The Problem with Good News Republicans

I am continually dismayed by the attempt of Republican rank-and-file to turn the news from Iraq into an indictment of the media. They claim that the news from Iraq doesn't represent the real progress ("good news") that is being made in the country. They think that a focus on bad news is a plot by the liberal media to undermine the moral cohesion of the US re: the war in Iraq.

This is ass backwards. The peripheral "good news" we get from Iraq doesn't reflect the major trend lines in the country. A new school (etc.) doesn't have any major impact on the revival of Iraq from its status as a failed state (in any time periods that matter). Security and critical infrastructure do (this should not be in dispute). The news we get is focused primarily on security and it is bad. It therefore reflects what we need to know about the country.

An attack on the media in this will likely perpetuate the distraction of the US from those factors that matter in Iraq. It clouds our ability to process factual information (since all bad news is now suspect). This hurts our ability to succeed because it creates a group of people that are non-responsive to criticism that may improve efforts in Iraq.

Ultimately, it divides us into non-cooperative centers of gravity. This will spill-over into areas beyond the war and may over the longer term make the US impossible to govern.

Disclosure: I was a Republican but I am now non-aligned (or more accurately: a proud member of the Pragmatic Party).

Comments

[b]

@Disclosure - We have all sinned in our youth, you are forgiven.

[Valdis]

It's that Macintosh you just bought -- it is making you "think different"! ;-)

[jamie]

This could be part - amongst other things - of your "controlled chaos" exit strategy. After all, it's politically necessary to decalre victory before leaving and so in current circumstances it's necessary to try and discredit those media which arent with that programme. Control the perceptions first and the reality doesn't matter.

[Mark]

I find claims of media bias pretty funny because everyone claims it's biased against them. That being said, "If it bleads, it leads" doesn't seem like a very representative way to report the news. I think at least part of the problem here is that we all know people serving in Iraq, and the story they tell is wildly divergent from what we see on the news. They don't downplay the dangers or the bad things, but they seem to have lots of stories of progress. And not just "building schools." I guess you could say that these are anecdotal and not representative of the trends, but how is the media being more representative by reporting their anecdotes?