When I give talks about the Middle East there is invariably at least one person in the audience who asks a question along these lines: "Isn’t it true that we Americans are doing lots of good things in Iraq, but we never hear about it because the media simply refuse to report it?"
My answer runs something like this: Iraq is both better and worse than what you see on TV. Better, because good things are happening there, and, arguably, they are under-reported. Worse, because the over-arching reality is that the inability of the Coalition to get a handle on security undoes most of the genuine good that we Americans and our allies are doing.
What got me thinking about this was an article that ran earlier this week in the New York Times. It was headlined: "Editors Ponder How to Present a Broader Picture of Iraq", and began:
"Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year.
"Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?" the anonymous polemic asks, in part. "Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?"
"Of course we didn’t know! The message concludes. "Our media doesn’t tell us!"
Well, yes, it is true that those things are happening. It is equally true that you don’t read about them very often. There are several reasons why this is the case, and none involves a media conspiracy to hide the good news from Iraq.
First, most of that good’ news has been reported (as the Times piece noted a bit further down). But you can’t run stories about school building every day. Journalism tends to focus on bad things. That is why the American media have devoted so much time and space over the last few months to a single missing American teenager in Aruba while running few, if any, stories on the hundreds of thousands of people who vacationed in Aruba this year without getting kidnapped and murdered. Car bombs, assassinations, kidnappings and murders are news. That is not a conspiracy to hide broader truths: it is simply the nature of the business.
Another part of the problem is that most of those good’ things are taking place outside Baghdad. Even if it was safe for foreign journalists to travel outside Baghdad (and, usually, it isn’t) carnage in a capital city of 5 million will inevitably be central to news coverage of that country.
My own complaint has long been that the relentless focus on the car-bomb-of-the-day causes us to lose site of the bigger political picture: the inability of Iraq’s emerging political class to work with one another, the progressive fracturing of the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, the growing desire of each community to protect what it has at the expense of everyone else. When I worked at Iraqi television in 2003-04 confessional differences were not a big issue among the staff. Today, from what my friends tell me, they are.
The real problem with the news out of Iraq these days is that we do not get enough of it. That is not the fault of the Baghdad press corps. It is the fault of editors and producers in the States who sense frustration and boredom on the part of their audiences and have opted to tell readers and viewers what they want to hear rather than what they need to know. Even the coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s protest outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford is not really about Iraq it is about the domestic political conduct of the war (from London, where I’m writing this, it is worth noting that the entire Sheehan story has barely registered in the foreign media).
Meanwhile Baghdad burns. And, yes, there are some good things happening even today but the bad stuff far, far outweighs it. And that is something we need to hear more about, not less.
