I disagree with this accusation against news outlets. I read all the disgusting news of the anti-occupation parties’ actions in the Wall Street Journal. It is all there. The Mahdi Army’s Sharia courts, tortures and executions. The weapons in schools and mosques. The tortured and assassinated Iraqi civilians, politicians, police officers, clerics, etc.etc.etc.
The “success” stories about “50 insurgents killed today” and “4000 jigowatts of electricity capacity achieved this week” have been on globalsecurity.org for as long as I remember. After almost two years, you’d think that all those so-called “successes” would have added up, right? What’s wrong with this picture?
Here’s another reason why the press reports the stuff that it does, in addition to the reasons already mentioned. Reporters, for all their faults, are much smarter than this barbarian soldier. They have at least some slightly broader perspective. The stupidity and myopia of this guy is absolutely appalling, disgusting and revolting. He counts number of people killed as the metric of success!! Fortunately, most people outside of the military understand the idiocy of such a view.
People also understand that you can’t balance the failures of the occupation against “successes” like number of schools painted. Here’s a nice recent quote by a certain famous blogger: “I sometimes get messages from readers who are excited by all the rebuilding work the US has done in Iraq and think it is unfair for it to be overlooked. This way of thinking is just wrong. The British in India built railroads and lots of infrastructure. By the 1940s, no Indians were grateful, and they just wanted the British out so that they could have their independent country. The railroads, they said, were after all mainly built to transport British troops and merchandise. When you mess with a people’s independence, they stop being grateful for infrastructure. Ask King George III.”
This guy’s right, though, about how smartly certain groups of insurgents (like the former Tawhid and Jihad group) are able to manage their publicity. Those guys are not nearly as dumb as LTC Tim Ryan looks.
I wonder how many insuirgents watch our evening news.
I also wonder how much is not merely a matter of perception. Turd-polish and all that.
It seems that those who said Team Bush pre-war projections were ludicrous (down to US 30,000 troops by Sept 2003, flowers and candy, cakewalk, etc) are still right. Yet, despite the facts, certain of the"pre-fooled" and various politicos insist that the piss on their leg is rain.
The question I ask myself is, “Do I trust politicians and the radio propagandists?” IMHO, it’s inherently un-American to trust politicians.
As far as the tattered “Liberal Media Bias” crap re Iraq, it fails to take into the account the writings of Bill Buckley jr and Brent Scowcroft and other Realists. There’re still quite a number of conservatives who are a part of the reality based community.
I thought about this when reading a recent thread about treason and the media. The invasion of Iraq is the single most aiding and abetting thing that’s been done by Americans. I’m sure al Qaida says, “Thanks.”
To be fair, they ran stories about how there’d been serious looting of dangerous materials since “the end of major combat operations”. (Nice to know that all we’ve had since are minor dust-ups. I’m sure many a soldier would be glad to hear that.) Of course, they tried to push the idea that this looting meant that Syria prob’ly had Hussein’s stockpiles of flying, poison-spraying robots that Mr. Bush was concerned about in Cinci a few Octobers back.
Hold the phone! Let’s remember the situation here! You’re assuming that “positive news sources” would be those that report on the number of Iraqi deaths in any engagement and call attention to how overwhelming they are compared to American casualties. But it ain’t so. Those would not be “positive news sources.” This is one of those “we’re here to help these people” wars. And “these people” includes the insurgents and their sympathizers, like it or not. So American combat deaths are unambiguously bad news – but deaths of insurgents, or of suspected insurgents, are not necessarily good news, and should not be reported as such. It is a plain fact, as you have pointed out in this thread, that many, many more Iraqis than Americans are being killed; but it’s not something to gloat over, nor is it a good sign. Every dead Iraqi, whether insurgent or “collateral damage” noncombatant, will leave dozens of living relatives who will hate America passionately for the rest of their lives.
I do agree that it’s sloppy reporting for the media not to mention Iraqi deaths at all when they give the number of Americans killed in a given battle – but I’m more inclined to attribute that, not to a liberal American media bias that wants to show the war is going badly, but to a nationalistic American media bias that doesn’t think Iraqi deaths really count as news, the way American deaths do.
Sidebar: How come the pro-war apologists who keep touting the number of new schools built in Iraq never answer the question of how many of those were destroyed by the US bombing campaign?
The Pentagon has a formal policy of not announcing Iraqi death total estimates, and that certainly makes reporters’ jobs even harder. Perhaps some reporters don’t think other sources for such estimates are reliable enough to report?
Just to point out here that Ryan’s lumping in Chile with the USSR is rather telling. Salvador Allende was freely elected. It was not a dictatorship. He was overthrown, and killed, with US backing, and replaced by a brutal dictator. (But not a socialist, so it is okay!) If Pinochet is healthy enough he will be tried for crimes against his people. What a great example of American benevolence at work!
But has the Pentagon ever said why? I mean, they have to give some kind of pretext, like calling the Iraqi casualty figures “vital strategic intelligence” or something, don’t they? They can just tell reporters, “It’s our policy not to disclose those figures, next question.”
Wow, I pull my thumb out of the dike for a couple of hours to get some work done and I’m overwhelmed with responses. Most of them informative, some inflamatory. I tried to steer away from the ‘Liberal bias slant’ route that I could have taken but it seems to have just gone that way by itself.
Some of your posts have been extremely helpful in countering the link in the OP.
I will attempt to digest the more helpfully critical posts and conjure up a response that will summerise a sort of middle ground if you will. A few of the responses did cause me to re-think my position in support of LTC Ryan to the extent I did when I opened the OP. I will try to address the posters who influenced me the most by tomorrow morning.
