This is a great article to highlight after the below piece in which I shine a spotlight on the MSM’s continued bias in their reporting. It’s written by Dr. Sami Alrabaa in Kuwait:
Generally speaking, the media worldwide report predominantly about the sensational, catastrophes, deaths, controversial statements by international personalities, wars, celebrity stories, gossip, rumours and the abnormal.
News about socio-economic success, development and progress is scantily tackled. A veteran German reporter told me this kind of news is boring for media consumers. People prefer the sensational. Hence, media providers fiercely compete to get hold of dramatic events. This is the kind of news that mesmerises people to the media. Commercial media, above all TV channels rejoice in reporting about wars and killing, the sooner the better.
[…]Had Mohammed Yunus not won this year’s Nobel Prize for peace, no body would have taken notice of his great Mini-Loan Bank in Bangladesh which helped eradicate poverty for seven million people. International media used to report almost only about floods and poverty from Bangladesh. Yunus’s work was ignored. It was not sensational enough. Commercial media live on the sensational, the weird, the bloody, the negative, the abnormal, and the controversial.
All this seems to apply to Iraq. We only hear and read bad news from Iraq: suicide and car bombs. Random killing, sabotage, and destruction are the only news we get from Iraq. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General describes the situation in Iraq as "worse than a civil war." Obviously he watches only CNN. But is Iraq really only killing and destruction?
An American businessman with links to major parts of Iraq told me another story of Iraq. While he admits that there is daily killing and destruction in Iraq, there is also construction, development, progress and freedom. Here are some of his facts: Slowly but steadily, "80 per cent of Iraqis are creeping (back) to (normal) life."
"Um Qasr, in the southeast extremity of Iraq on the Persian Gulf" which was deserted by the spring of 2003 is back to normal. "It is back in business as a port with commercial and military functions. "Hundreds of families have returned – joining many more who have come from all over Iraq."
"The boom in Um Qasr is part of a broader picture that also includes Basra, the sprawling metropolis of southern Iraq"
[…]The growing dynamism of the Iraqi economy is reflected in the steady increase in the value of the national currency, the dinar, against the three currencies in direct competition with it in the Iraqi marketplace: the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the US dollar, since January 2006."
"No doubt, part of the dinar’s strength reflects the rise in Iraq’s income from oil exports to almost $40 billion in 2006, an all-time record. But oil alone does not explain all, since both Iran and Kuwait are bigger exporters than Iraq."
"The fact that civil-servant salaries have increased by almost 30 per cent, with a further 30 per cent due to come into effect early next year, also has helped boost demand.
Much more where that came from. None of this kind of stuff finds its way into our newspapers or on the evening news. The only thing we get is death, destruction, and six burned Sunni’s.
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The more I learn about the MSM, the less I buy their old excuses that the public isn’t interested in economics, in foreign policy, in international news, or in “good news”. I suspect it is more likely the reporters and editors who get bored, or who find the material too challenging, or who are too lazy to do the necessary research and checking. It is the reporters and editors who are fascinated by celebrity drivel, far beyond the public’s ability to maintain an interest in it. It is reporters and editors who like the easy to tell, blood and guts crime stories, and whose eyes glaze over if asked to explain a Supreme Court decision. They are the undereducated, intellectually challenged, short-attention spanned types that they accuse the general public of being. No doubt there are some serious professionals among them, but these days, it’s hardly worth wading through the quagmire of failed reporting perpetrated by the undisciplined majority.