Not Good News, Just News
By Callimachus | Related entries in Media, Military, The War On Terrorism, The WorldI always cringe when I hear people complain that the mainstream media “never tells the good news” from Iraq. No, it doesn’t. Because in the cold and cynical calculus of commerecial journalism, good news just isn’t news. The 500 kids in your high school who didn’t knife anyone last night won’t be on the front page tomorrow. The one who did, will. If you want to read about the rest, buy a yearbook, not a newspaper.
What’s missing in Iraq is not “good” news, but a more complete picture of the country than a list of car bombings and IED casualties. Yes, those things are important news. But Americans, in judging the sum of our efforts and experience in Iraq, need to know more than just the butcher’s bill. We can’t make intelligent decisions about the thing, and vote accordingly, unless we know more about what, exactly, we’re doing over there.
How often do you read about the daily activities of average soldiers and Marines in Iraq? How often are their voices heard in your media? The Associated Press every day tells us about the 2,300 dead. What about the 130,000 or so living?
Are they out there laying sewage pipes in Sadr City and painting schoolrooms in Fallujah? I want to know about that. Because then we can discuss whether that’s something they ought to be doing.
You could argue that they ought to be securing the borders and infrastructure of Iraq and picking off insurgents full-time, and letting the Iraqis do the smily happy work.
If one of the goals of this war was to address the root cause of terrorism — and the biggest root is a widespread feeling of impotence and inferiority in the Islamic world — then the important thing is to make Iraqis feel like its their country. If we want to turn Iraq into something all Arabs can point to with pride as an example of what they can accomplish, then we need to let Iraqis do that work.
We want to turn this wounded culture from which so much poison flows into a place where people feel their efforts at self-improvement are worth making. That will turn them away from the dark paths of jihad.
If we paint their schools, they may smile at us. But maybe the goal we ought to have is not to turn them overnight into America’s number one fans. The goal is to give them something better to do with their waking hours than hate us and dream up ways to incinerate us by the thousands.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 and is filed under Media, Military, The War On Terrorism, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 9th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Ali from AFreeIraqi.blogspot.com said,”This is one of the main reasons why many Iraqis were and still are disappointed with America. No, these Iraqis do not hate America as most like to think, they’re just disappointed with her for not fitting the image they had in their minds; the just tyrant that should’ve taken full responsibility for some time until they could find their own just tyrant who would make their life much better without forcing them to share a burden and a responsibility they never thought it was among their duties as citizens.”
The post can be found here: http://afreeiraqi.blogspot.com/2005/04/asking-few-questions-makes-difference.html
April 9th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
One big failure of the MSM is that they fail to portray the totalitarian nature of terrorist organizations. They fail to show the difference between living in a free society and living in a terrorist regime. This is important because every one on earth has a stake in the war on terror. Ironically, the media which depends on freedom of speech has a lot to lose if the terrorists who don’t believe in freedom of speech get their way, yet the media is the most powerful weapon the terrorists have.
Compare Blogger Michael Totten’s reporting of Hizbullah
http://www.laweekly.com/news/42/guess-whos-coming-to-iftar/
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001116.html
to TIME magazine’s Michael Ware’s reporting of Iraqi insurgents:
http://www.radioblogger.com/archives/march06.html#001505
Totten shows the totaliarian nature of Hizbullah while Michael Ware romanticizes Saddam’s ex-thugs as “dishonered” and “[Iraq's] West Pointers, who are fighting what they see as a war of liberation ” . . ..
April 10th, 2006 at 4:17 am
Tom, it’s good to see you here. For those who don’t know, Tom did yeoman work in helping some of the key Iraqi bloggers get the money to get themselves up and running after the fall of Saddam. He’s a true hero of the ’sphere.