Glenn Reynolds has a round-up of links on the current situation in Iraq. For all the talk about how Iraq is exploding with sectarian violence, the numbers don’t seem to show it. If anything, the bombing of the Askariya shrine has cemented Iraqi public opinion against al-Qaeda. Such a vicious and craven attack is not the sort of thing that wins hearts and minds.
Reynolds also has some harsh words for the media:
Yes, I’ve gotten some email of the “you only want happy news” variety, which proves that those people didn’t read the posts I indicated above. I just want the press to avoid false information that damages the war effort. Is that asking too much?
Apparently. Others write that if we lose the war it won’t be the press’s fault, but the fault of Chimpy McHitlerburton. Well, maybe. But even so, that won’t change the fact that a press that looks in many ways as if it’s rooting for defeat won’t make an appealing scapegoat for a lot of people. Given the press’s concern for how it’s perceived in various communities, you’d think it would care enough to avoid being perceived as unpatriotic by the patriotic-American community. Yet the exquisite sensitivity that we see in other settings is not so apparent here.
The press is the most distrusted institution in American society according to the latest Kennedy center poll. Those numbers are hardly surprising given the agenda-driven reporting that has become endemic in the media today. The situation in Iraq is one of the strongest cases for the weaknesses of the media – most journalists rarely if ever leave the Green Zone, and the stories they get are being fed to them by the same Ba’athist minders that controlled the flow of information during the Hussein regime. The true story of Iraq remains untold – and that story is every bit as important as the one the media is pushing.
If we lose this war, the media will be collateral damage. It’s already clear that the media is increasingly partisan, increasingly useless, and increasingly anti-American. Bin Laden himself understood very well that the media could easily become a force-multiplier for his efforts, and al-Qaeda’s psy-ops campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere have paid enormous dividends for them. At the same time, it’s getting harder and harder for the media to argue that they aren’t a fifth column working, intentionally or not, towards the same causes as the enemy. Freedom of the press is not license to spread the propaganda of the enemy, and the media has strayed far from the days of Ernie Pyle where reporters felt that they had the moral obligation to help their country.
Freedom of the press was purchased with the blood of American soldiers throughout the decades – and the media has returned the favor with the utmost contempt. If this is the way the media treats our country, it should be hardly surprising that many Americans also find the media contemptable.
“Freedom of the press is not license to spread the propaganda of the enemy, and the media has strayed far from the days of Ernie Pyle where reporters felt that they had the moral obligation to help their country.”
Boo-hoo. The media were willing stooges of the administration and the military in the early stages of the war, when their scrutiny was most needed in thwarting the historic mistake we’re now quagmired in for as far the eye can see. After realizing they’d been duped, they wisely decided to climb out of their “embedded” tanks and do their jobs, investigating the reality of war beyond Pentagon talking points.
If you want a media more bound to faux-patriotism than reporting the reality of wartime, why don’t you move to North Korea?
Or how about a media that doesn’t act like a propaganda arm for the enemy? Like how White Phosphorus was suddenly a “chemical weapon” or that US soldiers shot at Guiliana Sgrena?
The media doesn’t “report the reality of wartime” they only report what their minders want them to see. It’s all a bunch of carefully crafted bullshit designed to harm the war effort.
Or the Koran flushing story, the re-release of more Gitmo photos and the self censoring for the “offensive” cartoons (whats the lefts explaination of that). The release of the prisons in Eastern Europe and Allies story, the release of the Airline that flew CIA operatives around the world, the release of ease dropping on the Al-Qieda operatives, the release of…such “faux-patriotism” that one could mistaken them for the North Korean news service.
“they wisely decided to climb out of their “embedded†tanks and do their jobs, investigating the reality of war beyond Pentagon talking points.” I thought that the embeds was the best reporting, its when the press retreated to the green zone is when they became the post 60’s retreads.