Apparently the main stream press feels that they have the ultimate authority to decide what we need to know.....
From Investors Business Daily:
Posted 12/2/2005
Journalism: The L.A. Times has charged the U.S. military with paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories praising the U.S. and Iraqi effort and denouncing the terrorists. Biased media shouldn't throw stones.
The Times notes "the articles are basically factual," and that some newspapers labeled the stories as "advertising" while others "shaded them in gray boxes or used a special typeface to distinguish them from standard editorial content." Still, it whines "they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S, or Iraqi governments."
Well, we have the American media to do that. A new study by the Media Research Center reviewing every Iraq story on the evening news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC from January through September found 61% of the stories were negative or pessimistic while only 15% were positive or optimistic — a 4-to-1 negative ratio.
The MRC found that 79 stories focused primarily on allegations of wrongdoing by American forces in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib rehashes, while only eight focused on the heroism of American soldiers or their good works.
In his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, where the Class of 2006 was the first to enter after 9-11, President Bush paid tribute to the men and women who have died for Iraqi freedom, and ours, by reading the moving letter of Cpl. Jeffrey Starr to his girlfriend found on his laptop computer after he died in a firefight in Ramadi.
He read the entire letter, not the selectively edited version printed by The New York Times — the part the "newspaper of record" found fit to print to deliberately portray Starr as anti-war. The part the Times chose not to print, painted a different picture:
"I don't regret going, everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom. Now this is my mark."
You wouldn't know this from reading the American press. You also wouldn't know that before 2003 there was not a single independent media outlet in Iraq, but that today there are 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations and more than 100 newspapers. It's no longer all-Saddam all the time.
Do you also know that, as columnist Max Boot reports, per capita income has doubled since 2003 and that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% next year? Or that there are five times more cars on the streets than under Saddam, five times more telephone subscribers and 32 times more Internet users?
While our media go on about the failure of Iraqi forces to take on more of the burden, U.S. troops in November turned over to the Iraqis Saddam's sprawling 18-palace hill compound in his hometown of Tikrit — the 30th U.S. base turned over to Iraq this year.
We didn't have to pay millions of Iraqis to march to the polls last January to vote for an interim government to draft a constitution that even more would risk their lives to ratify in a second free election. Next week, they'll march to the polls again, amid media prophecies of doom, to elect a permanent government.
How many readers of the L.A. Times or The New York Times or viewers of the evening news know about the underreported good news — such as 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are virtually violence-free?
Well, they could always buy an Iraqi newspaper.
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