October 12, 2003

Chris Matthews: When Good News Is Bad

I'm just mystified by the way much of the press persistently distorts the situation in Iraq. Today, on the Chris Matthews Show, Joe Klein just couldn't help comparing Iraq to Vietnam, suggesting that dispatching Condee Rice to make a more realistic case about the positive news from Iraq was analogous to Lyndon Johnson appointing a Speakers Bureau. What nonsensical hyperbole. And Norah O'Donnell's counterfactual assertion that things are getting worse in Iraq, as an explanation for the rift within the White House between the Rumsfeld/Cheney clique and the Powell/Rice clique is just more of the same lazy formulaic disinformation. The fact is that things aren't getting worse in Iraq, as this roundup of news by Citizen Smash, as well as numerous articles in WaPo and other sources suggest. And at the current casualty rate from the so-called "guerrilla war" it would take 500 years to reach the death toll we endured in Vietnam. This is not Vietnam, and the nostalgia that much of the press has for that "simpler time" doesn't make it so

But what really perplexes me is how the sort of disinformation campaign that Klein and O'Donnell are promoting can continue without eventually losing readership for their employers, especially if the responsible press keeps reporting things as they are, spurred by direct dispatches from the men at the front. Which reminds me: Isn't a situation where the frontline toops correct the press about being too pessimistic about as different from Vietnam as it's possible to conceive? Why isn't this a lead story somewhere? Or at least the subject of a well written editorial? It's a delicious and instructive sort of irony.

What's going on with the press has become a matter for social psychologists. I think what's happening is that the Vietnam generation is traumatized by the fact that we are rapidly leaving that era behind, and moving into an entirely different historical landscape. I think this is really about a sort of group or cohort psychological dependence on their "coming-of-age" experience. And it will finally come to a head in the election of 2004.

Posted by Demosophist at October 12, 2003 12:03 PM | TrackBack
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