For years, leading conservative voices have described the media as the principal problem with the war in Iraq. Reporters, according to the many on the right, “refuse to pay more attention to repainted schoolhouses and instead focus on stuff like insurgent attacks, ethnic rivalries, collapsing infrastructure, ineffective government, and corrupt police forces.” Journalists, obviously, hate America.
With the far-right’s whining in mind, it was rather startling to see that National Review Editor Rich Lowry put his reflexive anti-media animus to rest, at least for this week.
[Lowry] explains: “Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war…. Conservatives need to realize that something is not dubious just because it’s reported by the New York Times. […]
“In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.”
At this point, I had to check the byline to make sure this was the same Rich Lowry that wrote a 2005 cover story titled “We’re Winning.” Fortunately, they are one in the same. Looking back at that article, Lowry wrote, “It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq. Even as there has been a steady diet of bad news about Iraq in the media over the last year, even as some hawks have bailed on the war in despair, even as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has become everyone’s whipping boy, the U.S. military has been regaining the strategic upper hand.”
That, of course, was 19 months ago. The December 2006 Lowry can’t help but notice at least some of reality.
What about the painted schoolhouses?
Lowry apparently knows better.
The “good news” that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war. An old conservative chestnut has it that only four of Iraq’s 18 provinces are beset by violence. True, but those provinces include 40 percent of the population, as well as the capital city, where the battle over the country’s future is being waged.
A breakthrough for the right? Will National Review start to connect with the reality-based community? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here’s NR’s Stanley Kurtz today:
Conservative distrust of the media’s very real bias has inclined us to dismiss reports about problems in Iraq that are real.
In the end, I think the media bears fundamental responsibility for this. Had they been less biased — had they reported acts of heroism and the many good things we have done in Iraq — I think conservatives would actually have taken their reporting of the problems in Iraq more seriously. In effect, the media’s consistent liberal bias discredits even its valid reports.
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this one. The media reported the truth … but the right hates the media … so the right rejected the truth … and it’s the media’s fault conservatives were wrong about the war.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.