Is There Any Good News?

Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express-News military writer, offers a long (but well worth reading) editorial in which he struggles to come to grips with the shifting relationship between the media and the military

A familiar Iraqi street scene plays out on a flat-screen TV in the office of the U.S. Central Command's No. 2 man here.

Shot from an RQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, the image captures Iraqis in traditional Arab dress walking onto a street in Mosul near a set of earthtone homes.

"You're looking at a city that didn't look very much different than any community in the United States," said Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy chief of the U.S. Central Command. "Traffic all over the place, people all over the streets, commerce going on, and they don't have mortars going off and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) blowing up and all that stuff all the time."

That's the Iraq he thinks many Americans never see or read about. It's an argument as old as the U.S.-led occupation and tends to be made by some in the military and supporters of President Bush. Once a whisper, the claim is now a roar. "You're not telling the good news stories," they say.

Between occasional attempts at balance, the piece seems to lurch back and forth between an enthusiastic defense of the media position and a rather meager attempt to deflect blame for any disconnect to the highest levels in the Pentagon. Perhaps oblivious to his own shortsightedness, the author doesn't hesitate to espouse the Iraq quagmire and Rumsfeld bad mantra that is likely the core of the complaint that so many in my profession would lodge against so many in his.

Embedding reporters with troops was a great step toward repairing a strained relationship between the media and military that dated to the Vietnam War. But the natural friction between journalists and the military has risen as the lightning invasion has morphed into a quagmire. <...> Smith, Central Command's deputy chief, is weary of the Western media's focus on terrorist bombings, insurgent attacks and the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. Such reports overshadow a "vibrant" economy in Baghdad, a city that has "an awful lot of activity that's positive." <...> As he sat in his office July 8, after a two-day tour of Iraq with Express-News photographer Ed Ornelas and myself, Smith complained that Western media were still focused on Abu Ghraib.

"Abu Ghraib isn't a big story with the Arab media anymore. The turnover of the government, the future of Iraq, the folks that are dying senselessly, those are issues for the Arab media," he said. "But (the U.S. media) keeps wanting to get drawn back to this small group of people that humiliated a small group of Iraqis who in general were not good people to begin with."

But in the minds of many, Abu Ghraib is now about one thing and one thing only - getting Rummy - and it is (artificially) divorced from the situation on the ground in Iraq. The lust for the secdef is revealed in later passages:

..."At the Pentagon, there is a lot of bad blood between the Army and the office of the secretary of defense, and that makes reporting difficult. Also, many senior officers have the perception that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and those around him don't want generals to talk to reporters."

One journalist said reporters have become "increasingly cynical" about the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon's candor. He voiced suspicions that the White House and Pentagon have run a "concerted campaign to blame the media" for some of the failings in Iraq.

"I think the question of balanced coverage is a fair one. But demonizing one side or blaming the media for the unstable situation on the ground is telling."

<...>

Ricks and other reporters agree the low point came when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz this summer told the House Armed Services Committee, "Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and publish rumors."

Now if anyone can provide an example of anything the Pentagon tried to "blame" on the media, I'd truly like to see the quote. The more I read of this, the more I wonder about what drove it - has the failure of the press become so catastrophic? Has the desire to paint a picture so detrimental to the current administration now completely overwhelmed objectivity, restraint, and judgment of the average reporter, to the point that truth has become a casualty of a war - the war being fought in America, for votes?

Christenson notes:

It's convenient for the Bush administration and its supporters to make journalists the object of scorn for flawed policies and an obvious failure to do their homework. It is especially convenient to do so in an election year.

Journalists filing flimsy stories might be tired, stressed, under deadline pressure or lazy, but it's a stretch to imagine that any of us wake up in Iraq each morning thinking about how to trash Bush or the military."

But if he's truly interested in finding the source of mistrust that military commanders may harbor for reporters, he may want to look to Baghdad '03 before accusing Washington '04:

Wesley had been monitoring BBC radio that morning to find out how the news of the thunder run was playing. He had listened to Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, Iraq's bombastic information minister, deliver a taunting news conference at the Palestine Hotel on the east bank of the Tigris, just six kilometers from where Robert Ball had made the wrong turn off the spaghetti junction. Sahaf claimed that no American forces had entered the city and that Iraqi troops had slaughtered hundreds of American "scoundrels" at the airport.

"Today we butchered the force present at the airport," Sahaf had said,. "We are hitting them with rockets and artillery and surprising them with tactics that are new" -- apparently a reference to suicide cars and trucks. "Today the tide has turned, " he went on. "We are destroying them." Sahaf instructed Iraqi civilians to alert the armed forces to any American troop movements and to maintain "calm, good organization - to confront the enemy effectively, conquer them and force them to retreat accursed and defeated."

Wesley related Sahaf's outlandish claims to Perkins. He also told him that the BBC was reporting that its reporters had not seen any American tanks in Baghdad that morning, and had concluded that there had been no American presence inside the capital. Perkins pursed his lips and shook his head. Sahaf was starting to irritate him. It galled him that soldiers had driven so hard to penetrate the city, only to have a buffoon in a beret belittle them to the world. And the BBC wasn't even disputing Sahaf?s rants. Worse, Perkins thought, enemy fighters who had not actually seen his brigade's tanks that day would now believe their own propaganda. That only motivated them to fight harder in a doomed cause. He felt like driving his tanks up to the Ministry of Information in the city center to shut Sahaf up.

Then later, in the mission briefing:

Perkins mentioned Sahaf, the information minister. He had to admit it - he was becoming obsessed with that cocky little functionary in his military costume and ridiculous beret. Perkins didn't want to spin his own lies and propaganda. He just wanted the truth to get out. "So we're going to the back of the room where they give the news conferences and ask a couple questions - and ask for validation for parking for a hundred tanks, " he said.

Thunder Run, again.

Of course we all laughed at "Baghdad Bob" - but the reality was that Iraqi citizens out the next day under cover of nothing but a false sense of security were caught in a cross fire and never made it back home.

I certainly wouldn't want to be accused of blaming the media, but how many died as a result of reporting like this?:

SADDAM HUSSEIN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT - So where are the Americans? I prowled the empty departure lounges, mooched through the abandoned customs department, chatted to the seven armed militia guards, met the airport director and stood beside the runways where two dust-covered Iraqi Airways passenger jets -- an old 727 and an even more elderly Antonov -- stood forlornly on the runway not far from an equally decrepit military helicopter.

And all I could hear was the distant whisper of high-flying jets and the chatter of the flocks of birds which have nested near the airport car park on this, the first day of real summer in Baghdad.

The shooting and bad reporting continues to this day. Lets forgive the generals if they decline to offer any intrepid reporter their full and complete trust. We'll assume their motives are something beyond the story.

That Mr. Christensen seems to think the discussion is one of politics, vice human lives, is an interesting revelation in and of itself.