I have in front of me every issue of the New York Times and the Star Tribune for the week of February 6th through the 12th. Looking only at news of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq, what follows is a summary of what I found.
The Front Page
During this week, what news from Iraq was deemed worthy of the front page? Well, not much, according to the local paper. During the entire week, the Star Trib had only one story on the front page, on February 9th and it was a "local angle" story about a guy who "once served in the Minnesota National Guard" and who "is now a terrorism suspect" being held in Iraq.
The Times had four front-page stories on Iraq during this week. One story was about the Sunni Muslim population of Iraq being ill-treated by the largely-Shiite police, and how that is "feeding bitterness" on the part of the Sunnis. One story was about a Pentagon plan to "foil bombings in Iraq." One was a story about the roughly one percent of the population that are internet subscribers, with the headline "Danger? Drabness? No Date? Iraqis Find an Outlet Online." And the final one, a major story (3108 words) in the Sunday Times, was about the suffering of a wounded soldier, headlined "Healing, With New Limbs and Fragile Dreams." (Did you assume that the "wounded soldier" was a U.S. soldier? I'll bet you did. If so, you were correct.)
If one only looked at the front pages, what impressions would one have about Iraq? 1. "Terror" suspects are in Iraq, and may have connections to MY state; 2. There is a lot of sectarian violence in Iraq; 3. U.S. soldiers are suffering; 4. There is a lot of violence, and it is a result of insurgent bombings and killings; 5. The U.S. military is trying to stop the violence. The Inside Pages
There were a total of 8 stories about the occupation of Iraq on the inside pages of the Star Tribune during this week All of them were reprints of stories from the NY Times, the LA Times, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post. It's worth noting that the Star Tribune sent four reporters to Italy to cover the Olympics. There are no Star Tribune reporters in Iraq.
Here are a few phrases from the headlines in the Star Trib: "11 Killed in Violence;" "Prominent Sunni Cleric Gunned Down; He Was Slain Because He Urged Iraqis to Vote and Join the Police, a Colleague Said. Four Marines Were Reported Killed." "3 More Troops Killed in Iraq, Military Command Says" "8 Killed in Blast at Sunni Mosque; Foreign Elements of the Sunni-led Insurgency Are Blamed."
Looking beyond the headlines, I searched the articles themselves, looking for the word "killed." Here is a representative sample of what I found: "killed in attacks by militants;" "killed by gunmen;" "killed when militants detonated a bomb;" "Explosions have killed 1,123 American service members in Iraq;" "Three of the Marines were killed Monday ...and a fourth was killed elsewhere in Anbar Province;" "an Iraqi Army soldier killed a member of the Mahdi Army;" "police officers shot and killed a man who had fired a machine gun at Shiites."
In midweek the Times ran an article headlined "Report Says Number of Attacks By Insurgents in Iraq Increases." The "report" is a report by the U.S. Government, and the article was complete with graphs showing the number of attacks against "Iraqi Security Forces," and "Civilians" and "Coalition Forces."
The Times has a regular feature--now appearing almost daily--which is a special box in which appear the "Names of the Dead." It's not only names, but age, hometown, rank, and branch of the military. Again, the only "names of the dead" worth mentioning are U.S. soldiers. Certainly these ARE worth mentioning. But there are, after all, other people being killed, many of them at the hands of the U.S. forces. How many, we don't know, because it is almost never reported, with some startling exceptions that I will mention next week.
The reporting from Iraq in the U.S. media also tends to focus on so-called "political" developments: elections, parliamentary debates, and so forth. For example, during this week the headlines included these: "Shiites May Nominate a Premier Today" and "Iraq Struggles to Agree on a New Prime Minister" and "Iraqi Politicians Still Deadlocked on Premier."
The overall impressions one would get from reading the inside-page articles in the two newspapers echoes the impressions from the front pages: 1. The only noteworthy "violence" is committed by Iraqis and other "militants;" 2. The causes of "violence" are sectarian "bitterness" and the "fact" that, as Mr. Bush says, "our enemy is brutal"; 3. The occupying forces are victims of violence, not perpetrators; 5. This is essentially a ground war, with most deaths coming from roadside bombs, suicide attacks, and house-to-house fighting. What Is Missing?
I'm fairly certain that the ongoing war propaganda has been sufficiently effective that many people don't even notice what is missing from all of these articles. What is missing is actual war reporting. That is, reporting on the consequences of the actions of our military forces. Almost all the news is about the actions of one side in the conflict, and comes from official sources of the other side. What does this mean? Let us assume that it is true, as it seems to be, that the central fact of life for many Iraqis is that their country is being occupied by a foreign military force. In that case, it seems to me that the most important news for the people responsible for that occupation--that is, the population of the democracy that is doing the occupying--is news of how that occupation is affecting the population. And that is precisely what we are not getting.
There are three huge aspects of the occupation that remain--for a variety of reasons--essentially invisible to readers and viewers of the U.S. media. They are: 1. The costs, in both death and human suffering, of the U.S. invasion and occupation; 2. The intensifying air war being conducted by the United States in Iraq, and the fact that this air war is responsible for some unknown fraction of the unreported (unknown?) level of death and human suffering in that country; and 3. The ongoing construction of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and what that means in terms of "winning" in Iraq, which Mr. Bush says is what the U.S. forces are doing.
Next week's issue will be devoted to a closer look at each of these three issues. |