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Media bias in Iraq stories

Thomas Sowell:

THERE ARE still people in the mainstream media who profess bewilderment that they are accused of being biased. But you need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of The New York Times and in much of the rest of the media.

If a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and terrorists, while sustaining 10 fatalities, that is an American victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more likely to read: "Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq."

This kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat. Kept up long enough, it can even end up with real defeat, when support for the war collapses at home and abroad.

One of the biggest American victories during World War II was called "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" because American fighter pilots shot down more than 340 Japanese planes over the Mariana Islands while losing just 30 American planes. But what if our current reporting practices had been used back then? The story, as printed and broadcast, could have been: "Today, 18 American pilots were killed and five more severely wounded as the Japanese blasted more than two dozen American planes out of the sky." A steady diet of that kind of one-sided reporting and our whole war effort against Japan might have collapsed.

Whether the one-sided reporting of the war in Vietnam was a factor in the American defeat there used to be a matter of controversy. But in recent years, high officials of the Communist government of Vietnam have admitted that they lost the war on the battlefields but won it in the U.S. media and on the streets of America, where political pressures from the anti-war movement threw away the victory for which thousands of American lives had been sacrificed.

Today's media is ignorant of warfare and the significance that should be attached to events. The insurgents in Iraq have not had one militarily significant attack during the entire period of insugency. To be militarily significant an attack must effect the other sides ability to continue the war. The US has had several such attacks against the surgents the biggest of which was the recent operation in Falljah. The US has also captured 60 insurgent leaders in the last month including the main bomb maker for Baghdad. The insurgents have only captured noncombatants who are then put in videos of the insurgents engaging in war crimes. But the war crimes of the insurgents are never condemned, only the hazing of prisoners of Abu Ghraid is condemned. If the media is not ignorant of what they are doing, then there conduct is much more sinsiter.