Big Media sputters to a halt

As the Iraqi insurgencies tail off, the central govmt and its army really take control of the country, and life starts to visibly improve for many ordinary Iraqis, people have started to mull over such matters as the performance of the Big Media outlets during Iraqs tragic turmoil.

'Law prof Glenn Reynolds points out again that much of the recent news doesn't fit the dominant media narrative that the war is a lost cause, a quagmire that will never see any semblance of victory.

On the same day this latest good news emerged, the American Journalism Review published an article entitled "Whatever happened to Iraq?" In the lengthy piece, journalists are interviewed about why there's been such a precipitous drop in news coverage of the war.'

http://mattjduffy.blogspot.com/2008/05/instapundit-links-to-some-surprisingly.html

'Paraphrased by the AJR author, the Los Angeles Times' foreign editor Marjorie Miller cites three factors. Miller points to
- the ongoing interest in the Obama/Clinton race
- the fantastic cost of supporting a bureau in Baghdad.

But the third factor proves most revealing:

- With no solutions in sight, with no light at the end of the tunnel, war fatigue has become a factor. Over the years, a bleak sameness has settled into accounts of suicide bombings and brutal sectarian violence. Insurgents fighting counterinsurgents are hard to translate to an American audience.'

The fatigue indicated has nothing to do with a bleakly endless tunnel. The fatigue has to do with turning out to be wrong on every last thing. If you go back through the journalistic predictions about the US/UK/Allied intervention in Iraq, pretty much every single one has turned out to be horse hockey.

The press predicted that the whole Arab world, indeed muslim world would enter a huge Armaggedon-like conflagration because of the Allied intervention; that most of Iraq was controlled by the insurgents; that the insurgents were the equivalent of the Minutemen in US history; that the Abu Ghraib 'atrocities' had turned all Iraqis against the Americans forever; that the insurgencies could not be defeated by the incompetent US forces; that no infrastructure improvements were being successfully completed; that if insurgents were 'defeated' in one place, they would just move somewhere else in Iraq; that the US was just bombing civilians and alienating the population irritreivably; that Iraq was fragmenting into three parts never to be rejoined; that Al Qaeda were not in Iraq; that Al Qaeda were somehow immune from being beaten militarily; that the Sunni Arabs and Al Qaeda were deeply in love; that Maliki and his govmt were corrupt Iran-lovers; that Maliki was incompetent and ineffectual and a partisan leader; that the Iraqi govmt would never pass the legislation that would bring the Sunnis back into the political process; that the surge and the COP's would never work because it was too late.

The one absolute certainty throughout the whole Iraq intervention was that whatever Big Media predicted or asserted, the opposite was much more likely to be the case. But like a hyperactive village idiot, the Big Media outlets have thrashed and spewed themselves to a standstill and they just don't have anything more to say. There are just no decent angles left to continue the narrative of disaster.
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