As I’ve said before; the media coverage in our war against Islamofascism is in direct proportion to our success.
As long as the war raged, New York Times hacks like Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman, couldn’t stop their frothing diatribes against the military, George Bush, and the mission in Iraq.
The Fifth Column is already revising history, in the New York Times, naturally.
Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.
“The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it,” said Jane Arraf, a former Baghdad bureau chief for CNN who has remained in Iraq as a contract reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.
No. It didn’t produce the outcome they wanted, so they simply stopped covering it.
Now that we’re shifting battlefield focus to Afghanistan the media will follow, just to pick up where they left off with their tirades against the Iraq war.
Joseph Angotti, a former vice president of NBC News, said he could not recall any other time when all three major broadcast networks lacked correspondents in an active war zone that involved United States forces.
Except, of course, in Afghanistan, where about 30,000 Americans are stationed, and where until recently no American television network, broadcast or cable, maintained a full-time bureau.
At the same time that news organizations are trimming in Iraq, the television networks are trying to add newspeople in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with expectations that the Obama administration will focus on the conflict there.
Of course, the Iraq war has evolved and violence in the country has subsided. At the same time, President-elect Barack Obama and senior military strategists generally agree that tensions have risen in Afghanistan, leading to more violence and unrest.
In short, the story, certainly on television, is shifting to Afghanistan.
……ABC, CBS and NBC declined to speak on the record about their news coverage decisions. But representatives for the networks emphasized that they would continue to cover the war and said the staff adjustments reflected the evolution of the conflict in Iraq from a story primarily about violence to one about reconstruction and politics.
Don’t expect them to be as fastidious about the recontruction and evolving democratic political process as they were about bad-mouthing the war effort.
The staff cuts appear to be the latest evidence of budget pressures at the networks. And those pressures are not unique to television: many newspapers and magazines have also curtailed their presence in Baghdad. As a consequence, the war is gradually fading from television screens, newspapers and, some worry, the consciousness of the American public.
Of course, the picture they planted in the consciousness of the American public was not one of brave sacrifice and justified retaliation against the region of the world which produced the 9/11 atrocity. Instead, they did their level damndest to portray us in every horrid context they could muster.
……In the early months of the war, television images out of Iraq were abundant. “But clearly, viewers’ appetite for stories from Iraq waned when it turned from all-out battle into something equally important but more difficult to describe and cover,” Ms. Arraf said. She recalled hearing one of her TV editors say, “I don’t want to see the same old pictures of Soldiers kicking down doors.”
“You can imagine how much more tedious it would be to watch Soldiers running meetings on irrigation,” she said.
What the rag fails to mention is the real underlying reason as to why they’re losing interest; American victory doesn’t suit their agenda.
A picture of American Soldiers kicking in doors to nab bad guys sufficed as long as it could be perverted into “terrorizing innocent women and children”. And those gawd-awful meetings on the progress with Iraq reconstruction are such a a bore.
And the media wonders why we hate them.