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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Why the Media Gets the War Wrong

To a question from CBS's Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation -- had his "overoptimistic" statements led Americans "to be more skeptical in this country about whether we ought to be in Iraq?" -- Vice President Dick ("in the last throes") Cheney replied:

"No. I think it has less to do with the statements we've made, which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality, than it does with the fact that there's a constant sort of perception, if you will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad. It's not all the work that went on that day in 15 other provinces in terms of making progress towards rebuilding Iraq."

This was Cheney's version of an ongoing litany of not-enough-good-news complaints from officials of the Bush administration who are already preparing their (media) stab-in-the-back/we-lost-the-war-at-home arguments to cover their Iraqi disaster. ("A few violent people can always grab headlines and can always kill innocent people" was the way Condoleezza Rice put it on Meet the Press Sunday.) Missing, they regularly claim, are those quiet, behind-the-scenes stories of what's really happening in Iraqi life. They imagines such missing "good news" reports as like those the U.S. Central Command regularly sends out in its weekly electronic newsletter with headlines like "Darkhorse Marines Deliver Wheelchair to Iraqi Girl" and "Bridge Reopens over Euphrates River."

In a sense, many Iraqis might go partway down this path with them. It's just that most of them would undoubtedly define the nature of those quiet stories about real life a bit differently than the Vice President and Secretary of State do. Last December, in an ABC poll (taken in conjunction with the BBC)which reflected a degree of hopefulness about the elections soon to take place and the possibility of a better future, only 46% of Iraqis felt the country was better off than under Saddam Hussein (and those figures are guaranteed to be even lower today), while two-thirds opposed the very presence of U.S. troops in the country. When it came to "conditions in the village/neighborhood where you live," they were asked to "rate" a number of topics "using very good, quite good, quite bad or very bad?"

On the following topics, the "total bad" tally (combining "quite bad" and "very bad") went like this:

Availability of jobs 58%
Supply of electricity 54%
Availability of clean water 42%
Availability of basic things you need for your household 39%
Security situation: 38%

When asked to order their priorities for the next year, Iraqis ranked "the security situation" at the top of their list -- think: Cheney's car bombs -- but the other high percentage "bads" reflected a daily reality that the administration doesn't even bother to acknowledge. Unlike spectacular acts of suicidal violence, assassinations, bombings, roadside explosions, American raids, insurgent attacks on police stations, or mutilation murders, this daily reality really doesn't get the headlines or much notice most of the time in anything we read or see either. Yes, there are the odd newspaper stories on the lack of electricity in Baghdad or the near collapse of the Iraqi oil industry, but mostly subjects like lack of potable water, lack of fuel, and certainly lack of jobs are, at best, on the news backburner -- and our understanding of the situation there suffers for that.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 12:23 AM