There's Good News - But You Gotta Look For It!

Greetings from the Left Coast! I saw an amazing article in the Everett Herald this morning. It was an Associated Press article headlined "Deaths in Iraq Plummet." The opening sentence said, and I quote, "The number of American troops and Iraqi civilians killed in the war fell in September to levels not seen in more than a year." It was, in fact, the lowest number, in both categories, since July, 2006. The number of Iraqi civilian, police, and military deaths was 50% lower than August.

Isn't that interesting? We have 30,000 more troops in the region, many of them deployed to what had been the hotbeds of insurgency, and the number of both American and Iraqi deaths is down! Now, on the face of things, one might think that maybe there is some correlation there. Fortunately, thanks to that brilliant military strategist Senator Chuck Schumer, we know that the violence has gone down "despite the surge, not because of the surge." (See earlier blog entry entitled "General Issues.") Boy, glad you told us that, Senator, or we might have actually thought that the troops were succeeding in their mission.

Now being the curious sort of person that I am, I decided to search some other local papers to see if they carried this news. I no longer subscribe to the Seattle Times - I got tired of its editorial bias. But I did search their Web site. I did find an article that apparently ran in yesterday's Times. The one-sentence first paragraph does say that the US military deaths were the lowest since July, 2006. The article then went on to describe various military actions that took place, then segued into a discussion of how Iraqi politians were criticizing the nonbinding U.S. Senate resolution that called for essentially partitioning Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions. The article spent eight paragraphs discussing that issue, and concluded with the observation that, "Nevertheless, ethnic and sectarian turmoil have snarled hopes of negotiating such measures..." One sentence on the drop in military deaths, eight paragraphs on an issue that was totally unrelated to the headline, no mention at all of the dramatic decrease in Iraqi deaths. Concluding paragraph obviously intended to convey the hopelessness of the situation. Hmmm....

How about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? Boy, I really had to search for this one. I finally found it buried in an article that was headlined "Britain to pull 1,000 troops from Iraq." The article begins, and I quote, "Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Tuesday that he was slashing the remaining British contingent in Iraq by nearly 20 percent." It goes on to discuss how U.S. military officials are "concerned that the reduced British presence in the south could open security gaps along key supply and transit routes to Kuwait." Way down in the article, second paragraph from the end, it says, "The U.S. military toll for September was at least 65, the lowest since July, 2006..." So, let me see, Britain is slashing their troop levels, the U.S. is concerned about it, the "beleaguered Iraqi leader" says they will be able to pick up the slack, but the head of the Basra security committee said that the departure of British forces from that city "had a negative effect on security," and, oh, by the way, U.S. military deaths were the lowest since July, 2006. Hmmm...

This, boys and girls, is called "spin," and it's one reason why the circulation numbers of lots and lots of newspapers continue to plummet. Don't ever let anyone tell you that a newspaper's editorial bias doesn't affect how they report the news. It does.

A Pew Research paper published back in 2004 stated that only 7% of journalists in national publications, and only 12% of journalists in local publications, described themselves as politically conservative. 34% of national journalists, and 23% of local journalists, described themselves as liberals. The rest believed they were moderate. By contrast, 33% of the general public described themselves as conservatives, and only 20% as liberals. So, in case it wasn't already obvious by the way the news gets reported, the survey confirms that conservative Americans are seriously underrepresented in the media - particularly at the national level - and liberal Americans are overrepresented. If we were talking about racial composition rather than political viewpoint, this would be decried as an unacceptable situation that must be remedied, probably through government-mandated quotas.

More than 75% of both national and local journalists believe it is a bad thing for a news organization to have a "decidedly ideological point of view" in their news coverage, yet more than 40% of both groups said that journalists too often did let their ideological views show in their reporting. And here's a really interesting statistic: When asked whether they could think of a news organization that was especially liberal or especially conservative, two-thirds of the conservative journalists answered yes to both questions. When liberal journalists were asked the same thing, almost 80% of them could think of one that was especially conservative (Fox News got the top honor there), but only 25% of them could think of one that was especially liberal. So three-quarters of the liberal journalists couldn't think of a single news organization that was especially liberal!

This would tend to support the position Bernard Goldberg articulated in his excellent (and highly recommended by yours truly) 2003 book Bias - the liberals in the media honestly believe that they represent mainstream America. When they claim that they're not biased, they're not, in their own minds, lying. They really believe it's true. They tend to move in the same small circle of friends and acquaintances who all believe the same way they do, and they reinforce one another's world view. They're convinced that they're mainstream, and truly don't understand why the rest of America doesn't agree.

All I can say is thank God they don't have the stranglehold on news reporting that they had a generation ago. Today, the truth is there to be found, if you're willing to look for it. Thanks for listening.