Hugh Hewitt on MSM And The War

There's an interesting and very healthy debate underway about the legacy media's coverage of the war. The Today Show video below is evidence of that discussion.

Now Hugh Hewitt (left) has appeared on CNN's Anderson Cooper show, forcefully making the point that all we hear about from the MSM is flame, failure and death in Iraq. Here's an excerpt from Hugh's post about an exchange on the show with Time's Michael Ware:

At one point, Time's Ware got rather emotional and attempted to argue that Iraqis are worse off than they were four years ago, though he didn't quite allow himself to say as much. I'll play the audio on the program tomorrow.

Ware's argument is the equivalent of arguing Poland was worse off in 1992 than in 1988 because the transition to real democracy was so difficult. Stalinist dictatorships are pretty awful things, and Iraq under Saddam was a Stalinist dictatorship. Ware doesn't seem to get this crucial point, or to be concerned with the mass graves that keep turning up.

The vanity of western media is that if they didn't see it, it didn't happen. That Iraq under Saddam wasn't so bad because MSM Baghdad bureaus didn't exist, and those that did (CNN's) censored the news.

The takeaway: MSM wants Bush to fail, and as a result MSM's coverage of Iraq tilts to the IEDs and the terrorist successes and never, ever provides the context that the president did in the press conference today. The MSM thus allows itself to be used by the terrorists, and thus to hamper victory. MSM doesn't believe in "victory," in fact, or in Saddam's unique evil. It believes, mostly, in the necessity of humbling Bush.

We need to see more of this direct challenge to conventional liberal wisdom. As many have noted, a debate like this would have been unthinkable in 1992 or at any other pre-blogospheric time.