The media and war coverage

As you know, I am (along with many other conservative bloggers) harshly critical of the way the mainstream media has reported news from Iraq, because of their unwritten “if it bleeds, it leads” policy, which ignores the full picture of what’s happening in Iraq in favor of reporting only gloom and doom. Well, Stephen Green at Vodkapundit has posted the mother of all arguments regarding the crappy one-sided coverage the Iraq war has been getting from our anti-war MSM and puts it into historical perspective. It’s a long post, but well worth the time it takes to read it and should be considered a must-read. If you can’t read it at the moment, print it out for reading later today.

5 Responses to "The media and war coverage"

PCD says:

November 8, 2005 at 2:59 pm

I took a stroll through Democrat Underground regarding that liar Massey that the MSM has been leaning on for anti-war quotes from a Marine who has been there.

Massey was a paper pusher and recruiter who only spent 2 months in Iraq, and those 2 months were from before the capture of Saddam. Massey is a liar and mentally ill, but he says everything the anti-American, anti-war MSM wants to parrot.

The MSM have no reason to investigate because they realize all they’d end up doing is impeaching their boy’s veracity.
Baklava says:

November 8, 2005 at 5:09 pm

What a find. He’s cute and has a blog! ops:

The post was really good.

I really liked the analysis. He shows that our economic system is capable of so much with the following: “Only a free economy could produce the quality needed to defeat the Soviet Union’s quantity. Although our economy was never as free as I would have preferred, it remained free enough to put Communism into “the ash-heap of history.”

While we were doing all of that we were able to have relatively low taxes, low unemployment, relatively high productivity, high foriegn aid and protect the world. The rising wealth of our nation lifts a lot of boats. Companies that put factories in other nations pay 5 times the prevailing wage in the other countries. Leftists have to resort to whining that we pay too low but when confronted with the fact that we pay higher than their own companies they say that we distort the market forces in that country.

He asks, “So what does matter? What is the postmodern arm of decision? My answer (almost the same as his) is this is a battle of wills. This battle of wills is aided by information and misinformation. It would be great if we could just take out the misinformation sites. As a centrist conservative, I think that Bush has been too liberal on this War on Terror by allowing the misinformation campaign to continue. Thus the Al Jazeera’s of the world are able to recruit more and foment their intolerance and perpetuate hate. We cannot win given the current circumstances of misinformation. People need to be held accountable for their words in a time of war and UNTIL we get the will to win we won’t win.

He included this in his post: “an example of how to get it as wrong as you possibly can. We bragged that we were going to “clean up Dodge.” And the Marines went in, tough and capable as ever. Then, just when the Marines were on the cusp of victory, they were called off, thanks to a brilliant, insidious and unscrupulous disinformation campaign waged by al-Jazeera. I was in Iraq at the time, and the lies about American “atrocities” were stunning. But the lies worked and the Bush administration, to my shock and dismay, backed down.
Let’s be honest: The terrorists won First Fallujah. And for six months thereafter Fallujah was the world capital of terror â€“ a terrorist city-state.”

Which points out what I thought back then and now and that is that we need to control the area totally and heavy handedly and that means the information or misinformation as well.

I am very happy to see he posted this as well: “Am I saying that Iraq is a lost cause? Far from it. While the White House remains clueless, our armed forces have been busy analyzing the After Action Reports, and adjusting their tactics accordingly. Being in the Navy myself and watching enough PBS documentaries on military tactics I know that American ingenuity will triumph. Our servicemen will find a way to win every battle as best as they can. They will use their brains. Our lives will improve and the freedom hating terrorists will find it harder to live and/or die. Sure we don’t know Arabic and need more translators. The left will use that fact as ammo against Bush. People like me know that we will overcome because we aren’t as a nation all about our leader or a central government. We find our strength in our individual freedoms, talents and intelligence. While the enemy only knows the Qaran or the message of hate or what has been passed down to them from their leader we have a culture of wanting to know and wanting to succeed and finding ingenious ways of succeeding.

I love this quote, “But if we lose this Terror War, our media will be seen as largely to blame.

And this quote, “Criticism isn’t just necessary, it’s a necessary good. But the MSM needs to relearn constructive criticism”

THANK YOU FOR THE LINK ST!
Severe Writer's Block says:

November 8, 2005 at 6:29 pm

Argument for the war

Vodkapundit has an argument for the war on terror that’s worth checking out (hat tip Sister Toldjah).
steve says:

November 8, 2005 at 9:34 pm

You can’t kill a bad idea with a bullet. But, you can kill it with a better idea. Maybe the better idea is non-violently crusading for Peace. Peace
Kevin says:

November 8, 2005 at 10:35 pm

I took vodkapundit off my daily reads recently because (imo) he was not offering any new information. This post, however, is brilliant! I have put him back on the everydays. Ty for linking this one. My favorite line:

It’s not fair to run headlines like “Battle Deaths Continue to Mount.” No shit, Sherlock? A real story would be, “Battle Deaths Decline as Fallen Soldiers Miraculously Resurrected.”

Nothing to do with the overall message of the article, but I had honestly never considered “Battle Deaths Continue to Mount” to be as absurd a statement as it clearly is.

Back to his point: There is no question that media helped us lose Vietnam, and helped us win the first gulf war. And the media is totally ok with us losing in Iraq (apparently). But… how do we resolve this? How do we stop our media from aiding our enemy? What is our recourse?

This is so important that I have to turn on ‘capslock’: WHAT IS OUR RECOURSE?!?

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