Perhaps they hold “our guys” to a higher standard. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I also found one other quote from the article particularly telling:
The media isn’t reporting on all the good news because they’re the target of armed terrorists and thugs if they venture out of Baghdad or other large cities. But apparently, we should blame the media for this turn of events, instead of saying “Good news! Iraq is so out of control that terrorists and insurgents can apparently target whomever they damned well want outside of a handful of major cities!”
Well if they don’t like it they can just drive to the airport and … oh wait they can’t do that either because the one of the most important roads in Iraq is too dangerous to do that on. Sunshine and lollipops …
I’ll take a little of each please. Whatszat? No-one’s offering any?
I suspected as much when I started the thread. However, my understanding of this board is that even though many do not like to watch football on television, they are still able to critique the broadcasters. Maybe I was wrong.
Orbifold, the flawed logic in your last statement is, how do the reporters get the negative stories? Are they being spoonfed? Or do they choose which to report.
I agree with Ryan, some of the reporters are in a predicament as far as location goes. Should they be the ones that bring us the reliable news or should they be filtered out in favor of the more rounded reporting?
First off, it’s inaccurate to claim that the U.S. media only reports the bad things that happen to Americans. Cite. What is that if not “good news” from Iraq, from ABC no less?
What you and the good Lt. don’t seem to understand is that, besides the fact that it’s inaccurate to say the media doesn’t report the bad things the other side does, reporting on it doesn’t paint “The Coalition” in any better of a light. Would al-Sadr’s followers be kidnapping and beheading scores of people had the U.S. not toppled the government with inadequate troops to secure the country, or even the damned Capitol city?
I’d like some proof that there is any progress. I don’t see how increased violence and declining control is progress. Elsewhere in his diatribe the Lt. claims that they killed 1500 insurgents and dealt a devestating blow to the insurgency in Fujalla. If it was so devestating then why has the death rate of U.S. troops increased almost monthly since “Major Operations” ended?
Well, since we blew it up, shouldn’t we put it back together? You don’t get parades and laurels for doing what you’re supposed to do.
U.S.: As long as bombings are a daily occurance, that’s what you’re going to hear about 99% of the time on the news. That’s just the way news operates. It’s not bias, it’s what people want to read about. Put out two newspapers, one with all the negative news and one with all the positive news, and guess which one is going to sell and which one isn’t. I’m sure there are wonderful things happening everyday in Iraq, but we’re two years into this now and civilians are dying pretty much EVERY DAY from bombings. All the wonderful news in the world can’t outweigh that in importance, because it represents an almost complete breakdown of civil society. Not in all of Iraq, but in a very large portion of it.
Fewer Americans being killed each week, not more. Fewer Iraqis being killed each week, not more. Increasing security in at least the areas we claim to control, not decreasing - as has already been pointed out, it’s worth your life to travel from the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport now, there are increasing attacks inside the Green Zone, and why must there still be a Green Zone after 2 years anyway? You must get it, if you want to convince us the facts are not what we’ve seen, show us those contrary facts. Diatribes like yours and the guy you quote don’t do it unless they are based on facts. That’s not so hard, is it?
Some of us remember the body count reports from Vietnam. Even as a child then, I could tell from that there was nothing left to accomplish but to get the hell out. We are now hearing body count reports from Iraq as if their increase is a sign of progress.
This guy Ryan is right to be frustrated with the local reporters’ haphazard exposure to life outside their hotel lobbies. They can only report what they see, and what they see is that not even the designated safe zone is safe anymore. Can’t really blame them for that, can you? But Ryan’s also in a position to help make trips outside safe enough for embedded reporters to go along. Is he doing it, or just whining about it, or is it just not possible for him to make *anybody * safe?
Lt Ryan complains that the media only talks about American casualties and doesn’t mention Iraqi casualties. That’s not true but even if it were how is that negative bias towards American troops? If the headline read “American forces inflict 50 Iraqi casualties” with no mention of the American losses, Ryan would surely claim that was more unfair.
Or consider Ryan’s question, “What did the the media show or tell us about Margaret Hassoon, the director of C.A.R.E. in Iraq and an Iraqi citizen, who was kidnapped, brutally tortured and left disemboweled on a street in Fallujah?” Wasn’t her story printed and broadcast as a lead item for weeks? Haven’t all of the hostage situations been fully reported? Isn’t that part of what Ryan is complaining about?
Ryan complains that the media gives the terrorists too much attention. And he complains the media doesn’t talk about them enough. Ryan complains that the media isn’t covering the real fighting going on. Then he complains when reporters won’t leave the battlefront to come cover the opening of his youth center.
It seems to me Ryan just doesn’t like the fact that the media is reporting there’s a war being fought.
Striking, the irony that someone who wishes to censor negative (as regards the US, presumably) information about the conflict in Iraq is referring to those who don’t as having their heads in the sand. The argument being made here is “the media is not reporting what I personally want to hear”. Too bad for you. This is not a very intelligent argument, and is along the lines of advocating shooting the messenger.
