Full Version: Reporting on Iraq
An interesting article over at Michael Yon Online. Michael Yon is an embedded reporter in Iraq who is shocked at the media's portrayal of the situation on the ground, including its tendency to compare things to last year as a way to judge our progress.
Yon also writes about something he calls Proximity Delay where journalists like him, who are on the ground in Iraq, as "scooped" by the big-box outlets who are unfamiliar with what's going on there.
I wholeheartedly agree with Yon that you cannot hide military successes from the enemy and are only helping them by not publicizing them to our people back home.
Questions for Debate:
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
QUOTE
Resistance is Futile
October 22, 2007
Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed.
I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.
No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.
Today I am in Iraq, back in a war of such strategic consequence that it will affect generations yet unborn—whether or not they want it to. Hiding under the covers will not work, because whether it is good news or bad, whether it is true or untrue, once information is widely circulated, it has such formidable inertia that public opinion seems impervious to the corrective balm of simple and clear facts.
<snip>
Several upcoming dispatches will focus on how the situation in Southern Iraq has dramatically improved over past months. Ironically, the character of this improvement is distinguished by the lack of violence, as well as the increasing order and normality as Iraqi Security Forces step up to greater responsibility for security in the region. Though the local leadership picture in downtown Basra is fuzzier now that British forces have pulled further back to begin performing their long-planned overwatch phase, it is clear that this natural progression in turning Basra over to Iraqi control has not catapulted the city into chaos.
October 22, 2007
Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed.
I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.
No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.
Today I am in Iraq, back in a war of such strategic consequence that it will affect generations yet unborn—whether or not they want it to. Hiding under the covers will not work, because whether it is good news or bad, whether it is true or untrue, once information is widely circulated, it has such formidable inertia that public opinion seems impervious to the corrective balm of simple and clear facts.
<snip>
Several upcoming dispatches will focus on how the situation in Southern Iraq has dramatically improved over past months. Ironically, the character of this improvement is distinguished by the lack of violence, as well as the increasing order and normality as Iraqi Security Forces step up to greater responsibility for security in the region. Though the local leadership picture in downtown Basra is fuzzier now that British forces have pulled further back to begin performing their long-planned overwatch phase, it is clear that this natural progression in turning Basra over to Iraqi control has not catapulted the city into chaos.
Yon also writes about something he calls Proximity Delay where journalists like him, who are on the ground in Iraq, as "scooped" by the big-box outlets who are unfamiliar with what's going on there.
I wholeheartedly agree with Yon that you cannot hide military successes from the enemy and are only helping them by not publicizing them to our people back home.
Questions for Debate:
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
How can it be accurate if reporters cannot go outside of a military escort to get the real story?
Of course it's not accurate. I'm not saying so from a negative versus positive standpoint. But being embedded with soldiers or reporting from the confines of the green zone hardly paints an accurate description of the situation no matter who the reporter or the reporter's agenda.
If I could find a reporter who would embed with police in the bowels of Detroit or South Central LA, we would get a story of how things are improving, there are relative areas of safety, and we shouldn't be so doom and gloom.
Of course it's not accurate. I'm not saying so from a negative versus positive standpoint. But being embedded with soldiers or reporting from the confines of the green zone hardly paints an accurate description of the situation no matter who the reporter or the reporter's agenda.
If I could find a reporter who would embed with police in the bowels of Detroit or South Central LA, we would get a story of how things are improving, there are relative areas of safety, and we shouldn't be so doom and gloom.
DaytonRocker raises a good point. How can we possibly trus the testimony of our reporters in Iraq? The age of the hard-bitten war reporter is over. There is no hunkering down with dead and dying soldiers in the trenches, (heck, there aren't any trenches to hunker down in anyways), there is no attempt to bring truth to the general populace. In this way, I think that our electronic society has worked against us. We are alomst completely isolated from the outside world; our only sources of information are from people we have never even seen, much less met. With a society as acclimated to remote sources of info as ours is, it becomes exponentially easier to feed us lies, and consequently, for us to believe them. With so much information floating freely around the 'net, we seem to have forgotten its accompanying caveat; some of it is false.
Its easy to blame lack of involvement on the part of the American people. But really, we all know its far more complex then that. Slowly, without us even noticing, we have come to the point, that we can engage in a war, and not bother to learn about what has happened in the day-to-day, ignore soldiers and enemies alike.
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
No. They're not even reporting. War doesn't seem to make much money any more, wahich says a lot about us.
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
Do they? Or might it be because there is none? A few miniscule advances, with international pressure from all sides, is hardly anything to brag about. We, one of the largest countries, with the best-funded army, are being beaten by fanatics in a country whose dictatorship we supported, not even twenty years past. This entire war is a big failure in the eyes of the powers that be, and I assure, that there will be no optimistic reports or parades until we pull out.
