This is a perfect example of how the media distorts reality, whether it is intentional or not. In this case it is Afghanistan.
Yesterday, the AP had a depressing story about how Afghanistan was falling apart. Rampant unemployment, corruption, people more pessimistic than ever, support for the US presence at all time lows. Americans making things worse by pouring more troops in and killing civilians etc. Sounded pretty bleak.
Jan10, 2010
By TODD PITMAN
Associated Press Writer
Afghans losing hope after 8 years of war
KABUL (AP) -- The man on the motorcycle was going the wrong way down a one-way street, gesturing indignantly for the phalanx of traffic-clogged cars in front of him to move.
"Brother, why are you angry with us?" said a passenger leaning out of one of the vehicles blocking his path. "It's you who are going the wrong way!"
"I'm not angry at you, I'm angry at Afghanistan," the man cried back, waving his arm dismissively as he negotiated his bike onto a crowded sidewalk and drove off in a trail of exhaust fumes. "These are sad days."
In Kabul, even a traffic jam can provoke a comment on this Islamic nation's dismal state, which most people here believe is at its bleakest since the U.S. invaded to topple the Taliban in 2001. It's a striking sentiment when you consider it comes after eight years of international intervention, $60 billion in foreign aid and the lives of thousands of foreign troops and Afghan civilians.
http://hosted.ap.org/...
Of course this is EXACTLY the sort of story the media wants to tell so it was picked up by several main stream media organizations which is where I found it. Curiously it is nowhere to be found today for some reason.
Maybe this is the reason? Today a story comes out about a poll that has 7 in 10 Afghans supporting the US effort and more optimistic about the future.
The poll of a national random sample of 1,534 Afghan adults was conducted from Dec. 11 to Dec. 23 by ABC News, the BBC and ARD German TV, their fifth since 2005. The poll has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Field work was done by the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research in Kabul, a subsidiary of D3 Systems Inc. in Vienna, Va.
After steep declines in recent years, nearly seven in 10 Afghans also think their nation is headed in the right direction. That's up 30 percent since January 2009. The number of Afghans who expect their lives will be better a year from now also has jumped 20 percentage points from a year ago – to a new high of 71 percent, the poll said.
So who is right and who is wrong? This new story seems to contradict the AP story in EVERY way. It is also a story the media is not interested in because it does not tell the doom and gloom story they want to hear and report on.
As I type this, Huffingtonpost has the "Deadliest Day in Months" Afghanistan headline at the top of their world page with this "7 in 10 Afghans support the US" about 3/4 of the way down. I don't want to link to it because I do not want to reward HP for bad behaviour.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
http://salon.com/...