One of the oldest critiques that supporters of the Iraq war offer is the charge that the liberal, anti-war mainstream media (usually acronymed as MSM) deliberately ignores the “good news” stories from Iraq. Instead, so the claim goes, the media plays up the acts of violence in order to drive home the larger anti-war narrative of chaos and failure. Some war supporters, when feeling generous, attribute this pessimistic reporting to mere sensationalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Thus, stories of peace, progress and reconstruction would never make it to the front pages of the news. In many ways, war supporters hope to stave off what they deem as the press’s complicity in undermining the Vietnam War.
I find it striking how rare we hear this claim anymore. Not even the White House or Congressional Republicans bother to say that the war is going much better than reported. In fact, as Atrios noticed, even the Congressional Armed Services Committee website has left its “Good News” link untouched since May 2005. Arthur Chrenkoff, who once kept a regular blog entitled “Good News From Iraq” gave up his regular blogging gig in September 2005. Tellingly, nobody has picked up the tab. And then there was the infamous “truth in Iraq” tour promoted by right-wing talk radio hosts like Laura Ingraham. And Steven Moore’s blog that purported to cut through the media’s anti-war bias. It’s last posting was in 2004. There are certainly still some “truth in Iraq” style blogs out there, like this grammatically incorrect site entitled Truth on Iraq that tout the handovers of authority from the Iraqi military to Iraqis and other such stories publicized in the MNF’s own site.
But perhaps the real reason we no longer hear about “the good news” from Iraq is that reporters cannot leave the Green Zone to report on it. Assume, for a moment, that there really is a lot of substantive progress in the development of a free and democratic Iraq. The only problem is that the media is unable to report on it for fear of assassination, mob attack or kidnapping. In a recent interview with Editor and Publisher Magazine, NY Times journalist Dexter Filkins notes that total anarchy outside the Green Zone prohibits journalists from visiting sites of reconstruction with their own eyes. Seasoned journalists must now rely on Iraqi stringers to bring in news, and even they have to remain anonymous about their employers. Ominously, Filkins remarks that even US soldiers have less to say about life in Iraqi communities because they stay holed up in bases much of the time.
I recently heard Iraqi Shia expert Valy Nasr speak at my school and one student ask him if the media was shielding the truth from the American public. The student did not say, specifically, that the media was making the war look worse than it actually is, but the implication was clear in his tone. Anyway, Nasr echoed Filkins’ observation that Iraq was actually much worse than the media reports because journalists cannot cover the story with any degree of safety and security.
I remember reading a story a year ago about why stories of reconstruction suddenly disappeared from the news – even the pro-war outlets like Fox. The reason was that insurgents were watching the video stories of school paintings and the like and regularly destroyed any evidence of progress revealed to a world audience. In response, US military officials actually turned away reporters from pro-war media outlets because their reporting only served to invite terrorism.
Even this story is less common now because reconstruction has, to a large extent, vanished from the US agenda. Though the recently written US Army Counterinsurgency Manual specifically recommends the sort of “hearts and minds” strategy that war supporters once regularly touted, the extent of civil war and chaos has made this “clear, hold and build” strategy less tenable.
In many ways, the changing tone of the Bush Administration from progress to fear of failure reflects this deteriorating situation on the ground. But most striking is the silence from pro-war bloggers, analysts and others who used to trumpet relatively minor “good news” stories as evidence of MSM foul play. Instead, supporters of the war have finally accepted the fact that the situation in Iraq really is dire, and the leadership from US and Iraqi civilian authorities is increasingly rudderless.