Of Course, The Mainstream Media Is Making Life Easier For The Terrorists In Iraq

“If the same person who told President Bush to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were advising him on foreign policy and we invaded the Cayman Islands instead of Iraq, I, too, would be criticizing the war. But I wouldn’t pretend that by calling for an immediate troop withdrawal, I wasn’t encouraging the Cayman resistance force to hold on and fight harder. Clearly, I’d be offering aid and comfort to the poolside waitresses, cabana boys, and scuba instructors we were fighting. But if there were a vote to withdraw troops from the Cayman Islands, I wouldn’t pout and say that’s not fair and then vote against it. It is simply a fact that naysaying the war and claiming that things are going so badly that troops must be withdrawn will encourage the enemy and demoralize our troops. Why can’t Democrats just admit that?” — Ann Coulter in her new book, Godless

Today, from a Richard Morin column in the Washington Post,

“More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks.

It’s a macabre example of win-win in what economists call a “common-interest game,” say Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University.

…The researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period. Using a statistical procedure called the Granger Causality Test, they attempted to determine whether more coverage directly led to more attacks.

The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage — a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.” —

Terrorist attacks can produce body counts, but that won’t win you a war. For that, you need an army that can take and hold territory. That’s why the biggest weapon in the arsenal of the terrorists in Iraq isn’t suicide bombings or beheadings, it’s the American press.

In fact, it’s fair to say that thousands of people have died in Iraq so that the terrorists can show off for papers like the New York Times and Washington Post.

It makes perfect sense from the point of view of the terrorists. The more people they murder and splashier their attacks are, the more the MSM and the Democrats will claim that the war in unwinnable. If the MSM and the Democrats can convince enough people they’re right, the American troops will come home before the Iraqis are ready and this will give the terrorists an opportunity. They’ll always be hopelessly outmatched against America’s military, but if the United States were to pull a “Murtha” and leave chaos in our wake, then the terrorists might be able to raise large enough militias to have a chance to eventually take over.

Does this mean that no negative news from Iraq should be reported? Absolutely not. We need to know the negative news. However, we also need to get the positive news and the context. In these two areas, the mainstream media’s coverage of the war has been woefully inadequate.

Think of it like this: During WW2, on D-Day, 1465 men were killed, another 3184 were wounded, 1928 men went missing. However, if the headline had been “1465 Killed!” and out of 12 paragraphs, 5 focused on the men who died, 3 focused on other negatives from the war, 2 paragraphs were from Germans saying the operation was insignificant, and 2 paragraphs gave a brief synopsis of why D-Day was important along with a couple of quotes from US generals, would that have given the American people a good understanding of what was going on? Not at all.

Yet, that’s what we get day in and day out in Iraq. The liberals in the MSM have a template. That template says, “This is another Vietnam, we can’t win, and while we’re convincing people of that fact, we have to be very careful to downplay any positives because they might help Bush or keep the war going longer.” 95% of the material we get from the MSM comes right out of this template and unfortunately, the people who benefit most from that are the terrorists who want to see every American dead.

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