The October issue of Wired has an interview with Rashad Mandan Omar, Iraq's Minister of Science and Technology in which he says:
Before the collapse of the regime, average monthly salaries were $10 to $15. Now, in less than a year, the average salary is 10 times that, and inflation is down. Previously, no Iraqi was allowed to have a cell phone or an Internet connection. But now there are no restrictions, and our markets are full of computers and electrical appliances.
Assuming he is not making this stuff up and that many Iraqis are considerably better off financially since we showed up on the scene, why do we not hear this sort of thing from the media? To read the news, you would think that no good has come from our presence, wouldn't you.
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Maybe things are different for different classes of Iraqi people. Certainly you might get a different story depending who you ask over there, much like in the United States. Maybe Wired likes to interview the top 5% of Iraq or something. ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that life is different over there for people depending on their exact circumstances, but if the media was objective and balanced (which it should be but we know it isn't) we would hear about the positive changes that are taking place as well as the suicide bombings.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading a lot of "milblogs" (military blogs) lately and many of them indicate that what is shown on cable news is not what they see on a daily basis.
Thanks for stopping by! Hi to Emily.
(aunt) k.
I think the news has a conservative bias when it comes to war, the military, the president, the Middle East, etc., and it has a liberal bias on such things as "moral issues," i.e. mostly sexual and reproductive issues. I have a good friend who served in Iraq for over a year, and he agrees that what is shown on the news is not what he saw on a daily basis. It is, according to him (an eyewitness), much worse.
ReplyDeleteI read recently that most people choose a tv channel for news based on their own leanings. In other words, if they lean left, they choose a left-leaning station and if they lean right, they watch Fox. That says a lot about the media, which is supposed to be unbiased. Regardless of what journalists might claim, everybody knows what to expect from each station or network -- and it is NOT unbiased coverage!
ReplyDeleteAs for your friend's view, that contradicts what I'm reading on milblogs. Maybe each person's "reality" is determined by where he/she is stationed and what job he/she is assigned. (I'm sure the folks who are in the vicinity of Samarra today belong to the "things are really sucky here" camp.)