Tuesday, March 21, 2006
It's The Media's Fault!!!
Those nattering nabobs of negativity just won't cover positive stories out of Iraq.
All they do is focus on the bad - like the car bombs, the mass executions, the kidnappings, the beheadings, the torture, the IED's, the lack of water, electricity, and employment, etc.
But they never talk about the good things in Iraq - like, well I dunno, like how McDonald's and Pizza Hut have opened franchises in our permanent American military bases or how Halliburton has made a shit load of money over the last three years.
At least so say Preznit Bush, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham et al.
The problem, at least as conservatives see it, is that the media has turned the American people against the war by only showing the bloodshed and horrors.
Laura Ingraham, for instance, said this to David Gregory this morning on The Today Show:
Ingraham is of course insinuating that American reporters are too lazy to do some real reporting so they simply cover the horror stories instead - like the car bombs and the mass killings - and then go off and enjoy Happy Hour drinks at 2 PM.
Which is of course a load of shit. Iraq is so dangerous that any American or Western reporter traveling around the country risks death, kidnapping, beheading etc. every minute of every hour of every day they are there.
As Richard Engel noted in the Andrea Mitchell MSNBC report:
Including Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll.
So for Ingraham, Limbaugh et al. to insinuate that reporters are cowards for sending out Iraqi counterparts to do the reporting and mostly sticking to the Green Zone to file their stories is a bullshit argument. If the reporters treated the Iraq story the way they treated the Katrina story, they would be all over the place filming and reporting and also being kidnapped and killed.
That is the reality in Iraq.
And you'll notice all the conservatives complaining about the cowardice of the American media in the coverage of the Iraq war are doing so from the comfort of climate controlled studios in America.
So I've got an idea. How about Rush and Laura Ingraham do The Today Show for a week from a different city in Iraq. Start in Samarra, head to Mosul, then Fallujah, then Tikrit, and finish up in the Sadr City slum in Baghdad. No bodyguards, no weapons, no safety net - just the way kidnapped reporter Jill Carroll operated before she was captured by insurgents. Then, after Laura Ingraham's head is returned in a bowling bag and Rush's fat drug-addicted ass washes up on the banks of the Tigris, I think some of the whiny conservatives will realize how inane their criticism of the media's Iraq war coverage is.
All they do is focus on the bad - like the car bombs, the mass executions, the kidnappings, the beheadings, the torture, the IED's, the lack of water, electricity, and employment, etc.
But they never talk about the good things in Iraq - like, well I dunno, like how McDonald's and Pizza Hut have opened franchises in our permanent American military bases or how Halliburton has made a shit load of money over the last three years.
At least so say Preznit Bush, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham et al.
The problem, at least as conservatives see it, is that the media has turned the American people against the war by only showing the bloodshed and horrors.
Laura Ingraham, for instance, said this to David Gregory this morning on The Today Show:
“David, to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people,” Ingraham said, “Instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off."
Ingraham is of course insinuating that American reporters are too lazy to do some real reporting so they simply cover the horror stories instead - like the car bombs and the mass killings - and then go off and enjoy Happy Hour drinks at 2 PM.
Which is of course a load of shit. Iraq is so dangerous that any American or Western reporter traveling around the country risks death, kidnapping, beheading etc. every minute of every hour of every day they are there.
As Richard Engel noted in the Andrea Mitchell MSNBC report:
“There have been about 70 reporters killed over here while trying to go out and find the stories,” Engel says. “Another 40 of them have been taken hostage, three are still being detained by kidnappers.”
Including Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll.
So for Ingraham, Limbaugh et al. to insinuate that reporters are cowards for sending out Iraqi counterparts to do the reporting and mostly sticking to the Green Zone to file their stories is a bullshit argument. If the reporters treated the Iraq story the way they treated the Katrina story, they would be all over the place filming and reporting and also being kidnapped and killed.
That is the reality in Iraq.
And you'll notice all the conservatives complaining about the cowardice of the American media in the coverage of the Iraq war are doing so from the comfort of climate controlled studios in America.
So I've got an idea. How about Rush and Laura Ingraham do The Today Show for a week from a different city in Iraq. Start in Samarra, head to Mosul, then Fallujah, then Tikrit, and finish up in the Sadr City slum in Baghdad. No bodyguards, no weapons, no safety net - just the way kidnapped reporter Jill Carroll operated before she was captured by insurgents. Then, after Laura Ingraham's head is returned in a bowling bag and Rush's fat drug-addicted ass washes up on the banks of the Tigris, I think some of the whiny conservatives will realize how inane their criticism of the media's Iraq war coverage is.
