I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but many people think that the Iraq reporting has been inaccurate and biased:
…overall, about one-third of Americans believe that the news media present too negative a picture of what is happening in Iraq; one out of five believe that the news media present too positive a picture, and the rest say that news media coverage is about right or have no opinion.
As the party breakdown shows, the lunatics who think that coverage has been too “positive” are part of the “reality-based community.”
Newsweek has just hailed the emergence of a booming market economy in Iraq as “the mother of all surprises,” noting that “Iraqis are more optimistic about the future than most Americans are.” The reason, of course, is that Iraqis know what is going on in their country while Americans are fed a diet of exclusively negative reporting from Iraq.
Of course, it would have been better if he’s written “almost exclusively negative,” given that he was citing a positive Newsweek story as evidence.
And also of course, expect my anonymous and cowardly moronic leftist troll to show up in a minute or two with the daily “chickenhawk” stupidity, and demands that I go to Iraq.
Am I the only one who thinks it strange that Rosie O’Donnell is described by Baba Wawa as the “moderator” of The View? Seems like “extremator” would be a better title.
I observed that three articles on conditions in Ramadi and al Anbar Province had appeared within a week of each other giving entirely different points of view. Mine and one in the Times of London said we’re winning the war in Ramadi; a Washington Post A1 story co-authored by “Fiasco” author Thomas Ricks claimed exactly the opposite. The difference, I said, could be explained simply. I and the Times writer reported from Ramadi. Ricks and his co-author have not only never been to Ramadi, they wrote their piece from Washington.
Preemptive note: we can expect Anonymous Moron in the comments section to chime in with the chronic mindless “chickenhawk” attack on me any minute now, because, you see, I’m not allowed to criticize the media reporting in Iraq unless I go myself. He or she never disappoints.
Why are we watching AP repeat the same basic mistake that CBS committed with Dan Rather’s fake-but-accurate National Guard debacle?
Two words: “Everybody knows.” Anyone who has studied anthropology, sociology or mass psychology understands how false beliefs can become conventional wisdom within groups if (a) high-status individuals within the group advocate the belief, and (b) there is no one inside the group to dispute the false belief.
That, in short, is the herd-mentality explanation of why liberal bias pervades the MSM. It’s also the explanation of the Heaven’s Gate cult (whose members acted on the belief that they must commit suicide in order to be taken aboard a cosmic mothership traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet). Where group membership is dependent upon shared belief, where skepticism of key beliefs is viewed as disloyalty to the group, and where non-believers are stigmatized, marginalized and excluded, the truth or falsehood of group beliefs is moot. Logic and evidence, so far as they might undermine belief, are unwelcome. This is how it becomes possible for groups to act upon false beliefs.
It’s one of those stories too good to fact check, because they want so badly to believe anything bad about Iraq (read: bad about Bush).