The real story from Iraq is how the media does its best to lessen the impact of the bad news. Injuries in Iraq? Rarely, if ever, reported in any detail, or with any followup (see item just below). But even deaths are minimized. Yesterday three American soldiers died in Iraq in one day. In the San Jose Mercury News, though, the front page headline on the "Iraq story" reads "U.S. presses U.N. for help." Continued on page 11, there's a new headline, that still doesn't get it right - "2 U.S. soldiers die in attacks against U.S." Only be reading the entire article, and making it to paragraph 11, does the reader learn that actually a third soldier died as well, after stepping on a land mine. Evidently that falls in the same category as traffic accident or heart attack; it doesn't "count" as an "attack against the U.S." Why, I don't know. Was this land mine left there years before in some previous war? Or was it placed there the night before by Iraqi guerrillas who knew American soldiers would be coming that way? I wouldn't know (although the latter seems a lot more likely), but it seems that, for the American military and its scribe, the U.S. press, unless we know with absolute certainty that this was a deliberate attack, then we should assume it wasn't. Just an accident, folks, nothing to see here. Move right along. And in the meantime, the casual reader of the Mercury News thinks that only two American soldiers died yesterday, not three, and that things are going 50% better than they really are. The article also notes only two injured American troops, although other media reported eight injuries, just from the three incidents which also involved deaths. As has been noted before, injuries which occur in the absence of deaths are almost always completely unreported.
Do you think that if a policeman in your town were injured in an ambush, and lost a leg, that the story would go unreported? Do you think that if it happened every single day, that you would say "things were going well" in your town?
From Left I on the News
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