Ok, I went back to the Den Beste article I posted. this was the text
In a lot of cases the problem has been that the reporting has left out critical information so as to let us all misinterpret what we are told. For instance, there's this report from Thursday:
More than 280 Iraqis have been killed and 400 wounded this week in the U.S. Marines' siege of insurgents in this city west of Baghdad, the director of Fallujah's hospital said Thursday.
First, keep in mind that he might be lying. During our operations in Afghanistan in October and November of 2001, the Taliban routinely exaggerated their reports of Afghan casualties resulting from American operations there.
But even if we accept his numbers, notably absent from this report is any indication of how many of those who were killed or wounded were active combatants. Quite frankly, by using the bland term "Iraqis" collectively for all of the casualties, this news report tries to portray all of them as innocent victims, uninvolved civilians. That's exceedingly unlikely. There can be no doubt that many of them were killed or wounded because they were shooting at the Marines, and the Marines shot back.
Some of them likely were civilians, however. That said, how many of those became victims because they were being used as human shields by combatants?
The one I was objecting to was much more serious. This one is minor, and was part of the bigger point Den Beste was making. The text continues
What inspired me to write was this news report. It's from Reuters, which has been responsible for some of the most blatant distortion in news reporting of the war we've seen from any "reputable" news collection agency. It begins:
US Forces Attacked in Baghdad, Offer Falluja Truce
Street fighting erupted in Baghdad on Saturday and sporadic gunfire echoed across Falluja despite a new U.S. truce offer and an effort by Iraqi officials to secure a peace deal with insurgents in the western city.
It then rounds up nearly every recent example of resistance it can find, and then reports Bush's response. The overall effect is to strongly imply that everything is going to hell; the US is on the ropes; Bush is lamely talking tough in public, but the Americans are actually desperate – and so they offered a truce to the insurgents in Falluja in hopes of disengaging there.
That was his main point. Although I agree with Den Beste that the reporter should have dug deeper, rather than just taking the raw numbers. He could have least have said something to the effect, "we don't know the breakdown on these numbers between fighters and civilians."
I agree with Den Beste that the reporter was trying to leave the impression that they were all civilians. It's no big deal if you don't. Den Beste's major point was the Headline distorting the ceasefire. |
