Shooting at the Messenger ..The risks, and benefits, of a 24/7 media war

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110003246 Shooting at the Messenger
The risks, and benefits, of a 24/7 media war.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Those words are attributed to Marshall McLuhan, the media guru who famously gave us the notion of the global village. And so runs a similar if understandable fear (or hope, in some quarters) today: That once the American public is exposed to what is our first 24/7 television war, it will recoil in horror and force President Bush to bring the troops home.

We think that fear is misplaced, and for the same reason we support the Pentagon's risky decision to "embed" more than 500 journalists (American and foreign) with U.S. forces. The U.S. didn't "lose" Vietnam because of journalism; Americans soured on that fight only when they lost faith that American leaders had a plan that included winning. We see no signs of a similar failure in this Administration.

On the early returns in fact, we'd say the "embedding" policy looks like one of those gambles that may work for all parties--the Pentagon, the media and the public. An important debate in recent years has been about the emerging gulf between the all-volunteer military culture and broader civilian culture; one rarely met the other. The risk was that a warrior caste would emerge that grew resentful of a society that didn't appreciate the dangers they face or the sacrifices they make.
This ringside, real-time witness to war may do more to span that gulf than anything since the draft. One of the things that has come out so far in Iraq is the "we" that slips out so often from the lips of the reporters now risking their own lives in the field. That's only natural when you are sharing the same foxhole, being shot at with the same bullets and, as we have sadly seen, being killed along with the soldiers.

What we are all getting is a crash course in the ways and means of the modern volunteer force. Yes, journalists embedded in combat units are under some constraints not to disclose troop movements and the like. But no one is asking them to shade the truth. And their interviews with soldiers, both officers and enlisted, reveal in nearly every case a professional military that is remarkably well trained, well disciplined and able to explain what they do. And also risking their lives for us.

The 24/7 exposure is not without risks. At the top of the list has to be the recognition that the camera does lie, even unintentionally. The depressing weekend news--a firefight that caught our troops here, the American POWs there, the fragging of U.S. troops apparently by one of their own--are all real things that happened. But while the camera can record them accurately, the one thing it cannot do is provide the larger perspective. So a single ugly battle can mislead about the pace of the broader war.





This too we saw in Vietnam. Remember the Pulitzer-winning Eddie Adams' 1968 photograph of what captions invariably described as a Vietcong "suspect" about to be shot by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan? The image of a slight, handcuffed man being shot point-blank on the streets in a summary execution was one of those defining moments of the war. What the picture does not show is the executed man had killed a policeman, his wife and six children shortly before.
We'll also admit to growing tired of sermons from the likes of embedded ABC's Secretary of State Ted Koppel on the "reality of war." But the younger reporters, without Vietnam-era baggage, seem less cynical and more eager simply to report what they see and hear. There is also the risk that some brutal image of American troops fighting Iraqis will be caught on tape and broadcast out of context around the world--say, to Islamabad or Amman--and turn those publics against us.

But the reality is that technology has created this world of instant communications and we cannot control it all even if we wished. That much should be evident from Al-Jazeera, the Arab-run news station that wasn't around for the first Gulf War and now seems to serve chiefly as an agent of Iraqi propaganda.

In the long run, the only real antidote to false or misleading news is honest news. The reality of war means that honest reporting will include some harsh events, but in the long run the American belief is that the truth will set us free.