Last month saw a significant drop in casualties in Iraq (reflecting a downward trend since the summer). Obviously, this is very good news. Yet, you wouldn’t know it by the mainstream media’s reporting. Of course, they’ll report any uptick in casualties on the front pages without hesitation. But the mainstream press is “unbiased”, right? They wouldn’t favor bad news over good, now would they?
There is an interesting article today at NewsBusters about two “journalists” attempting to justify this discrepancy in reporting.
This question was posed to Robin Wright: “Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?”
Not necessarily. The fact is we’re at the beginning of a trend — and it’s not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.
There are combat deaths. There are sectarian deaths. And there are the deaths of criminal — from criminal acts. There are also a lot of numbers that the U.S. frankly is not counting. For example, in southern Iraq, there is Shiite upon Shiite violence, which is not sectarian in the Shiite versus Sunni. And the U.S. also doesn’t have much of a capability in the south.
So the numbers themselves are tricky.
Don’t want to jump the gun, huh? Right. What about an increase in casualties?
KURTZ: But let’s say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.
STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that’s certainly — that, by any definition, is news. Look, nobody more than a Pentagon correspondent would like to stop reporting the number of deaths, interviewing grieving families, talking to soldiers who have lost their arms and their legs in the war. But, is this really enduring progress?
We’ve had five years of the Pentagon telling us there is progress, there is progress. Forgive me for being skeptical, I need to see a little bit more than one month before I get too excited about all of this.
So, casualties going up is “news”, but casualties going down is something to be skeptical about. It’s almost as if they want us to lose.
As always, read the whole article.
Comment timeout
More than 90% of the traffic to this blog is merely spambots trying to post spam as comments and trackbacks. Akismet catches almost all of it, so I can mostly ignore it. However, that traffic places an undue burden on the server and clogs my access logs. Since there’s very little real commenting on this blog, I’ve decided to install the Comment Timeout plugin. This plugin will automatically close comments and trackbacks on old posts. I’ve set a timeout of 30 days, and we’ll see how that goes.