News You Won't Hear In The News March 25th, 2008

There was a recent story about the reduction in news stories about Iraq these days. At this time last year, 23% of news stories were about Iraq. During late 2006 and early 2007, the outlook wasn't good. Then the surge deployed, and over the last 5 or 6 months there have not been more than 40 US troop deaths.

With that reduction, the air time dedicated to Iraq has since dropped to 1% of total airtime since the beginning of the new year. Even HuffPo admits the surge is working stating;

From a journalist's standpoint, the story hasn't changed for several months. The American "surge" appears to have made progress, and while Iraq is hardly safe, pockets of the country are much safer than before.

It's possible to pinpoint the exact week that the switch turned off. The war averaged 30 minutes per week of coverage last year on the three network evening newscasts up until Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. forces, testified in September about the surge's progress, according to news consultant Andrew Tyndall. In the last 15 weeks of the year, the broadcasts collectively spent four minutes per week on the war.

But there are still stories to tell in Iraq. Michael Yon has been reporting in Iraq since at least 2005, and has an open policy about his reporting. Any news agency is free to use his dispatches AT NO COST, and yet not a single report has been published by any of the mass media. This latest one is one that needs to be looked at. Here is an inspiring piece from it (emphasis mine);

Al Qaeda is still trying to spin Iraq into civil war, but whereas in 2005-2006 al Qaeda was succeeding, today al Qaeda is being shredded.

An Iraqi officer near Sinjar told me that recently a group of perhaps twenty “jihadists,” many of them foreign, descended on a Nineveh village. The Iraqi officer said the terrorists killed some adults and two babies. One baby they murdered was 15 days old.

Until recently, such terror attacks inside Iraq could have coerced the village into sheltering Al Qaeda. Yet this time, the “jihadists” got an unexpected reception. Local men grabbed their rifles and poured fire on the demons, slaughtering them. Nineteen terrorists were destroyed. Times have changed for al Qaeda here. Too many Iraqis have decided they are not going to take it anymore. Al Qaeda in Iraq is still fighting, and they are tough and wily, but al Qaeda Central seems to realize there are easier targets elsewhere, perhaps in Europe, where many people demonstrate weakness in the face of terror.

This type of story NEEDS to be heard by more people.

H/T: Jawa Report