Spin vs. Truth in Iraq

The third anniversary of the war came, and the third anniversary went, and an opportunity for media outlets to offer hard-nosed assessments on the state of the conflict or reflect on their own coverage flashed by as quickly as one of those network logos.

It was news business as usual with a few minor exceptions and little deviation from the template of a pro-war media-frame, even as more critical comments percolated through -- usually from people wearying of the story and upset because the invasion has not been more effective. USA Today even reported that one out of four Americans admitted the war had, at one point or another, made them cry.

If the outcome had been different with a clear-cut victory, a real "mission accomplished" or a decisive bad-guys-gone, good-guys-win formulation, we would be seeing parades and we told-you-sos all over the media. Reality forced media outlets to tone down the celebratory tones we saw when the war was originally being described as a "cakewalk."

At the advice of his media managers, President Bush remained upbeat, jumping out in public early to reinforce his policy with a series of political campaign-like speeches and the promulgation of a "new" strategy document based entirely on an old one. It was a PR maneuver straight out of the information war-info dominance play book in which positioning is everything, ie., the person who defines the issue first shapes the news.

In his case, the president was mindful of the erosion of public support and so careful not to even use the word "war." Democracy is now his buzzword du jour. His rhetoric sought to do what his Pentagon couldn't -- convert defeat into a victory. This media strategy is designed as a proactive way to manage perceptions because everyone else is then forced to react to you. After several sound-alike speeches, he appealed to the public to leave the war behind as in "lets not talk about it anymore."

Not everyone in the press played along. The AP carried an analysis showing how the president's speechwriters cited quotes from "straw men" to concoct phony arguments that he then verbally knocked down. I saw that story on Yahoo, not on the air.

Operation Swarmer

With a $2 billion media budget, the Pentagon staged its own media anniversary war game with a special military maneuver tantalizingly titled "Operation Swarmer." They know that the TV cameras need pictures, so we were treated to images of an armada of helicopters out to "smoke out" some terrorists instead of the nightly display of dead bodies. Like film producers they "deployed" Hollywood narrative technique to create a visual storyline infused with the "bang-bang" that networks love, along with an animation showing how their gung-ho tactics are "making progress."

It was this made-for-TV media story that spun the anniversary on the ground, until a few days later when Time came out to report that the whole staged spectacle "fizzled."

Time's man on the spot writes: "But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ('Air assault' is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no air strikes, and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What's more, there were no shots fired at all, and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders."

Downplayed stories:

1. Escalating costs

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reported that funding for the war we are supposedly winning will go up. U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will average 44 percent more in the current fiscal year. Spending will rise to $9.8 billion a month from the $6.8 billion a month the Pentagon said it spent last year, the research service said.