That Wild-And-Crazy MainStream Media

by the Pirate on May 8, 2008

Morrissey at Hot Air notes that families are being evacuated from Sadr City in Baghdad, so the Iraqis may be getting ready to drive out the last of the Sadr militia and many of the Iranian-financed thugs.

Since Sadr refused to disband the militia, Maliki has little choice but to root it out and destroy it. The US and Iraqi forces have already started doing that by building barriers to keep the Mahdis locked into known positions, with some skirmishes already taking place in Sadr City. Now that they have the battleground defined, the next step will be the military action that will end the Mahdi Army as an organization and establish lawful control over the last of the rebel ground Sadr controls.

This will likely take weeks to complete. Once the battle starts, expect to read and hear plenty of media reports emphasizing civilian deaths, setbacks in the battle, defections in the Iraqi Army, and statements of defiance from Sadr. What we won?t hear is progress by Maliki and the US in finishing off Sadr?s forces until it suddenly becomes impossible to ignore it ? and then we will hear about how inept the Iraqi forces were in achieving victory.

Call it the Basra Narrative.

Insty quotes Ed, and remarks that we should brace ourselves not just for the offensive, but for our own media’s “creative” treatment thereof:

The basic rule of press coverage is that if there’s fighting, we must be losing. All wars produce ups and downs, bad news and good. It’s interesting, though, that our press seems mostly interested in making things look bad, though they’re not even very good at reporting the bad news that matters. [ . . . ]

UPDATE: Reader Walter Boxx emails: “The way the Japanese could tell they were losing WWII was that the great victories reported by their media were getting closer and closer to home. Our media problem is like a fun-house mirror version of this – the way we can tell we are winning is that our crushing defeats are happening less often and to different enemies.”

I’m really looking forward to this particular “crushing defeat.”

Here’s a past post from Glenn (which he linked in his post above) about how it isn’t just good news that goes unreported by our MSM, but important bad news as well: he points out that bloggers don’t have the same access as MSM reporters, and it would be great if the latter were to step up to the plate.

I am not, of course, holding my breath.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: