Article

2004-06-03 Iraq-Jordan

Reuters Reporters Say Every Man on Iraqi Street Opposes US

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Posted by Mike Sylwester 2004-06-03 11:22:32 AM|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 All except Iyad Allawi, Iraqâs new Interim Prime Minister, and other people that actually count.

Posted by Lou 2004-06-03 11:40:19 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:40:19 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Was that Baghdad or Berkley? I someitmes get them confused. So three people equals the opinion of 25 million? I bet that at least the governing council like him. How about the Kurds? What about the Sunnis? Al Sistani has given his stamp of approval, they couldn't find one of his supporters? You sure this isn't the SF Chronicle or a Move On release?

Posted by Cyber Sarge (VRWC CA Chapter) 2004-06-03 11:41:39 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:41:39 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 CS - The Kurds hate us too, apparently. Murat says so.

Posted by Bulldog 2004-06-03 11:44:21 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:44:21 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Reuters is far and away the champion of idiotarian reporting, but I didn't realize they had gotten this bad.

The line bewteen objective reporting and editorializing has vanished completely among the old media.

Posted by Chris W. 2004-06-03 11:46:55 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:46:55 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 dosn't GWB have a 95% approval rating with kurds? guess they really must hate us - all 5% of them!

Posted by Shep UK 2004-06-03 11:47:24 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:47:24 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 I think the problem is that they interview the same 10 people (originally vetted for their astounding stupidity or willigness to parrot whatever the reporter wanted to hear) every time. Slightly skews the results. Rooters. Consistently just to the Left of Trotsky.

Posted by .com 2004-06-03 11:53:08 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:53:08 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 As Mel Gibson said in "Tequila Sunrise" (I think): "Oh, and what street is that?"

Posted by St James 2004-06-03 11:57:09 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:57:09 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 I think they just print whatever the hell they feel like. If they interview people at all, they simply ignore anyone who tells them what they don't want to hear.

Reuters, Guardian, Independent... burned their credibility ages ago and are just preaching to the loyal perverted converted.

Posted by Bulldog 2004-06-03 11:58:31 AM|| 2004-06-03 11:58:31 AM|| Front Page Top

#9 I wonder if they actually left the hotel bar to take this 'poll'......

Posted by CrazyFool 2004-06-03 12:04:28 PM|| 2004-06-03 12:04:28 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 2LT Brian Suits said live on radio from Iraq yesterday that many Iraqies will say what it is they think you want them to say. He said he makes a point of asking questions of the folks and also asking that they tell him what they really think.

From what I was able to tell from his interview, they want US gone when the time is right and that they know whats going on and like the nation building. I trust what he says.

Posted by Lucky 2004-06-03 12:07:48 PM|| 2004-06-03 12:07:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 For their next assignment, these Reuters "reporters" are going to Iran to interview the space aliens that landed near the nuclear "power plant" under construction. . .

Posted by BigEd 2004-06-03 12:09:31 PM|| 2004-06-03 12:09:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 Speaking of aliens, about 3am last night a UFO crossed over Washington state. One eyewitness was out checking on her dog and said it went from dark to broad daylite as the object went by. It also made a large racket. Another guy, a night watchman thought it was Christ himself come to shepard the flock.

Although some say it was a meteor and that it was flaming and split apart. Whatever it was it was big to put out that much light and noise.

Posted by Lucky 2004-06-03 12:45:30 PM|| 2004-06-03 12:45:30 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 Apparently the reporters use the same translators that Sammy's Iraq Interior Ministry provided as "minders". So what do they think people are going to say to the translator? Do they think the translator is even asking the same question?

Derranged leading the blind.

Posted by john 2004-06-03 12:49:01 PM|| 2004-06-03 12:49:01 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 Lucky...normally you are a pretty rational guy. You been hanging out with Mucky this morning? Mokin some dat weed? (Course if you can link to a source on this, even the Intelligent Post in Seattle, I shall backpedal furiously.)

Posted by remote man 2004-06-03 1:23:44 PM|| 2004-06-03 1:23:44 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 The knives are out, my friends. Reuters, AP, BBC, Le Monde, Peter, Tom, Dan, Chris Matthews, etc. Something is reported re Iraq/terrorism every day in media with blatant/subtle bias. Recent example: I'm watching BBC coverage of opening of WWII memorial this past weekend on public TV WYCC in Chicago. Reporter goes to two WWII vets. One says Bush is a good man but not the guy capable to fight the WOT. Other guy says he doesn't understand why Americans are dying for people they don't know. End of comments. A couple of my aging hippie-type cousins would pounce on a reportage like that and say,"See, Mike? You DO get a different perspective from BBC. Not dolts who just never question the BS The Man is spreading. It was the same, like, in Vietnam, man." See? Iraq=Vietnam. So subtle the way the BBC does it. Just a little editing and it's Even The Greatest Generation is against The Cowboy.

