A "radical" view of the press coverage of Iraq

[120mm]

The author of the article, in the terms he framed it, is accurate. I agree with him that "in general" the press is pretty accurate, fair, balanced, and all that happy stuff.

But "in general" serial killers are just regular guys, like you or me.

The people in the press that I've met, tend to mean well and work hard, but only up to a point. In general, though, when dealing with complex, sensitive subjects (with which they tend to have a poor knowledge base), there is a tendency for members of the press to dismiss important details as "trivial" and their resultant articles/features miss the point completely, or paint a picture that is correct to the letter, but violates the essense of what actually happens.

It's a matter of knowledge base and talent. Unfortunately, those with the correct knowledge base tend to lack journalistic skill, while those with journalistic skill tend to not have a good subject knowledge base. Or if they have a good subject knowledge base, they acquired it because they have an agenda.

Of course, the press, like all other walks of life, is inhabited by many who lack knowledge and talent.

[Sargent]

I don't necessarily disagree with your critique of the press. What little press coverage there is of Fallujah is almost always wrong in some details, large and small, mostly because they aren't in the city much -- it's too dangerous.

And you rightly acknowledge that this is not the point of Gentile's article. However, to assess the problems that you bring up would require a book length treatment of the subject. Gentile only sought knock at the notion that the press unfairly reports only the bad news in Iraq. And I would submit that we can't get to the point of dealing with the problems you bring up until we knock down the shibboleth that Gentile is attacking:

Contrary to what most believe in the American military, as well as some conservative columnists and a few politicians, the American press does give a reasonably full, fair and balanced picture of what is happening in Iraq.

Point of fact, I think that the press, on the whole, is so scared of being labelled as unpatriotic -- if not downright traitorous -- that there is often a knee-jerk flail to tell _any_ good story that can be found. I rarely watch the news, but by some twist of fate I happened to be watching the day that the piece Gentile refers to aired. I found the coverage of the garbage situation a bit like commenting that a dead body's hair was well-coiffed.

By way of contrast, look at the almost entire lack of coverage of the process of bringing home the fallen. Consider how it was covered in the case of Lt. Travis Manion:

A six-man Marine honor guard stood by as the helicopter eased down from the afternoon sky. It carefully transferred Manion's body to a gray hearse waiting outside Hangar 680 - a ritual seldom shown in public....

Yesterday's transfer of the flag-draped silver casket was a scene the Pentagon has often taken pains to shield from public view during the Iraq war. It was displayed at the request of Manion's family, who cast the day as a celebration of his return.

"His passion and dedication are an inspiration to us, even as we mourn his passing from this Earth," the family said in a statement.

[from "A sad homecoming for fallen Marine," The Philadelphia Enquirer, 4 May 2007]
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local...en_Marine.html



There is a video on the web of the ceremony. It's gut-wrenching, but it's also the human side of the war. Why shouldn't the American public see this? Most people aren't serving, the least they can do is be forced to confront some of the real costs involved. Such coverage doesn't have to be a critique of the policy, but it's part of the reality. But there's a fear that such coverage will be assumed to be "negative" that it's being left out of the public story of this war.

So, let's take down the big lie so we can get at the small, and vastly more important, truths of the problem. I think Gentile's piece can be a starting point for that process.

[marct]

Hi Sargent,

There is a video on the web of the ceremony. It's gut-wrenching, but it's also the human side of the war. Why shouldn't the American public see this? Most people aren't serving, the least they can do is be forced to confront some of the real costs involved. Such coverage doesn't have to be a critique of the policy, but it's part of the reality. But there's a fear that such coverage will be assumed to be "negative" that it's being left out of the public story of this war.

I must admit that I have found he US press' reluctance to show material like this to be puzzling. Cori had mentioned elsewhere that the Canadian press was more likely to show images like this, and that is definitely true. Press coverage of fallen Canadian soldiers starts with the report of their death, reactions of their comrades in the AO and at their home base, follows them back to Canada, covers their funerals, etc.

I fully realize that part of the difference is based on the shear number of casualties, but I think a lot of it has to do with two other factors: a) the open debate on the war here (multi-party vs. two-party) and b) the resurgent control of PR by the Canadian Forces. All through this, we see a fairly consistent "message", and the reactions from the population seems to mirror it.

I'm mentioning the Canadian example because I think it can be instructive for the US military in how to produce a "message" that is a) true and b) matches the current needs.

Marc

[Steve Blair]

I also think in this case that the media in the US is afraid of its own history. During Vietnam media outlets were often accused of using footage like this to "spin" the coverage of the war in a particular direction. And with Fox News standing ready (too ready according to some) to call other outlets to task, I think they're afraid of that possibility. We may have a two-party system (something I think is a major failing of the American political system as it's evolved over the years), but we now have something close to a multi-polar media network. And I don't think they know how to handle it....

