It’s the Media, Damnit!!!
By From Fox News’ Soldier’s Diary correspondant Capt. Dan Sukman:
Most of the coverage seems to focus on the bad things that happen here — car bombs, murders, etc. — but that’s what news is. Footage of a car blowing up will always make for more readers or viewers than all the cars that do not explode. The analogy I will use here is this: If a triple homicide occurs in your hometown, everyone is tuned in to see what happened, but you will never see a news report about some guy going to work like he does every day.
My question is this: How is a reporter supposed to make an event like this look good?
Insurgents stormed a jail around dawn Tuesday in the Sunni Muslim heartland north of Baghdad, killing 19 police and a courthouse guard in a prison break that freed dozens of prisoners and left 10 attackers dead, authorities said.
As many as 100 insurgents armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the judicial compound in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles northeast of the capital. The assault began after the attackers fired a mortar round into the police and court complex, said police Brig. Ali al-Jabouri.
Is the media supposed to focus on all the days that the jail wasn’t the scene of a massacre of police officers and a mass freeing of prisoners? No attack on the jail happened yesterday, after all, or the day before that, or even the day before that. Postive news!!!! Is it supposed to point out that many other jails in the country haven’t suffered from an attack by 100 armed men? The media concentrates on cars that explode, bridges that get blown up, and jails that get attacked because, in the normal course of business, cars aren’t supposed to explode, bridges aren’t supposed to be blown up, and hundreds of armed men aren’t supposed to attack jails. If these events take place with some regularity, it’s evidence that something is wrong. That they happen so often in Iraq actually works to reduce the cumulative effect of the violence rather than enhance it; we actually don’t hear about, and don’t pay attention to, most of the massacres, explosion, and suicide bombings in Iraq because they’re so common.