Hi Drediock,
Originally posted by DREDIOCK
How wrong has it gone?
One of the complaints I hear the troops have is all you see on the media is what has gone wrong but not the positives that are being done and they are doing.
Not surprising. How often does the media present good news as news?
Funny, I was just thinking about exactly that point today. Our local gas prices are back down to the $2.03 level with hardly a peep from the local media. On a hunch, I did an archive search on the local paper and found that they've run roughly seven "Gas Prices Higher" stories for every "Gas prices Dip" story, and the stories about the prices going higher were further up front and got far more lineage. Exactly the same is true for stories about the economy "possibly" tanking, vs. economic reports showing improvement. The recent numbers showing a sharp increase in spending and consumer confidence also got predictably little mention.
In conversations I've had with troops who've been to Afghanistan and Iraq, they are uniformly (no pun intended) sick of the media only reporting the wicked exploits of the Jihadists. If an IED blows up, we all get to hear about it and watch the Al Jazeera provided video. Any success in rebuilding infrastructure, introducing democracy, feeding children, or even eliminating terrorists is either ignored or given hardly any commentary. One soldier even commented that he'd asked a journalist if he was going to file a report on his unit providing an Afghan village with a medical clinic, water pump, and school, for the first time ever. The reporter commented that even if he did file it, it wouldn't run, so he wasn't even going to bother. He half-jokingly said that if and when the Taliban blew the clinic up and executed the teachers, that he'd mention that his unit had helped build these things.
I can't help but wonder Is it:
A) that we have built a media culture that thrives on death, destruction, and pain, and which sees its job as to alarm, frighten, depress, or anger the public?
B) That we have a media so politically biased, that any story that might possibly be viewed as providing assistance or support, direct or indirect to the present administration, must be spiked on principle?
C) A & B
I'm trying to remember back to the 90s, was the reporting on Kosovo and Somalia also uniformly
"All the bad news we can fit in print?" I seem to remember some occasional glimmers of light, but as far as I can tell, we seem to have created a media monstrously addicted to pain, self-loathing, victimhood, defeat, darkness, and cynicism. No wonder the mainstream media circulation is declining.
- SEAGOON
