shower – and stay there. That’s another good thing about having grown up in a country like Poland – it gives you a historical perspective and the understanding that most processes last longer than a news cycle, that there will be ups and downs, two steps forward and one step back, one step forward and two steps back – but the struggle will go on.

CHESTER: How do you feel about jihad in Southeast Asia? Is it on the rise? Is it a future battleground?

CHRENKOFF: There’s ongoing violence in southern Thailand and in the Philippines, and Jemaah Islamiah has got a strong presence in Indonesia, as evident from the Bali bombing in 2002 and the more recent attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Muslim societies in Southeast Asia are generally quite moderate, and radicals enjoy limited electoral appeal. Of course, you don’t need to be a mass movement to cause trouble, but a resurrected Caliphate in the region is not a widely popular vision.

CHESTER: How did the “Good News In Iraq” and “Good News in Afghanistan” series get started? How did you get picked up by Opinionjournal.com?

CHRENKOFF: One day I simply got sick of continuous barrage of bad news and thought to myself – surely, logic alone would suggest that there must be some good things happening; so where are they? And I started looking around the internet. A few hours later I had the core of the first round-up, which I updated over the next few days and then published. Some of the stories were from the mainstream media, but often overlooked in the rush of bad news (a terrorist attack usually gets covered by hundreds of media outlets, a comparable piece of good news by only half a dozen of sources), some of it was from the authorities and the NGOs and didn’t even get into the media in the first place. So I quickly realized that there was indeed a lot of good news coming out, but the reporting was so diffuse that it simply wasn’t having much impact on the public.

As for “The Opinion Journal”, it was a simple case of “link whoring” known to every blogger. I sent James Taranto links to the first two round-ups and he included them in his daily “Best of the Web” segmeny. Upon the third or fourth time, he emailed back saying: it doesn’t make much sense me just linking to your stuff – why don’t we publish a complete round-up instead? And the rest is history.

CHESTER: What do you think are the obstacles to getting the good news out?

CHRENKOFF: Partly, it’s an institutional bias in favor of bad news, the proverbial “if it bleeds, it leads” newsroom attitude. Whether it’s Boston or Baghdad, the media prefers to report on violence, crime, corruption, and controversy because it seems more newsworthy and more serious than good news. But there is clearly an ideological bias – whether against the United States, against any Republican administration, against a forceful foreign policy, or against the military. There are also more innocent explanations – ignorance, as well as logistical problems – reports quite often simply are not in the right place at the right time to report on positive developments.

CHESTER: Have you read any constructive criticism of your Good News efforts from the left? Has anyone offered some sort of insight that made you change the content, focus, or something else about it? Or has it all been silently received on the left? I'm sure you've received lots of emails about it . . .

CHRENKOFF: Plenty of criticsim but nothing that made me change my direction. The critics don't seem to have read very carefully what I've written – I never claimed that that bad things are not happening or that all is well is Iraq, and I never made claims that the good news I pull together outweighs all the bad news - that's a decision for the readers to make, but they can only make that sort of an informed decision after they have in front of them both sides of the story. There is a widespread feeling on the left that to report bad news is a duty, but to report good news is propaganda.

CHESTER: If you were in charge of public affairs at the Pentagon, how would you do the job? What would you do differently than is being done today?

CHRENKOFF: It’s a tough one, because large sections of the public, and most of the media, are pretty skeptical of the military authorities and their message. So from one point of view, Pentagon could do ten times as much as it’s currently doing, and do it in ten different ways, but the media filter would still find ways to ignore or downplay the message.

On the other hand, embedding journalists is one of the best media strategies around. During the initial stages of war, almost 800 journalists were attached to various military units; now it’s only 30. Living and working alongside the troops gives journalists an invaluable perspective - a much better understanding of all the realities as well as of the people. Not only is it a useful counterbalance to the usually uninformed and dismissive reporting of military matters, but it also gets the reporters to where the action is. The media have missed out on so many good news stories – of security successes, of reconstruction, of winning hearts and minds – because they simply weren’t there “at the coalface” with the troops.

Also, if the mainstream media is part of the problem and not the solution, than you should diversify and try to utilize the new media to get the message across – talk radio, blogs, etc.

CHESTER: What’s the future of all this – the media that is? Papers, journalists, blogs, TV – the whole shooting match. Where will it all be in 5 or 10 years?

CHRENKOFF: Ah, if I knew the answer I would be a very rich man – in 5 or 10 years.

CHESTER: Have you ever been to the US? You are certainly welcome in Texas anytime.

CHRENKOFF: No, but would love to one day, and even better, to take a few months off and drive across the country from east to west. Texas, of course, would be on my route.

CHESTER: Thanks very much for your time!

CHRENKOFF: Pleasure – thanks for having me.

Posted by Chester at September 22, 2005 10:45 PM

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