Posted on 10/19/2003 8:48:13 AM PDT by FairOpinion
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. government has launched a "good news" offensive in Iraq, and a couple of Baghdad street kids, peddlers of soda pop, have been recruited for the first wave of attack.
On a two-day visit, U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans said thousands of new businesses have sprung up here since the war, and gave an example of new entrepreneurship: two boys he spotted by the road selling soft drinks to Baghdad's parched drivers.
For the man who runs the Bank of Baghdad, however, those cola kids don't impress much. His own reading on new business is decidedly downbeat. "No one's applying for credit," an unhappy Mowafaq H. Mahmood said.
Who to believe? It's good news versus bad once again in an American war zone, and once more the media are caught in between - between a U.S. government that wants to accentuate the positive, and journalists' own duty not to eliminate the negative.
This time the American offensive is rolling out big guns, including President Bush himself, who says the media "filter" is distorting the truth of Iraq. "Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter. We're making good progress," Bush said last week.
Squads of Republican congressmen agree, as they troop through Baghdad on fast-paced tours to see what's going right in Iraq - electricity returning, schools repainted, water pumps repaired. One, Rep. George Nethercutt, went home to Washington state and complained that the U.S. press was missing the real story.
"The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable," he said. "It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."
Losing soldiers is the bad news, the news no American likes but the U.S. media won't ignore.
In 20 or more hit-and-run attacks daily, almost 100 American soldiers have been killed by the Iraqi resistance since Bush declared major combat over on May 1. An even greater number of Iraqis have died in mysterious suicide bombings terrorizing their cities.
In every modern American war, the government and the press have been at odds - over media "bias," over government secrecy and untruths, over the balance of the good and the bad.
In every war as well, the government has unleashed a flood of news releases promoting the U.S. Army's good deeds in an occupied countryside. In Iraq, the floodgates opened in May and have not closed: releases about GIs helping rebuild hospitals and playgrounds, restore water supplies and electricity.
"Iraqi orphans enjoy fun with soldiers," read one typical release.
But U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. George Krivo complains that the media focus too heavily on the simmering guerrilla war. Some soldiers are "frustrated because much of the incredible progress that is being made in the vast majority of the country seems to go un- or underreported," he said. Another colonel, James Otwell, protested that, for example, "no media at all covered the arrival of 100 new fire trucks in Baghdad."
Some of the loudest complaints focus on what American officials say is poor news coverage of the U.S. rehabilitation of more than 1,000 Iraqi schools.
Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said it was only by coming to Iraq that he learned of the program. "I was not told by the media in my country that thousands and hundreds of (Iraqi) children went back to school this week," he complained Oct. 6.
Concluded his delegation's leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., "Journalism schools teach that news means bad news."
A check showed, however, that television news shows and U.S. papers from coast to coast - including the senators' own hometown Washington Post - did report the reopening of Iraq's schools. Vivid color pictures of Otwell's arriving fire trucks, meanwhile, had been sent nationwide by a U.S. newsphoto network.
Beyond that, even such "positive" stories mask "negative" sides unseen by senators on tours closely guided by American occupation authorities. The schools, for example, need rehabilitation in large part because of the chaotic looting touched off by the U.S. military's entry into Baghdad in April. And many schools have not been rehabilitated, particularly in poorer neighborhoods and the south.
The good and the bad met on a bus this week where Commerce Secretary Evans briefly bade farewell to report-ers.
"You know," he told them, "the impression people get back home is very different from what's going on on the ground." His own presence showed that Iraq is safe, Evans said.
But just moments before, U.S. soldiers had delivered the bad news: They'd found a roadside bomb on the route. The bus would be diverted.
I think that fast-paced is further indicative of bias. It implies (to me, at least) that the "squads of (clumsy, thoughtless, militarist) republicans are kept moving fast so that they won't notice the problems."
As if ANYONE could miss the problems!
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