This type of out-of-context "reporting" has been so pervasive for the past two-three months. First it was Paul O'Neill's book. Remember Dean quoting from it on the Sunday news shows? Then Richard Clarke's book and theatrics. Then Condi brooha Will she testify or won't she, UNDER OATH, dammit! Then Joe Wilson's book. Then Woodward's book. Oh, yeah, now it's Zinni's book. Abu Ghraib. Next, Clinton's book. All We, the uncleansed masses, hear is what Big Media believe to be appropriate. Let's Give You the Other Side of the Story. Only our enemies and adversaries are the ones telling the other side. Notice there are no stories about increased electric production to above Saddam production. Sorry, but I should be the one commenting on TV re Saudi Arabia, not Nora O'Donnell, not Eleanor Clift, not McLaughlin. Why don't Katy and Matt interview Iraqis living in the US re the future of the country? To illustrate I have reached my limit is that yesterday I watched Charlie Rose for only literally 5 seconds. He was interviewing Tom Friedman. Zap. Sorry, I can't stand his fisked, documented flip flopping portrayed as reasoned discussion. I turned channel to the 5th Wheel. I guess we need Blog TV just like there is talk radio for those of us who need to respond.

I guess after today's events, we should be reading about George Tenet's book signing with Simon and Shuster in about, oh, a month.

So, if this is the situation in the US, of course Iraq is easy pickings for Rooters, CNN, etc. to find people not happy about their quality of life. What does one expect after 35 years of Stalinism/Baathism/Islamofascism/Terrorism emminating from Iraq? But there is absolutely no proportion given in reporting. How about some mainline media stories on improvements? The ONLY thing Ive seen in the past several months was Fox Sunday Morning reporting on infrastructure accomplishments in Iraq. All in reaction to Nightline's reading of our military's dead (both combat and accidents) names, notice only for Iraq, not Afghanistan. This negativity is seeping deep into the crevices of the citizenry in the US, no doubt. So W, just what the hell are your people doing about it? Just give us the facts. Insist on national broadcasts. Speak up on the letter signed by Swiftboat vets. I showed my military files, why cant Kerry? Bush has to fight back eventhough in a gentleman's game it might be unseemly to respond to crazy charges, but this is not a gentleman's game, W. Faster, please. On all fronts. We're out there waiting for the counterattack.

Posted by Michael 2004-06-03 2:11:29 PM|| 2004-06-03 2:11:29 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 Lucky - 'twas a hoax.

Michael - I think the knives were out long before this; there's just more of 'em now.

Posted by Raj 2004-06-03 2:20:07 PM|| [http://angrycyclist.blogspot.com] 2004-06-03 2:20:07 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 Michael, that's a most excellent rant. I've never seen wall-to-wall negative coverage like this, including (from distant memory) the coverage of Nixon during Watergate.

Just think what they'd be saying if things really were going badly in Iraq.

Posted by Matt 2004-06-03 2:22:44 PM|| 2004-06-03 2:22:44 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 I just think it is awful that everyone hates us. We should have listened to the UN, and continued with the inspections. The Iraqis want to govern themselves and are not happy with being occupied. How would you like it if some country just came in and bombed everything, put Bush in prison, and then sent that Kimmel girl in to be a prison guard? Just because we are the strongest country doesn't mean we can just do what we want.

Posted by Jennifer 2004-06-03 2:24:47 PM|| 2004-06-03 2:24:47 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 Jennifer, everyone DOES NOT hate us!
We are loved all over the world.
(Done any world travel? I have.)
I hope we never listen to the U.N.--No wonder they didn't want Saddam to leave; the UN was making BILLIONS off his Oil-for-Palaces program!
Saddam was a criminal who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, if not millions.
The Iraqis don't miss him at all.
Because we're the strongest country in the world and because we're America, it means it behooves us all the more to do what is RIGHT.

Posted by Jen 2004-06-03 2:29:23 PM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-06-03 2:29:23 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 Everybody hates us? Well, that is bad if our primary foriegn policy objective is to be well liked.

A friend of mine is of German descent. He happened to be visiting his relatives on Reunification Day, after the Wall came down. When midnight struck, a woman walked up to him and kissed him full on the lips. When he expressed pleasant surprise, the woman said, "But there are no other Americans in the room for me to thank!" She wasn't looking for any guys with blue helmets on, or any Frenchmen, or any Swedes.

Posted by Matt 2004-06-03 2:42:11 PM|| 2004-06-03 2:42:11 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 We should have listened to the UN, and continued with the inspections.

Jennifer - Have you been measured for your burqua yet?

