Media Elites: 'Public Numb to US Deaths in Iraq'

October 20th, 2006 2:07 PM

Media types are trying to understand why their carefully crafted agenda journalism, and fake and staged news, are not having the desired effect among the lumpen proletariat.

Reuters explains the latest mainstream meme, the public is "numb" to Iraq war deaths:

But with the U.S. military death toll hitting 2,787 on Friday, and with 73 deaths so far in October, it is shaping up to be the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the Falluja offensive two years ago.

Analysts said even local media coverage struggles to overcome the numbing affect of the steady flow of deaths.

"In Iraq, certainly while we were losing relatively small numbers of soldiers early on, I think that was a huge shock," said Max Boot, a senior fellow of national security studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

"But now that it's kind of accumulated it doesn't have as much of a shock value. This is reminiscent of (Soviet dictator Joseph) Stalin's phrase about how 'one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.' There's some truth to that."

This is exactly the sort of story one could expect from Reuters, which still refuses to use the word terrorist. They have a tendency to throw Occam's Razor overboard, and over-intellectualize the things that puzzle them.

Apparently, the think-tankers and journalists see "numbness" because of the lack of Vietnam-era style mass demonstrations, as no other reason for believing Americans don't care about their war dead is mentioned. What they're really saying is that Americans are not reacting in the way they would prefer, by calling for retreat and surrender in the War on Terror.

Here's a hint for these poor souls: We are at war. We were attacked in our own homeland. Our soldiers are fighting a war. Everyone knows that people die in a war. The remarkable thing about this war is not that American warriors are dying, but that so few are - a tribute to their training, tactics, and determination.

And many of us are onto the tactics of agenda journalsim; tactics that have been evolving since Vietnam. It's very telling that a wire service can write a story about American dead in the War on Terror...and never once mention 9/11.

We are at war, and Americans know it.