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March 16, 2006
The Legacy Media's Campaign: Incremental and Tireless
This morning after dropping the kiddo off at school I heard Laura Ingraham's recap of the MSM coverage of the opening of the Iraq parliament. I had to sigh with disgust at the utterly predictable treatment: Iraqi parliament opens to massive discord, adjourns indefinitely. Meanwhile Bush's approval ratings reach an all time low as Iraq tries to avoid the slide into civil war...
I made up this little example from memory, based on Laura's radio summary. Maybe I should go to work for Reuters; look at what John Hawkins over at Right Wing News found:
You don't even have to go beyond this short, first paragraph of a piece at Reuters to see exactly what's wrong with the way the media covers Iraq:"Three months after it was elected, Iraq's parliament was finally sworn in on Thursday but the 20-minute session was an empty formality that did nothing to break a government deadlock or halt a slide to civil war."The media has been claiming that Iraq is about to "slide (jnto) civil War" for three years and they've been wrong every single step of the way. [...]
Also, you've got to love the way they've slanted the news about the first meeting of the Iraqi Parliament. Here we have a historic event, elected Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds offically meeting for the first time to represent their constituencies and help guide their country towards freedom and it's just brushed off. "Oh, they didn't fix all of Iraq's problems in their 20 minute session, so who cares?"
They just wear you down by relentless incremental pressure--was it Goebbels who pioneered the technique of repeating a lie until it became accepted as truth? In this case it's not a lie that's being repeated--I imagine that the reports are substantially correct--but the omission of the rest of the facts necessary to make an accurate assessment. In that sense, the overall impression left with the news consumer is indeed a lie. In the event the MSM are caught in a factual error, the correction is buried in the back pages and the editors move on to another topic. If there's no factual error, then any outcome contrary to their story is simply ignored.
As John Hawkins acidly notes, if the MSM were actually hired by the jihadists to deliberately sabotage the US mission, they could do no more than what they are doing now.
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