What Iraqis think

Joel Mowbray:

Ask most Americans if they were aware that Iraqis, by almost a 2-to-1 margin, believe that life today is better than it was under Saddam Hussein, and you'd most likely elicit incredulousness, blank stares or outright laughter. Not because it isn't true, though. It is.
The mainstream media just forgot to mention it.
In the past month, two surveys that involved face-to-face interviews with thousands of ordinary Iraqis have been released. While each contained significantly different results, both provided substantial evidence that Iraqis are not nearly as gloomy as Americans have been told to believe.
To the extent the mainstream media covered the surveys, far more attention was given to the one with more negative results, which was sponsored by ABC News, USA Today, BBC and a German TV network. Most Americans would not have even known about the poll conducted by British market research firm Opinion Research Business, which self-funded its survey of face-to-face interviews with 5,019 Iraqis, were it not for the Drudge Report.
Only because of Drudge, which linked to the Sunday Times of London coverage of the poll, did Americans have a chance to learn that Iraqis believe life today is better than under Saddam, by 49 percent to 26 percent. Coverage of this important fact was almost non-existent in the mainstream media, found in fewer than five straight-ahead news stories in the entire Nexis database.
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Apparently desperate to find even more bad news coming out of Iraq, most of those who covered the ABC News/USA Today poll portrayed it ominously. Of the major newspapers, the New York Times was perhaps most generous with its headline, "Iraqis Say They Are Less Hopeful." USA Today's bleak headline was, "Iraqis see hope drain away." The Washington Post was almost as downbeat: "Poll Shows Dramatic Decline in How Iraqis View Lives, Future."
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In what appears to be a compulsion to attack any good news coming out of Iraq — assuming it bothers to report the information in the first place — The Post offered the caveat that the Opinion Research Business poll had found more positive results, but then made a strange assertion, referring to the ABC poll as "more comprehensive." Given that opinion Research Business interviewed more than 5,000 Iraqis — more than double the other poll's sample size — The Post must be "arguing some odd definition of 'comprehensive' that does not include breadth and volume," quips Kellyanne Conway, president of the polling company.
Considering the daily drumbeat of dim news from the cradle of civilization, any reasonable person would expect that ordinary Iraqis rued the day we liberated them. Mainstream media execs defend the tenor of the coverage, reminding us that the news business must report what is new — and it is true that the security situation, particularly in and around Baghdad, has deteriorated.
Reporting news events without context, however, can easily create dangerously false perceptions.
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My Journalism 101 textbook was titled Facts in Perspective. Perhaps the problem is the warped perspective of many of the reporters and editors when it comes to this war that many of them have always wanted to lose. When you want to lose you find a way to work that into your story and you avoid things that conflict with that perspective. Sometimes a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.