Media Criticism

There are few things I dislike more than when President Bush tries to make an historical analogy and fails miserably. Bush gave a speech yesterday at the VFW annual convention in Kansas City where he compared the push for withdrawal in Iraq to a similar push at the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam. He made a similarly strained comparison between the Iraq War and the American Revolution after Fourth of July 2007. I cannot wait for the president to compare Iraq and the Mexican-American War or the French-Indian War.

While the analogy sounds great and draws applause from some conservatives, most reasonable people know that it rings hollow. I heard numerous programs on Wisconsin Public Radio (I live in Milwaukee) where the experts were trying to hide their bile for such a poorly constructed argument. Cheney, Bush and their group of spokespeople have denounced this comparison for years now because it denotes failure. I am convinced that the orchestration of this turn by the Bush Administration was the swan song of former puppeteer Karl Rove. The dynamics of surrounding nations was different in Vietnam as it is in Iraq even though war supporters have tried to cast the former as a defeat to communism and the latter as a failure against terrorism. Bush’s speech exposed his fatal flaw which is his inability to see the gray between black and white.

Alright, this is a bit conspiracy-theorist and I don’t completely believe that. I am having an issue, however, with the way Bush’s speech at the VFW was framed all week. Every time you saw an article on Hillary Clinton speaking at the event, it would indicate that President Bush would sweep in at the end of the week as a conservative salve for veterans. While the speech was recognized as a mixed blessing by most accounts, media outlets all over the country have subconsciously helped set up Bush’s effort to recast the war as a mission of American promise. As a nation, we need to look back the faux intellectualism that is inherent in making a comparison between past and present events to keep Republicans and war Democrats honest.

This morning’s Washington Post article on Iraq seems disjointed at best. It begins with a description of a recent attack in Kirkuk, but it then degenerates into a haphazard conglomeration of facts and quotations about the war.

This type of reporting makes it difficult for the reader to get a clear picture of the war. On one hand, it quotes statistics that indicate civilian deaths are down, and the article seems to indicate that US control of the country is rising. On the other hand, the main focus of the article–the recent bombing–indicates a civil war of increasing intensity.

However, there is a certain advantage to fact-heavy reporting. A more coherent article would focus on either the US military gains or the regional ethnic conflicts. The result of such an article would be a more distorted perception of the war; at least the random back-and-forth of this article denies the reader the ease of an easy answer to the war.

Maybe that’s why it’s so frustrating to read.

Iraq, Kirkuk, Bombing, Washington Post