How does the media cover the military? An important article by John Q. Wilson, first published November 6, 2006, needs to be read and archived for what it says about the way media coverage of government and the military has changed. Why are people so negative on President Bush and the war? Consider this paragraph from the article:
When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89% were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94% were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.
. . . But the war coverage does not reflect merely an interest in conflict. People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult.
Wilson goes on to document how the reporting of the Iraq war has been conducted and compares and contrasts it with coverage of previous wars. He includes a fascinating depiction of how, given the current mindset, World War II would have been reported. This is truly instructive reading.
His concluding paragraph is sobering:
The mainstream media's adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.
The current state of affairs illustrates, in my judgment, the "great liberal death wish" that British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote so powerfully about some years ago. An exposition of that must await another time.