A thanks to those of you who were pleasantly critical.
Carry on.
What do you expect when you post an inflammatory OP? Duh.
I don’t understand this comment. That the media has a liberal bias was the ENTIRE POINT of your OP. If you were trying to steer clear of the issue, you did a very poor job of it.
You know, these “the media is being excessively negative about the war in Iraq” threads would make a lot more sense to me if someone could explain why the media keeps making up fictional positive stories about what’s going in Iraq. To cite the most obvious example, virtually every media source in the world reported, in May of '03, that a crowd of jubilant Iraqis in Bagdad had toppled a statue of Saddam to celebraqte their ‘liberation’ by American troops. The media knew full well, at the time, that the falling statue was actually a propaganda stunt arranged by the American military. So if they wanted to be negative, wouldn’t the media have reported the truth about the military misleading the public, as opposed to parroting the lie that the military wanted?
How can we possibley know that? When has this ever happened?
You really think that people buy the daily news to read depressing stories?
If the public really wanted depressing sensationalism, then why do most movies, books, etc, all have happy endings?
OR, is that just what the norm is and we expect to see it splashed across the front page everytime we grab a newspaper?
And, if it’s the bad depressing news that sells, then maybe we should be asking, why?
First, it doesn’t matter who ran the column, it would have had the same content if it were posted on any other website.
Second, this thread is not about the reasons for this war so you can dispense with presumed judgements of the OP and kindly stick to the fairly narrow topic that WAS outlined in the OP.
In the OP I did not take a stand one way or the other on the reasons for this war.
I appreciate your frankness.
Maybe, but I think it’s more likely that I wanted to believe that it’s not as bad as the news is reporting. I haven’t read elsewhere such testimony from someone the likes of LTC Ryan. I try to be an optimist, and naturally assume that the media will report mostly negative.
NiceGuyJack, thanks for the informative post.
I didn’t say ALL news outlets. The fact that you only mention the WSJ might actually strenghten my point, not yours.
Good point. I do suspect that they have knowledge of the fear that the average American has for their own safety, and play off that.
I suppose that could be true, although I haven’t heard that theory yet. I think the ‘liberal’ slant is a more stable theory.
Lissa, would it really be *that * difficult for the media to tell us what the soldiers were doing when they got killed? We don’t usually get the full story. Were they helping old ladies cross the street when the car bomb went off? Or were they in the middle of a gunfight with insurgents and died in a crossfire?
These are the kind of ommissions that irk me.
You made it sound like I was asking for a detailed biography of every soldier that was killed.
Again, I don’t expect the media to spoonfeed ME. The media knows it’s spoonfeeding the majority of American already, who don’t bother to look further for news. My point again, why should they have to look further? (I know the answer, just being facetious)
Inflammatory towards whom? The media, not you.
Wrong, I was not adressing the liberalness of the media but rather it’s inability to report more of the positive experiences in Iraq. That seemed to whooosh right over yours and Lissa’s heads.
But as Elvis points out those appear to be few and far between. I did a search for Green Zone and came up with some pretty depressing first hand stories of the usual daily occurances there.
If i can generalise LTC Ryans comments (and your take on the link ), i think you’d get a statement something like:
Group X uses the way the media will focus on the worst aspects of a situation, to further thier own goals.
I could replace ‘group x’ with ‘Terrorists’, ‘Pressure groups’, ‘Enviromentalists’, ‘Democrats’ or even (dare i say) ‘The current US administration’ and the statement will still be equally valid.
If this is the case, how can one term hold more sway than the rest? And if they all hold equal weight, then isnt the argument , well a bit daft?
Personally , i agree that its pathetic that the media does this. But its pathetic across the board from court reporting to global warming.
<Aside>: I was listening to C-Span on BBC Parliament last sunday (16th Jan ) and there was a question and answer with one of the USs’ main reporters - perhaps someone can remember who it was. He was asked about this very point - he said it was sad, but as soon as reporters start publishing good news, you/me/us start switching off by the million. So, its your fault for being human, i guess </Aside>
The US and the UK used the media to spread fear and I.N.T.E.L.I.G.E.N.C.E ( yeh i saw it last night !) info in order to justify invading Iraq. How is this different?
That’s probably because the Pentagon doesn’t want such information released. The soldiers may have been on a mission to quell insurgency which could be threatened by the release of information as to what, exactly, they were doing when killed. Besides, what does it matter? The kids are dead just the same whether they were helping kittens out of trees or on patrol.
You’re doomed to a very frustrated life, aren’t you?
No, you made it sound like the media should be out scouring the earth for Happy News, or positively-slanted stories, and that they were biased for not doing so. (They are biased, but that’s not the point-- the media always has been biased and always will.)
Look, if there was a market for it, there would be the Happy News Network. Since there is not, you will have to search the internet, just like I have to do for books.
Apparently, you do, because you don’t think you should have to look for stories outside of the mainstream. You think you should be able to see the stories you want on the CBS Evening News, regardless of whether those stories are what the rest of the public want to see.
Why don’t you let them worry about that? You don’t have much faith in your fellow Americans, do you? You seem to think that they’re sheep-- if they’re exposed to bias, they will immediately buy into it, fooled utterly and completely. Don’t you think Americans, for the most part, are smart enough to think for themselves and can weed out the bullshit? Sure, there are the stupid ones, but they were doomed anyway. Even with “pure” media, they’d still be stupid.
stares blankly
You do?
Then what has this whole thread been about, anyway?
Say huh? In this exact same post you said,
So, you’re saying there’s a liberal slant. But that’s not why they don’t report the Happy News.
Personally, I think they do it just to piss you off.
:eek:
</Aside>