Reaching Out at Fallujah Outpost

Reaching Out at Fallujah Outpost (washingtonpost.com)

You don't see many articles like this one. For months all I've seen about Iraq in the papers and network news is doom and gloom: Another U.S. soldier killed, roadside bomb, RPG attack, beheading, blah blah blah. You'd think that the entire country is in chaos, which of course it isn't. There are a few nasty places like Tikrit, Fallujah, Mosul, etc. where insurgents, bolstered by foreign muslim fundamentalists are terrorizing U.S. troops, Iraqi police and the local residents. But even there a few miles from contained chaos, there's a silver lining.

The Washington Post has been getting high marks from me lately for its reporting. For a while it was a really slanted newspaper, aligned with the New York Times and the L.A. Times. But over the last four months it's been surpising me with incredibly fair articles. I read a lot of different papers for the news so I tend to notice the differences between the reporting as much as what's being reported. The turn around at the Washington Post is striking. Though it may have something to do with a really low ranking on a recent poll in which people were asked about the newspapers they trust. This turn around though predates the poll by a few weeks.

In any case, the doom and gloom news gets better ratings but it's depressing. I feel like it's a short-sighted strategy to harp on the negative all day and night. For one thing it's a very smug attitude to take. It's easy to sit around and criticize something after the fact. The monday morning quarterback syndrome in full effect. I think it gets old... Secondly, along those lines, people can only take so much negativity before they just shut down and become depressed. Americans are always depressed. It's like an epidemic or something. I can't believe how sad and pathetic we have become as a country. The guilt, sadness, and futility laid on the American people by the papers and TV is outrageous. You watch programming that depresses you and then they bombard you with ads for drugs that will fix it. I want to construct a conspiracy theory with the TV and Newspapers in an unholy alliance with the drug companies to lead us into a THX 1138 world of mandatory medication.

Fortunately, there's a power button on our TVs still. We don't have to sit and absorb the negativity coming from our idiot boxes, we can choose to be active rather than passive. My own defense against depression inducing media is to adopt a generally critical approach to the media. Critical thinking makes you an active viewer or consumer of news, not just a passive recipient.

In the end the news media may increase ratings with the negative, doom-and-gloom stuff over the short term, but as people become more depressed with the news, they just stop watching in resignation, and the news corporations don't want that either.