The @#$%! liberal media

Several weeks ago I got an e-mail message with "Pictures From Iraq That Are Too Shocking & Graphic for The Mainstream Media." They showed American soldiers with Iraqi children, soldiers linking arms in a prayer circle, Iraqis holding up signs saying "Iraqi people happy today," "thank you thank you U.S.A." and "Thank You Very Much Mr. Bush," and a heavily armed soldier leaning down to pet a kitten. Below the pictures, the message asked, shouted in all-caps, rather, "PLEASE KEEP THIS GOING EVEN IF YOU HAVE PASSED IT ON BEFORE."

It is, of course, a variation on the age-old tactic of reviling the people who report the news instead of the people who make the news when the news isn't good. In slightly different versions, it's been passed around on right-wing websites for two years now. I Googled the keywords and found the pictures here and here, among other places ... but also a personal blog that amended the heading to read "Photos That will NEVER Make the News, unless they were released by major news organizations in the first place." The blogger had a point. Of 10 or 12 pictures, two carried credit lines from The Associated Press, one from Reuters and one from Agence France Presse.

Here's the point: Who ran the pictures the news media don't want us to see? Why, the news media, that's who.

I was reminded of the now-we-see-them-now-we-don't pictures when ABC News anchor Bob Woodward and his camera operator were injured over the weekend by a roadside bomb blast in Iraq. As Slate.com noted, even conservative bloggers, who normally attack the MSM for what they see as a liberal bias, noticed they were in country on a "good news" story. New York Times TV critic Allesandra Stanley explains that angle, which wasn't developed in most accounts I've seen:

Bob Woodruff was in Baghdad for ABC reporting the good news that the Bush administration complains is ignored by the news media, and he ended up as a glaring illustration of the bad news.

Mr. Woodruff, the newly named co-anchor of "World News Tonight," spent Friday chatting with friendly Iraqis on the street and slurped ice cream at a popular Baghdad shop to show how some in Iraq are seeking a semblance of normalcy.

Yesterday he and an ABC cameraman, Doug Vogt, were badly wounded while traveling in a routine convoy with Iraqi military forces who are being trained to impose that normalcy and allow American troops to go home.

What happened to Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt was one of those chilling television moments that mark a milestone. This conflict has shown all too clearly that soldiers, civilians, aid workers and journalists are all targets.

But apparently this accolade from the dreaded, elitist New York Times was too much. Cori Dauber, a mass communications scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, went right back to blasting away at the TV networks and the dreaded Times. In her blog Rantingprofs.com, Dauber writes:

Every other aspect, element, item, or fact about the country [Iraq] -- including the political situation -- has just gone away. It's been all roadside bombs all the time.

The irony, of course, is that the story the ABC crew was originally sent out to cover -- the quality and progress of Iraqi troops -- was the first story to fall by the wayside. What has been covered in the interim was the risk of roadside bombs and the quality of military medical care, and that's about it. The only thing that's been said about Iraqi troops is that the ABC crew was with them because that's "the" story to cover. After which they once again disappeared from the scene. [Emphasis in the original.]

It looks like, if nothing else, the right-wing blogosphere is back on message.

LATER: To test Dauber's hypothesis the mainstream media coverage of Iraq is "all roadside bombs all the time," I searched the Google news page for all stories mentioning the keyword "Iraq" between Jan. 29, when the ABC newsmen were hit by the bomb, and Jan. 31. I got 38,800 hits. Then I did an advanced search on keywords "Iraq" and "roadside bombs." I got 229, or 0.59 percent of the total. That seemed low, so I searched again for keywords "Iraq" and "Bob Woodruff," and got 2,790 hits. I think that figure demonstrates Dauber's point that the ABC anchor is being covered like a celebrity, but it comes out to 7.19 percent of the total stories on Iraq. If my math is correct, she still overstates the ratio by a little more than 90 percent.