California Conservative

That’s a deal, Bob. We’ll just blame the media for not getting the stories out accurately. Here’s how Schieffer closed his ‘Face The Nation’ program:

CBS “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer lashed out at the U.S. military on Sunday, saying top generals need to “stop blaming the media” for negative coverage of the Iraq war. Closing his broadcast Sunday with a commentary on reports that Iraq has descended into civil war, Schieffer urged: “What must stop is the ongoing government effort to sugar coat [the lack of progress in Iraq], trying to blame it on the media or saying it’s all going very, very well, as our top general Peter Pace did last week.”

The reality is Mr. Schieffer’s colleagues in the Agenda Media haven’t gotten much right about the supposed Iraqi civil war. The truth is that Ralph Peters exposed their failings for all the world to see. The truth is that Jack Kelly exposes them in his Sunday column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, aptly titled “All Bad News, All the Time”. For Schieffer to accuse Pete Pace of sugarcoating what’s going on in Iraq is shameful.

If he wants to accuse Gen. Pace of sugarcoating what’s happening in Iraq, it might serve him well to also attack the media’s willing accomplices who misrepresent what’s actually happening in Iraq.

Here’s another example of the media’s not telling us the truth about the military:

“Much of the reporting has exaggerated the situation,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday. “The number of attacks on mosques had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated. The behavior of the Iraqi security forces had been mischaracterized.” For instance, The Washington Post reported on Feb. 25 that 120 Sunni mosques had been attacked in retaliation for the destruction of the Golden Mosque, holy to the Shiites. In a March 3 news conference, Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said:
“We can confirm attacks on about 30 mosques around the country, with less than 10 of those mosques moderately damaged, and only two or three severely damaged. We visited eight mosques (in Baghdad) that were reportedly damaged. We found one broken window in those eight mosques.”

This is breathtakingly awful reporting. In fact, it’s a stretch to call it reporting. It’s more like fiction because it’s got nothing to do with factual things. And this is just one thing that I can cite. Earlier I mentioned Ralph Peters’ reporting. There’s no better example of the media getting things wrong than Col. Peters’ reporting. His mocking them saying:

“I’m trying. I’ve been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I’m looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can’t find it. Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view’s clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn’t give me the right skills. And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn’t stoop in such an hour of crisis.”

That’s called sticking the knife in deep, then twisting it ever so slowly as you extract it. That type of report lays open the Agenda Media’s willful disregard for the truth. There couldn’t have been any fact-checking back at the office. There couldn’t have been any true investigating on the reporter’s behalf that led the NY Times to conclude that Iraq had descended into civil war.

Mr. Schieffer would do well to not push this issue too far, lest the Right Blogosphere call him on the awful reporting that the Agenda Media have done.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 12:28 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Iraq, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.