Iraq and the Media
Matt Sanchez pokes the cry baby media with a stick:
Everywhere I have traveled throughout Iraq, I’ve heard troop horror stories of seemingly friendly reporters “burning” them, but reporters defend themselves. An LA Times correspondent insisted she was meticulous about getting quotes right, another journalist from the Army Times said soldiers sometimes regret saying things that look dumb in print. Misled or misspoken? The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but there should be no doubt about the friction between those on post and those in the press. Reporting as if the war were some type of game show, media coverage has been reduced to a running tally of dead servicemen and “expert commentary” from the faraway, air-conditioned offices of a midtown Manhattan newsroom.
Setting a Guinness record for distance to commute to work, Time magazine’s Iraq “expert” Joe Klein has managed to get his opinion and analysis to audiences worldwide since 2003. With no military experience (which seems to be a prerequisite for reporting from Iraq), perched above is keyboard in Westchester, N.Y., Klein has been a persistent back-seat driver in the “rush to war”. Finally, after four years of his articles have influenced millions of readers and news outlets throughout the world, Joe Klein has made it into Iraq just in time to declare the effort hopeless.
As I read much of the Western press I wonder, who side are these guys on? Of course, the answer is that they’re supposed to remain neutral, but this neutrality is a luxury afforded the media by a standard that only one side will meet. When Time magazine interviewed a bombmaker claiming to be responsible for “rising American casualties,” they forgot to ask the “sophisticated and tenacious enemy” the tough questions like, “What’s your exit strategy?” or “How broken is the insurgency?” “Could you define victory?” or even the most basic, “Why are you doing this?” The fact that the press demands accountability from one side and offers servility to the other is a very cunning strategy to win an asymmetrical war. That is, it’s as if the press were conducting a war of its own.
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