| Gary D. Halbert President & CEO |
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MEDIA BIAS: SUCCESS = FAILURE
Introduction
President Bush’s approval
ratings have slumped to 52% according to the latest Zogby poll this past
weekend, down from the low 70s and upper 60s just a few months ago. The
Zogby poll also found that Bush’s negative approval rating has risen to 48%,
the highest since before 9/11. Yet the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll
found that 69% of Americans still think the war in Iraq was worth it. So,
what gives?
This week, we will look at how
the mainstream media has successfully spun the news to create the impression
that everything Bush has done has been a failure. To illustrate, I will
quote liberally from our friends at the
Media Research Center who continually monitor the media for bias
. I continue to highly recommend this free service at
www.mediaresearch.org.
The fact is, the liberal media
has done an excellent job of selling failure by the Bush administration on
numerous fronts, but especially on Iraq. Now the president’s approval
ratings have fallen to the point that the 2004 election might just be a
horserace.
Selling Failure On Iraq
Here is the Media Research
Center’s latest assessment of media coverage in Iraq:
QUOTE: “In a recent
newspaper profile, CNN anchor Aaron Brown is captured trying to be witty as
he cobbles together his ‘Newsnight’ show. He asks his co-workers, ‘So what
the hell are we going to sell here?’ There’s an easy answer if you watch
television: failure.
For most of the post-war
period, the networks have sold us failure. The details change here and
there, but the pitch remains the same. Failure to find weapons of mass
destruction. Failure to work with do-nothings at the UN. Failure to restore
water and electricity supplies even as saboteurs seek to undo every good
deed. Failure to anticipate that snipers would be paid to shoot our soldiers
in the neck while they buy a soda. Failure to create Iraqi democracy out of
thin air within two weeks. Failure to keep sixteen dubious words out of the
State of the Union address. Failure to nab Saddam or his odious sons.
But what happens when one
of these failures turns upside down into a success, as in killing Uday and
Qusay? Easy. More failures. Failure to capture the sons alive for their
intelligence value. Failure to understand that Iraqis need to see the
corpses. Failure to understand Muslims don't like to see corpses preserved.
Eleanor Clift even suggested the failure to keep Saddam’s sons alive in
order to cover up the failure to find weapons of mass destruction -- failure
squared.
The ideology of failure
makes journalism so easy and carefree. When yesterday’s media beef (we can’t
kill the sons) totally contradicts today’s (we shouldn't have killed the
sons), that’s okay. Coherence isn't required. Building a daily soundtrack of
doom is the objective. Since the ‘major fighting’ ended, the media have
tried to turn the world upside down. In the daily episode of self-fulfilling
prophecy, reporters like CBS’s Joie Chen proclaim that as soldiers die ‘day
by day’ in Iraq, ‘the concerns, and the doubts, of many of the folks back
home grow.’
Joie Chen should try
visiting the troops. E-mails home from soldiers in Baghdad paint an almost
entirely different picture than what the networks are offering. One Green
Beret’s e-mail (he asks for anonymity) about the unreality of the staged
news from Iraq is hotly making the Internet rounds. In raw language, he
laments being unable to touch ‘those taunting bags of gas that scream in
[soldiers’] faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC,
CBS, CNN, or NBC. If they did, then they know the next nightly news will be
about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people hate us. Some do.
But the vast majority don’t.’
This soldier, who says he’s
spent time ‘babysitting the pukes’ from TV networks, also maintains that the
more Iraqis see that our soldiers don’t start any violence, and try to be
friendly and compassionate to children and the elderly, the more their
hostility dissolves. ‘I saw a bunch of 19-year-olds from the 82nd Airborne
not return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly
civilians out of harm's way. So did the Iraqis.’
When some enemy combatants
rounded up women and children as human shields, the soldiers negotiated
their release. When a young girl was discovered thrown down the stairs after
the standoff, ‘the G.I.s called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her
mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there
hasn't been a problem in that neighborhood since. How many such stories, and
there are hundreds of them, ever get reported in the fair and balanced
press? You know, nada.’
The soldier's missive is
long, bitter, and instructive. He is stunned that the American press is so
hostile to the U.S. mission. He oughtn’t be. This is the American media at
its most typical.
Steve Hayes of the Weekly
Standard has just returned from Baghdad, where he found, ‘Most Iraqis are
overjoyed about their liberation. The American troops I spoke with, even
those from units that have suffered postwar casualties, said they have
received a warm welcome from their hosts. But most surprising were the
strong words of praise for postwar Iraq from [non-government organization]
leaders. If even some of what this delegation heard is true, the
reconstruction of Iraq is going much better than reports in the American
media suggest.’
Another journalist on the
trip, the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot, reported that Iraqis are
‘petrified’ that President Bush will lose office and U.S. troops will leave
too soon.’
These accounts do not match
the daily drip-drip-drip of our Bush-bashing press, always focusing on
failures -- real, alleged, or invented. There is one failure they ignore:
their own failure to recognize the public’s -- and the military’s -- growing
disdain for the nattering nabobs of negativism.” END QUOTE.
Same Song, Second Verse
I know what some of you are
thinking: Gary’s taking one article from one source and treating it like
it’s the Gospel. Actually, there are numerous sources for evidence of
liberal media bias in addition to the Media Research Center. One of these
is Accuracy In Media, a media
watchdog group located on the Internet at
www.aim.org.
In an August 20th article, AIM
correspondent Cliff Kincaid wrote about the liberal media’s activities in
Iraq. I will quote part of that article below, but let me warn you that it
is likely to make you very angry, unless of course you are one of those
liberal apologists for all things anti-American:
QUOTE: “The Washington
Post reports that L. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator in Iraq, has
issued guidelines for Iraqi media, forbidding them from inciting violence,
promoting hatred or circulating false information ‘calculated to promote
opposition’ to the new governing authority. But the Bush administration
seems to be doing nothing about American reporters in Iraq serving as
propaganda mouthpieces for foreign terrorists killing U.S. military
personnel. The stories produced by these reporters undermine the war effort.
