Please keep praying for our troops and for the people of Iraq who are trying to make a difference and support what our troops are trying to do. I think it’s sick that so much good is going on over there and the “media” is so discriminating. Thank you for posting this, Leanne and Mark.

I got that information in an email around a month ago and have seen one other blog post about it. It’s good that it’s making the rounds because this is the type of information no one ever hears about.

Excellent stuff. For more read Chrenkoff.

Amen to that girl! Can’t somebody pleeeeaaaase give us all the information????? I hope that most Americans realize what they are seeing on the 6:00 news is usually slanted for the shock value.

Wouldn’t life be grand if all news reporting included the full truth and the WHOLE story?! I guess that would be wishful thinking though. I have a suspicion the big wigs at my local newspaper think their paper will fall apart if they print unbiased material. 😆

Hey! I see a new career! I could be a reporter who only reports on the reporters’ reports. Ya’ know…find out what information they “forgot” to say. What do you think?

w00t!~

Thank you for the reminder. Although being so close to the military like I am, I hear this all the time, especially from soldiers returning from there that catch up with my hubby.

No I didn’t know all that. Thanks for posting this. I also didn’t realize your hubby was an Iraqi Freedom vet. He gets a salute and a cold beer from me anytime he wants it.

[…] An email (copy of the progress email here) to The Tampa Tribune sparked this debate, and surely it is a good debate to have. Most of the criticism over the coverage of the war has been on the basis of bias. While there is certainly a bias that no one in their right mind could deny, is it a political bias or a ratings bias? […]

I thought that you would get a kick over the background of that email message and how it confounded the NYT and the AP.
http://www.opinioneditorials.com/freedomwriters/rboyd_20050816.html

August 16, 2005

While Editors Ponder…
Robin Mullins Boyd

The New York Times ran an article on August 15, 2005 that was an eye opening discourse into the
soul of the print media. The article, “Editors Ponder how to Present a Broad Picture of
Iraq”, was spurred by an anonymous email that has been making the rounds since January 2005.
The email was basically a list of many of the accomplishments that had taken place in post Saddam
Iraq. A number of editors of major newspapers, all Associated Press members, had concerns that they
where “not telling the whole story” about Iraq.

Mike Silverman, managing editor of the Associated Press, lamented the fact that “explosions
and shootings and fatalities and injuries on some days seem to dominate the news.” Silverman
cited the dangers in Iraq as one of the reasons reporters were not getting more of the good things.
Kathleen Carroll, the AP’s Executive Editor, actually said that “it was much easier to
add up the number of dead than to determine how many hospitals received power on a particular day
or how many schools were built.” Silverman than threw out the typical media excuse –
the positives listed in the email were actually in various AP stories but they were buried in the
articles.

Well here’s a news flash for the editors cited in the article. The email that started the
ball rolling was actually excerpts from an article published on the Internet on January 30, 2005.
The article, “Accentuating the Negative”, was published on OpinionEditorials.com. How
did I get all of this information about the original article? Easy – I wrote it.

Yes, the major print media was thrown into fits of “healthy discussion” by a woman who
lives in Guyton, GA. A southern belle, wife, mother and grandmother that works full time as a
Registered Nurse. A writer that has no degree in journalism but writes op-ed pieces for free (but
would not mind getting paid). A woman who loves to write and has book number 2 in production with a
publisher. I am just someone that seeks out the facts and doesn’t rely on what someone tells
me. Someone that can form an opinion all by their little self. I put my critical thinking skills
developed through years of nursing to work.

Believe it or not, a dreaded “FReeper” and member of the Pajamahadeen knows more about
the situation in Iraq than all of the high paid, high powered editors that rule what we read every
day. I have no connections, no anonymous sources. Ramsey Clark did not have to set up interviews
for me. I do not have an account at Kinko’s or access to forged memo templates. No one got
“outed” in my attempt to uncover the truth. Lives were not placed in jeopardy. Not one
single animal was harmed in my quest for information. No one was forced to wear panties on their
head or participate in naked pyramids. Heck, I didn’t even have to give money to “the
other side” in Fallujah to get the low-down.

In an ironic twist, a follow-up article, “Ignoring the Positive”, was published on opinioneditorials
.com the very same day. I did not have to be stationed in Baghdad or embedded with troops in
Fallujah to get my information. No one was firing RPG’s at me. The only injury I sustained
was a paper cut while printing out my rough draft of the article. The information for both articles
came the War on Terror section of the Department of Defense website – information that anyone with
Internet access can get any time of the day. Guess that blows Mr. Silverman’s excuse out of
the water.

Am I surprised that the print media executives were clueless about the reconstruction facts in
Iraq? Not hardly. Was the information more difficult to obtain than tallying up the dead and
injured in Iraq? Uh, no. Any one with any amount of common sense knows the truth. Things are not
all peaches and cream in Iraq but they certainly are not all black as the media would have us
believe. So the next time one of the media pundits laments the difficulty obtaining positive
information from Iraq, consider the source. The only difficulty the media has is setting aside
their hatred of President Bush long enough to do their job. And they wonder why the newspaper
circulation numbers are down across the board? Guess it’s easier to tally up the numbers than
find out the truth.

My prayers go up daily for all our soldiers and their families. God Bless our Soldiers, our President and our Country.

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