If you or the OP can demonstrate that any of this unspecified negative reporting is factually untrue, please feel free to do so. If you wish to ignore this reporting because you don’t happen to like it for one reason or another, feel free to do so. You’d better have a pretty good argument, however, if you are going to claim that negative information concerning US operations in Iraq must be suppressed for our own good. So far, I haven’t seen one.
So let me see if I’ve got the colonel’s position straight: the reporters only see the bad news because they’re in Baghdad, and Baghdad is subjected to “a car bomb…one day, a few mortars the next”, and so forth. Meanwhile in the rest of the country, presumably good news abounds just waiting to be reported…but if a reporter leaves Baghdad or the other major cities, they become the target of insurgents and terrorists.
In short, according to the colonel himself Baghdad and other major cities are subjected to daily or near-daily terrorist violence directed against civilians, Iraqi police, and U.S. and coalition troops while the countryside outside those cities is so lawless that terrorists and insurgents can target whomever they please.
This does not paint a picture of media bias, this paints a picture of a country that’s completely out of control.
But we built a sewer! Great. Now we have a place to flush the ashes.
But the insurgents are doing more horrible things than our troops! Yes, that is awful. But “dog bites man” isn’t a story, and “The U.S. Army–not actually as bad as terrorists” isn’t going to get stiched into a sampler any time soon.
But we flattened Fallujah! Well, far be it from me to rain on Lt. Col. Ryan’s “symphony of destruction”, but as Homebrew said the coalition and civilian casualty rates haven’t exactly gone down since then. The Allies’ breakout from the hedgerows in WWII, to which Ryan refers, actually helped the Allies retake France. The coalition’s assault on Fallujah appears to have just shuffled the insurgents around like a hideous game of three-card monte.
In short, I don’t think “media bias” is really the problem here.
Oh, Jesus Christ allmighty. I am so utterly and completely sick about people bitching and moaning over media bias-- like it’s something new, or unexpected. Guess what? The media always has been biased and always will be.
For the same reason that I can’t buy cultural anthropology tomes by Yale University Press from the gas station book rack-- it’s not what the public wants, and thus it’s not profitable.
Why do you expect the media to spoon-feed you, anyway? Is it really too much to ask to have to expend five minutes of effort to get in-depth news?
I guess I should go down to K-Mart and bitch because they don’t have a good sociology or biology selection in their book section. Why should I have to go to Amazon.com to get good books?
And damn my neighborhood grocery, anyway! They don’t carry tonkatsu sauce. What do you mean I have to go to a specialty store? Wouldn’t it make sense to include it with the other sauces they carry?
Whooshed by Geraldo. That is really sad. Does the motto “if it bleeds, it leads” mean anything to you? Check out your local news sometime. Murders, fires, crashes are what is covered.
Are you saying “forget about that provincial governor who just got blown up, show the new classroom instead?” Is that good journalism? And why don’t you tell us what percentage of Iraq is not safe enough to hold elections in while you are at it?
We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the old fool and his cohorts say to go on.
But the war in Iraq isn’t going well, one soldier’s opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. I don’t understand what it is you want the media to do - stop reporting the deaths of American soldiers? Do more reporting of Iraqi deaths? It’s ironic that right-wing hawks are castigating the supposedly left-leaning media for not reporting how many Iraqis are killed, when liberals have been complaining about the utter lack of statistics of Iraqi deaths from the very inception of the war. Do you really think the failure to report how many Iraqis are killed is due to liberal bias?
And I’m really getting sick of people comparing Iraq to WWII. News flash: We were ATTACKED by the Japanese in WWII. Not a “gathering threat of a possible arms buildup maybe sometime in the future”. I wouldn’t say WWII went well at all. We suffered massive numbers of casualties. But that’s not the point; the point is it wasn’t a CHOICE. It was a NECESSITY. And Iraq was NOT a necessity. Bush tried to bill it as a necessity, but his evidence did not pan out. Then he re-billed it as a “liberation”. So don’t say, “Well in WWII, we had to do such-and-such to obtain X objective, so it’s just like Iraq…” because we didn’t have a CHOICE then. When you launch an unprovoked attack on another country, act like it’s gonna be a cakewalk, and send fewer troops than even YOUR OWN ADVISORS tell you you’re going to need, you are, quite simply, subject to a harsher standard of criticism.
I am quite aware of the positives going on in Iraq. I have gotten direct word from someone serving over there, but I have also read articles in the paper about the positive accomplishments. But at issue of these two divergent types of news, is the fact remains that our soldiers are getting killed or injured in the process. Taking in account we opted to invade and destroy the shit out of their country, there is an obligation to rebuild. If the reason(s) to invade were honorable and with merit, public opinion would more than likely be different despite the weighted news to the contrary.
