Media Analysts Sound Pessimistic as Iraq Civil War Fails to Materialize
<p>WASHINGTON &mdash; Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy<br />
note today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in<br />
Iraq had been averted.  &#8220;The prospects for regime change in Washington<br />
seem increasingly remote,&#8221; said one senior White House reporter who<br />
spoke on condition of anonymity.</p>
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<p>&#8220;We gave the insurgent Democrats millions of dollars worth of air<br />
time, fake-but-accurate reporting, and the deadliest editorials we<br />
could write,&#8221; he continued, &#8220;but their popular support in-country just wasn&#8217;t what we expected.&#8221;</p>
<p>Efforts to isolate and discredit the rogue theocratic regime of<br />
George &#8220;Chimpy&#8221; Bush in the international arena have been more<br />
successful, the press spokesman said.  &#8220;The U.N. is completely with<br />
our program on that one,&#8221; he said, also citing moves by lawmakers<br />
in Belgium and elsewhere to have Bush arrested and charged with<br />
war crimes should he enter their jurisdiction.</p>
<p>While there is some resistance to the regime in the urbanized<br />
Northeast, the Bushites&#8217; strong base of support in the tribal<br />
provinces of the South and Midwest has been sufficient to keep them in<br />
power.  &#8220;Despite frequent overflights,&#8221; the spokesman admitted &#8220;we<br />
know almost nothing about conditions there.&#8221;</p>
<p>Faulty intelligence has been a continuing theme in the press&#8217;s<br />
failure to achieve its policy goals. Critics charge that expert<br />
evaluations have been routinely distorted or suppressed to further a<br />
preconceived agenda, reading to major embarrassments like the<br />
Rathergate scandal, false allegations of Koran-flushing at Guantanamo,<br />
and erroneous reports of cannibalism in the New Orleans Superdome.</p>
<p>In the wake of these failures, a rising tide of anti-press<br />
sentiment is making its choices more difficult.  Fearing to venture<br />
from its limousines and air-conditioned hotels in the Blue State Zone,<br />
the press seems increasingly prone to live in a bubble, with wishful<br />
thinking substituting for a clear grasp of facts on the ground.</p>
<p>In this atmosphere, outright fabrications like those at the heart<br />
of the the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair scandals have become all<br />
too common, and led to the tragic downfall of at least one major editor.<br />
Despite this, calls for &#8220;reality-based&#8221; reporting have gone largely<br />
unheeded by a media establishment insistent on its ideological vision<br />
of a better future.</p>
<p>Media planners have pinned most of their remaining hopes on the<br />
2006 elections despite the disappointments of 2000 and 2004. &#8220;Those<br />
elections didn&#8217;t come out the way we wanted,&#8221; a former CBS staffer<br />
observed, &#8220;so they must have been rigged by at least the <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=154'>15% swing</a> we can deliver.<br />
We&#8217;ll try harder next time.&#8221;</p>
