Media Mythbusters Blog

Cross-posted at Confederate Yankee:

“We’ve won the war.”

Milblogger “Greyhawk,” currently deployed in Baghdad, Iraq, Oct. 16, 2007, and again in more detail on Oct. 19, 2007.

“The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse.”

New York Times Editorial Board, Manhattan, NY, Oct. 23, 2007

Writing at his blog, Jules Crittenden, a Boston Herald editor and columnist notes the continuing failure of another media organization, the Associated Press, to also honestly deal with evolving conditions on the group in Iraq that have seen both Iraqi civilian deaths and U.S. military deaths drop in recent months.

In his new home at the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett notes the plunging casualties:

The results of the surge, or “the escalation” as Harry Reid derisively called it, have been obvious in the Icasualties.org numbers. Before the surge, a bad month would claim the lives of roughly 3,000 Iraqi civilians and security force members. In February ‘07, the exact number was 3,014 Iraqi casualties. In March, the figure was 2,977. As the surge began to have its effects, that number dropped to 1674 in August. In September, with the surge taking full effect, the numbers showed a profound change–the Iraqi death toll plunged to 848.

Happily, September’s figures don’t appear to be an aberration. October has seen 502 Iraqi casualties so far. If the trend continues though the end of October, the final number should be around 650 for the entire month. That represents better than an 80 percent improvement from the war’s nadir.

YOU’D THINK THIS would be a big story. After all, the mainstream media makes such a show of “supporting the troops” at every turn, you’d think it would rush to report the amazing story of our soldiers accomplishing what many observers declared “impossible” and “unwinnable” not so long ago.

But the mainstream media can’t actually support the troops, can they?

Despite the onionskin-thin layers of nuance favored by those on the extreme edge of the progressive movement, the leadership (but not the rank and file) of the Democrat Party, and the editorial offices of many newsrooms, in real-life, supporting the troops really does mean supporting the mission.

The platitude of those that claim “we support the troops, but not the war,” is an empty one; analogous to claiming that they support doctors, but not practicing medicine on certain patients even if they have the same disease.

“Iraqis? No. Why don’t you go treat those people in Darfur instead…”

And so we get stories like the latest from AP’s Steven R. Hurst noted by Crittenden, where every possible silver lining is discarded in worship of the cloud.

We get editors that would rather torpedo their careers than admit they were wrong.

We get columnists that refuse to concede to hope.

And of course, we get faked massacres, fauxtography, gross inaccuracies, false premises, buried stories and preferrential treatment for fellow defeatists, all because those multiple layers of reporters, fact-checkers, and editors are determined to craft a message that they can be comfortable with publishing, that echoes their values and their beliefs of how the world should work.

In that world, a bumbling, semi-articulate President with approval ratings in the 30s, that has made one mistake after another related to the war, simply cannot be in charge when we win a war that they do not support, because of him.

As they have told us repeatedly: This. Is. Bush’s. War.

They might be able to do a better job moderating their disdain for the military if it was simply run by the right POTUS; just preferably not a simpering idiot from Texas, or at least not a Republican one.

But as much as he is detested in newsrooms and dining rooms across America, George W. Bush is the President of the United States, and because of this unpalatable fact, it is simply unfathomable to the media and their supporters on the fringe left that General Petraeus and the soldiers under him could shift strategies to take advantage of and exploit shifting public opinions in Iraq to execute a counterinsurgency doctrine that has Sunni and Shia joining forces with the U.S. and Iraqi security forces to stamp out criminal gangs, insurgents, rogue militias, and terrorists at what seems like an exponential rate.

We find ourselves in late October of 2007 with a war that, while not “over” in terms of ending all violence and all terror attacks, is “over” in that there is little doubt who the winner of the conflict will be.

There will not be a sectarian “”civil war” in Iraq, perhaps best evidenced by the fact that the media—excuse me, actual reporters in Iraq, not plaintive Times editorialists—have quietly let the claim die. Just as quietly, they have stopped wondering if Iraqi security forces will be able to hold together, and instead focus on corruption in the higher ranks.

At the present rate, the only way the media could shift goalposts faster is if the crane moving the goalposts was attached to Jeff Gordon’s stock car.

While the opinion of the Iraqi people has drastically changed in past months and they seem to see the outcome being decided in their favor and sooner rather than later, the world media, led by the U.S. media, is refusing to acknowledge the possibility that the outcome of the war (if not the end of the counterinsurgency effort) may be decided before President Bush leaves office, making him the victor.

While the security forces of Iraq and allied nations seem to be turning/defeating the insurgency in Iraq, we are having considerably less success fighting an insurgent media that refuses to yield ground—unless forced every step of the way—by what they consider an unpleasant reality. The dead-enders of the Iraqi insurgency will likely meet their end via a bullet from Iraqi soldiers, policemen, or the growing number of civilians styled as “concerned citizens.”

Some of the insurgent media is being “killed off” in a rather spectacular blaze of glory, and some dead-ender media companies may one day collapse utterly for being unwilling to change. That admitted, most journalists, if for no other reason than their personal bottom lines, will eventually begrudgingly admit success, or at least change the subject.

Like the terrorists our soldiers fight, the biased media doesn’t have to like being defeated. Sometimes “winning hearts and minds” amounts to just beating them enough to take the fight out of them and focus their efforts elsewhere, which is already occurring on newspaper front pages.

This is the way “Bush’s War” will end in the media: not with a bang, but with a whimper.