good news talking points

Just saw a couple of nice shots at the meme that the press is failing to justly report the good news from Iraq. The video at crooks and liars of Lara Logan is pretty impressive. For a while at least, you can get both that and the most recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon at working for change. Peter Daou was also talking about this, but it's late and I'm too lazy right now to find the link.

Despite these recent nice hits, I have not seen the round rebuttal this meme deserves. Here are some points that should not be overlooked:

1. Iraq is the Titanic sinking. Good news is not common and favoring it would not enhance accuracy.

1a. Almost all the good news is at least arguably meaningless. Fix something that was destroyed a year ago so it can be destroyed again tomorrow. Most of the good news is strictly symbolic -- Saddam is on trial, but life is worse than it was under Saddam. Some of it is staged -- statutes pulled down amid celebration of a few of the usual suspects, carted in to shoot the video. Jessica Lynch made the subject of a phony rescue from nonexistent captors. Illigitimate and unlawful elections that do not actually lead to a sound or popular Constitution, and still no functioning central government.

1b. Reporters can't get to the "real good news" without getting killed (that's how good things are).

1c. The MSM hardly scratches the surface of the bad news.

2. The function of standard news values is to favor bad news. This is a good thing. It's the things that go wrong that need our attention so we can fix them. Reporting about how soldiers were forced to scavenge "hillbilly armor" for their vehicles embarassed the DOD into action. Emphasising good news in this situation would be like feeding the viewers so many drugs they can't tell when their own arm is on fire.

2a. The role of good news is solely to establish the context and scale of bad news. Hence, it is appropriate to let people know that some small portion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were not squandered or stolen, even though billions were. That the electricity is working in some places. However, the media often neglect this in other contexts and to demand better performance here is to demand a lopsidedness and bias. For example, on 9/11, it was not reported that 99.999% of Americans were not attacked by terrorists that day, or that Al Qaida was a strategic ally of the US in the 80s in Afghanistan or in the 90s in the Balkans.

3. Logan made a great point that I hadn't heard before. The same government that at one level is attacking the media for not reporting the good, is at another level asking that the good not be reported, and obstructing these reports, because our accomplishments are apparently too fragile -- drawing attention to them will only place them in danger of insurgent attack.

4. The complaint comes from a lying government that keeps pushing optimistic propaganda and previously claimed, we would be greeted as liberators, mission accomplished, there is no insurgency, the insurgents are in their last throes, etc. etc. etc. Or from a right wing that insists that we tell a certain kind of story, true or false, to "support" the troops, because perception is reality and the media create reality by creating perception -- a convoluted excuse for shooting the messenger. These arguments have abandoned credibility and rationality, which is fine if you want to be a pathological liar or a psychotic, but neither of these is a proper role for the media.

More later.