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Old 08-16-2005, 06:29 PM
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Default The Good News Is, the Good News May Get Reported

The Good News Is, the Good News May Get Reported
A heartening piece of metajournalism appeared in yesterday's New York Times. It seems the Associated Press has come under pressure from American editors about the negativity of its coverage from Iraq. Rosemary Goudreau, editorial page editor of the Tampa Tribune, received numerous copies of a mass e-mail listing accomplishments in Iraq, and this prompted her to contact the AP:

Ms. Goudreau's newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these assertions and to put them into context. Like many other journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.

Ms. Goudreau's query prompted an unusual discussion last month in New York at a regular meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press. Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the daily death tolls.

"The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we're making progress in Iraq," Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question.

"It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is such a dangerous place," she said. "But there's a perception that we're not telling the whole story."


The fault here, though, does not lie entirely with the AP. Silverman says he researched the e-mail and found that in the Times' words, "most of the information in the anonymous e-mail message had been reported by The A.P., but the details had been buried in articles or the articles had been overlooked." The Times piece concludes by noting that Goudreau conceded that by the end of the meeting, "editors were acknowledging that even in their own hometowns, 'we're more likely to focus on people who are killed than on the positive news out of a school.' "

And indeed, here's an AP Baghdad dispatch that moved yesterday on the AP wire:

The capital's Sadr City section was once a hotbed of Shiite Muslim unrest, but it has become one of the brightest successes for the U.S. security effort.

So far this year, there has been only one car bombing in the neighborhood, and only one American soldier has been killed.

A year ago, militiamen garbed in black and armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades roamed the streets in open revolt against the American presence. But U.S. troops quelled the uprising, and today calmly patrol the district, aided by loyalists of the radical cleric who spurred the violence.


A Google News search--which is wide-ranging but not comprehensive--turned up only two newspapers that have published the Sadr City story: the Chicago Sun-Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The story is not terribly time-sensitive, so let us hope that other papers will pick it up.

One additional bit of context: It was in Sadr City that Casey Sheehan was killed in action in April 2004. America's success there is further evidence that he did not die in vain.
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Old 08-18-2005, 12:43 PM
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When the Today show sprung a surprise this morning -- an unannounced trip to Iraq by Matt Lauer -- one US soldier had a little surprise of his own for Today and the media at large.

Lauer interviewed a group of soldiers at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, and at one point asked about the state of morale. After getting two responses to the effect that morale was good, Lauer had this to say: "Don't get me wrong, I think you're probably telling the truth, but there might be a lot of people at home wondering how that could be possible with the conditions you're facing and with the insurgent attacks you're facing. " [Notice the condescension in Lauer's question, implying that the soldiers were too stupid to know when their morale was bad!]

If Lauer was the advocate for the anti-war case, [Well, duhhhh!] he then made the cardinal mistake that no advocate should make: asking a question to which you don't know the answer. [Proving again just how inept he really is.] Asked Lauer: "What would you say to those people who are doubtful that morale could be that high?"

Captain Sherman Powell nailed Lauer, the MSM and the anti-war crowd with this beauty: "Well sir, I'd tell you, if I got my news from the newspapers also I'd be pretty depressed as well!"

Bada-bing!

Powell went on to add that, while acknowledging the difficulties the media face in getting out into the field in Iraq, "For those of us who have actually had a chance to get out and meet the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police and go on patrols with them, we are very satisfied with the way things are going here and we are confident that if we are allowed to finish the job we started we'll be very proud of it and our country will be proud of us for doing it!" [Deja vu: many of the so-called reporters from the Vietnam war era rarely ventured out from the Hotel Caravelle in Saigon, except to attend the daily press briefings at MACV hqs. They were not really for us then, and they are not really for us now.]
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Old 08-29-2005, 11:57 AM
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LTC Rob Risberg, Commander, Task Force 1-10 FA