The latest example is an
August 18 Newsweek story, ‘Inside An Enemy Cell,’ which refers to the
terrorists killing American troops as ‘resistance fighters.’ Newsweek
interviewed members of the ‘Army of Mohammed,’ who insisted that they don’t
favor Saddam’s return and enjoy support from the Iraqi people. Newsweek
reported that the group says that, ‘The Americans have occupied our land
under a false pretext, and without any international authorization.’ That
sounds like the typical liberal Democratic Party complaint about failing to
get U.N. approval before going to war and then allegedly misleading the
people about the reasons for the war. The ‘Army of Mohammed’ is using
well-tested propaganda themes to win sympathizers in the West.
The Newsweek story, written
by Scott Johnson, followed a July 21 CBS Evening News story by David
Hawkins, who also provided a flattering portrait of the killers of
Americans. In an interview arranged by a gun-runner, Hawkins offered the
views of ‘three men who claim to have participated in several recent and
deadly attacks on U.S. soldiers’ and who ‘say they’re not doing it for love
of Saddam—but instead for God and their country.’ One of the terrorists,
referring to American troops, told Hawkins, ‘We advise them that they have
to leave Iraq before they die here.’
This report was then
followed by an interview by CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston of
several Iraqis awaiting orders to become ‘martyrs’ against U.S. forces.
‘Hassan,’ a volunteer ‘martyr’ speaking on camera to CBS News through a
translator, said, ‘I will fasten a bomb to my body and explode myself in
front of an American tank.’
What a change from the days
when American reporters were embedded with U.S. troops as they fought Iraqi
troops. At this rate, it may not be long before American reporters are
embedded with the Iraqi terrorists as they actually kill Americans. These
stories serve no purpose other than to demoralize our troops, their families
and supporters of the war back in the U.S…
…There is a real
possibility that efforts such as those of ‘Bring Them Home Now,’ egged on by
the major media, could produce a U.S. defeat. The foreign terrorists
flooding into Iraq to kill Americans are certainly counting on breaking the
will of the American people to resist and persevere.
Liberals on Capitol Hill
ridiculed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz for stating the obvious
- that ‘Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terrorism.’ The bombing
of the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad has further demonstrated the
truth of his statement. But it will be difficult to win this war when the
terrorists are getting better press in the U.S. media than our own troops.”
END QUOTE
You can read the entire AIM
article by Cliff Kincaid by clicking on the link that follows this article.
No Fair And Balanced
If you still think that I am
quoting too extensively from “conservative” media watchdog groups, you might
want to visit the Spinsanity
website at
spinsanity.com . This is one of the most objective sources of
media bias I have seen, and it pulls no punches either way. If you are a
big Bush fan, you won’t like some of the articles you will see there, but
for those wanting to see through both the conservative and liberal spin,
this is an excellent website.
The truth is, the Bush
administration has made some mistakes in Iraq. It is clear they did not
accurately assess what a post-war Iraq would look like.
Yet who would have thought that Saddam Hussein and his
military would disappear, leaving the Baathist supporters heavily armed and
dangerous?
The killing of American (and
other) troops is deplorable, even if the numbers have been relatively
small. Yet to listen to the media, you would think they prefer that we
never went to Iraq in the first place, and that they would rather Saddam
still be in power. Fortunately, a large majority of Americans (69% as noted
above) does not agree.
And yes, you can count me among
those who think the war in Iraq was worth it, as well as among those who
believe that weapons of mass destruction will eventually be found
underground or hidden in the rugged terrain of Iraq. Of course, when they
are found, look for the liberal media to whine about it taking so long to
find them, or that they were just “planted” evidence, or that they were
moved into Iraq after the end of the war by the “resistance fighters” noted
in the AIM article above.
The latest media flap is over
whether or not we should have more troops in Iraq now, and the Democrats
wasted no time jumping on this bandwagon. The media and the Dems are now
criticizing Bush for not sending more troops into Iraq to stop the
violence. The media hopes the public has forgotten how they criticized Bush
for sending too many troops into Iraq in the first place. Cries of
imperialism were widespread. Some believe this was precisely the reason
that Bush and Rumsfeld were quick to pull troops out of Iraq soon after
Baghdad was occupied. Now, the media and the Democrats are calling on Bush
to send more troops in immediately. I guess if you are the media, you can
have it both ways.
For the record, I happen to be
one who agrees that we need more troops in Iraq. I also believe we need to
increase the size of the military in general. But that’s another discussion
for another day.
Conclusions
Liberal bias in the media is
nothing new. I have written about it periodically for the last 20 years.
Over that time, however, I don’t recall the media being this strident in
their opposition to a president. As I have written in this E-Letter before,
I believe there are many in today’s media who actually hate George W. Bush.
And they will stop at nothing in their campaign to run him out of office.
Also, we have to content
ourselves with the fact that we are in an election cycle. The Democratic
contenders, aided by the media, will continue to criticize Bush, even though
he led with authority and brought down one of the most despotic regimes in
history. Yet the media would have us believe it was a colossal failure. It
wasn’t.
Whenever I hear this constant
negative criticism, I am reminded of a quote from Theodore Roosevelt,
another American president who often found himself in the crosshairs of his
critics and the media:
It is not the critic who
counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the
doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man
who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again;
because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does
actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great
devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in
the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails,
at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Amen, Teddy… Just my thoughts…
That’s all for this week.
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