What Is This World Coming To?

When there’s a suicide bombing in Iraq, it is Page One News in America. If there are plenty of casualties, it is a Page One Above-the-Fold News (with pictures.) If Americans are among them, then you can count on it being continued on Page Two (with additional pictures.)

But if the news smacks of anything resembling military successes in Iraq, if it gets any mention at all, it is generally buried somewhere in the middle of the paper. The anti-military (and therefore anti-American, unless one is so naive as to think freedom is actually free) bias in the mainstream media (and among the Democrats in general) is so blinding that even the San Francisco Chronicle took note:

The success of the Bush surge - with Iraqi forces having led offensives in three major cities and taking on Shiite militias - has been greeted in America with a collective shrug. “My perhaps overly cynical view is that it’s probably too much to hope for - a lot of good-news stories coming out of Iraq,” U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said during a recent conference call. But also, with the al-Maliki government clearing once dangerous areas and violence dropping, “Iraq no longer occupies the status as the overarching, all-encompassing crisis that requires full national attention.”

The mainstream media, particularly the liberal standard-bearers like ABC and CNN are ready with a quick answer.

“And yet, there is a “marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq,” ABC news’ Terry McCarthy told the Observer. “That’s partly due to the election, partly because of the fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don’t see them anymore. A drip, drip story that’s getting a little better day by day doesn’t make a headline.”

CNN’s Michael Ware calls it “audience fatigue.” Other journalists, who have risked their lives covering the war, complain that Americans aren’t paying attention to their stories on Iraq.”

“Audience fatigue” — that’s a novel way to justify propagandizing the news. “We’d report on it, but you don’t care.” The Iraq War has been the seminal issue for two presidential elections, both of which were styled by the media as a ‘referendum on the Iraq war’. In the first ‘referendum’ the vote was whether to quit while we were losing or fight until we were winning.

The public paid enough attention then to leave John Kerry in the Senate and George Bush in the White House, despite the best efforts of the media to convince voters that the war was lost.

“When liberal Democrats were trying to take over Congress in 2006, they used the war to clobber President Bush and told America that if they were in power, the war would end. Well, they took control of Congress, and the war continues. So now there are fewer political points to be won banging the war.”

Good point. And now that we are clearly winning, the media complains that the public isn’t paying enough attention to the Iraq War for them to bother reporting it? It must be a 21st century variation of that old news adage. “All The News We See Fit To Print.”

Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizen have risked everything to secure Iraq; 4,098 Americans made the Supreme Sacrifice for their country. But CNN had decided for its audience that they are ‘tired’ of being informed of their successes on our behalf.

“It seems the better the war goes, the less interest some partisans show in Iraq. Their attention wanders if they can’t play the blame game and chant, “Bush lied.” Ah, and this time, the critics were wrong when they argued that the surge could not work. Obama was wrong, and, face it, opposing the surge was the politically easy thing to do.”

The San Francisco Chronicle highlights the hypocrisy of the Democrats, but in so doing, fails to do justice to the real point of the story. The mainstream media has completely abandoned any pretense of objectivity, and has become an openly partisan political propaganda machine.

They control what you see, what you hear, what you are informed of, and they decide on your behalf what should be important to you when making your political decisions. They don’t pretend to hide it, and they evidently don’t care whether you like it or not. And even that isn’t the most important aspect of the story.

They don’t pretend to hide it — and WE pretend not to see it. After all, nobody wants to be the first one to shout “the Emperor has no clothes.”