Posted by BigEd 2004-06-03 2:44:04 PM|| 2004-06-03 2:44:04 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 Let's see what we can do to spruce this one up...

In a "man on the street" piece, Georgy couldnât find a single Iraqi who had a good thing to say about Allawi, or, for that matter, the United States. "Iraq is the same as under Saddam Hussein," said one hotel manager whom Georgy reports "refused to give his name" ~~but he was in the bar at the time I was typing this~~. "I reject him," declared Hassan Ali, a policeman ~~who was standing outside while I was waiting for a cab~~.

Posted by eLarson 2004-06-03 2:58:25 PM|| 2004-06-03 2:58:25 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 IIRC, this "hotel manager" has been quoted many times. That must be a damn good bar he runs. And I suspect the "reporter" rarely gets below 0.15 blood alcohol level. Gotta keep up the tradition...

Posted by PBMcL 2004-06-03 3:33:46 PM|| 2004-06-03 3:33:46 PM|| Front Page Top

#24 So under Jennifers logic the UN fatcats would still be profiting under the oil for food program - saddam still killing peoples - i am sure that poor guy who ran the the UN vechicle pleading for help is long dead - but the world would like us...if that is what it takes them scew the world..
this is not about saddam, the un , the french - it is about our national security..

Posted by Dan 2004-06-03 3:43:12 PM|| 2004-06-03 3:43:12 PM|| Front Page Top

#25 Jennifer: I just think it is awful that everyone hates us.

This is because they are incessantly lied to by their local press and their government, which pump out disinformation in order to advance their national interests. You will never hear a foreign journalist criticize his government for doing sleazy deals because that has an impact on press licenses and could bring about libel suits and tax audits. Foreign journos are also extremely bigoted - they believe their countries' problems must not be due to internal causes - they are ethnically/racially/culturally too superior for that to be the case. This is why the US always gets the blame. Bottom line - foreign journalists are full of the nationalistic prejudice that Americans like Mike Wallace are free of when he said he would not warn Americans who were about to be killed if he managed to find out beforehand, while doing an investigative report.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2004-06-03 5:08:39 PM|| [http://www.polipundit.com] 2004-06-03 5:08:39 PM|| Front Page Top

#26 Julius Streicher was one man, Al Reuters is a gang of thousands. No problem, we have lots of rope.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2004-06-03 6:08:52 PM|| 2004-06-03 6:08:52 PM|| Front Page Top

#27 Jennifer, two things spring to mind - first your position based on emotion, rather than reason. Nothing else can explain your contention that we would have been better off with Hans Blix and company getting paid not to find WMDs and our UN "allies" on the security council taking billion dollar kickbacks from the "Oil-for-Food" program. Not to mention the collateral fallout of what you're advocating - the deaths of at least 60,000 Iraqi civilians (under Saddam about 5,000 died each month from malnutrition, torture and imprisonment) and Saddam remaining in power. Tell me, how does that benefit the U.S. or Iraqi people?

The second thing that comes to mind - "I just think it is awful that everyone hates us." Why? Why do you think it's just awful? That type of sentiment smacks of the obsequious approval seeking done by unpopular kids in highschool. Everyone hates us? Really? You polled them all and they all hate us? I don't think that they do, if they did then why do they keep coming to America in the first place, but even so - so what? Being an adult means doing what's right, not what's popular.

Back in the 80's the European left, specifically the French and West German intellectual elite, positively despised America. Why? Because Reagan dared to defy the conventional wisdom of the day and instead of adopting an attitude of reconciliation and submission toward the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact he adopted an aggressive posture, choosing confrontation over detente. Americans were thought of as boorish, arrogant, ignorant cowboys (sound familiar?) and we didn't care. Back then it was "get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US!". So what happened? Reagan was right. The Soviets couldn't compete with Western free market capitalism and the cold war ended because two people, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (he couldn't have done it without her) had the temerity to defy the elites and do the right thing instead of the popular thing.

If we'd done the popular thing back then we'd have been popular with the French and West Germans but there's a pretty good chance that half of Europe would still be dominated by the USSR and Warsaw Pact. There's also a good chance that none of us would be talking right now because we'd be dead and half the world would be a radioactive wasteland. I make the odds 3 to 1 against but even so, who wants to try those odds?

Posted by Robert Modean 2004-06-03 6:27:10 PM|| 2004-06-03 6:27:10 PM|| Front Page Top

#28 Jennifer, why to you believe what Al Reuters tells you? Are you not aware that these people can edit and distort their accounts to create whatever impression they like?

I have been to 41 different countries at one time or another. Not everyone hates us, not at all.

The ruling elites hate us most places, and today that includes the institutional media.

