Getting Out Of The Bunker
More of this please.
New York Times – Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year.
“Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?” the anonymous polemic asks, in part. “Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?”
“Of course we didn’t know!” the message concludes. “Our media doesn’t tell us!”
Ms. Goudreau’s newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these assertions and to put them into context. Like many other journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.
Ms. Goudreau’s query prompted an unusual discussion last month in New York at a regular meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press. Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the daily death tolls.
“The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we’re making progress in Iraq,” Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question.
“It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is such a dangerous place,” she said. “But there’s a perception that we’re not telling the whole story.”
I’m glad that their having this discussion, but the “its to dangerous to leave the bunker [read: hotel - ed.]” excuse is bunk. Covering good news like the rebuilding of schools and infrastructure and the re-establishment of embassies (I hadn’t even heard that one) isn’t any more dangerous than covering IED attacks and convoy ambushes.
The fact that the media isn’t covering the good news is a combination of a “if it bleeds it leads” approach to reporting and a pervasive anti-war bias. Because they could be covering the good news, if they really wanted to.
WOOF said, Iraq remains extremely dangerous. a land of random violence and little law.
This story was about the bad news dominating and none of the good news getting told. Thank you for once again proving the point. You want to prove it a fourth time WOOF?
I suspect that you will,…it seems you can’t help yourself.
Wasn’t the Egyptian Ambassador ambushed a few weeks ago and the Egyptians consequently pulled out of Iraq?
How many Iraqi Ministers have been killed in the last month?
Steven Vincent a reporter for the CS Monitor was killed last week and what 20 American troops?
Americans are not stolling out of the Green Zone to buy ice cream and visit the local schools.
Why do you believe this 47 embassies story?
Where are these embassies? Attribute the claims please?
30 days, 2,368 attacks.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2004/09/28/international/29ATTACK-GRAPH.html
Need I remind people that we are at war, and when at war, PEOPLE DIE. If these people were apposed to dying for the cause, they shoudn’t have signed up in the first place.
That’s another good reminder. Although I feel bad for all the soldiers who died and their families, there was no draft for this war, so every one of these men and women consientiously signed up for the military knowing the chances of there being a war.
WOOF:
He was killed in Basra, and not by terrorists. My understanding is that he “stepped over the line” in the local culture. This could have happened anywhere in Arabia and while brutal is not prohibitive of security risks unique to Iraq.
The green zone is in Baghdad. I suppose its not lost on you that the borders of Baghdad don’t encompass the entire country. If you look at the pattern of attacks, most of them are concentrated in the Sunni provinces and in Baghdad. Baghdad is a high-value target for the insurgency. If they lose the capacity to inflict terror on Baghdad their cause is lost.
I am numbed to this argument. Before the war started I heard of how we were going to loose 10’s of thousands in the first wave. If there was less of the parroting of ONLY this type of news the Terrorist wouldn’t bother to try so hard… Terrorism only works if people hear about it… 24 hours a day… 7 days a week… 365…. You get the idea.
Likwid:
I hope that I wasn’t too subtle: “WOOF said, 30 days, 2,368 attacks.” That was October, 2004.
So not only did he feel the need to counter it with bitter rhetoric, he fished up data that are nearly a year old to support it.
WOOF said, 30 days, 2,368 attacks.
You prove the very reason for the story WOOF. It appears as though you are afraid of the good news and feel the need to counter it with bad.
Perspective Bowen would let you see the parallels of The Great Patriotic War fought by the Russians and Iraq.
Foreign troops on a nations soil incite resistance. We are going to be engaged in conflict as long as we are in Iraq.
The Gulag Archipelago is the story of Russian collaboraters.
Iraq remains extremely dangerous. a land of random violence and little law.
US troop deaths by month 2005
8-2005 55 as of 8/16
7-2005 54
6-2005 78
5-2005 80
4-2005 52
3-2005 36
2-2005 58
1-2005 107
http://icasualties.org/oif/
These numbers do not mention the Iraqi Police ,Soldiers and civilians killed or wounded.
No Seth, the Germans were the occupying force.
We are still in charge.
We are still the occupying force.
2Hotel9 I refer to
Mr Bowen:
These numbers sound awfully high. Got a reference? Not trying to pick a fight, just curious. I can’t imagine any country sustaining the loss of 8,000,000 men in a single campaign and still have be an effective fighting force.
