http://www.investors.com/editorial/issues.asp?v=9/25Getting The Truth
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
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Media: News outlets around the country continue to report on Iraq in ways that make the situation there look grim, like a fiasco, a quagmire. It ain't so.
But please, don't take our word for it. Just listen to those who have actually been there and are now reporting back, getting around the major media's filter on the news.
Just last week, a bipartisan House Armed Services group returned from a fact-finding trip to Iraq. The congressmen concluded the American media are systematically distorting the news from Iraq, exaggerating the bad, ignoring the good.
Typical was this, from Democrat Ike Skelton of Missouri: "The media stresses the wounds, the injuries and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. (Dave) Petraeus has 3,100 projects — from soccer fields to schools to refineries — all good stuff, and that isn't being reported."
Rep. Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina who himself previously worked as a reporter, was also taken aback.
He cited what he called a "hysterical" account on CBS radio of an attack that led to three deaths: "The media portrayed it as an act of sophistication and a regrouping of Saddam's forces, when, in fact, it's an indication of disorganization and desperation."
Jim Marshall of Georgia, another Democrat and a Vietnam veteran, was so angered by what he saw, he penned an editorial when he returned. Today, IBD runs it.
Of course, as anyone in the media will tell you, bad news sells; good news doesn't. Sadly, that's true. But it goes deeper than that.
"There is corruption in our business," wrote John Burns, a New York Times correspondent in Iraq, who took the media to task for their failure in a scathing piece in Editor & Publisher. "We need to get back to basics."
Others who have been to Iraq have similar conclusions. Federal Judge Dan Walters, a Democrat appointee who traveled to Iraq to help reform that nation's legal system, noted, "We are not getting the whole truth from the news media."
We've said it before — we're not Pollyannas. But we've noticed a consistency to the reports we read of people who return from Iraq and say pretty much the same thing. Things there are far better than is being reported.
It's all over the Web, if you care to look.
Average soldiers, writing home, paint a much different picture than the media about what's happened. Like this from Art Messer, a Navy Seabee in Iraq, at sfft.org: "I can honestly say 98% of the population of Iraq loves us and they do not want us to leave — ever!"
Yes, we know people — Americans too — are still dying. There's disorder in some areas. Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.
But Iraq is far better off today than it was a year ago. By any measure. And the people there, by and large, are happy we're there.
Again, that's not us talking — it's the Iraqis themselves. In a Gallup Poll released Wednesday, 67% of those living in Baghdad say they're glad Saddam is gone, even after recent hardships. And two-thirds expect things to be much better in five years.
Americans have much riding on this war on terror. They need the truth — facts and honest analysis, not bias and cant.
Anything less than that is a disservice to Iraq's nascent democracy. And to ours.
