Perception
This is Steven Petrick Posting.
One of the problems we deal with in an open society is that it is far too easy for the media to tell us what is wrong with ourselves, and reinforce the image of failure, than it is for the media to give us an idea of what our opposition is dealing with.
Thus the media can easily find a U.S. soldier to interview for his opinions of how things are going.
But the media cannot find an Afghan insurgent who can tell them about the horror of seeing the other 15 members of his Taliban raiding force that were killed by the Apache gunship, or the Saudi National who answered the call to Jihad only to find himself lobbing bombs into market stalls to kill fellow Muslims because it was too difficult to attack the Americans.
The result is that the U.S. Media looks for "bad news", because "bad news sells". It has no interest in positive stories because those do not sell. So the news that generally does make it to the TV screens or the front page of the newspapers out of Iraq and Afghanistan is almost universally bad. You can go weeks at a time without a headline from those areas, but let there be something that can be seen as a negative and it will not only be on the front page but above the fold. The result is that every time you hear about Iraq or Afghanistan the association you will be making is "bad news", and bad news means defeat.
The converse is that for the Taliban and Al Qaida, what we get is their propaganda line. They do not send interviews to Al Jazeera (at which point it will be picked up by Western News Outlets) about Taliban Leader X deciding to go over to the government, or that Al Qaida Leader Y's attempt to take over a village ended with half the men he took with him killed, wounded, or captured. Al Qaida and the Taliban largely get to trumpet success. And since the media repeats their claims usually without any "due diligence" this increases the image of failure in Western thought processes in the war on terror.
To a great extent the West relies on a free press to keep it informed, but this reliance depends on that press to create an honest image of what is going on. Truth to tell, the press has never been honest (you can review the way the print media in the last two centuries largely defamed the politicians of the opposing party depending on the editor's own political leanings for example). By its insular nature, belief in its own infallibility in how it reports the news, and the short-sighted nature of its reporting, our modern media does a dis-service to all of us that will be paid for by future generations.
One of the problems we deal with in an open society is that it is far too easy for the media to tell us what is wrong with ourselves, and reinforce the image of failure, than it is for the media to give us an idea of what our opposition is dealing with.
Thus the media can easily find a U.S. soldier to interview for his opinions of how things are going.
But the media cannot find an Afghan insurgent who can tell them about the horror of seeing the other 15 members of his Taliban raiding force that were killed by the Apache gunship, or the Saudi National who answered the call to Jihad only to find himself lobbing bombs into market stalls to kill fellow Muslims because it was too difficult to attack the Americans.
The result is that the U.S. Media looks for "bad news", because "bad news sells". It has no interest in positive stories because those do not sell. So the news that generally does make it to the TV screens or the front page of the newspapers out of Iraq and Afghanistan is almost universally bad. You can go weeks at a time without a headline from those areas, but let there be something that can be seen as a negative and it will not only be on the front page but above the fold. The result is that every time you hear about Iraq or Afghanistan the association you will be making is "bad news", and bad news means defeat.
The converse is that for the Taliban and Al Qaida, what we get is their propaganda line. They do not send interviews to Al Jazeera (at which point it will be picked up by Western News Outlets) about Taliban Leader X deciding to go over to the government, or that Al Qaida Leader Y's attempt to take over a village ended with half the men he took with him killed, wounded, or captured. Al Qaida and the Taliban largely get to trumpet success. And since the media repeats their claims usually without any "due diligence" this increases the image of failure in Western thought processes in the war on terror.
To a great extent the West relies on a free press to keep it informed, but this reliance depends on that press to create an honest image of what is going on. Truth to tell, the press has never been honest (you can review the way the print media in the last two centuries largely defamed the politicians of the opposing party depending on the editor's own political leanings for example). By its insular nature, belief in its own infallibility in how it reports the news, and the short-sighted nature of its reporting, our modern media does a dis-service to all of us that will be paid for by future generations.
posted by Federation Commander at 1:36 PM
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