The Gulag Archpelago is the story of Lenin and then Stalin crushing the people of Russia, and in turn the vassal state, who dared to want something other than communism. It is sitting on a shelf 24 inches to my right as I type. Go pedal your crap to someone who might buy it.
Carrick, the casualties inflicted by the Germans in the opening phase of Barbarossa were the result of a scorched earth policy taken to the Nth degree. Towns and villages were wiped from the face of the earth without allowing one single person, not child,woman, or elderly, to surrender. The Russians counterstroke was just as vicious. All people found alive in the occupied quadrants were marched off to camps in the east, or killed outright. Anyone in the path of either army were considered enemies by both sides. It was not called the death of the Ukraine for nothing.
&heellip; Well of course the majority of Americans think we’re going to lose. All they ever see in the news are the stories about death and destruction. And when they’re not reading about death and destruction they’re reading about stupid polls, misleading polls like the one described above. &heellip;
I’ve gone and chuckled myself to tears!!! LOL… ROTFL!
Perspective.
During Operation Barbarossa, Russia lost 4,500,000 dead or wounded and 3,800,000 captured opposing the Nazi attack. Of the 3,800,000 captured, 2,800,000 died of malnutrition and exposure within the next year.
Between 1941 and 1945 America suffered 300,000 casulties. I would consider the loss of ten times that many a cheap price to pay to end the threat of Islamofascist terrorism.
It’s all about perspective, but we’re talking about Leftard reaction here. Leftards wouldn’t recognize perspective if it walked up and bit Cindy Sheehan on the ass.
Very true! They were considered”contaminated” by contact with the west. Though that contact was in the form of torture and starvation at the hands of the Nazis. Why did the Great Stalin do this? Because the nazis recruited guards and troops from these prisoners. About .10% of them took the deal. All others were punished for this crime. And the fact it was easier than feeding and relocating them back to their homes.
So much for the “it’s too dangerous to get the good news in Iraq” theory or “it’s too difficult to figure out how much electricity they have” theory….
While Editors Ponder…
The New York Times ran an article on August 15, 2005 that was an eye opening discourse into the soul of the print media. The article, “Editors Ponder how to Present a Broad Picture of Iraq”, was spurred by an anonymous email that has been making the rounds since January 2005. The email was basically a list of many of the accomplishments that had taken place in post Saddam Iraq. A number of editors of major newspapers, all Associated Press members, had concerns that they where “not telling the whole story” about Iraq.
Mike Silverman, managing editor of the Associated Press, lamented the fact that “explosions and shootings and fatalities and injuries on some days seem to dominate the news.” Silverman cited the dangers in Iraq as one of the reasons reporters were not getting more of the good things. Kathleen Carroll, the AP’s Executive Editor, actually said that “it was much easier to add up the number of dead than to determine how many hospitals received power on a particular day or how many schools were built.” Silverman than threw out the typical media excuse — the positives listed in the email were actually in various AP stories but they were buried in the articles.
Well here’s a news flash for the editors cited in the article. The email that started the ball rolling was actually excerpts from an article published on the Internet on January 30, 2005. The article, “Accentuating the Negative”, was published on OpinionEditorials.com. How did I get all of this information about the original article? Easy — I wrote it.
Yes, the major print media was thrown into fits of “healthy discussion” by a woman who lives in Guyton, GA. A southern belle, wife, mother and grandmother that works full time as a Registered Nurse. A writer that has no degree in journalism but writes op-ed pieces for free (but would not mind getting paid). A woman who loves to write and has book number 2 in production with a publisher. I am just someone that seeks out the facts and doesn’t rely on what someone tells me. Someone that can form an opinion all by their little self. I put my critical thinking skills developed through years of nursing to work.
Believe it or not, a dreaded “FReeper” and member of the Pajamahadeen knows more about the situation in Iraq than all of the high paid, high powered editors that rule what we read every day. I have no connections, no anonymous sources. Ramsey Clark did not have to set up interviews for me. I do not have an account at Kinko’s or access to forged memo templates. No one got “outed” in my attempt to uncover the truth. Lives were not placed in jeopardy. Not one single animal was harmed in my quest for information. No one was forced to wear panties on their head or participate in naked pyramids. Heck, I didn’t even have to give money to “the other side” in Fallujah to get the low-down.
