20070723 Media- What’s Deteriorating?

I was struck over the weekend by the repeated use of a phrase throughout the continuing Mainstream Media coverage of Iraq. Repeatedly, the media referred to the “deteriorating security situation” in Iraq, implying that the country is going to implode any minute into a region destroying war. This assertion was presented not only as a fact but also as a foregone conclusion against which there is no contrary evidence.

This conclusion, though presented as fact, is also untrue. It is untrue because it does not take into account so many facts-unreported or under reported by the Mainstream Media-about what is actually happening on the ground in Iraq. Based upon how this information is presented, this failure to report the facts is part of a widespread effort on the part of the MSM to sway public opinion about US involvement in Iraq by selectively reporting the truth, thereby allowing many people to reach untrue conclusions.

The MSM, like anyone else who uses words for a living, understands the power of words, and using words like “deteriorating security situation” repeatedly lets them report “the facts” without telling the truth. How so? Because most reporters in the MSM understand that the truth is that the situation in Iraq is actually improving since the beginning of “the Surge” of American troops and that the situation in Iraq could easily get better, to the point where the success so panned by the MSM in 2006 and 2007 could be achieved in 2008. Yet, those same reporters tell their stories using a backdrop of wordsmithing that casts those facts in a light that implies immediate impending doom.

The MSM understands the power of words, and it also understands that very few people choose to look beyond the headlines and sound bites it provides. The average news reader sees phrases like “the deteriorating security situation in Iraq” and believes that statement to be an accurate simply because he does not believe that the MSM would lie. Unfortunately, the MSM does lie, not by presenting falsities–although falsities are becoming a more and more frequent part of MSM “journalism”–but by not presenting the whole truth, thereby creating false impressions of what the truth may be.

None of these assertions is at all designed to claim that things are good in Iraq. The situation there right now is tenuous at best, however the situation there is, once all of the facts have been considered, also hopeful. All of the information coming from Iraq says that the tide may yet be turning and that success is not only yet possible in Iraq but probable if the current formula for success is allowed enough time to see itself to fruition. The MSM, however, does not want such success.

The bottom line is that the Mainstream Media, like their allies on the Liberal Left, do not want the United States to succeed in Iraq because success means that those of us who honestly and truly support the war against fundamentalist Islam and totalitarian despotism around the world are right. If we are right, then defending and spreading liberty and democracy by whatever means necessary is the right thing to do and the oligarchic socialism of the left wants to impose on all of us has no place in such a world. Success in Iraq means revealing the MSM and the Left for what they are, thereby diminishing their power over all of us.

In the end, this war is a war of words and ideals as much as it is a war of bullets and bombs. If we let liars win the war of words, then who will win the war of bullets?

-=DLH=-