An excellent piece in the Weekly Standard notes something you aren’t going to read in your daily newspaper: the declining number of casualties in Iraq. Dean Barnett writes:
“Happily, September’s figures don’t appear to be an aberration. October has seen 502 Iraqi casualties so far. If the trend continues though the end of October, the final number should be around 650 for the entire month. That represents better than an 80 percent improvement from the war’s nadir.
“You’d think this would be a big story. After all, the mainstream media makes such a show of ‘supporting the troops’ at every turn, you’d think it would rush to report the amazing story of our soldiers accomplishing what many observers declared ‘impossible’ and ‘unwinnable’ not so long ago.”
What will it take to reinvigorate the press’s coverage of the Iraq War?
“What’s most frustrating about the press’s reporting about Iraq,” Barnett concludes, “is that you just know the next time something goes wrong, be it a car bomb slipping through or a mishap involving American soldiers, that story will get above-the-fold treatment in America’s major dailies. The same old voices will begin shrieking ‘quagmire,’ and an American pop-singer will probably re-shape John Kerry’s tired ‘Who will be the last to die for a mistake?’ query into a lame rock song. (Wait, Bruce Springsteen has already done that.)”