{"id":6932,"date":"2006-03-23T11:14:19","date_gmt":"2006-03-23T16:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6932"},"modified":"2006-03-23T11:14:19","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T16:14:19","slug":"bush-vs-the-media-vs-the-state-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-vs-the-media-vs-the-state-department\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush vs. the media vs. the State Department"},"content":{"rendered":"

The White House and its allies have decided that they need to push back against the media is on Iraq. Over the weekend, Dick Cheney said<\/a>, “There is a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what’s newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad.” Donald Rumsfeld added<\/a>, “Fortunately, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on Web sites or the latest sensational attack.” At his president conference this week, Bush didn’t note the bad news in Iraq, he noted “the bad news on television<\/a>.” Yesterday, a questioner at a Bush event insisted that “our major media networks don’t want to portray the good<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

On the other hand, we have people like NBC correspondent Richard Engel, who, earlier this week, said the situation on the ground “is actually worse<\/a> than the images we project on television.”<\/p>\n

Who’s right? By way of my friend Knob Boy<\/a>, the Chicago Tribune’s Cam Simpson noted<\/a> that Bush’s State Department isn’t sticking to the optimistic, only-highlight-the-positive script.<\/p>\n

Repeated suggestions by the White House and friendly commentators that the news media’s selective displays of terrorist attacks in Iraq are warping American public opinion seem to belie several unclassified assessments of the situation produced by the U.S. government itself.<\/p>\n

In fact, just two weeks ago the Bush administration publicly released a detailed report stating that “even a highly selective” inventory of the terrorist attacks inside Iraq “could scarcely reflect the broad dimension of the violence” there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Simpson was referring to the State Department’s “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” which includes a section on Iraq — and paints as bleak a picture as anything Americans will see on CNN. In fact, according to the report, the media isn’t exaggerating anything. As Simpson put it:<\/p>\n

In several important respects, this report contradicts the thesis of the current White House public relations campaign on Iraq — to convince Americans that the “reality” in Iraq is far better than the constant stream of bad news they see on their televisions every night.<\/p>\n

If anything, the State Department’s candid assessments would seem to indicate that things might be far worse than the press is currently able to report.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Time for a pushback against Bush’s State Department?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The White House and its allies have decided that they need to push back against the media is on Iraq. Over the weekend, Dick Cheney said, “There is a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what’s newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad.” Donald Rumsfeld added, “Fortunately, history is not made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}