Is your local paper listening to soldiers dissent?

Posted by Philip Barron at 12:23 PM on January 2, 2007.

It's rather likely that no matter how you-the-individual feel about the American occupation of Iraq or George Bush's leadership as a self-described "war president," you'd assume that most active-duty soldiers largely support the president and his Iraq policy. According to a recently-released poll of service members, however, you'd be dead wrong.

Guest-posting at the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report notes that a poll of 6,000 active-duty personnel conducted by the newspapers of the Military Times (Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Times) reaches conclusions that fly in the face of common conceptions on Iraq - conclusions that have so far gone largely unremarked in the press:

Barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war; a majority believe it was wrong to go into Iraq in the first place; and a plurality reject the notion of sending additional troops into the war.

For reasons that are unclear, the media seems to have missed the poll entirely. [...]

In terms of newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News and the Seattle Times were the only U.S. papers to run stories of their own. Reuters and UPI mentioned the poll in wire stories, which were not widely picked up. That's it. That's all the print coverage the poll received.

A quick check of my own home daily - the doggedly-centrist St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a property of Lee Enterprises of Iowa - finds no mention whatsoever of the Military Times poll. Perhaps it's not surprising for an increasingly local-emphasis paper like the P-D, but given that the paper relies heavily on the wire services for rumors of war, the omission of news of such a large-scale military poll seems conspicuous.

After all, as Benen says, the story "sounds kind of newsworthy."

Well. Perhaps your local paper has done a better job of listening to soldiers and telling you what they think. Or perhaps not.

Tagged as: iraq war

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.