Its easy to blame lack of involvement on the part of the American people. But really, we all know its far more complex then that. Slowly, without us even noticing, we have come to the point, that we can engage in a war, and not bother to learn about what has happened in the day-to-day, ignore soldiers and enemies alike.
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
No. They're not even reporting. War doesn't seem to make much money any more, wahich says a lot about us.
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
Do they? Or might it be because there is none? A few miniscule advances, with international pressure from all sides, is hardly anything to brag about. We, one of the largest countries, with the best-funded army, are being beaten by fanatics in a country whose dictatorship we supported, not even twenty years past. This entire war is a big failure in the eyes of the powers that be, and I assure, that there will be no optimistic reports or parades until we pull out.
QUOTE(akalae @ Oct 22 2007, 01:37 PM) 
The age of the hard-bitten war reporter is over. There is no hunkering down with dead and dying soldiers in the trenches, (heck, there aren't any trenches to hunker down in anyways), there is no attempt to bring truth to the general populace.
Then why have more reporters been killed in Iraq than in any other conflict that measured the number of journalists killed? If there's no attempt to bring the truth to the general populace, why have most reporters been killed in Baghdad and closer to the Green Zone than, say, Anbar? (Link) They can't get very far without getting popped. Maybe the media should stop disappointing people's ideal reporter, fire their local journalists, and replace them with light-skinned and better-paid Western reporters. Yeah, their chances of surviving would be a lot better.
Here's a clip of Lara Logan.
We don't have the ability to go out and cover those. If they want to see a fair picture of what's happening in Iraq, then you have to first start with the security issue. When journalists are free to move around this country, then they will be free to report on everything that's going on. But as long as you're a prisoner of the terrible security situation here, then that's going to be reflected in your coverage.
And not only that, but their own figures show that their reconstruction project was supposed to create 1.5 million Iraqi jobs. To date, 77,000 Iraqi government jobs have been created. That should give you an indication of how far along they are in terms of reconstruction.
We have to put everything in its context. We can't go to one small unit and say, oh, they did a great job in this village and ignore all the other villages that haven't seen any improvement in their conditions. They read the same comments. You know, are there positive stories? Can't you find them?
You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.
Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked.
I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to cover away from reconstruction to — they've been diverted to security.
Soldiers, their lives are occupied most of the time with security issues. Iraqi civilians' lives are taken up most of the time with security issues. So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?
QUOTE(akalae @ Oct 22 2007, 01:37 PM)
It's easy to blame lack of involvement on the part of the American people. But really, we all know its far more complex then that. Slowly, without us even noticing, we have come to the point, that we can engage in a war, and not bother to learn about what has happened in the day-to-day, ignore soldiers and enemies alike.
Aside from the fact that I don't think we can get everyone behind a war without a declaration of war based on threats that don't need to be sold through intelligence agencies and marketed through the media, we don't need the media to reinstate the draft, ration goods, and raise taxes. If everything the media reported was rosey while someone told you civilization as we know it was on a head on collision with Islamofaciocrazies but he failed to back his words, you wouldn't be interested in engaging the enemy that requires so little personal sacrifice.
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
It's as accurate as they can get it. If their mobility sucks, and they see the mobility of other people is negatively affected, be prepared for reporters to ask why this is the case and write/report from that angle. Yon is embedded. He doesn't have to get in line to hop into an armored vehicle and see the countryside. At least, not to the extent that reporters do. He's also a veteran. I think that works in his favor.
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
My guess is for tactical reasons. Soldiers, journos and Iraqi civilians don't want to get wacked by calling attention to success stories. A war supporter reading this will point to it as "proof" that the situation is better than journos present. I will look at my own statement as more evidence that we shouldn't even be there.
As far as I'm concerned with Yon's article, it offers the possibility that chaos may not erupt because of an orderly withdrawal. Whether or not withdrawing means Iraqi interests converge with Iranian interests, however, is another matter and pointless to counter. Yon's observations about our infotainment focused media are spot on, but that's a systemic problem that isn't necessarily informed by this war or the insurgent nature of this war. I can't wait for FCC Chairman Martin to relax more media ownership rules and see his decision upheld by the new conservative Supreme Court.
QUOTE
Questions for Debate:
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
IMO the news is the usual bad news (or lack of good news) we have always heard. Some actually report that ethnic deaths are down 55% and casualties in Baghdad are down 45% but its rare.
QUOTE
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
It may be that the military just does not do a good job getting statistics out. Some "news" may be "classified". Most reporters are hiding in the Green Zone.
Is the major media reporting of Iraq accurate? Is it in the proper context?
Doubtful. If it bleeds it leads and any bad news is good news.
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
[/quote]
Not aware of any incidence where the military censors good news, seems counterproductive to me. If there is censorship it comes from the news media IMO.
Doubtful. If it bleeds it leads and any bad news is good news.
Why does the US military seemingly censor the good news in Iraq?
[/quote]
Not aware of any incidence where the military censors good news, seems counterproductive to me. If there is censorship it comes from the news media IMO.
This is a simplified version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.