Media Won't Report About Pro-U.S. Iraqis NewsMax.com Friday, May 9, 2003 The media establishment is playing down or ignoring the friendly dealings between U.S. forces and the people of Baghdad. The press is not likely to write about the Iraqi women flirting with GIs, lifting their veils to smile or waving from windows, or children elbowing each other for a moment of attention with a soldier or even the extravagant expressions of gratitude that accompany every honeymoon-like encounter with the troops. “Instead, you read story after story about the supposed fury of Baghdadis at the Americans for allowing the breakdown of law and order in their city,” according to a report by Jonathan Foreman in the May 12 issue of The Weekly Standard. Foreman, a correspondent for the New York Post embedded with the Scout Platoon of the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, sees things quite differently. “I’ve met hundreds of Iraqis as I accompanied army patrols all over the city during the past two weeks,” he writes, “and I’ve never encountered any such fury.” He notes that there is “understandable frustration about the continuing failure of the Americans to get the water supply and the electricity turned back on, though the ubiquity of generators indicates that the latter was always a problem.” In his column, Foreman gives many examples of skewered reporting by the media in Baghdad. He notes that “perhaps this is just another case of reporters with an anti-American or anti-war agenda. Perhaps living in Saddam’s totalitarian Baghdad has left some of the press here with a case of Stockholm syndrome.” Whatever the cause, the result has been very selective reporting, according to Foreman. The looting of Baghdad in the first days after the U.S. troops took key points of the city was “massively exaggerated and misrepresented” by the Associated Press's Hamza Hendawi, for instance. Hendawi described an “unchecked frenzy,” which Foreman writes did not exist. “The looting was targeted and nonviolent.” Reports April 18 that “Tens of thousands of protesters demanding that the United States get out of Iraq” were exaggerated, particularly by Reuters’ Hassan Hafidh. Foreman writes that reporters seem to have confused a few protesters with a large number of Shia Muslims gathering for a pilgrimage to Karbala – a pilgrimage long forbidden by Saddam Hussein's regime. Foreman notes that there are frequent small demonstrations in the blocks outside the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, “partly because that is where the press corps is congregated and also because it’s an area that many Baath party officials fled to after the war began.” Far more typical and frequent demonstrations involve hundreds and even thousands of Iraqis gathering to cheer U.S. troops. Stories that the military let the city, particularly hospitals and the national museum, be destroyed while guarding the Ministry of Oil are “myths,” Foreman writes. “The Marines defended only the streets around their own headquarters and so-called Areas of Operation.” The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran quoted Saad Jawad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University, as saying: “The Iraqis had very high hopes for the Americans. But all this euphoria about change, all this relief, went away when they saw the amount of destruction to the infrastructure …” The reporter did not note in the story that roads, bridges, power stations and rail lines were all left unbombed and intact by U.S. forces. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/5/9/152147.shtml Typical.
