The MSM has a new mantra out there: the Right is simply shooting the messenger about news in Iraq. We on the right are just upset that polls are down, etc. However, that is not the case. Check out this great analysis by Tim Graham over at NRO:The third anniversary of the war for a free Iraq occasioned a wrong turn for the media. On Tuesday, NBC’s Today planned to discuss media coverage of the war — certainly an underexplored angle — with Laura Ingraham and James Carville. NBC’s question: "Is American getting a fair picture of what’s actually happening in Iraq?" Ingraham came out of the blocks with fire, doing something no conservative does who wants to be invited on TV ever again. She went straight at her hosts:
The Today Show spends all this money to send people to the Olympics, which is great, it was great programming. All this money for "Where In The World Is Matt Lauer?" Bring The Today Show to Iraq. Bring The Today Show to Tal Afar. Do the show from the 4th ID at Camp Victory and then when you talk to those soldiers on the ground, when you go out with the Iraqi military, when you talk to the villagers, when you see the children, then I want [challenge] NBC to report on only the IEDs, only the killings, only the reprisals.
Conservatives at home heard the "Hallelujah Chorus" in their heads. One of the TV networks finally allowed someone to say they were unfair, unbalanced, and even lazy. Ingraham lectured:
To do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.
It was poetic justice, then, that her interviewer was a substitute host, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory. As a caller to her radio show Tuesday morning observed, suddenly Laura Ingraham was Gregory, and Gregory was Scott McClellan, twitching nervously and trying to change the subject: "Okay, hold, hold, Laura, Laura, I get, I get, I get the point. I get the, I get the anti-network point." He suggested: "Let me redirect this to, to get off the media point." But wait — wasn’t that the stated topic of the interview? Gregory shifted the interview by asking how his guests would advise President Bush, because the focus is always supposed to be on evaluating the president, and never on evaluating the media. Gregory desperately wanted to cling to the primary talking point of the press: Bush, how flagrantly has he failed?
Note the classic media trick of changing the purported topic to something more to their liking when they step in a pile of truth, as provided in this case by Laura Ingraham.
But the media couldn't stand to be assaulted by a woman conservative. They lashed out following the interview:
Andrea Mitchell did a defensive story.
Are the images Americans are seeing from Iraq due to the level of violence or is it just the messenger? And as the president suggested today, are the media also being used by the insurgents? As opposition to the war rises, it's a theme amplified by the vice president and conservative talk show hosts: a supposedly passive, even lazy media focusing too much on random violence.
After playing soundbites from Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, she quickly turned her story over to George Packer and David Gergen to state the usual cynical media response: the White House is lashing out in desperation over its awful war and its awful polls. Left out of the story was any real attempt to analyze if the media coverage is too dependent on violence or too well-tuned to what insurgents want Americans to hear. Self-examination? Humility? There’s no time for that.
And then we saw Tim Russert, supposedly down the middle, give the partisan line with Katie "Sounds like Nails on a Chalkboard" Couric:
Katie Couric brought on Tim Russert to defend the network against scapegoating: "Does the Bush administration have a legitimate gripe about the media coverage of the war, or do you think the media is being used as a scapegoat as public support for the war continues to erode?" Russert defensively argued: "We capture reality. Sometimes it’s a political strategy to shoot the messenger, but the fact is what is happening on the ground is what you’re seeing on your TVs and reading in the newspapers."Russert is a pathetic hack. Graham notes in his analysis:
What arrogance. "We capture reality"? Not even "we try to capture reality"? TV news is a vanishing snippet of reality, a carefully edited (and often loaded) version of reality. Some viewers think the networks have captured reality all right — and are holding it hostage in a basement until the president surrenders. What this narrative omits is that the White House’s so-called war with the "messenger" has two sides — and the "messenger" is holding his own just fine. The networks suggest that they’re just holding the president accountable. Then why can’t the President and his supporters do the same for the media?
Rush has more coverage of the new mantra, the self-victimization of the media by the media. Don't buy it. These aren't sympathetic figures, these balcony Bravehearts--they are pathetic spinners of fact that want to see us fail in Iraq.
You know, we on the Right often get accused of just parroting talking points and such from the White House, with no brain or analysis. Uh, who does it sound like is just a parrot now?
More people are waking up to the truth: the MSM lies to advance its own agenda. It is not about reality, it is about crafting a picture to get the outcome THEY want. Don't buy it.
