The Best Way to Lie is to Tell Only Half the Truth

In Mainstream news media suffer collateral damage from Iraq war, Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder attempts to justify the coverage of the Iraq war by the major news media. I say justify, because that is the overall tone of the article, and of Hutcheson's own wording. (He uses the standard media term "military insurgency" for those who are murdering Coalition troops, Iraqi police and military, and Iraqi civilians, rather than calling them terrorists, which they are. The only "insurgents" in Iraq are the left-over Baathists who are trying to put themselves back in power, and the dupes who follow Sadr and the other "leaders" who want to set themselves up as the next Saddam and don't give a flying shit about Iraq as a nation. According to Iraqi reports, the majority of the terrorists aren't Iraqis, and therefore aren't "insurgents." Nor, as they have no command structure as defined by the Geneva Conventions on Warfare, are they "military." They are terrorists, pure and simple.)

While the article does give time to those who see the current mainstream coverage as overly negative, it gives much more time, and its conclusion, to those who support the coverage as entirely proper.

Media experts note that the journalist's job is to report what's happening and why, not to rally support, and that news judgment requires assessing which facts are most important. If schools are being rebuilt, that's a news story, but if the society they're in is being blown apart by civil war, that's a bigger news story.

"If events go well, that's what you report. If things are going poorly, that's the reality," said GWU professor Livingston, who's lectured at the National War College. "If bombs blow up and bombs kill Marines and kill soldiers, that's an important story, and covering that is not bias."

U.S. journalists will always focus on lost American lives, media experts said, because that's the most direct link between Americans at home and the war overseas.

"That's the nature of journalism. And it's the nature of combat," Wyatt said. "To criticize the media for covering combat in wartime is like criticizing the sun for coming up."

BUT!!! That is not what the criticism is about. The criticism is that the media are using sanitized, PC terminology -- "military insurgency" vs. "terrorists" -- that express an inherent bias on the part of the reporters. The criticism is that only the negative is being shown, and the new schools, local governments, roads, power plants, and all other improvements are being left out. The view of the mainstream media, therefore, is that the bombs and mortars are the entirety of the reality and that things truly are going poorly. Of course, the view from the anti-war segment is that the media is using overly sanitized reporting by not further emphasizing the negative.

In contrast, the view of the troops and NGO workers who have been there and reported their experiences on blogs and small presses, and the view of numerous Iraqi bloggers, is that the bombs and other murders are only part of the reality. The improvements to infrastructure, social integration, government, police, and other movements by Iraq toward full independence and self-sufficiency are the much more important part, and are the majority of the reality.

"War is a complex thing, and you're going to have different realities from different perspectives," said Steven Livingston, an Army veteran and political communication professor at George Washington University in Washington. "What you see depends on where you stand."

Therefore, the media need to find another place to stand and see what is actually going on, before they presume to tell the world that their myopic, sensationalist view is the total reality.