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Feb. 22, 2007 From the onset of the Iraq War, we have been told endlessly by our beloved media that President Bush is "going it alone" in Iraq, that he just did not pursue a true worlwide consensus before the invasion was undertaken. The collective press paid little mind to the more than 40 nations that were then and have been on board with the president. For extended periods of time, in fact, one would be hard-pressed to find references in the mainstream press which indicated that Bush's staunchest ally, Tony Blair, was actually with us from the beginning. Much of the message presented in the media has been that the dire situation in Iraq was a concoction of George W. Bush and other "neocons" who have much to benefit from going to war. "Bush lied, people died" is the theme and anything which counters this philosophy must be pushed to the background. Generally, Tony Blair would be considered one of the nuanced elite which the left would love and respect, except that he had the audacity to support the Iraq invasion. Blair, therefore, has been marginalized by the American press and Britain's role in the coalition has been significantly deemphasized in coverage as has that of all of the other members of the Coalition forces. In the almost four years which have passed since the invasion of March, 2003, the tone of mainstream media coverage persisted with the "cowboy president" mentality. Media members who were reluctant to give Bush much credit when things seemed to be going well in Iraq (after all Coalition forces managed to topple Saddam Hussein's government and take control of most of Iraq's cities in 21 days with minimal casualties), have assigned virtually all of the blame to the president as the situation has been bogged down with politics and a military that has been hamstrung with political correctness run amok. We should expect our American media to hold our president more accountable than foreign leaders for actions undertaken; however, we should also expect that same media to frame a situation as fairly as possible. This week, Tony Blair announced that Britain would soon begin pulling out some of its troops as more responsibility for security is turned over the Iraqi forces. A significant portion of the American press treated this as an abandonment of the cause. Denmark also announced it was pulling its troops out of action (which should come as a surprise to many who rely on the mainstream press for their information, since we would not even know Denmark had soldiers in Iraq), and the coverage took on a tone which indicated that the Coalition is coming apart; the press took this as another opportunity to take a stab at Bush. An Associated Press report provides an excellent example of the tone the coverage has taken this week: "President Bush's "coalition of the willing," long seen by much of the world as a shell for a largely U.S. operation in Iraq, is quickly becoming a coalition of the unwilling." This was the opening line in an article covering Tony Blair's announcement and it is a representation of the "unbiased" reporting this issue receives on a regular basis. It is so completely full of a predisposed mentality, that the reader cannot possibly assume what follows is an even remotely impartial version of reality. So the "coalition" is "seen by much of the world" as a sham? This is a statement of pure subjective opinion and it was completely unsupported in the article. According to who? If "much of the world" believes anything to be true, can it not also be said that "much of the world" believes something else? Much of the population of American baseball fans consists of New York Yankee fans, but does this mean that the majority of baseball fans are Yankee fans? Much of the
world believes only that which the collective media tells them is true in the first place. So Great Britain announces a troop reduction, likely largely due to its own domestic political landscape, and Denmark announces a pullout and this equates to a complete meltdown of any Coalition? The remaining members can now be viewed as a "coalition of the unwilling"? (Britain also announced that Prince Harry and his company would be taking a multi-month tour of duty in Iraq, which seems to counter the notion of a quick pullout by Britain.) A media which gave limited credit to the fact that Great Britain, and virtually no credit to Denmark, being on board with the Iraq War now proclaims that the reduction of British forces and the withdrawal of Denmark's small contingent is a sign of something huge, again reinforcing the theme that "news" is only meaningful when it makes Bush, or the United States, look bad. The American media cannot have it both ways on this issue. If the Coalition was and always has been nothing but a sham, a tool of the Bush Administration to convey the idea that there is more support for the cause than is true, then that same media should not report that the reduction of British forces or the pullout of one small nation is symbolic of anything. Further, it seems absurd to use the term "quickly" to describe the effective unraveling of a coalition which has existed for the entire four year duration of the Iraq operation. It is unreasonable to assume any multi-nation coalition will last indefinitely. A more fair media would more likely acknowledge it to be a significant accomplishment that the Coalition has held together for this long, despite the struggles on the ground in that nation. The problem those of us from the political right have with the mainstream press is not so much related to its pushing of bad news and virtual oversight of anything positive. I acknowledge that the media in general is far more likely to subordinate the positive to the negative. "If it bleeds it leads," is the old saying after all. Inflammatory news probably does sell more papers and garner more audience to the broadcast outlets. The larger problem we have with so many members of the press is that they no longer simply report bad news more than good news, they actually appear to be rooting for the bad. Take a look at the lead sentence from the AP story above (in fact, read the article in its entirety) and you will note there is more than a hint of glee expressed by the writer in what is being reported. More generally, the overemphasis of the importance of the Coalition now, when it appear to be breaking, while it's significance was universally panned at the onset of the war
appears to demonstrate something less than complete media objectivity.
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