|
“Dear
Colleague” letter from Jack Kingston to GOP members of Congress
Dear Republican Colleague:
This past week I traveled to Iraq as
part of a bipartisan delegation to gauge the morale of our troops,
talk with the officers and soldiers about the war, and witness the
progress in Iraq and that of the Iraqi people. The bottom line: The
war in Iraq is a much different war than the one we read about in
the major media everyday. Progress is being made.
As you may have read in Tuesday's
Washington Times, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "We've
arrived at a strange time in this country, where the worst about
America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by
the press and reported and spread around the world." He continued,
saying the reporting is "often with little context and little
scrutiny, let alone correction or accountability after the fact."
Attached is a
report prepared by the Media Research Center, which studied the
networks' coverage of the war in Iraq in 2005 and found that, in
fact, the networks HAVE BEEN biased.
For instance, the data show that the
coverage has been:
-
Overwhelmingly pessimistic
-
Increasingly negative over time
-
Highlighting terrorist attacks as
centerpieces of the nightly news
-
Downbeat on the Iraqi political
process
-
Limited to only eight stories of
heroism or valor by U.S. troops -- out of 1,388 news reports!
This new study confirms what our
troops told me in Iraq, that they wondered why only the bad news
seemed to be getting reported to Americans through the media. Our
nation's media can do better. Journalists have an obligation and
responsibility to report in a fair and balanced manner.
Unfortunately, for the story about
the war in Iraq, that's not happening.
Sincerely,
Jack Kingston
Member of Congress
Take Action and Make a Donation!
|
