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Originally posted by bilmore
A "bad man". Wow. Averaging 3000 deaths per day of his reign, he's a "bad man", whose acts you equate with panties on heads. Yeah, I would consider his deeds to be more newsworthy over the past ten years, but your media disagreed, I guess. Same media that talks about the horrors, today in the NYT's lead article, of Iraqis being stripped naked. Wonder how many people died today in North Korea, or Africa? We'll never know, will we? But we know that some Iraqis were nekkid. And I bet we hear about some Palestinians who had to move. But very little about famine in China.
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How many people died today in traffic accidents? Or from preventable maladies, e.g. as the result of smoking. Quite a few, and yet they will receive less attention that the sarin-filled artillery shell that killed no one earlier. Something is news in large part because it departs from our expectations. Hussein's deeds were in the news over the past ten years. Anyone who was paying attention didn't need a refresher course. In fact, conservatives weren't doing a lot of lecturing about the need to focus on Hussein's bad deeds a few months ago when the President was getting better press. It's only now that recent events have turned uglier that we are hectored about this.
How many people died today in North Korea? If that's not being reported, it has at least as much to do with the fact that the administration would rather that North Korea is not in the headlines, and with the concomitant reality that our press corps is hard pressed to cover foreign events. Not profitable. There are all sorts of press failings we could discuss -- the free market doesn't do a particularly good job of telling people things they don't want to know. But your real problem here is that people do want to know about what we did to Iraqis in our custody, and that the media is telling them.
