Two Iraqs

So based on information they've gotten from the major media, a large part of the Amerian people believe that we've screwed up in Iraq.

But how is the media getting their infomation?

Eric Johnson is a Marine reservists who served in Iraq. He's written a piece that has thoroughly skewered a good chunk of the left's opinion in this area.

This section, though, is a money quote for its revelations of so much of the media's coverage of Iraq - in this case, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the WaPo's Baghdad bureau chief:

The grizzled foreign-desk veteran - who until 2000 was covering dot-com companies - now sits in judgment over a world-shaking issue, in a court whose rulings echo throughout the media landscape.

He finds the Bush administration guilty. Such a surprise. Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the U.S. operation a failure.

Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: Basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don't know what they're doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.

How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.

It goes downhill from here - if you have faith in the major media, anyway.

Read it all, natch.

Posted by Mitch at July 5, 2004 05:00 AM | TrackBack