{"id":269,"date":"2006-02-28T21:36:22","date_gmt":"2006-03-01T02:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=269"},"modified":"2010-07-19T01:47:58","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T06:47:58","slug":"media-analysts-sound-pessimistic-as-iraq-civil-war-fails-to-materialize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=269","title":{"rendered":"Media Analysts Sound Pessimistic as Iraq Civil War Fails to Materialize"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>WASHINGTON &mdash; Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy<br \/>\nnote today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in<br \/>\nIraq had been averted.  &#8220;The prospects for regime change in Washington<br \/>\nseem increasingly remote,&#8221; said one senior White House reporter who<br \/>\nspoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We gave the insurgent Democrats millions of dollars worth of air<br \/>\ntime, fake-but-accurate reporting, and the deadliest editorials we<br \/>\ncould write,&#8221; he continued, &#8220;but their popular support in-country just wasn&#8217;t what we expected.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Efforts to isolate and discredit the rogue theocratic regime of<br \/>\nGeorge &#8220;Chimpy&#8221; Bush in the international arena have been more<br \/>\nsuccessful, the press spokesman said.  &#8220;The U.N. is completely with<br \/>\nour program on that one,&#8221; he said, also citing moves by lawmakers<br \/>\nin Belgium and elsewhere to have Bush arrested and charged with<br \/>\nwar crimes should he enter their jurisdiction.<\/p>\n<p>While there is some resistance to the regime in the urbanized<br \/>\nNortheast, the Bushites&#8217; strong base of support in the tribal<br \/>\nprovinces of the South and Midwest has been sufficient to keep them in<br \/>\npower.  &#8220;Despite frequent overflights,&#8221; the spokesman admitted &#8220;we<br \/>\nknow almost nothing about conditions there.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Faulty intelligence has been a continuing theme in the press&#8217;s<br \/>\nfailure to achieve its policy goals. Critics charge that expert<br \/>\nevaluations have been routinely distorted or suppressed to further a<br \/>\npreconceived agenda, reading to major embarrassments like the<br \/>\nRathergate scandal, false allegations of Koran-flushing at Guantanamo,<br \/>\nand erroneous reports of cannibalism in the New Orleans Superdome.<\/p>\n<p>In the wake of these failures, a rising tide of anti-press<br \/>\nsentiment is making its choices more difficult.  Fearing to venture<br \/>\nfrom its limousines and air-conditioned hotels in the Blue State Zone,<br \/>\nthe press seems increasingly prone to live in a bubble, with wishful<br \/>\nthinking substituting for a clear grasp of facts on the ground.<\/p>\n<p>In this atmosphere, outright fabrications like those at the heart<br \/>\nof the the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair scandals have become all<br \/>\ntoo common, and led to the tragic downfall of at least one major editor.<br \/>\nDespite this, calls for &#8220;reality-based&#8221; reporting have gone largely<br \/>\nunheeded by a media establishment insistent on its ideological vision<br \/>\nof a better future.<\/p>\n<p>Media planners have pinned most of their remaining hopes on the<br \/>\n2006 elections despite the disappointments of 2000 and 2004. &#8220;Those<br \/>\nelections didn&#8217;t come out the way we wanted,&#8221; a former CBS staffer<br \/>\nobserved, &#8220;so they must have been rigged by at least the <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=154'>15% swing<\/a> we can deliver.<br \/>\nWe&#8217;ll try harder next time.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WASHINGTON &mdash; Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy note today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in Iraq had been averted. &#8220;The prospects for regime change in Washington seem increasingly remote,&#8221; said one senior White House reporter who spoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2344,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/2344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}