Not News

20060103

Did anyone notice what was not in the news today? Granted I was not constantly checking the news, but I do read various news sources often enough to notice what was not there. There was no news from Iraq today.

Now, such a claim is obviously ridiculous, because many things obviously did happen in Iraq today, but none of it was worthy of making the major news websites. In fact, even Google News showed a dearth of Iraq news today. Interestingly, this absence of news blatantly reveals the bias of American and Western news organizations. If nothing blows up and no one dies, then there is no news.

Interesting also is the fact that wider and wider groups of people are becoming aware of this fact. As recently reported by Mark Hyman on the syndicated news commentary show “The Point“, a recent conference hosted by the International Center for Journalists recently revealed that many Arab journalists are unhappy with the bias of American and Western journalism.

Within this reality lies a much commented upon lament of mine, and that is that, if the news is biased, does that also make it untrue? Consider the situation in Iraq. As I posted recently, somehow Iraq managed to conduct massive and greatly successful parliamentary elections in spite of the fact that Western news reporting, if relied upon alone, seemed to indicate that the millions of Iraqis who decided to vote were certainly destined to die in an unending cycle of assassinations and car bombings.

When this violence did not materialize, the media did not even comment, but went right back to reporting the violence that reignited in the days after the elections. Yet, in their failure to report lay the glaring reality of their bias: obviously most of Iraq is secure enough that millions of unarmed civilians could go to the polls unmolested and vote.

What is required for something like an election of that magnitude to occur? Obviously, the people are eating enough that they could walk. Things were secure enough that the people felt safe going to the polls. The polls that were open well into the night had electricity to light them, yet none of these things was reported in the Western media.

How can this be? Because there is indeed a bias in American and Western media, and this bias is certainly distorting the American and Western view of the world. Because the news, once trusted as a source of unbiased information and informative commentary, has become a platform for political ideology, information is no longer flowing to the public in a way where it can make an informed decision about what is going on around them.

As a result, most Americans believe that we are still in a recession in spite of multiple quarters of growth in almost every economic category since the end of 2003. Most Americans believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake, that there were no, and perhaps never were, weapons of mass destruction, and that our current operations there are a failure. Ultimately, a sad majority of Americans believe that President Bush is doing a terrible job managing the country while Congress fails to do its job and no one seems to care.

All of these facts result in the growing backlash against the media. While it is still currently difficult, a growing number of Americans and Westerners are abandoning traditional news sources in favor of reading the writings of people who are actually in the thick of the news. These people chose to get what the facts are and decide for themselves what the truth is. While the number of people who are following this path is small, it is also growing everyday.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of weblogs like this one to give more people access to the raw facts so that they too can decide what is and is not with greater clarity and less bias than the media chooses to give. It is a daunting task, but it can be done.

DLH