Biased Coverage in Iraq

Biased Coverage in Iraq
Helle Dale
December 2, 2004

If you trust most media accounts fed to American viewers and readers, Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. There is no security throughout the country, and armed insurgents are springing up, sown like dragon's teeth by the offensive of the U.S. military forces. The scheduled elections are highly uncertain. Indeed, 100,000 Iraqis have been killed by U.S. forces. Iraqis have never had it so bad. It is a drumbeat with echoes of the way the American media reported the Vietnam War.

Those who have the opportunity to hear the accounts of Americans serving in Iraq often come away with a completely different impression. Many readers of this newspaper who have relatives and friends serving in Iraq know that they hear differently from them. This point was recently brought up by Ambassador Edward Rowney in a Council on Foreign Relations discussion with former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, who is an ardent critic of the war. Mr. Brezinski's response was to dismiss first-hand accounts as mere anecdotal evidence.

Yet even in the mainstream media, differing views do seep in. Consider a recent column by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, a paper that has consistently reported the bad news from Iraq. This is what Mr. Friedman wrote from Iraq. "Readers ask me when I will throw in the towel on Iraq." Impressed with the spirit and the commitment of the troops on the ground, Mr. Friedman writes, "I will be guided by the U.S. Army and Marine grunts on the ground. They see Iraq close up. Most of those you talk to are so uncynical — so convinced that we are doing good and doing right, even though they are unsure it will work." And the fact is that despite the unrelenting drumbeat of bad news, there is much good to be told as well, only you don't hear it as much. Agreement has so far been reached with Iraq's Russian and European debtors to forgive $33 billion of Iraq's debt, about a quarter of the total. Some 45,000 Iraqi police and 48,000 Iraqi army and National Guard troops have now been trained. $5 billion in U.S. aid alone has been disbursed, and oil revenue, which flows into Iraqi accounts via a U.S. government trust, reached $1.9 billion in October.

A weekly update of reconstruction projects in Iraq can be located on the Web site of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Much of this good work you will never find reported, precisely because no news is good news for much of the U.S. media. And the foreign media is even worse.

Admittedly the security situation is dire, but look at these figures. In October, the number of Iraqis killed was 775 from acts of war and murder; American troops suffered 63 casualties and 691 wounded. These are too high, but at a time of a major military offensive against insurgents, those numbers are not gigantic.

Or how about the constantly cited figure of 100,000 Iraqis killed by Americans since the war began, a statistic that is thrown about with total and irresponsible abandon by opponents of the war. That number, which should be disputed at every turn by those who care about the truth of what is going on in Iraq was derived from a controversial study by the British journal of medicine the Lancet. It is five to six times higher than the highest estimates from other sources of all Iraqi deaths, be they military or civilian. The Lancet study relied on reporting of deaths self-reported by 998 families from clusters of 33 households throughout Iraq, a very limited sample from which to generalize.

As the Financial Times reported on Nov. 19, even the Lancet study's authors are now having second thoughts. Iraq's Health Ministry estimates by comparison that all told, 3,853 Iraqis have been killed and 155,167 wounded.

The fact is that 40 percent of Iraqis say their country is better and 65 percent are optimistic about the future. Iraqis are intending to vote in the upcoming elections to the tune of 85 percent, and 45 percent currently support Prime Minster Iyad Allawi. Many are unhappy with the U.S. troops presence there, but at least 35 percent want the United States to stay.

We still have a rocky road ahead, beyond doubt, but these figures do not add up to a picture of unmitigated failure being painted by critics of the Bush administration.

Helle Dale is deputy director of the Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation

Tilting for the Children

Tilting for the Children
Suzanne Fields
December 2, 2004

My mom was a full-time mother and I was the envy of my classmates. Not just because she was there, but because she was there and she was fun. She might be baking a chocolate cake and she would let us eat the raw dough from the Mixmaster bowl. She listened to us recite the lines we had to memorize from "Romeo and Juliet" and play the nurse or Friar Lawrence.

In high school, everybody descended on my house after school to plan campaigns for class officers, plot class picnics or gossip about who was going out with whom. My father would breeze in to talk about the Redskins (more fun to talk about in those days) with the boys and to tell the girls how smart and pretty they were. I didn't realize how lucky I was at the time, it was just how things were supposed to be.

