Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Media bias against our boys...

Well duh..

From Blogs For Bush:

This was sent to me by Barbara Ledeen of the Senate Republican Conference:

So I asked my intern to do a little research today because yesterday's WashPost outlook section was just so over-the-top in its anti-American soldier articles. I asked him to check how many article/editorials the Post did regarding the two soldiers who were grotesquely tortured, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23 of Houston Texas and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore.
There are 7 news articles in all. 2 or 3 of the articles are actually amalgamations of Iraq-related news stories. There are no editorials. One of the articles actually groups the kidnapping of the 2 soldiers together with a story about US soldiers charged with murdering Iraqis. When I put in a search for the names of the 2 soldiers plus the word "torture" nothing came up. The last of the 7 was published on 6/28/06.


I'm sure you'll be gratified to know that when I typed in the word "Haditha" the search turned up 149 Washington Post hits, including editorials and news items. Since June 19th (the day after the first news story re: the 2 soldiers appeared), there have been 12 items published in WaPo on Haditha, compared to 7 on the soldiers.

When I typed in "Abu Ghraib" the search engine stalled because the search would've returned more than 1000 documents.

It isn't a matter of not wanting bad news to be published - but it is a matter of the bad news being endlessly highlighted, while news which might make Americans feel good about our war effort, or outraged at enemy action, is downplayed. This is what we mean by "media bias" - not a failure to tell the truth so much as a failure to tell the whole truth.