I was bothered by Dante Chinni’s article about Bill Roggio at the Christian Science Monitor. Dante accuses Bill of a “pro war” bias. I was just reading this article by Mr. Roggio and I found it to be objective.

So I decided to run a little experiment. I wrote this post this morning. It includes three stories. The first is the car bombing in Baghdad today. The second is a story about Iraqi Police finding a bomb near the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The third is about Iraqi army forces freeing 23 hostages and capturing or killing some members of the cell.

I consider the deaths of the innocent people in the car bombing, “negative news.” I consider the other two stories “positive news.”

I decided to follow all three today and see just who picked them up and who didn’t. To test the old saying, “Bad news travels fast.”

First we have the bad news about the car bombing. It has 779 entries on Google news. Everyone reported it as expected.

Next we have the attempted bombing at the Mosque. It has only 10 entries on Google News. NPR did report this over lunch hour. However, note the al-Reuters story uses a misleading sensational headline, “Bomb explodes at Iraq's Samarra mosque”. That kind of dampens the mood eh?

And last but not least we have Centcom’s report on the hostage recovery, with enemy terrorists killed and captured. It has one entry on Google News, me.

But we follow a lot of hostage stories. So I thought surely CSM will be covering this. After all Jill Carroll works for CSM. So I surfed on over and nope, nada, nothing!

I would have expected that 23 hostages saved from being shot or cruelly beheaded would be news and big news at that. I guess not.

MORE BELOW However while we are on the subject al-Reuters did rerun a story they have listing hostages still missing in Iraq. Four more were taken today. I expect George will be a long shortly to add to any captives that Reuters might have missed.

Dec 12 (Reuters) - Four South African security workers have been kidnapped north of Baghdad and their whereabouts remain unknown, South Africa's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday....

...The following is a list of foreigners kidnapped since the beginning of 2005 and believed to be still missing in Iraq:

HOSTAGE NATIONALITY DATE OF CAPTURE 2005: Mohammed Haroun Hamad Sudan March 9* Maher Ataya Sudan March 9* Nabil Tawfiq Sulaiman Egypt March 19 Mitwali Mohammed Qassem Egypt March 19 Jeffrey Ake U.S. April 11 Six unidentified Jordan May 6 Ali Abdullah Turkey June 7 Unidentified Turkey June 21* Samuel Edward Egypt Sept 26 Abderrahim Boualam Morocco Oct 20 Abdelkrim El Mouhafidim Morocco Oct 20 Six unidentified Sudan Dec 23 2006: Moses Munyao Kenya Jan 18 George Noballa Kenya Jan 18 Three unidentified Kenya July 28* Four unidentified U.S. Nov 16 One unidentified Austria Nov 16 Four unidentified South Africa Dec 10.

The MSM just doesn’t report good news. That is the gap we are trying to fill. If no one reports it then morale suffers. Morale if very important, if you want to win.

See Bill Roggio’s rebuttal here.

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

Others Black Five, Badgers Forward and Daily Pundit.

Posted by: Howie at 04:51 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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