Good News Gone Bad

If You Absolutely Refuse To Say Anything Good About Things, Go Find A Bad Angle To Write About It...


I'm going to give the ASSociated Press a break this morning and not pick on their management and reporters for a change. Instead of the AP, I'm turning my sights on The McClatchy Company, a newspaper company whose mission statement on their Website says:

The McClatchy Company is the third-largest newspaper company in the United States, a leading newspaper and internet publisher dedicated to the values of quality journalism, free expression and community service. [emphasis mine-VRR] Building on a 150-year legacy of independence, the company's newspapers and websites are steadfast defenders of First Amendment values and advocates for the communities they serve

Gee...for some reason I thought newspapers were in the business of reporting the news, not "free expression and community service."

Anyone agree with me when I say that they should leave the free expression to the hippies and college students and the community service to the churches and Red Cross?

Well, any way, a couple of reporters with the McClatchy Company were out yesterday doing their imitation of the ASSociated Press.

Here, take a look at their contribution to negative reporting on improved conditions in Iraq:

As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch

By Jay Price and Qasim Zein, McClatchy Newspapers Tue Oct 16, 2:40 PM ET

NAJAF, Iraq — At what's believed to be the world's largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn't good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

"I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead," said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. "People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don't talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more."

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it's 4,000 or less, he said.

Malik said that the daily tide of cars bearing coffins has been a barometer of Iraq's violence for years. The number of burials rose and fell several times during Saddam Hussein's persecution of Shiites, and it soared again during the eight years of the Iran - Iraq war in the 1980s.

Then in the 1990s, the daily average fell to 150 or less, Malik said. With the current war, the burials again reached 300 daily.

In the early days of the war, some bodies brought for burial had been victims of Saddam, found by their families in unmarked mass graves. Later, there were surges; September 2005 marked a high point after a stampede during a Shiite Muslim festival killed hundreds on a Baghdad bridge. More than 1,300 were buried in a single day, Malik said.

Yeah, Malik, I think that there are a bunch of news reporters and Democrats out there that feel pinched, in a different way, by the decline in the death toll in your country.

If things went the way I wanted, there would be no more coffin makers or undertakers anywhere in the world working on bodies pierced by bullets and shrapnel, BUT...

As long as there are dictators and despots around like that wild eyed "cupuchin monkey look-alike" they let run Iran and the little Trolls calling the shots in Venezuela and North Korea, not to mention the millions if not billions of peaceful Muslims running around shouting "death to the infidels," I'm pretty certain the grave digger and coffin maker jobs are secure.

The bad news is that Malik and the rest of the members of his tribe may just have to place a phone call to Mayflower Van Lines (or is that Ishmale's Camel Service?) and start packing up their possessions in anticipation of relocating.

(Ishmale's Camel Service...Sometime's I disgust myself...NOT!)

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