David Kronke: Shoot the messenger. Literally.
At a press conference this week, President George W. Bush suggested that insurgents in Iraq are creating terror in the country because they know the media will report on it. I know Mr. Bush is no great fan of the media, but I don’t believe he was really trying to put all the blame on journalists; he was simply stating a political truism: Everyone wants to control the story. (Does the politician exist who didn’t do something just because he knew the media would cover it?)
Nonetheless, conservative pundits leapt upon the statement as a new talking point. Most notable was radio host Laura Ingraham’s appearance on “The Today Show,� where she chided reporters for ignoring the good news coming out of Iraq, sneering at journalists timidly “reporting from a hotel balcony in Baghdad.� (She had recently spent eight days in Iraq, no doubt striding about as confidently as Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now.�)
Naturally, the media then came to its own defense.
The next morning on “Today,� Richard Engel filed a report on reporting in Iraq – coverage of one of those “good news� stories was interrupted by nearby explosions – and noted, “The security problem is the overall story and most Iraqi's I speak to say, actually, most reporters get it wrong – the situation on the ground is actually worse than the images we project on television.�
Keith Olbermann on MSNBC was even more adamant: “That hotel balcony crack was unforgivable. It was unforgivable to the memory of David Bloom, it was unforgivable in consideration of Bob Woodruff and Doug Vought, unforgivable in light of what happened to Michael Kelly and what happened to Michael Weiskopft. It was unforgivable with Jill Carroll still a hostage in Iraq.�
And Lara Logan of CBS News, speaking from Iraq on CNN this morning, was, if possible, even more outraged. She noted how much dangerous the situation has become in the past year and disclosed that she has been asked by the military not to cover school reopenings and reconstruction projects because that makes them potential targets for saboteurs. “So how is it that security issues should then not dominate the media coverage coming out of here?� she asked.
“I really resent the fact that people say that we're not reflecting the true picture here,� Logan declared. “That's totally unfair and it's really unfounded.�
(A couple of weeks back, ABC News was working on a “good-news� story about a new Iraqi TV sitcom; while a reporting team was on the set of the show, its producers received word that the head of entertainment for the network on which the sitcom would be broadcast had just been assassinated.)
I’ve heard accounts of bureau chiefs for major American newspapers in Baghdad carrying sidearms (and not because of Geraldo Rivera-style bravado); all media outlets in the country must hire bodyguards. I imagine if one spends every waking hour worried about getting blown up, it becomes fairly difficult to concentrate on finding “good news,� though we’ll likely see an uptick in it now that a gauntlet has been thrown. And it is necessary that Americans see what we’ve been fighting for.
Still, this seems like an infantile way to treat the American public, to coddle us with upbeat features and divert our attention from the tragedy that is indisputably occurring in Iraq. I think Jack Nicholson was wrong in “A Few Good Men:� We can handle the truth. We just need to know what it is. And the partisan antics of pundits on both sides of the issue won’t help us find it.
What do you think of media coverage of the war in Iraq? Are reporters focusing too much on the negative, or is there too much negative to focus upon?
I think you're spot on. Interesting, also, that Bush would chide journalists for covering stories allegedly designed for media at a time when he has engaged in the same strategy with TV-friendly speeches calculated to defend his Iraq policies.