Talking Points Memo is alerting readers to a terribly distressing op-ed from yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The essay, written by Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), attempts to lay the blame for our problems in Iraq not on Bush, not on Rumsfeld, not even on Saddam loyalists — but on the media.
Marshall is a Democrat and a Vietnam combat veteran, but he couldn’t be more wrong about this.
“On Sept. 14, I flew from Baghdad to Kuwait with Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg from Dearborn, Mich. He was in a body bag,” Marshall wrote. “He’d been ambushed and killed that afternoon. Sitting in the cargo bay of a C 130E, I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in his death. News media reports about our progress in Iraq have been bleak since shortly after the president’s premature declaration of victory.”
Perhaps the reports have been bleak because our progress has been bleak? Besides, hundreds of our troops have been dying in Iraq, thousands more injured. They’re overworked and understaffed, struggling under intense and demanding circumstances. Iraqis target U.S. soldiers for attacks for many reasons. Tom Brokaw isn’t one of them.
Marshall went on to argue that the new media “are hurting our chances” of success by “dwelling upon the mistakes” and “weaken[ing] our national resolve.”
“We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media,” Rep. Marshall concluded. “I’m afraid it is killing our troops.”
As Josh at TPM said, “It really doesn’t get much lower than that.” I’d have to agree.
Media coverage of the war since the end of “major combat operations” on May 1 has been, as far as I’m concerned, fairly even handed. When our troops get ambushed, we hear about in the media. When Iraq sent representatives to the United Nations, beginning the process of bringing international respect and credibility to their nation, the media reported that too.
To argue that news coverage is “killing our troops” is absurd. It shamelessly pins blame where it doesn’t belong.
Unfortunately, Marshall isn’t the only one making his misguided argument. Rumsfeld has also been chastising the media for telling the American people about our troubles in Iraq.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin did a fine job debunking this whole approach in a column brought to my attention by a Carpetbagger regular I fondly call Madre.
“Islamists aren’t inspired to kill by stories in U.S. newspapers, nor would a good-news blitz stop them,” Rubin explained.
And as for the Marshall/Rumsfeld spin that popular opinion has been unduly driven by bad news reported by the media, Rubin explained, “Public support is being eroded not by the media but by prevarications of the Bush team.”
“The president’s poll numbers are declining because he didn’t level with the public about the aftermath of an Iraq war,” Rubin wrote. “The public is startled by his request for $87 billion (in addition to more than $50 billion so far) because it was never forewarned of such numbers. A year ago, White House budget director Mitch Daniels excoriated Lawrence Lindsay, Bush’s economic adviser, for suggesting that war with Iraq eventually might cost $100 billion to $200 billion, and Lindsay was soon fired. Daniels said that the costs would be between $50 billion and $60 billion.
“Bush economic advisor Glen Hubbard said the cost would be ‘very small,'” Rubin added “Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. And on and on.”
Exactly. Polls are showing that public support for the administration’s war efforts is sliding downward, but journalists aren’t to blame, the administration is.
After all the rhetoric about the nuclear threat that didn’t exist, the weapons of mass destruction that can’t be found, the non-existent ties to 9/11 and al Queda, the arguments that the war would be a “cakewalk” that can be done on the cheap, and the boasts that we don’t need international support, many Americans are understandably frustrated when our troops are getting shot at every day.