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In the only sociological study to date of the substantive content of media coverage during the first six weeks of the Iraq war, Andrew Lindner found that journalists embedded with American troops emphasized military successes more often than they covered the invasion’s consequences for Iraqi citizens.
“The embedded program proved to be a Pentagon victory because it kept reporters focused on the horrors facing the troops, not the horrors of the civilian war experience,” said Lindner. “The end result: a communications victory for an administration that hoped to build support for the war by depicting it as a successful mission with limited cost…”
“With the vast majority of embedded coverage citing U.S. military sources, as long as the soldiers stayed positive, the story stayed positive,” Lindner said…
While embedded reporters were most likely to tell the military’s story, and local consequences were well represented by Baghdad-stationed reporters, independent reporters produced the most balanced coverage depicting both sides of the story.
A PDF of the article is available here.
Or to put it more succinctly – wars kinda suck, so it makes good for politics to not show people how much.
I think WWII was missing some of that balance, too.
RBG
Isn’t this usually the reason for embedded journalists? To sell a war to the general public?
Google Video has a fascinating video that people should see, it starts of pretty hard and keeps going:
“ring of power”
http://video.google.com
“The embedded program proved to be a Pentagon victory because it kept reporters focused on the horrors facing the troops, not the horrors of the civilian war experience,”
I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of the US media’s audience was much more concerned with what was going well for our troops than what was happening to Iraqis. And still are I might add.
It is a simple human condition to vie for attention to ones side. Whole industries are built around such smokestacks. Complete cultures murder their only begotten child for the blood of their future offspring.
The media didn’t report things in the manner most likely to make the public hate the war and vote Democrat. This is clearly a failure of the media.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
I have to admit that my heart sank a bit to see Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in association with Bush’s Iraq.
Check out McCullough’s 1776 for an account of that xmas eve when Washington kicked those Hessians ass. It’s a great bit of history.
That was just E’s attempt to throw his bias into the story. As usual, it failed.
Actually, you’ve got to consider this thread a failure: The story was too complex for the hacks to reply to it. Further, all of the replies to the story are very good.
You’re in the hit count game, editors. This (rare) decent story didn’t do the job.
“Won the Journalism War” – What, with Bush “Approval Rating” at 20% ??? Another Republican said a long time ago: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” – somethine the FOOL IN THE OVAL OFFICE HASN’T LEARNED YET – DESPITE ALL HIS “DEGREES” FROM YALE AND HARVARD !!!
#11, Jim,
He doesn’t need to fool all the people all the time. He has made his profit from the war. What else could you want?