In an ironic twist, a follow-up article, “Ignoring the Positive”, was published on opinioneditorials.com the very same day. I did not have to be stationed in Baghdad or embedded with troops in Fallujah to get my information. No one was firing RPG’s at me. The only injury I sustained was a paper cut while printing out my rough draft of the article. The information for both articles came the War on Terror section of the Department of Defense website – information that anyone with Internet access can get any time of the day. Guess that blows Mr. Silverman’s excuse out of the water.
Am I surprised that the print media executives were clueless about the reconstruction facts in Iraq? Not hardly. Was the information more difficult to obtain than tallying up the dead and injured in Iraq? Uh, no. Any one with any amount of common sense knows the truth. Things are not all peaches and cream in Iraq but they certainly are not all black as the media would have us believe. So the next time one of the media pundits laments the difficulty obtaining positive information from Iraq, consider the source. The only difficulty the media has is setting aside their hatred of President Bush long enough to do their job. And they wonder why the newspaper circulation numbers are down across the board? Guess it’s easier to tally up the numbers than find out the truth.
http://www.opinioneditorials.com/freedomwriters/rboyd_20050816.html
In 2002 Illinois had 106,211 deaths.
World wide, AIDS (a disease you can avoid by not having sex) will likely kill…
PERSPECTIVE!!!
If you were to hear about the successes more than the problems, the number of US Military Deaths in Iraq (while regrettable, horrible, and tragic) might seem less futile!
Yeah WOOFIEPOO, the way our presence in Germany, Japan, the Philipines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Midway Islands, American Samoa, Virgin Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Palua, Guam, England, Kuwait, Turkey, South Korea, and every damned elsewhere we’ve ever occupied has led to armed insurgency.
Or not.
Next you’ll be telling me that armed insurgency and geurilla warfare is always successful, despite it’s 90% plus failure rate throughout history.
Asshelmet.
Carrick, my source is The Illustrated History Of WWII, by John Ray, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, section “The Russian Campaign, 1941-42″, chapter “‘Barbarossa’: The Attack”, page 95, first paragraph.
According to Wikipedia, not only did the Soviets have 4.5 million casulties of all types, (POW losses are not mentioned), they continued re-inforcing at such a rate that by the end of 1941 they faced the Germans with a 4 million man army.
Estimates of total Soviet military losses for the entire war are between 8.5 and 15 million, 20 million is the generally accepted estimate for total Soviet civilian losses.
Now that’s some perspective, but I doubt Leftards will be able to recognize it.
And exactly in what parts of Iraq are these casualties heaviest? Shot yourself in the foot with that map once, why not do it again.
Journalists have chosen this life, why are they hiding. Martyrs for the cause of truth. Whats the matter, got no balls? As for the embassies, notice who is not being fucked with. Very telling.
WOOF, re: embassies in Iraq. Here’s a list in no particular order:
United States, United Kingdom, Norway, China, Egypt, Russia, Switzerland, Syria, France, Bangladesh, India, Australia, Denmark, Indonesia, Chezch Republic, Philipines, Romania, Oman, Malaysia, Finland, Greece, Bahrain, Afganistan, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Iran, Slovakia, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia
I count that as 38. There are very probably others, but there is actually no single good list of embassies so it’s more than a trivial 10 minute Google research project (I’ve already spent more than 30 minutes on it, and am unwilling to spend any more).
WOOF:
Utter horseshit. In Baghdad and in four Sunni-dominated provinces and of Iraq, those where the former Ba’athists thugs that you so idolize reside, this statement is true. And it is precisely because of these butcherers and their blatant disregard for their own people that this lawlessness is present in those provinces.
The fact that you are claiming that that similar conditions exist in other provinces in Iraq simply demonstrates that you have no f**king idea what you are talking about.
Remember I am talking about Iraq for Iraqis, not the experience of foreign occupiers. However, it is true that the attack rate on even US soldiers and other coalition members outside of those four provinces is very low, a fact you continue to willfully ignore.
I think it’s time for you to put down the party koolaid and get a clue.
From that great NYTimes graphic,[*] and I quote: “Most attacks were in areas populated by Sunni Muslims.”
Quote from me: “. If you look at the pattern of attacks, most of them are concentrated in the Sunni provinces and in Baghdad.”
QED.
[*] Unfortunately your graphic is from October, 2004, so it likely does not reflect the current pattern of activity. Did you know this? If so you were being very misleading.
Come on WOOF. I know you to be more intellectually honest than this. The Russians were there to be an occupying force. We aren’t. We have turned over sovereignty and they are making their own government. Was the USSR interested in allowing the people to make their own government????
Apples and Earth Worms…