MSM Bias Revisited

Cliff May over at the Corner makes a cute point about the tenor of MSM reporting on the Iraq elections.

[A] p. 1 story in the WP reports that President Jalal Talabani promised a true coalition government “if Sunni Arabs turned away from their two-year-old insurrection and joined in the political process.” So now it’s “their” insurrection – a Sunni insurrection, not an insurrection by Saddamites, by Baathists, by the remnants of the former ruling class?

If there had been an MSM like today’s after the U.S. Civil War, imagine how they’d have covered the “insurrection” of the Ku Klux Klan. “Wolf, there’s been another lynching down here but when you consider the services that got knocked out in Atlanta after Gen. Sherman came through … well, people are obviously disappointed and angry and I think this puts the Union’s credibility on the line again.”

Read it here.

This, of course, is entirely fanciful and more than a little inaccurate in its assumptions. Press coverage throughout the Civil War, and in its aftermath was far more partisan and irreponsible than it is today. There are instructive parallels between the Iraq today and the Reconstruction period in American history, but media coverage is not one of them.