Open Letter to the Mainstream Media
Dear Media:
I realize you’re really busy right now covering the resignation of HBO’s chief and that whole messy Paris Hilton business, but I’d like to point out a major story you seem to have missed.
Apparently on Tuesday, a majority of the Iraqi Parliament voted to reject the U.S. occupation of their country and called for a timetable for troop withdrawal:
On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.
It’s a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass (there are 275 members of the Iraqi parliament, but many have fled the country’s civil conflict, and at times it’s been difficult to arrive at a quorum).
Gee, you’d think that would be — dare I say it? — newsworthy. And yet, short of one story on AlterNet, I can’t find any coverage of this development anywhere. In fact, a Google News Search finds not one story about this at all (a ThinkProgress story links to AlterNet’s coverage). You’d think with the Vice President being in Baghdad and all, someone would have got wind of the Iraqi Parliament’s actions. CNN? ABC? NBC? Anyone? Hello?
It seems the glorious news revolution promised by the 24-hour networks has failed. We were promised more information, better coverage, more in-depth reporting. Instead we get the same crappy stories repeated over and over again.
You’re bleeding ratings. People aren’t watching because we aren’t getting what we need. Maybe, instead of covering the Paris Hilton story five times in one hour you could devote one or two of those segments to something big like, say, the fact that the Iraqi Parliament wants us out of their country.
Just a suggestion.
Love, Southern Beale