Omar writes a restaurant review. Definitely sounds vaut le detour, as they say in the Guide Miche. I wouldn’t mind an order of that grilled maskoof myself. Omar adds:
You sit in a restaurant like this one and see families relaxing with their children playing and having fun late at night and you feel that there’s ‘something’ wrong in the way MSM is dealing with the Iraqi issue. I watch TV and I see hell breaking around me then I go outside and see enough normalcy AND progress to make me believe that the people in the media are not here to report how’s life going but rather they are here reporting pre-prepared stories and to be faced with something that contradicts the picture they have in their minds would be really annoying and will mean more hard work to try to find the truth or something close to it.
We are very fortunate to be able to hear from Omar, who brings the reality of everyday life to us through his blog.
Although there are occasional stories in MSM about certain things going well, the contrast between something like Najaf and what Omar is writing is never addressed. It’s actually past time someone in MSM interviewed Omar. Nightline can do more than rehash Howard Dean’s talking points.
I would urge readers to continue on down the page past the restaurant post if you haven’t read Omar for a bit. His piece about his uncle (read his link to his previous piece) is really encouraging. I confess that I don’t understand why al-Sadr is still breathing but I am relatively cheerful about the freedom that the Iraqi government is enjoying and allowing.
Well I have put in my two cents on the Nightline web page.
Dear Mr, Koppel,
I would like to suggest an idea for a Nightline program. I strongly encourage Nightline to interview the three brothers who put together the blog, Iraq the Model http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
They offer a significant and eloquent counterpoint to the frequent portrayal by Western media that Iraq is going to hell in a hand basket. Omar, the youngest of the three, is an articulate young professional man who watches and carefully analyzes Western media reports about Iraq. Take your cameras to see how they live and to listen to their perspeectives. It will make for compelling viewing.
Sincerely,
Barry Dauphin, Ph.D.
It is gratifying to read the Iraqi bloggers–the researcher part of me would love to see some analysis done of the role of blogs as somehow a replacement for the posited civil society as a prerequisite for democracy put forth by Bob Putnam of Harvard–an argument that I basically support.
I have learned to read between the lines–even the drumbeat of bad news reporting by BBC and NPR reporters slips when they lapse into pieces that inadvertently describe people shopping, going to restaurants, and buying cars–that tells me a lot about what is really going on.
For anyone interested, see also Allah Is In The House.
Glenn Reynolds links to a Chicago Sun-Times article about how and why we must read America’s (formerly) great newspapers like Soviet citizens used to read Pravda and Izvestia.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul24.html
That’s quite a concept but one that is unfortunately supported by the empirical evidence. What are some of the implications? One possibility is that if the New Democrats have been making such a howl about using the Patriot Act as a government bludgeoning tool then I gotta’ believe that they think it can be used to control the opposition (that would be us by and large) when and if they win in November.
Barry:
That is a good idea. I wonder at what point reproters will start treating Iraq like a country instead of a war zone.