More Misinformation on Dayside
Reported by Janie - October 18, 2005
Yesterday (10/17) Dayside only dedicated a few short minutes to updating what is happening in Iraq, and the Constitutional vote that occurred on Saturday. During these brief moments, the viewers were only given one side of the story, and more misinformation.
The segment turned to Iraq, and host Mike Jerrick began with: "Rough, rough weekend in Iraq. US warplanes and helicopters bombed two Western Villages killing an estimated 70 militants near a site where 5 US soldiers died in a weekend roadside blast."
Comment: How nice of Jerrick to simply give us the statement from the Pentagon and not do any investigative work (i.e., a Google search) where he could have found out that most likely 39 of these 70 "militants" were actually nothing more than civilians.
They turned the segment over to correspondent Courtney Kealy, who had this to say: "We did hear that the Constitutional referendum was quite successful and we were looking at the Sunni vote and the majority. The attacks by the fighter jets and the helicopter took place in the Anbar province which is mainly Sunni, but other Sunni provinces came out in droves. One province, the Fox News team and I were in was the town of Tikrit on Saturday and there was a high voter turnout. We're now looking at ballots being counted in Baghdad. They've been trucked in and um, and they're going to be recounting until about Wednesday."
Comment: The "Fair and Balanced" network forgot to mention quite a bit of information here. The vote was portrayed by Fox as going smoothly without a hitch, and had a high voter turnout. What Fox neglected to mention here was the fact that there were many Sunni dominated areas that had no voting locations, leaving many Sunnis unable to vote. They also neglect to mention that the vote is currently being looked into for fraud, due to such high percentages of "yes" votes and that there have been reports of areas that had more votes than registered voters. The viewers were left with a glowing picture of the Iraq vote, and were not given the chance to hear the whole story.
