[SacTown Chronic]

Originally Posted by The Shadoe

Laura Ingraham recently went all out on the Today show, criticizing them for not telling the whole story, not talking to the soldiers, and not talking to the citizens. It looks like there has now been an Ingraham effect... what's that? More positive news from Iraq? Seems like MSM is trying to paint LI as being wrong. Too late.

An Ingraham effect? Urm, no.

The following are examples from recent days of Bush and administration officials directing blame at the media's coverage of Iraq:

On March 19, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on CBS' Face the Nation and answered a question about the sagging support for the Iraq war by noting that "there's a constant sort of perception, if you will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad."

During a March 20 press gaggle, White House press secretary Scott McClellan discussed the speech Bush would give later that day in Cleveland. McClellan said that the "dramatic images that people see on the TV screens ... are much easier to put into a news clip" and told reporters that the president would address the "real progress being made toward a democratic future."
In his speech to the City Club of Cleveland, Bush said he understood "how some Americans have had their confidence shaken." He continued: "Others look at the violence they see each night on their television screens, and they wonder how I can remain so optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq." Bush then talked about the town of Tal Afar, which he described as a "concrete example of progress in Iraq that most Americans do not see every day in their newspapers and on their television screens."
Later in the speech, Bush said: "The kind of progress that we and the Iraqi people are making in places like Tal Afar is not easy to capture in a short clip on the evening news. Footage of children playing, or shops opening, and people resuming their normal lives will never be as dramatic as the footage of an IED explosion, or the destruction of a mosque, or soldiers and civilians being killed or injured."

During a March 21 press conference, Bush said that "for every act of violence, there is encouraging progress in Iraq that's hard to capture on the evening news."

Later in the press conference, Bush claimed that he had presented "a realistic assessment of the enemy's capability to affect the debate. ... They're capable of blowing up innocent life so it ends up on your TV show. And, therefore, it affects the woman in Cleveland you were talking to. And I can understand how Americans are worried about whether or not we can win. "

As the White House mounted its offensive in recent days, the Bush administration's argument that news outlets have consistently ignored the good news in Iraq in favor of reports on bombings, kidnappings, and other atrocities has echoed throughout the media. For instance, as MSNBC host Keith Olbermann noted on the March 22 edition of Countdown, radio talk show host Laura Ingraham appeared on NBC's Today on March 21 and complained that the network's Iraq correspondents only "report[] from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs [improvised explosive devices] going off." Later that day, in an appearance on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Ingraham claimed that there are many in the media "who are invested in America's defeat." O'Reilly, in turn, expressed his belief that "there is a segment of the media trying to undermine the policy in Iraq for their own ideological purposes," as Media Matters for America noted.

Actually what you have here is the latest administration excuses for failure talking points being distributed to, and parroted by, all the usual suspects. Blaming the media seems like the last, and most desperate, act of a nothing's-our-fault administration.

But hey, far be it for me to come between you and Laura I. Carry on with the hero worship.