Someone asked me today if I thought the lack of good news out of Iraq (by most media) was some sort of conspiracy. My take? I don't think so.
I believe the answer to that question has less to do with bias than it does with the nature of traditional news.
News exists to report the out of the ordinary. When there's a 17 car pileup on the freeway near your house, it's news because that rarely happens. YOu know it rarely happens because you drive on that freeway. So the news agency doesn't need to report every day that nothing happens. You have what's called CONTEXT.
Now, look at Iraq. The news people go over there and dutifully send you all the out-of-the-ordinary things that are happening there. But since you personally don't have any CONTEXT to put those stories into, those very news stories become, from your perspective, ORDINARY. So you end up with a very negatively skewed vision of the war.
This week,
a farmer in South Baghdad received a microgrant from the USDA to reopen his feed mill. This mill is needed to provide scratch grain for the area's burgeoning chicken industry, which was also re-started with micro-grants and loans from the U.S. State department.
But this isn't the kind of thing that makes news. Some guy getting money to put a new roof on his business. Yawn.
Read between the lines, however, and you'll learn that the insurgents who terrorized the man and his family were more criminals than soldiers, and you'll realize that rational men don't begin rebuilding until they believe the threat is past. This tells you a lot about the situation in Iraq today.
Most journalists never go to where the action is. When you see them "Reporting live from Iraq" they are usually ensconced on the balcony of a hotel in the green zone, which is safer than most cities in the U.S.
Every day these green zone wonders go to the "TOC" or Tactical Operations Center and pick up a copy of the report that details all the "incidents" that took place over the last 24 hours. This is essentially a list of all the bad things that happened that day. These newsies then make their report based on this "rap sheet" and voila - all bad news, all the time.
This does not pass as journalism, in my book. If you want the real news about the war, you can find it today in the reports coming out from the
armed forces information network, and independent bloggers like
Michael and others who actually go to where the fighting is.
Chuck Holton
www.livefire.us
