Is the GOP Media Backlash Incoherent?

Matt Taibbi has a good (and amusing) piece in the recent issue of New York Press. Among other things, he writes, "In all seriousness, there have been hints in the last week that a 'blame the media' backlash might be in the works as a strategy for dealing with all the ugliness in Iraq," as evidenced most memorably by Sen. Inhofe's being "outraged by the outrage". If this is true, I suspect the GOP may have to modify its approach, and there are reasons to think the GOP may have a difficult time doing so.

On the face of it, at least, the GOP's strategy consists really of two opposed strategies. First, there's the attempt to gloss the situation in Iraq by only highlighting positive events (e.g. businesses openning, children going to school, the creation of Boy Scout troops, etc.), or highlighting positive myths, as the case may be. Second, there's the attempt to dehumanize "the enemy," as evidenced by Inhofe's apparent endorsement of torture as a means for dealing with Iraqi POW's.

The problem with trying to implement both strategies is that it runs the risk of pulling our intuitions in opposite directions. That is, the first strategy humanizes the Iraqis (in that colonial assistance kind of way), while the second strategy says the Iraqis are getting the violent punishment they deserve. These two approaches can only be reconciled if one successfully sells the American people on a distinction between "good, democracy-lovin' Iraqis" and "bad, terrorist-supporting Iraqis". But it's hard to sell that distinction when it becomes common knowledge that, say, the majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were innocent civilians. "Oops!" just won't cut it, b/c the positive depiction of "good Iraqis" has already inclined us to look favorably on what are now the victims of our soldiers' torture. Reports of devastating attacks on wedding parties might work the same way.

I write this, in part, because I wonder whether it is a bad thing if the media highlights something good that's happening in post-Saddam Iraq (assuming, of course, that it's true). Cultivating sympathy for Iraqi civilians generally makes it more difficult to ignore civilian atrocities. Admittedly, there is a much larger problem in that the SCLM doesn't want to cover civilian deaths, generally. But if the torture scandal becomes something of a watershed moment and the media begins to report at least some of the military's wrong-doings, perhaps the positive stories of post-Saddam Iraq would be a helpful complimentary addition that we should actually welcome. For it'd be a real shame if the young Iraqi woman who learned to bake a cake could no longer do so because her arms had been blown off by an American AC-130.