bluesman,
Quote:
The media are fellow-travellers. I don't care if you don't believe it, but I see it day after day after day, and it is as plain as anything what's going on. It's no 'legende'; it's happening.
Whatever the administration can be blamed for (and the list is growing every day), whenever the good news DOES come forth, how much traction does it get? How much play does something like THIS story get?
Why, 'NONE' is the answer you're looking for, I believe, and why do you suppose THAT is? Because, instead of all us sheeple that don't know what's going on being sold on a 'legende', ala the German mythology of orogin of their misfortune, the truth is 180-out.
The media has its own paradigm, and it refuses to be shaken out of it. (And when I write of them as if they are a monolithic, single-minded bloc, I'd just like to point out right here and now that they dam' near ARE, as proven time and time and time again through studies and surveys and facts that cannot be dismissed anymore by the media's apologists.) And that paradigm is VIETNAM.
They are CONVINCED that every single time a uniform talks to them, it's nothing more than the Five O'Clock Follies, just like the Good Ole Days back in Saigon. (YOU know - the Glory Days, when they first felt their power; a war lost through political power and public opinion, led by - guess who?) Every briefing, every press conference, every news release; all lies from them Evil Uniformed Gang-Rapists. All officers are mendacious and evil; all enlisted are stupid and desperate to escape their poverty-ridden lives. The military is filled with sadistic knuckle-dragging troglodyte jungle-dwelling creatures, eager to murder and destroy.
They LONG for this war to BE Vietnam; they hope it'll end the same way, and for the same reason. And if it DOES end the same way, it WILL be for the same reason: a press corps hostile to the war's aims. Oh, and abetted by a chief executive that can't coherently explain why we should at least TRY to win.
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and i say even if that WERE true- which i do not believe- none of it would mean anything had the executive branch carried out its duties. it was not the media that set our troop levels at a minimally low level; it was not the media that told the administration to scrap carefully laid out plans and promote interagency wrangling; etc etc etc.
what the media DOES have an effect on is public determination/will, as you say; but again, was it the media that told us we'd be down to 30K troops by nov 2003? was it the media that said $50 billion for the war and a cakewalk thrown in? in short, false impressions on the war is not a province of the media alone.
in any case, i don't believe the media is a "conservative stalking horse", nor do i believe it is all part of some big liberal conspiracy. the media, as with all businesses, is out there for profit. as shek has pointed out, the media does not so much create bias, but follows them. the war is perceived by the public as going poorly (and by the original standards- ie our troops gone by 2004 and iraq a fully functional democracy- it is hard to say it is going well), and so the media portrays it poorly. that's what sells well.
but hey, if you wish to keep to your stereotype of them liberal traitorous newsie- a blanket statement just as ridiculous (if less patently offensive) as that of the knuckle-dragging military type, that's your call. too bad such a viewpoint doesn't get us an iota closer to winning the vital information war, though.