The time has come to offer our heartfelt apologies to the people of Iraq. Oh, don't get me wrong. Only the far-Left fringe would even consider apologizing for removing a brutal tyrant like Saddam Hussein from power. One would have to be mad to apologize for freeing 25 million people from over three decades of injustice, preventing Saddam from filling more mass graves and ending forever his predilection for genocide. Who regrets giving Iraqis the opportunity to hold free and fair elections for the first time ever -- making the oldest civilization the youngest democracy? How could any American want to apologize for exposing and halting the massive corruption in the United Nation's Oil-for-Food program, which funneled billions of dollars into Saddam's pockets while doing nothing for his people? Or for the way France, Russia and China sold Saddam their influence with the UN Security Council in exchange for oil exploration rights, to be exercised as soon as the sanctions -- which only hurt the Iraqi people, while keeping Saddam in power -- were removed? No, there's only one thing that America needs to apologize to Iraq for: inflicting our Liberal agenda-driven media on them.

During the actual Iraq war itself, the "mainstream" media was quite fair in its coverage. It could hardly be otherwise, with reporters taking the field alongside the soldiers themselves. The talking heads on the home front started using the "Q-word" and making Vietnam comparisons before even a week had passed, but their dour outlook was negated by reports from their own embedded colleagues. Of course, they projected the same negativity during the Afghanistan campaign, too. All battles are quagmires, and all wars Vietnam, when a Republican is in the White House.

After the short war to topple Saddam was over, the embedded reporters returned home, or retreated to the relative safety of Green Zone hotels, from which they now rarely emerge. "The journalists among us agreed that our work increasingly relied on phone calls to Iraqis on the scene, rather than real reportage of what we could see and touch," lamented journalist Dan Murphy in April 2004. Two years after the liberation of Iraq, most of the "news" they report from Iraq consists of reciting death counts or bewailing the costs of Iraqi freedom. They get most of their information and slant from old contacts, formerly Saddam's "minders," or by taking phone calls from... who knows who?

In order to tell us how badly everything is going in Iraq, the mainstream media must consistently ignore good news unless there's a down side upon which they can dwell. For instance, Americans have to check with the BBC to find information on the reflooding of the Iraqi marshlands. Saddam drained them to punish the inhabitants by destroying their land and culture, in what UN Environment Program Executive Director Klaus Toepfer called "a major ecological and human disaster." Don't waste your time trying to find an environmentalist giving Bush credit for their restoration. Civic and economic restoration are also largely ignored. The American media was quick to discuss Fallujah while Americans were taking casualties there, but have been as silent as the proverbial grave since the main fighting stopped and the city has undergone what can only be termed a renaissance.

Even when reporting positive developments they can't ignore, like the Iraq election in January 2005, the writing of a constitution or actions against terrorists and insurgents, they feel it necessary to mention unrelated American and civilian deaths or Abu Ghraib. Few, if any, reporters mention the rebuilding of hospitals, schools, roads and other infrastructure. Even overwhelming victories against the insurgents or the foreign terrorists -- of which there have been quite a few -- are treated as defeats in the press. The media seems determined to follow some sort of "equal time" law for both sides of our fight to protect and stabilize Iraq.

The media is intent on portraying American soldiers as either victims or brutes, ignoring all the good they have done and still do. The only time we hear about heroes like Casey Sheehan, for example, is when his own mother refers to him as though he were a foolish child, praises his killers as "freedom fighters" and uses his death to demand that America abandon Iraq to the mercy of its totalitarian and theocratic neighbors. The old clich?, "if it bleeds, it leads," has been almost completely replaced with, "if it hurts Bush, it leads." And Iraq is unfortunately caught in the crossfire, as the media tries desperately to discredit and undermine support for President Bush and the military.