Once my father gave us a genuine Wurlitzer jukebox for the rec room. He showed us how to push a button in the back so it wouldn't require a nickel to play a Perry Como record. We learned to square dance to the music on the juke: "Dive for the oyster, dive. Dig for the clams, dig. Do-si-do and away we go." Corny it was, but kids are born with a taste for corn. (Every generation just thinks its corn is cool.)

Mary Eberstadt's new book, "Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes," brought all this to mind. The title is a mouthful and it raises a noisy controversy over the effects of modern feminism on child-rearing practices. For years, the idealized stay-at-home mom, with Daddy as the breadwinner, has been under siege and on the defensive, decried as the victim of "gender tyranny." The cover of "Home-Alone" would melt the heart of Scrooge, with a little boy clinging to the ankles of his mommy and daddy, armed with matching briefcases, heading out the door.

That's a metaphor for lots of children today and it's not necessarily all bad. It helps children recognize that parents have a life beyond the hearth. But for some children it's sad indeed, and it's the sad children that Mary Eberstadt's book is about - children who rarely have any fun with their parents, suffering the cries and whispers of loss without having a name to put on it. It's about the tilt of a culture that encourages the growth in the number of those children.

The emotional life of childhood when parents are absent from the during-the-day lives of their children is often empty, indeed. Although we've heard a lot about the pros and cons of day care for the youngest children, we haven't heard so much about what happens to teenagers deprived of parental supervision after school. These are the chapters that will spark debate. The teenage years are the last best chance to influence a child's character and values, and it's the most sensitive time to shape development, to enable children to see parents as models for their future.

"If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's is the music of abandonment," she writes with poignant documentation.

Coinciding with this lament is the documentation of what happens when vulnerable teenagers in empty houses hook up casually, and always hurtfully. Such teenagers are not rebelling against their parents so much as taking advantage of their parents' absence. You don't need the statistics - though they exist in abundance - to know that teenagers whose parents aren't around indulge in more sex (and acquire more sexually transmitted diseases), drugs, alcohol and cigarettes than teenagers supervised at home.

So what to do? Eberstadt does not offer prescriptions and she doesn't try to fit square parents into round holes. One size does not fit all. There's room in her scenarios for men and women who are better off divorced, for working parents who can't be home and whose children succeed despite all kinds of emotional obstacles. But she accumulates the evidence that requires us to question deeply the tilt of priorities that shortchange children.

No parent can participate in a child's life 24 hours a day. But we can encourage parents to be there for teenagers in bigger chunks of time, both formal and informal. Teenagers are enormously susceptible to rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior if a loving person is present to provide it.

"For a significant number of today's kids, life is worse in important ways than it was for their parents," writes Eberstadt. And, "many of us adults know it."

i'm lucky that my Mom was a stay-at-home Mom. i'm lucky that i am a stay-at-home Mom. usually, while our child is on vacation, our home is filled with his friends playing video games, watching movies, playing games, or, once in awhile, helping me bake up their snack of the day (usually cookies). i have great fun with these kids. i listen to the same music they do, watch the same movies, know the same "celebrities". i pay attention to what interests our child. and his friends.

i have a rule, though. visiting children must always have their parents' permission to be here, their parents must have our phone and address, and the children must call their parents upon arrival to our home and upon departure.

i was shocked, in the beginning, when quite a few of these children said, "oh, Mom doesn't care where i am. it's okay." no, it's not okay. how can a parent let their child out of the house (under twelve age group) and not know where they are or care about with whom their child is spending time? i don't get that. at all. not even a little bit.

the same with youth sport practices. parents drop off their children and go shopping. what? these children are in a park! a big park! and when practice is over, the supervisors/coaches of the sports practices leave. they don't stay behind to protect the "abandoned" children. i do, though. i wait with them until their uncaring and self-absorbed parent/s return. they gotta be former Kerry-supporters. *grin*

that's it, though. the parents are so involved in themselves, they leave the children to fend for themselves. the children aren't able to develop a relationship with their parents. "hi" and "bye" seem to be the depth of the relationships i've had the great misfortune of witnessing.

no wonder the youth of recent years has no idea what it right, wrong, or moral. if you can get away with it, it's cool. no limit on

It's News to Us

It's News to Us
By: Bill O'Reilly for BillOReilly.com
Thursday, Dec 02, 2004

The changing of the guard at NBC and CBS News is more a media event than a people event. Even though there is some sentimentality attached to the departures of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, few of us have emotion invested in them simply because our lives are so frenetic. Long gone are the days when guys like Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley had an honored place in millions of American homes. That time in America featured an early family dinner and a ritual of national news viewing. Talk about Jurassic Park!