[milesce]

A couple of years back one of the network news shows (my recollection is that it was Nightline) was going to spend a substantial amount of airtime simply reading the names of the fallen. They were pretty savagely attacked -- the accusation being that it was a political move to do so.

I participate in a small blog network that features one soldier or marine every week, most of the time someone who has been killed in action. Ironically, the reaction has been almost entirely negative. I get emails from folks on the left complaining that I'm "glorifying the war", and emails from folks on the right saying I'm unpatriotic to highlight the fact that peope are actually getting killed.

At some point the partisan political attacks need to step aside in favor of some common sense and shared concern for our country.

[120mm]

Miles, I think with the media's late 1960s to present history, the burden of proof needs to be completely on them, when it comes to running what appeared to be a flagrant exploitation of dead soldiers for their own political gain, as it appeared to my eyes. They need to PROVE to me that they are not just using dead soldiers to sell news time/promote an agenda.

I have no idea when I quit trusting the media, but I do not trust them. (Dan Rather faked memo, exploding pickup trucks, Hiring terrorists as "news sources", retouching AP photos, operational pause=QUAGMIRE!, global warming hype, Everything is Bush/Rove's fault, etc...)

The problem isn't that the press is divorced from reality/lacks skill/is pushing an agenda, the problem is that Joe Six Pack perceives that they are and doesn't trust them, so when they DO run an accurate news item which reveals an embarrassing truth, the political commentators on both sides of the political aisle are able to make it "un-happen."

As Sargent points out, at least indirectly, is that the conditions are right for various parties to do a post-Versailles German "Stabbed in the Back" as an entity, instead of learning from our mistakes through an honest assessment. And, God forbid we fail to learn from this.

[Cori]

To be clear, when I had earlier written that the Canadian press seemed more willing to "show more" than the American press of bodies, I was in that case referring to, you know, bodies, as in images of bodies in extremis, images akin to those from Mogadishu, where dead American soldiers are being dragged through the streets, or the Fallujah images, where the contractors mutilated bodies were hung from bridges.

What about the kind of stories under discussion here, of the rituals surrounding the treatment of our honored dead, a different category altogether? First, I don't know it's true such stories have been entirely missing from the American press, or as absent as suggested here. (Although your impression of how much attention this category has received, and this is speculative on my part, may have something to do with where you live. If you're in an area where there are a number of military bases, you may have seen more of these stories, but it may be that they're handled primarily by the local press. Certainly they are more present in the print press.)

Second, I agree with Marc that there's no question the Canadian press focuses on this more. My sense is impressionistic, to be sure, since I don't see the Canadian press every day, but my sense matches with Marc's: it looks to me that there's coverage when a casket leaves Afghanistan, when it arrives in Canada, and then of the funeral itself. The question you have to ask yourself is whether that's an appropriate degree of coverage. Don't get me wrong: I'm all about due recognition for the military. But when there isn't adequate coverage of what the mission is for, and what the mission is accomplishing, then this becomes all about loss, loss, loss, and a way to push that message into the public's consciousness in the most brutally emotional way possible.

Let me be blunt: there is a strain of rhetoric afoot in both countries which infantalizes the troops, which frames them as victims, so that an inversion takes place. They are no longer trained professionals, whose job it is to defend the nation, but poor (probably in both senses of the word) "kids," who need us to defend them, by bringing them out of harm's way. The Canadian coverage of every single funeral ritual fits into this overall rhetorical theme -- and it's one thing to honor our fallen, but I don't know how you sustain a war when the nation are led to feel each loss in this way. It isn't about respect, it isn't about how deeply you feel the tragedy of each loss, it's about the quality of the emotion, if that makes sense, whether the focus is only on the loss itself -- a life, a promise unfulfilled -- or something more.

I've argued before that, for the American public, combat casualties remain acceptable so long as there is a belief that they are justified. I don't know what the research says about Canadian public opinion, but I can't imagine it's that far different, and I have also noticed that there is often in the Canadian coverage a focus on the casualties to a neglect of what has been accomplished (much as in our own coverage.)

This is in part a function of the fact that, unless things have changed very recently, the Canadian press are not allowed to go "outside the wire," whether they want to or not, by their editors and producers. My understanding is that this has created some real tensions between their press and their military, as it has sometimes seemed that their press is simply waiting for patrols to return so they can get a casualty count. So while I'm sure there's a robust debate over the mission in Canada, the question is how well informed that debate is by adeq. coverage of what the Canadian forces are out in the field doing. My information may be a few months out of date, but it is certainly the case that this has been a limitation on the coverage in the past. I would ask the Canadians participating here -- how often do you see news reports filed by CBC or other broadcast reporters embedded with the troops?