80% of the people who support Kerry are delusional. That's a result of watching & reading so much liberal propaganda:
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
By ROD DREHER / The Dallas Morning News
Are the news media giving Americans an accurate picture of what's really going on in Iraq?
Not according to the American people, who say they've seen too many photos of Abu Ghraib prison abuses. A CBS News poll released on May 24 revealed that 61 percent of those polled believe the news media are spending too much time on the Abu Ghraib story. This jibes with what some of us on the editorial board have been hearing more and more: that average Americans believe the news media are obsessed with bad news from Iraq and aren't paying enough attention to the good things going on there.
We decided to search photo wire service archives for the past month, looking for images of U.S. soldiers engaged in helping Iraqis instead of shooting at them. We were startled to discover that the photo accompanying this text was the only image of its kind that moved on the wires in recent weeks. This newspaper's photo department told me that if news photographers aren't shooting those pictures, it's because media back home aren't interested in those stories.
AP
Marine Sgt. William Perry of Texarkana, Texas, passed out school supplies at the Anwal Elementary School in Kandari, Iraq, on May 11. Which justifies the reader complaints we've been hearing, does it not?
This is not necessarily an issue of media bias. It's extremely dangerous for journalists to be in Iraq now, which limits the number of photojournalists in the field. Are editors stateside more likely to risk the lives of their personnel to have them shoot battle scenes, or pictures of soldiers handing candy to Iraqi kids? It is understandable that breaking news eats up the limited journalistic resources on the ground, but this means that Americans are not getting the complete story from their media.
It's not like there isn't good news to cover in Iraq. Back in March, on the first anniversary of the start of the war, a major national poll of Iraqis conducted by ABC News and the BBC found, in ABC's words, "a strikingly optimistic people, expressing growing interest in politics, broad rejection of political violence, rising trust in the Iraqi police and army and preference for an inclusive and democratic government."
"On a personal level," ABC continues, "seven in 10 Iraqis say things overall are going well for them – a result that might surprise outsiders imagining the worst of life in Iraq today. Fifty-six percent say their lives are better now than before the war, compared with 19 percent who say things are worse (23 percent, the same). And the level of personal optimism is extraordinary: Seventy-one percent expect their lives to improve over the next year."
And no wonder. Whatever mistakes American occupiers have made in Iraq – and there have been many of them – the fact remains that the mass murderer who ran Iraq into the ground was overthrown and is now in jail awaiting trial.
Since the poll was taken, of course, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and militants staged vicious insurgencies based in Fallujah and Najaf. But notice what has happened: Abu Ghraib has had surprisingly little resonance with ordinary Iraqis, particularly the Shiite majority, and the uprising has fizzled for lack of popular support.
But there are other positive developments to report:
• According to UNICEF, school attendance is up more than 95 percent from prewar times, and more than 2,500 schools have been rebuilt or renovated, with 1,500 more scheduled to be completed by year's end. And all the schools will, for the first time in three decades, feature textbooks that teach facts, not pro-Saddam propaganda.
• The Coalition Provisional Authority reports that all Iraqi hospitals and primary health care clinics were operating by December, and U.S. soldiers, along with UNICEF, are teaching basic personal hygiene and sanitation techniques throughout the country. Health-care spending is 26 times what it was under Saddam, the CPA says.
• The U.S. State Department says that the CPA has been building playgrounds, sports fields, youth centers and places where Iraqi women can get child care.
• The State Department also reports that the vast marshlands area of southern Iraq, which had been drained and destroyed by Saddam to punish the rebellious Shia who lived there, are being restored through efforts of the U.S. government, along with Iraqi and international agencies. Three-quarters of Iraq's irrigation canals were choked by weeds because of neglect. The CPA reports spending $9 million to clear those waterways, providing water to thousands of farmers.
• The U.S. Agency for International Development, along with private foundations, is conducting conferences and training sessions promoting democracy and teaching democratic decision-making and problem-solving.
For more hopeful news on the situation in Iraq, check out one of the increasingly popular Internet web logs from English-speaking Iraqis living in the country and sharing their reporting and perspectives. These bloggers are for all intents and purposes anonymous, which the careful reader will bear in mind when considering the credibility of the information found there. Nevertheless, these blog sites – which are by no means unequivocally pro-American – are a helpful tributary widening the stream of information coming out of Iraq.
Jay Rosen, head of New York University's journalism department, says that the problem isn't that the dispatches from Iraq are too negative, but that they're too narrow – and that this poses a challenge for our democracy in a presidential election year expected to be a referendum on the Iraq war.
"Without a steady focus on daily life," Mr. Rosen writes on the PressThink.org Web log, "I cannot answer the question that news from Iraq is supposed to help me with: how to judge the job my government is doing, how to hold President Bush accountable to what he said he would do."
Exactly so. We in the media owe you, the reader, a more complete picture.
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