More Friedman foolishness
This is guest blogger Wile E Coyote.
Tom Friedman writes in today's New York Times of his visit to Kurdistan, where he witnessed the kind of political and economic flourishing the Bush team had hoped to see in all of Iraq.
Friedman then asks" "Why is Kurdistan America’s best-kept secret success?" His answer: "Because the Bush team is afraid the Kurds will break away."
Now, think of all the things over the last six years the Bush team wished had not come to light but had, and ask yourself how in the world this team could have kept anything from the prying eyes of the mainstream media.
This simple answer is that the media have not been interested in reporting success and that Friedman's arrogance leads him to assume that if something important was also something he did not know, it must have been a secret.
Tom Friedman writes in today's New York Times of his visit to Kurdistan, where he witnessed the kind of political and economic flourishing the Bush team had hoped to see in all of Iraq.
Friedman then asks" "Why is Kurdistan America’s best-kept secret success?" His answer: "Because the Bush team is afraid the Kurds will break away."
Now, think of all the things over the last six years the Bush team wished had not come to light but had, and ask yourself how in the world this team could have kept anything from the prying eyes of the mainstream media.
This simple answer is that the media have not been interested in reporting success and that Friedman's arrogance leads him to assume that if something important was also something he did not know, it must have been a secret.
posted by LadybugUSA at 11:49 AM
4 Comments:
So your explanation is that the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy wants to keep the truth hidden. May I suggest an alternative explanation? You and I are competing newspaper publishers. You, being dedicated to Truth, Justice, and the American Way, publish your newspaper every day with the lead headline being "Everything Going Well in Kurdistan!!!". I, on the other hand, being a greedy capitalist, publish headlines about massacres, explosions, disasters, death, and mayhem.
Which one of us will still be in business after one year of this competition? Is this the result of a vast left wing conspiracy or capitalism? Perhaps it's capitalism you should be condemning. ;-)
Chepe Noyon makes a point about sensationalism selling news papers, but this can only be pushed so far. The fact that the MSM news is so totally one sided, presenting only a negative view of the news from Iraq, requires more of an explanation than the need to sell news papers. That additional explanation is spelled B-I-A-S. The uniformity with which the MSM present the Leftist perspective is overwhelming to any observer; one has to ask, "isn't there any other side to this?" The answer you get from the MSM is "no, there is only one side."
Coyote here.
I never suggested a conspiracy.
There is a difference between acting in parallel and acting in concert.
Chepe suggests, and I agree, that the mainstream media are acting in parallel based on profit motive.
There may also be bias, but again, its effects can result from prallel behavior rather than collusion.
My points were narrow ones and directed at Tom Friedman, a rather wide, hot-air-filled target.
Coyote, you make an excellent point in differentiating acting in parallel and acting in concert. And I will also admit that I find Mr. Friedman's hypothesis hard to believe. (Although I agree that Kurdish independence would provoke a Turkish invasion).
I don't accept Dr.D's suggestion that it's due to the bias of the Vast Left Wing Media Conspiracy. I've never been much on conspiracy theories. The whole idea of a free press is to get lots of different viewpoints in public. If most news sources declare "X", you can't be certain that X is true, but claiming that X is false is just pigheaded. So the only real question is, do we have a free press? If so, then I think we can give it a certain amount of credence.
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