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Good News Does “Not Necessarily” Need to be Reported
The media template: good news out of Iraq does “not necessarily” need to be reported. Bad news, of course, does.
Here is an amazing exchange between Howard Kurtz of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and Robin Wright of the Washington Post.
After stating that the media has pounced on the bad news, Kurtz wonders why the MSM has ignored the last several months of good news. Kurtz asked, “Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?”
Not necessarily. The fact is we’re at the beginning of a trend — and it’s not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.
There are combat deaths. There are sectarian deaths. And there are the deaths of criminal — from criminal acts. There are also a lot of numbers that the U.S. frankly is not counting. For example, in southern Iraq, there is Shiite upon Shiite violence, which is not sectarian in the Shiite versus Sunni. And the U.S. also doesn’t have much of a capability in the south.
So the numbers themselves are tricky.
Noel Sheppard from Newsbusters hammers this logic of the illogical:
Wow. Numbers shouldn’t be reported because they’re “tricky,” “at the beginning of a trend,” and there’s “enormous dispute over how to count” them?
No such moral conundrum existed last month when media predicted a looming recession after the Labor Department announced a surprising decline in non-farm payrolls that ended up being revised up four weeks later to show an increase.
And, in the middle of a three and a half-year bull run in stocks, such “journalists” have no quandary predicting a bear market every time the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls a few hundred points.
Yet, when good news regarding military casualties comes from the Defense Department, these same people show uncharacteristic restraint in not wanting to report what could end up being an a anomaly.
Isn’t that special?
Special? No.
Normal? Yes. Especially, as Amy Proctor points out, for CNN. In this report CNN correspondents, including Army (RET) Colonel Douglas MacGregor and Jim Clancy, explain away declining fatality rates with a sour dose of negativity. As Amy says, “CNN couldn’t find the sun even without a cloud in the sky.”