But there are other reasons that major press outlets tend to focus on the negative: the major media’s latent distrust of the Executive branch, distaste for American power, mistaken sense that war itself is the enemy and sad inability to know the difference between balance and bias, neutrality and anti-Americanism.
Just consider how The New York Times reacted to reporter Michael Gordon’s views about the troop surge into Iraq, which caught the attention of The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and ABC’s Terry Moran. Asked if victory was within reach, Gordon said, “As a purely personal view, I think it’s worth…one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we’ve never really tried to win. We’ve simply been managing our way to defeat. And I think that if it’s done right, I think that there is the chance to accomplish something.” In response, the Times publicly reprimanded Gordon, concluding that he “stepped over the line” and that his comments “were an aberration” and “went too far.”
Went too far? As Moran asked, is it now wrong for American reporters “to want the US to win the war in Iraq?” For a significant number of editors and producers at influential media outlets, the answer is coming into sharper focus every day. Thus, we are treated to a smorgasbord of bad news:
A study conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (and recapped by the Manhattan Institute) recently traced the steady downward spiral of Iraq reporting: In mid-2003, 51 percent of reports were negative; by late 2003, it was 71 percent; in 2004, it was 84 percent; in 2006, it was a stunning 94 percent.
In fact, according to the Media Research Center (MRC), for every positive story on the major networks about Iraq, there are four negative stories. Consider how CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” broadcasted footage of snipers hunting and killing American troops—footage that not only terrified stateside families and deflated stateside morale, but was delivered by enemies of the United States.
MRC also found that the number of casualties “was reported as a dry statistic, a morbid scorecard of what America had lost.” In other words, US casualty figures are seldom attached to any greater goal or good, and there is rarely an effort to put US losses in perspective by comparing them to losses in Vietnam, Korea or World War II.
The major press generally blames the ongoing war in Iraq on America’s failure to control chaos and looting in the immediate postwar period. But Iraq’s postwar war didn’t happen as some sort of spontaneous people’s revolt. It pays to recall that Charles Duelfer concluded in his postwar postmortem that Saddam “expected the war to evolve from traditional warfare to insurgency” and ordered his military to hide munitions caches throughout the country to support such an insurgency.
In 2005-2006, the press reported that US troops had perpetrated a “Haditha Massacre” without according the accused the same sense of objectivity and fairness reserved for stateside cop-killers—or even, ironically, captured terrorists: Recall the Orwellian decision by Reuters not to label as terrorists people who commit acts of terrorism.
Major print and television news outlets treated the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which concluded that terrorist activity had increased since the invasion, as if it had been handed down from Mount Sinai. Yet many of these same news outlets heaped scorn on the Bush administration for accepting the premise of the 2002 NIE, which concluded that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