Another factor that has eroded the power of TV news is the deep suspicion among many Americans that the press is not looking out for them. While there is some paranoia in this area, there is also some truth to the notion that what you get with TV news is not always "the way it is," to quote Cronkite.

Many of the news decision-makers today were children of the anti-war, anti-establishment 1960's. Their perceptions were formed in those free-wheeling, anti-war years and core liberal philosophies were ingrained. So, now, we have a bunch of baby boomer journalists imparting their view of life to a nation that, often, does not share the 60's sensibilty. Remember, survey's showed that about 80% of the media favored John Kerry for President. The divide between the press and the everyday folks is enormous.

There is no question that the daily headline service provided by the big three networks is valuable. But it is a random, often timid, reportage. The intense culture war in America is often ignored or presented in a one-sided manner. Even network news supporters would have to admit that the presentations are extremely politically correct. For example, the joke in the industry is that the only time you hear a pro-life point of view is when some nut blows up an abortion clinic.

Thus, traditional and conservative Americans often feel they are underserved by national news services which pander to the elite and see the world from a Manhattan or Georgetown point-of-view. Folks in Tupelo have figured out their values don't matter in Rockefeller Center.

So, the guard is changing, and the more traditional Fox News Channel is the chief beneficiary. That, of course, has caused enormous fear and loathing among the media establishment. In one of his last interviews before stepping down, Mr. Brokaw made it a point to say that the network news still dominates in the ratings. He pointed out that "Bill O'Reilly maybe gets 2-1/2 or 3 million viewers a night."

Well, my total audience last month doubled Brokaw's estimate, but that's not really the point. Fox News continues its dramatic rise as our competitors fall, because it makes room for the traditionalist point of view and provides provocative analysis that is lacking in the network operations.

In this age of spin, deception and defamation, honest analysis is a must, even if one disagrees with the analyst. Most Americans realize the danger this country is facing both inside and outside our borders. Confronting that danger in a straightforward way will attract an audience. Doing a politically correct dance no longer will.

And that's really the way it is.

Oil-for-Food Blackout

Oil-for-Food Blackout
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Tim Graham

The national media usually presents themselves as dedicated debunkers of every item of political pomposity, ready to milk the ratings out of exposing every sacred cow. But that has never been true of its coverage of the U.N., which represents for liberals the deeply idealistic notion of a harmonic convergence of governments, united to saving the world for humanitarian ends. Some news media may attempt to force the unfolding reality that the U.N. is deeply corrupt, but that would not include America’s liberal media elite.

In April, September and November, investigative reports revealed an increasingly massive scandal, involving billions of dollars (now estimated at over $20 billion), Saddam Hussein was able to steal from under the nose of the U.N. officials managing the Oil-for-Food program. This might seem like a big news story in an election year in which John Kerry’s stump speech constantly pounded on the need for greater multilateralism and greater American deference to the wishes of the U.N. bureaucracy. So how many stories did the Big Three networks air from January 1 to November 2? NBC was the leader, with three stories. ABC had one, on April 21, the day the U.N. announced its own internal probe into the scandal. CBS did not air one story.

Despite nine ongoing probes, the network watchdogs barked after anti-Bush angles. ABC, CBS, and NBC combined for more than 75 stories on George W. Bush's National Guard service, more than 50 stories on "skyrocketing" gasoline prices, and hundreds on prison abuse at Abu Ghraib. After liberal media stars denounced American allies as "the coalition of the bribed," where were they on the U.N.'s bribery scam?

Unfortunately, that same pattern continued after the election, even as Congress spoke out and held hearings. On November 30, CBS did its first story, a strange report which began with Dan Rather introducing the Oil-for-Food fiasco as an "alleged scandal." Is Dan trying to say that Saddam bilking the U.N. for billions should be seen as an acceptable method of international business?

Some news outlets, from the Wall Street Journal to Fox News, have taken the story more seriously and dug in deeply. But they have been dismissed by other journalists as partisan, eager to make trouble for the U.N. Shouldn’t so-called hard-bitten journalistic debunkers who revere the ideal of a functional U.N. be the most outraged by a corrupt bureaucracy that mocks the ideal?

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center in Alexandria, VA, and author of the book, "Pattern of Deception: The Media’s Role in the Clinton Presidency."



and there you have it.