Jim Kuypers, assistant professor of communication at Virginia Tech, wrote a book titled Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age. According to an accompanying press release, Kuypers, who has studied for some time journalism's various prejudices to fact, concentrated on what President Bush says one day and what, of that which he said, American press agencies tell their audiences by day's end. He found discrepancies between the two approaching totality, so that "if someone were relying only on the mainstream media for information, they would have no idea what the president actually said. It was as if the press were reporting on a different speech."
In Iraq there is, or isn't, a native named Jamil Hussein who, quoted as a district police captain by the Associated Press in several articles on murder in Baghdad, remains a witness that has yet to take the stand, possibly because he doesn't exist. The impression of terrorist and gang violence in Iraq's capital was enough, for most of this year, to protract a suspension of disbelief when wire reports announced death and mayhem on this or that street corner. On the day after Thanksgiving, however, consumers of news were asked to believe the sensational: arsonists set alight four mosques and six members of one congregation. Bloggers oppugned, American and Iraqi forces investigated: only one mosque with slight burn damage, no immolation in evidence. And, to date, no Captain Jamil Hussein.
The cynical rejoinder: What difference does the subtraction of six murders make? That is similar to extenuation, which comes from National Review's chief editor Rich Lowry, arguing that "realism is essential in any war, and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources." But what if "bad news" isn't representative of reality? What if it is false? When a) patently faulty goods that involve b) the guarantees of a possibly fictitious consultant are sold, and then c) repeatedly and acrimoniously defended by an executive as suitable for consumption, the whole of the company's product is called into question, on the intuition that dishonesty at the apex reaches all the way back down to the foundations.
For an end-of-year international edition Newsweek did its job and helped the Iraqi and American governments with what they have been desperate to make known: the Iraqi economy, particularly at the entrepreneurial level, has grown markedly. Standards of living, through the purchase of electronics and other retail amenities, have improved. How is all of this possible in a place that is, in print and on television, ever in pandemonium? That, with a glance at history, it really isn't, rebuts the cynic. A savage enemy isn't necessarily omnipotent, or favored by veritable conditions. Kuypers denounces the press as having become an "anti-democratic institution," something to which journalists should give more than a moment's thought, maybe a few column inches.