I’d also ask Uncommon Sense if, given that the WMD search ended quietly and unsuccessfully last month, there is any justification now for the 1,370 American soldiers who have died in this endeavor so far. Besides the hockey equipment, of course.
And finally . . .
hockey equipment? (Although that’s not really directed at him per se.)
I don’t blame Colonel Ryan one second for his writings that lament the bad news out of Iraq. He seems like a fine officer. And, as I have been told by many fine officers, their first responsibility is to their troops. That means that whatever they can do to keep morale up, they do. If officers start grousing in front of the men, I’m told, it’s all over, discipline breaks down, etc.
So do I blame Ryan for seeing the glass as one-eighth full? Not at all. But I’m not so gullible as to believe that a career-track officer is going to tell the American people the full story of what’s going on over there.
We did not invade Iraq because there was a shortage of schools there, or because Saddam was developing a new capability to produce new textbooks that contain a dangerous new strain of anti-Israeli hate propaganda. We invaded (allegedly) to drain a swamp of terrorism; but what we’ve got now, according to the CIA, is the most dangerous training ground for terrorism since the fall of Afghanistan.
I’m happy for the schoolchildren, but holy cow, you’ve got to have a major-league agenda not to recognize that the situation is going from bad to worse in Iraq. Lt Col Ryan’s agenda is obvious, and from my point of view, admirable. The OP’s agenda appears to be political wishful thinking. There’s a big difference between the two.
After reading this article, I confess I was quite disturbed rather than heart warmed.
LTC Ryan certainly has a point that the media may not help his cause, and they might be somewhat biased. But free press does tend to focus mainly on the issues concerning the people at home. American soldiers killed is one such topic. A new sewer would hardly interest Joe Blow in Amarillo, Texas.
So let’s take a look at the article itself and allow me to explain why I find it disturbing.
LTC Ryan brings up WWII quite frequently. It’s one thing to compare individual battles, but he is implying that the Iraq War is as justified as WWII. The wars and the events leading up to the wars were completely different. For one, America entered WWII only after having been attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. In addition, Japan and Germany were clearly the aggressors in WWII, the invaders of a number of countries.
In the Iraq war, America is the invader. Whether Saddam was a tyrant or not is beside the point. America invading a country is aggression. If, however, Iraq had invaded a neighbor, a counter attack would be more acceptable and a war may have been justified. Like what happened in the First Gulf War.
If a bigger stronger nation decided to invade my country to bring me “democracy” or something else I have never experienced, I could possibly react the same way. Even if the tyrant who was ruling me had been removed. It really brings up the third part of the story we don’t hear about. What made these insurgents? I can’t believe all these “terrorist” were imported by the Al Qaeda. What exactly pissed them off enough to start an insurgency? The whole thing reminds me of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. There must have been something that triggered the event.
On the second part of this, I find it ironic that he mentions cannons blasting away and how they have killed so many insurgents and then later says how peaceful it now is in Fallujah. Peaceful? Could it possibly be because the inhabitants were all dead?
As for the next item I wish to comment on and which I find the most distressing.
Okay, I got that, Sun Tzu was of course correct here and was referring to public executions in order to bring control the people under the emperor’s tyrannical rule.
The “terrorists” seem to have picked up on this.
But then:
I’m confused, it sounds like he has studied these guys and wishes to use the same tactics in Iraq
“One of the few French military guys who got it right?” The French colonial war in Algeria? Okay I see how it seems similar, the French were the invaders in Algeria and lost.
Napoleon’s campaign in Sardinia? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Napoleon a bit of a megalomaniac? So he wants to compare Napoleon’s invasion of Sardinia to the America’s invasion of Iraq?
Mao Zedung’s theories? How many people died of starvation under Mao’s regime?
Is a brutal dictator someone to look to to learn how to win in Iraq?
Nygen Giap? The North Vietnamese general? Didn’t America loose that war?
Che Gueverra? I thought he was an insurgent.
Then finally Sun Tzu once again. The general who won and concurred many lands for the emperor of China.
With the possible exception of Che Gueverra, he wants to compare America’s invasion of Iraq with tyrants, generals and conquerors.
What is wrong with this picture?
And then we have this:
Similar socio-economic changes? The Iraq war was an invasion, followed by political change forced upon a people not quite ready for it.
Every country he lists had change come about from the inside. The Chileans, the Bulgars, the Serbs, the Russians, all wanted change, and they changed it from the inside. It was not changed by invading forces.
Anyway, LTC Ryan does seem to have some talent in his profession. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have him in Afghanistan looking for Osama Bin Ladin and fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda?
Or did we forget who Osama is? Interesting that we hear so little about what’s happening on that front. Perhaps there is not enough news on Afghanistan because there are so few coalition soldiers being killed, but of course the death of American troops in Iraq does overshadow the failure to capture or kill the man responsible for the worst terrorist attack in recent history. Wonder why that is?