Follow The Bleeder
I can admit it. I’m a news junkie. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even listen to music on the radio anymore. As a consequence, if I’m listening to music at all, it’s one of my CD’s or an MP3 file on my computer or my handy-dandy new phone (I’m also something of a gearhead, but that’s another article… maybe). Truth is, I have more of an interest in current events than the trendy mall metal radio station in town, and so news talk radio is essentially the only thing I listen to anymore, either in the car or during the day at the new job I started just this September. If it’s part of the news cycle either on the CBS or FOX radio affiliates, I hear it a few times on any given day. At night, I peruse the news sites on the Web: Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail, and I usually glance at the Drudge Report and Media Matters for comic relief. Occasionally I catch the TV news on Fox or CNN.
What I notice in the consumption of my daily news diet is that, since about mid-2003, one can’t get through so much as a cursory look at the headlines without seeing something about the Iraq War. And, almost without exception, the news is bad. Scratch that; it’s terrible. A car bomb, a videotaped beheading of a hostage, an insurgent uprising in Fallujah, a mortar attack on the Green Zone, or the ever-growing tally of fallen American troops are the stories you see and hear from the press. It’s no wonder people in this country are seemingly so pessimistic about the Iraq situation. In light of what we get from the news on a day-to-day basis, the wonder is that anyone finds anything to be optimistic about at all.
And then, scant weeks ago, we hear the story of U.S. military writers submitting news stories to be translated into Arabic and published in Baghdad newspapers for pay as “unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists.” According to the story, which ran in the Los Angeles Times on November 30 of this year:
“The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.”
Aha! Things are so bad in Iraq that the military is having to make up good news to counter all the bad news! Except, the military isn’t “making up” the good news. This appears a bit earlier in the piece (emphasis mine):
“Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said.”
Okay, I have some questions at this point. First, if the information is factual, why isn’t the Iraqi media reporting it on their own initiative? Second, is anybody criticizing al Jazeera for “omitting information that might reflect poorly” on the insurgency? And third, why haven’t WE AT HOME seen or heard any of this good news from our own media?
I’m just a trifle confused. Why would respected news outlets – entrusted with the clear, undistorted and uncolored presentation of fact to the public – omit ANY information, good or bad, about such a hot-button issue as the Iraq War? Meaning, if there is good news to be found in Iraq, why wouldn’t they report that as readily as the bad news? Wouldn’t they be honor-bound to present all the information to the public – especially the American public, whose approval or disapproval of the War relies so heavily upon what is reported in the news?
Okay, let’s be honest here. I’m not so naïve as to believe the drivel in the preceding paragraph, or to even think along such Pollyanna lines. My lovely wife, Fraü Fleisch, who once worked for the local Fox affiliate, characterized the reality of the situation perfectly with the industry idiom, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Or, put another way, the news outlets have no interest in running news stories that don’t have a component of sensationalism. This is perhaps as it should be, but it still leaves the very real problem of where we as the American public are to go for the straight story of what’s happening in Iraq.
This was one of the things I was pondering about two weeks ago at work, when I struck up conversation with a coworker I had not yet met. During the course of discussing various things, he talked about how glad he was to be back home. “Back home? Where have you been?” I asked. “Oh, my unit just got back from Iraq a month ago,” he said. “Well, that explains why I’m just now meeting you,” I think to myself. It turns out that he had been on a year-long deployment to Iraq as part of the 278th Regimental Combat Team. “Self,” I said to myself, “maybe you ought to ask this guy what it’s really like over there.”
There are a few guys I know from back home that have gone over and come back, but since I moved away over a year ago, I don’t talk to many of my old friends anymore. So, this was the first opportunity I had to actually talk to an Iraq War veteran about what was going on.
Nothing could’ve prepared me for what he told me.
“We’re winning,” he told me matter-of-factly. “The Iraqi people are so close to being able to start doing for themselves it’s unbelievable. The locals we dealt with every day that I was there are grateful for what we’ve done for them, but they’re anxious to start seeing to their own country again. They’re almost ready.”
“But what about the insurgents?” I asked. “That’s all we’ve been hearing about here.”
“They’re losing steam, and they know it. The terrorists are usually operating out of four-man cells over there. They need at least that many to set up roadside bombs, and any more than that are too easy for us to take out. When the insurgency first started after we got rid of Saddam, the cells were getting paid the equivalent of $50 – to split among the four of them – for every roadside bomb and IED they set up. When I left, the price had gone up to $200 PER CELL MEMBER -- $800 TOTAL – to set up the same IED’s and bombs. They’ve had to go up on their payments because they can’t find people to do it anymore.”
“Why is that?”
“The locals have turned against them. The terrorists have mostly stopped targeting us, because we are ‘hard targets’ and we always end up killing way more of them than they do of us. So they’ve started blowing up Iraqis, some of them police or military but mostly civilians. Women and children. The locals are fed up. They were constantly tipping us off whenever there was a bomb or an ambush set up. The thing is, they see us building roads for them, building schools, and seeing to their safety. All they see the terrorists doing is killing. That sort of thing matters to them.”
We talked for about half an hour, but he told me more about the on-the-ground reality in Iraq in that half-hour than I’ve seen or heard from the media in all this time since the War started. I almost asked him why we weren’t hearing any of this in the news here at home, or why we never heard about the 278th Regimental Combat Team at all during their deployment in Iraq -- unless of course one of them was killed. I thought better of it, and in hindsight I’m glad I didn’t. I didn’t need him to tell me the answer anyway.
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
by
Nach dem Fleisch
