Quote Originally Posted by Jimbo View Post
My second issue with Gentile, is the "location, location, location" line from real estate. In Bagdhad you have a wide variety of national media avilable with all kinds of different opinions and perspectives on the US campaign/policy in Iraq. f you are not in Bagdhad, you do not see this kind of coverage. So I would contend that while Gentile made an accurate statement for what he saw in Bagdhad, I disagree with it based on what I saw in other parts of Iraq where I was.
The media aren't really in any other areas of Iraq. Even military reporting from these areas gets things wrong. I get more information on my husband's AO from jihadist or jihadist-sympathetic sites than I do from various American media outlets. They are there and have an interest to tell the story. All I need to do is reorient the skew, which isn't that hard -- their filter is pretty obvious. To be perfectly honest, I don't think it would help the "cause" much to tell the story from where he is. Yes, there are some nice uplifting points about the budding relationships between the American and Iraqi forces and such, but the rest is fairly dismal.

However, not getting the details correct, or not even covering the story to begin with, is different from telling only one side of the story to skew opinion to one political opinion or another. Again, that was Gentile's thesis -- that the media with which he dealt did not only tell the bad news so as to turn opinion against the war, but there was enough bad news that to _not_ tell it would be equally biased.