It's Hard Work

Yesterday David Sirota took on the corporate media and specifically ABC for not reporting on the Iraq war.

A MAJOR AMERICAN MEDIA OUTLET HAS NOW DECLARED THAT THEY SIMPLY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN LETTING THE CARNAGE IN IRAQ "BREAK THROUGH" IN THEIR NEWS COVERAGE - AS IF IT IS SIMPLY NOT NEWSWORTHY. You can just imagine the pathetic newsroom attitude: we don't cover cats getting stuck in trees, we don't birthday parties at the local McDonalds, and we don't cover America's multi-billion dollar war in the Mideast.

Not to surprisingly he received a number of messages from indignant "reporters". He answers them over at The Huffington Post.

For any reporters reading this, here's the deal: As my dad (and Tom Hanks in "League of Their Own") always said, your work is supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it (and granted, some of the no-talent clowns on TV prove, unfortunately, that everyone is doing it). The fact that Iraq is a "hard" story means you need to work extra hard to cover it - not simply ignore the story altogether, and create/justify an insulated Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom that says no one cares. If you spend more than 6 seconds outside the beltway echo chamber, you'd know damn well that people do.

This is a truly sad state of affairs that should make serious journalists from an earlier era (such as Walter Cronkite) sick to their stomach. Polls consistently show that the national media has become a laughinstock. And while some reporters lament this as unfair - this little interchange with ABC proves that it is grounded in reality. Far from stupid, the American public keenly recognizes that many major media today are simply no longer interested in reporting on anything that might fundamentally challenge the Establishment power structure. For when the media seems more interested in covering what's on the President's Ipod and what the President's dancing habits are than they are the death/maiming of American soldiers in Iraq, well, we've got a serious problem.

A majority now feel the Iraq war was a mistake. Can you imagine how they would feel if the media told them how bad it really was. While the administration and the military make it "hard work" to report the war if you are a real journalist it's your responsibility to do the hard work. Go check out both posts.