There is a remarkable book, The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank. I have called this the most important book of the last 10 years. When all is said and done, and the people of the distant future look back on us, they may well decide that it was the most important book of the 20th Century.

Subtitled Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism it explains exactly where the global media culture is coming from, why its values are what they are, and how this appalling situation originated.

The media culture is the most powerful force in the world, stronger than the military, stronger than any political ideology or religion, stronger (it would appear) than the survival instinct itself, and it does have an agenda. That agenda is driven by the basest aspects of human nature.

In allowing this Hollywood/Madison Avenue Cultural Axis and its foreign imitators to control our world, we have placed ourselves in the hands of devils.

The saturation media are newer overseas than in the US, even in Europe. Public skepticism of the media agenda has not had time to appear. In terms of their susceptability to mediatarian rule, the people of most of the world are at the same stage where we were many years ago.
This is unfortunate because media power peaked some years ago in this country, perhaps in the 1980s, and has been declining ever since. It is in its heyday in the rest of the world.
For example, in the 1960s and 70s, the CBS anchorman and left-wing propagandist Walter Cronkite was named the most trusted man in America in several polls.
Today, this notion would be laughable in America. In Europe and especially the Middle-East, media authorties still have this kind of credibility and authority.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2004-06-03 6:27:31 PM|| 2004-06-03 6:27:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#29 âJust because we are the strongest country doesn't mean we can just do what we want.â Actually Jennifer we can do pretty much anything we want. If we want to capture ALL the oil fields in the Middle East there is no one that could stop us. If we wanted to turn China into a parking lot, nothing stands in our way. And if we want to capture a despot, lock up his thugs, free an oppressed people, and establish a Democratic style government in an Arab country we are very capable of doing that. As a matter of fact we (and the UK) are the ONLY countries in the world that have a track record of setting up Democracy in countries. Also if we want to detain unlawful combatants indefinitely few people complain (I still maintain that they should have been executed on the field of battle). Some people (LLL) might not like what we do but the majority of the civilized world cheering for our success and the defeat of Islamofacists. FYI I could give a rats @$$ what al-rooters reports.

Posted by Cyber Sarge (VRWC CA Chapter) 2004-06-03 6:41:32 PM|| 2004-06-03 6:41:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#30 To quote from a recent Rantburg book of the month recommendation in regards to Europe a couple of snips from Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel......
"The United States fills a void caused by our [Eurpoean] inadequacy-not in our capabilities,. but in our thinking and our will to act"

"The pitying sniggers ritually directed against the American whipping boy by the European media, however, come from the most part from an ignorance so profound that it seems deliberate'

Posted by Bill Nelson 2004-06-03 8:11:16 PM|| 2004-06-03 8:11:16 PM|| Front Page Top

#31 Just like the Germans "hated" the Americans in 1945?

Well, the New York Times said so. What went wrong?

Posted by True German Ally 2004-06-03 8:37:28 PM|| 2004-06-03 8:37:28 PM|| Front Page Top

#32 The problem is the media believes its own BS. In part this is the 'film at eleven syndrome'. Whats news becomes what they have television footage to show and not whats important.

One thing that particular irks me at the moment is the media will interview an Iraqi who says security is the problem and then cut to the smoking remnants of a car bomb. I.e. the security situation is the terrorism, whereas I know that its a marginal factor in the lives of most Iraqis. I lived in Belfast when the IRA was setting a lot more bombs than the Iraqi 'resistance' manage and the media was doing exactly the same thing. Whereas if you lived there the bombs were considered a minor nuisance compared with good old fashioned violent and property crimes. And this is what the Iraqis are talking about.

Posted by Phil B 2004-06-03 8:58:18 PM|| 2004-06-03 8:58:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#33 Not a hoax, Been seeing security camera shots all day. The thing was bright and noisy.

Posted by Lucky 2004-06-03 10:56:53 PM|| 2004-06-03 10:56:53 PM|| Front Page Top

#34 Jennifer,
The media lost all credability for me when it swallowed Hilary Clinton's 'Vast Right Wing Conspiracy' line as Gospel without batting an eye. Can you imagine what would happen in someone on the right (Quayle for example) said this? they would be publically ridiculed for months (just look at what they did to Quayle....)!

Between that an calling a 7% increase in medicare a 'slash which would starve millions of seniors!' (and knowing that they are lying through their teeth!) and their deliberate ignoring of a protest of 100K to 1M Iraqis (supporting america) last December proves that they are not much more then a bunch of liars.

I *hate* liars!

I am still waiting for Billary to apologize to the Right for being wrong (her husband was having an affair with 'that woman' after all!) but am not holding my breath.

Posted by CrazyFool 2004-06-03 11:22:52 PM|| 2004-06-03 11:22:52 PM|| Front Page Top

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