Media Bias:
Investor's Business Daily:
Investor's Business Daily:
The video showed fingers being lopped off, tongues being cut out and heads rolling at Abu Ghraib. Is the press interested? Of course not. Those crimes were committed by Saddam Hussein, not U.S. troops.
The media have been obsessed for weeks with the treatment of Iraqis being held by the coalition at Abu Ghraib prison. Their interest wanes considerably when it has a chance to report on documented atrocities committed by the Iraqi regime.
New York Post columnist Deborah Orin was one of a few journalists who was intellectually curious enough to watch the four-minute video. In the end, she "couldn't bear to watch, so I walked out until it was over."
Apparently, little of the press corps could bear to watch any of it.
"Just four or five reporters showed up for the screening at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which says it got the video via the Pentagon," she wrote in her Wednesday column. "Fewer wrote about it."
The mainstream media's conduct on the 9-11 panel's findings has been shameful, full of misleading reporting and agenda-driven headlines that do not comport with the commission's account. The media have said the panel reports that there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida when the panel merely said it could find no evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida worked together in the 9-11 attack. It's not the same thing.
Neither is the torture and murder that was routine in Iraq's prisons under Saddam the same as the scandalous handling of detainees and prisoners in Abu Ghraib by U.S. troops. Until there's clear evidence that the incidents at Abu Ghraib under U.S. control reached the level of atrocities committed by Saddam, they should be treated differently.
Which the media are doing, but in inverse proportion to their importance. They yawn at the horrors of Saddam, but they become downright obsessive when a few U.S. troops take liberties with Iraqis under their care. The media, in a sense, have become Holocaust deniers while exaggerating into Holocaust dimensions the claims of abuse at the hands of Americans at Abu Ghraib.
Is it possible the media just can't see the disconnect in their coverage? Or is there something else at work here, namely a campaign to make President Bush look as despicable as possible in an election year?
Given the negative coverage that has been heaped on Bush by the establishment media, their general condescension toward him and the continued downplaying in the press of his thriving economy, there is only one clear answer.
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