Months and even years ago when the war in Iraq wasn't looking so good, every day the mainstream media would drone on and on about how terrible the situation is. Every negative snippet that could be run on the war was aired, and the President just got hammered for it. Despite the reluctance of the Dems, the Surge was put in place and dramatically reduced casualties in Iraq. Roadside attacks happen much less frequent because of the increase in troop levels, and while political progress is trailing, military success is evident.
Yet where are the headlines? You'd almost that we are no longer at war for the lack of coverage it gets these days. The Left called for a change in strategy. They won Congress back and had a mandate. Bush changed and requested more troops. Now they don't acknowledge that it is change and cite the slow Iraqi political process as Bush's failure. Do the Dems really want us to be successful in Iraq? If we succeed, all those who opposed the war look foolish. the Left continues to root for failure...Defeatocrats.
The political situation in Iraq to me is the most difficult part over there. You have three groups of people who have been fighting each other for 1000's of years, and we're trying to ask them to unite together for Democracy's sake. I'm not 100% convinced that Iraq can ever have a peaceful democratic republic, to be honest. The idea of splitting the country up into three parts deserves a close look, too. But, the state of the world and islamofascism is why we must maintain a presence in Iraq, however, and I'm convinced that we don't have any other rational choice but to stay and see it through.
So look around at the drive-by mainstream media see if you can find any coverage of the Iraq War. If casualties are DOWN, why isn't this being covered with the same ferocity as the INCREASES in casualties we were so accustomed to before the surge. Answer IMHO: another example of the left wing media refusing to run stories that cast President Bush and his policies in a positive light. That and they're probably all so consumed with Hillary vs. Barack that they can't even think about anything else.
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3 comments:
Major media is not influenced by the left, man, come on!
ha...this is the biggest example of how it is. prior to last september, every day we were getting casualty counts, but since the surge, its almost as if the war were over!
When you do hear something its because there were a large number of US casualties, but that is the end of it.
From Chris:
Hello, my friends. Today, I noticed a story that you'll find insightful. The supposed bias of the media is easy to parrot, but look a little closer. These are businesses like any other. The flagging economy affects the newsgathering abilities of major and minor newspapers, TV and radio stations, websites, etc.
Even so, there's still news out there about what's happening in the war. I wish there were more. And I wish the dialog in the presidential race were more productive. But you can only blame news outlets so much; the candidates dictate talking points and attack each other, and the media report it.
One last note: People like to complain about the prominence of bad news over good. They say they'd rather read positive news, that the media are biased or skeptical.
Of course the media are skeptical. Jimmy, I think you'll agree that the scientific method yields far more negative results than positive in laboratories. Thomas Edison said he didn't fail a thousand times before creating the light bulb; he said he found a thousand ways not to create the light bulb. Likewise, only through an understanding of the mistakes, abuses and tragedies that accompany all wars can citizens choose a more successful path.
It's important to know when things improve, in any facet of the news. And we do know. But it's easy to see why fewer soldiers dying is less newsworthy than more soldiers dying. The government and military should be held to account. They're supposed to do their jobs well. And, just as I see no good reason to go overboard commending Rudy Giuliani for doing what he was supposed to do during a crisis, I see no great benefit in praising leaders for reducing the damage their decisions have brought upon our country. It's good, but it's not yet enough. You know?
Anyway, I've pasted a passage from the story that details some of what I'm saying.
Hope you both had a good Easter. Baseball starts tomorrow. And the fantasy draft is at 3 p.m. today.
Okay. Here's the clip:
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
He argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown “surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail.”
Many news organizations have fewer people in Iraq than they once did, though no definitive numbers are available. Coalition officials have said that although there were several hundred reporters embedded with military units early in the war, the number has been measured in tens in recent months.
Violence against journalists makes reporting on Iraq costly and difficult; executives of The New York Times have said that the newspaper is spending more than $3 million a year to cover Iraq. The risks have forced news organizations to hire private security forces and Iraqi employees who can go places that Westerners cannot safely explore.
From the start of the war through 2005, journalists and their support workers were killed in Iraq at a rate of one every 12 days, according to tallies kept by the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2006 and 2007, the rate was one every eight days. Most of those killed have been Iraqis.
“Danger and the expense are gigantic factors,” Mr. Jones said. “The news media have to constantly revisit how much money and risk to expend.”
Thanks for writing this.
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