No matter what Iraqis do, the media will continue to focus on the negative. Nothing they do will ever be good enough to gain media approval, and for that we should apologize. It must be hard enough to rebuild your country after over 30 years of mismanagement without having every move you make scrutinized by an overly-critical media trying to get the American government to abandon you. Our own history is full of false steps and mistakes -- it took us seven years to write our own Constitution, for instance, and two more before we added the Bill of Rights -- but Iraqis will not be given any leeway whatsoever.

The Iraqis writing their constitution have some disagreements. Disaster! Civil War! It's all been a mistake! the media cries. One disagreement is over the role of religion in government. Horrors! Theocracy! What did we go there for? the media wails. Yet the Afghanis wrote a constitution that specifies the country is "an Islamic Republic" with Islam as the official state religion, and mandates that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam." The mainstream media never said a word against it. In fact, the New York Times praised it as "an excellent foundation for creating a better Afghanistan."

Watching their every effort to advance belittled in the American media may be the hardest test the new Iraq has to face. Terrorists with bombs are one thing, but a persistent campaign to sap the will of two nations is quite another. I'm sorry to see Iraq put through the media wringer that Afghanistan escaped.
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Old 11-09-2005, 02:34 PM
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I found this very interesting.


Alternatives in War
For our servicemen, we blog.

By Bill Roggio

`It isn't always the strongest gust of wind that bends a branch to its breaking point. More often than not, the limb is broken by the gust that is unexpected and counter to mainstream forces. This same contravening wind is found in independent military bloggers ? who, without the vast resources of the mainstream media, manage to remind that the war in Iraq is more than headlines of casualties, car bombs, and IEDs.




We approach this Friday's remembrance of veterans, past and present, with a nation bent into the gale-force winds of a story that, while not false, is far from the truth. And so, more and more are looking outside their local daily paper or nightly news for insight into the war ? or they are turning it off entirely. The consequences of this culture of quick headlines and blurb news is that we see not the war, its heroes, its villains, or its predicament. Instead we are left with the nausea of casualty counts, grim milestones, and acts of terror without hope, gravity, or context. Poll numbers show the impact. Fortunately there are those who stand against these winds.

In the halls of the Capitol building today Sen. Rick Santorum and four bloggers will stand to present ? in what is believed to be the first joint press conference of a senator and bloggers ? We will be offering an alternative view of the war. The point is to bring the character and context of the underreported story to the forefront, to highlight the men and women in service to our nation's defense, and to broaden awareness of the larger, more vital, reality in this war: U.S. and Coalition forces are defeating the insurgency.

The non-lethal weapons of our enemy, no matter their political or religious affiliation, include our own apathy and acceptance of the media's presentation of the war. In their efforts to be objective citizens of the world, the media's oftentimes morally neutral reporting on the terrorist insurgency-in all its horror ? paints an incomplete picture of what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.


It isn't my place to predict tipping points in the political arena or the social impact of blog going mainstream, nor would I offer advice to the mainstream media. Yet I do see in the words of the families left behind, and the soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine on distant shores that the media must be more aware of its perhaps unintended consequences in striving for ultimate objectivity. Reporting is more than stating a run of details, numbers, and facts. To convey as accurate a portrait of our efforts in Iraq as possible, the media must be willing to develop context, present the situation rather than the result of an action, and be clear that the scattered success of a car bomb or IED is far from the steady progress of coalition forces throughout Iraq, or political progress by the Iraqi people.

Concerned Americans will continue to seek alternative sources of reporting. And more political leaders will recognize that polls don't show the state of the war, only the state of our misgivings. As such, more will follow the lead of the Senate, which this past week began reading the accounts of servicemen and women in Iraq. This act is one of recognition and respect and highlights the need for all of us to remember, no matter our general awareness of the war or its status, that these Americans are our friends and neighbors, our husbands, wives, children, and parents.

? Bill Roggio is an independent civilian military blogger. He served in the Army from 1991 to 1995, and now writes for his blog The Fourth Rail. He'll soon be reporting from Iraq at threatswatch.org.

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