<font color=blue>media coverage has real impacts on the decisions of policymakers<font color=black>
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WE TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY, EVER: PART 2<font size=3>
A front page article in the Times today has senior officials, senior Iraqi officials, and senior military officials all saying explicitly what's been increasingly clear over the last weeks -- a major mistake was made in not allowing the Marines to finish what they'd started in Fallujah, and the result is a city that's now a sanctuary for terrorists and insurgent leaders with no good options for dealing with the problem. Now, there's no question that the administration made the decision that the administration made, and that decision is their responsibility. I thought it was a bad decision at the time, although I kept hoping that somebody somewhere knew something I didn't.
But, please, <font size=4>lets not pretend that this was an irrational decision or a decision without some basis in fact. A decision can be wrong and still be based on an understandable analysis of the facts on the ground<font size=3>, and although I disagreed with this one, I didn't think it came out of left field.
Because, <font size=4>lets face it, the Marine assault on the city, as precise as it was, and as careful and controlled, was being portrayed as a "slaughter" and was being used as a rallying cry against us across the Arab world. But it's interesting lately that when the coverage of the war has had some kind of effect, US outlets will either refuse to admit that, or admit it and then gloss over the fact that the information in question was never proven true.<font size=3>
The Americans say they could regain control of Falluja by military means, but likely at a cost of hundreds of Iraqi lives. They fear that significant bloodshed could spark the same sort of backlash as in April, when <font size=4>reports of as many as 600 people being killed inside the city became a rallying cry around Iraq and the Middle East and seriously strained relations with the Iraqi government.
It wasn't reports of "600 people" that did that. That's pure revisionism. It was reports of 600 people, either including or mostly women and children, claims that were never close to confirmed (which came only from the hospitals inside the city) and were denied by the US, but were repeated endlessly. Here's a classic piece of reporting from the BBC. (Here, by the way, is a web site with some information about the BBC's neutral humanitarian worker source, and here's USS Neverdock just ripping the BBC to pieces for using these sources on this story.) Here's a suggestion from the Christian Science Monitor that these numbers were drastically inflated. Of course that didn't stop CBS from repeating the claim. Or USA Today. The Boston Globe reported almost as many.
But as I've noted before, the story of the sacrifices the Marines made to protect the civilians of the city never seemed of interest to reporters.
These are American outlets. You can imagine what was being said in the Arab media. And of course these articles were also saying that because of these casualties, the Sunni and Shia were uniting together into a national uprising.
Well, nothing came of that either, but that's what the
American people were being told.
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In fact taking the city would have been like ripping a bandaid off. Yeah, it would have been bad, but it would have over fast. But lets not kid ourselves that there wasn't a real cost here that the administration was weighing in the balance.
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Given that I think the administration chose wrong, what's my point? That the media coverage has real impacts on the decisions of policymakers, and not because they're interested in anything so prosaic as what poll results mean for their political futures. I'm quite sure they care about that, but I think they more immediately care about what poll results say about their ability to sway the public to continue to support the mission. And the administration wasn't wrong to think that was in doubt with Fallujah. I just think they could have ridden it out before it became an issue. But it serves as another object lesson of the way the press coverage will have actual impacts on the world -- which the media will then ignore as much as possible.<font size=3>
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