Media bias in Iraq
Instapundit:
"...what has been obvious from here is that the bad news has been consistently overplayed and the good news consistently underplayed, as demonstrated by the mismatch between the very coherent "quagmire" narrative from the Big Media and what we've heard from returning members of Congress, federal judges, touring musicians, military bloggers, returning servicemembers and -- now, finally -- members of the press.
"To make an Amartya Sen sort of point, what's unfortunate about the slanted (and lazy) nature of most of the reporting is that it doesn't point out real problems in ways that can let them be fixed, and that will bring them to the attention of people who can fix them. When the coverage continues to come from the same tired Vietnam template, applied to a very different situation, it's not terribly useful and I suspect that it's largely tuned out by folks in the White House who assume (more or less correctly) that it's intended to hurt them.
"But that means that they have to rely on the reports of people in the chain of command, who have their own agendas. The press is supposed to be a check on that sort of thing, but it's fallen down on the job in postwar Iraq. Fortunately, the Internet has taken up some of the slack, and is (I'm being hopeful here) spurring the Big Media folks to take a second look at what they're doing."
Instapundit:
"...what has been obvious from here is that the bad news has been consistently overplayed and the good news consistently underplayed, as demonstrated by the mismatch between the very coherent "quagmire" narrative from the Big Media and what we've heard from returning members of Congress, federal judges, touring musicians, military bloggers, returning servicemembers and -- now, finally -- members of the press.
"To make an Amartya Sen sort of point, what's unfortunate about the slanted (and lazy) nature of most of the reporting is that it doesn't point out real problems in ways that can let them be fixed, and that will bring them to the attention of people who can fix them. When the coverage continues to come from the same tired Vietnam template, applied to a very different situation, it's not terribly useful and I suspect that it's largely tuned out by folks in the White House who assume (more or less correctly) that it's intended to hurt them.
"But that means that they have to rely on the reports of people in the chain of command, who have their own agendas. The press is supposed to be a check on that sort of thing, but it's fallen down on the job in postwar Iraq. Fortunately, the Internet has taken up some of the slack, and is (I'm being hopeful here) spurring the Big Media folks to take a second look at what they're doing."
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