So Who You Gonna Believe?

Why do I believe that the MSM isn’t reporting the actual story in Iraq. How about this story?

A Newsday reporter, writing under a Washington byline and supplementing his story with wire reports says that the southern Iraqi city of Basra is “in near total chaos both politically and militarily”.

On the other hand, Michael Yon, who has actually reported from Basra says that the city isn’t in chaos. Alternately, you could believe the reporter from the UK’s Telegraph, who reported just three days ago this contradictory news.

In the past few weeks there has been a tangible improvement in the security there, particularly since British troops vacated their last outpost in Basra’s city centre at the end of August. Crime in Basra is down 70 per cent, and rocket and mortar attacks against British forces – which were running at more than 90 a day in the summer – have been reduced almost to zero – as Mr Brown experienced for himself this week.

Indeed, wherever one looks in the British sector, there are grounds to believe that, far from degenerating into all-out civil war, the Iraqis are finally coming to terms with their post-Saddam condition and are starting to acquire the confidence and the institutions necessary for running their affairs.

So, on one hand, you get a story from the Telegraph and Michael Yon that say things in Basra are actually improving and one story that says it’s descending into rampant chaos. Unfortunately, it’s the latter story that Americans will see and it’s stories like this – irresponsible and incorrect – that have been instrumental in shaping public opinion on Iraq.

It’s no surprise that opinion runs the way it does about Iraq. Public opinion used to hold that the Earth was flat, not because it was but because the folks telling the stories told them over and over and over again that it was. Repeated tales have a tendency, as Josef Stalin famously noted, of being seen as true no matter if they are or not. So far, the oft-repeated tale is that our being in Iraq is, and always has been, a disater. That, folks, is simply not true. It never has been and anyone who wants to tell you otherwise is either telling you a bald-faced lie or is too lazy to look up the facts for themselves before they shared their ignorance with you.

Newsday ought to know better. It’s job is to tell us the facts and it failed. It’s up to you to decide whether that failure was on purpose or out of laziness.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media., The Long War Here At Home