Newsblog: What Peter Jennings Never Told You About Iraq

Yesterday, I went to a Missions Conference seminar on mission work in Iraq. Not usually something I would pick out, but I was quite curious as to how evangelism takes place in a place so incredibly embroiled in civil war. I mean, with car bombs at every corner and sectarian strife, I'm surprised this place isn't blacklisted by missions organizations.

The seminar was fascinating. Not because the speaker was dynamic, but because he painted a picture of the country that was so unassumingly honest--and so glaringly opposed to every image I'd picked up about the war from network news.

So did he talk about dodging missiles and car bombs? No.

Did he talk about pervasive fear among Iraqi citizens? Overt anti-Americanism? Nope.

Iraqis saying, "Hawaii and Alaska are far away too...why can't Iraq be the 51st state?"

Yes. Believe it or not. Yes.

David Pickering is a missionary to Northern Iraq, where he works with the Kurdish peoples. Those are the ones you see wearing the traditional dress, and along with the Sunnis and Shiites, they are one of the Iraqi people groups. Under Saddam's regime, they were persecuted and killed en masse. But since that dictatorship was overthrown three years ago, they have all the trappings of a functional democracy--from reliable electricity to satellite TV. Pickering doesn't have a political agenda, but he came right out with his stories about U.S. soldiers building friendships with Iraqi children and Muslims embracing him as an American. He describes Northern Iraq as stable, and he has pictures of calm pastoral backgrounds with him and some middle-eastern buddies locking hands.

Huh? Never seen that on Nightly News.

John Ziglar's KFI show was talking about this same thing tonight. Broadcasters are so unabashedly biased that it's almost sickening. The president of ABC sent out a company-wide email saying, "If Bush uses that 'mixed messages' line one more time I'm going to puke." Then they go on to bash the war, and their packages, which show Iraqi children laughing and playing on jungle gyms, throw in ubiquitous pacifist jargon about the people living in constant fear.

Ziglar made some good points--points you just can't access with the flaming liberals on network news. The media sets the bar for success in Iraq hopelessly high. To win, we've got to cultivate democracy in a place that's never sustained it before, we've got to rebuild an entire COUNTRY, we've got to create peace between three feuding groups who adhere to the belief that each other group is an infidel.

Nevermind the fact that our three years there have brought free press, infrastructure, relative stability, a parliament, elections, women voters. If an insurgent can blow up one Ford Tempo a day in front of the news cameras, suddenly we've LOST. Suddenly there's CIVIL WAR.

Before I heard Pickering. I kinda just cringed and believed the doom-and-gloom/we're-getting-annihilated banter on the 6:00 news. I mean, it's video footage. How can you fake that?

I should have known you can. I mean, I can change a story's implications without changing a single fact. I can totally manipulate an angle. And I'm trusting news that's coming from people who in one moment swear to journalistic objectivity and in the next say, "I can't believe the papers didn't bash Bush more on this" in the next (that was from an LA Times guy at the Associated Collegiate Press conference in LA three weeks ago).

Remind me never to let liberals in the media go unchecked. And remind me that there's a David Pickering on the other side of every story who has something truer to tell me.