Fixed war coverage brainwashes voters
Jason Locke - April 10th, 2008The murk of the Iraq War is thick. The murk turns into mire, and then a swamp as more and more journalists leave or avoid the country. The most recent statistic that I found for the number of foreign journalists in Iraq was estimated at 50, according to a USA Today article published in 2006. As the war has dragged on, those numbers have likely fallen further.
Most of the news about Iraq around today is from wire services and press releases, often with tacked-on analysis of what those sources contained. Aside from that, there are only reporters from major papers, and the hodgepodge of freelancers that brave the combat zones. This is not Vietnam where journalists from across the globe flock and scamper across the countryside looking for big stories, and where cameras catch the true horror of war.
What does this mean? A lack of a view from the ground is the side effect. Those aforementioned press releases are tainted by the policies of those who release them. The wire services provide the bare bones of a story. There’s no eye-to-eye contact between westerners and the majority of the country except when a major paper feels the need to run an in-depth feature when something tragic happens.
Even when there is something of real substance, it’s typically from the perspective of a reporter embedded with American forces. There are exceptions. Some journalists go off on their own, “unembedding” themselves to report on the Iraqis from the Iraqi perspective, and more of that is needed.
Granted, journalists aren’t entirely at fault. Terrorist and insurgent groups have made it abundantly clear that journalists are legitimate targets. This coupled with the typical dangers of bullets and shrapnel has accounted for the deaths of 174 “media personnel” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Web site.
Perhaps it’s a no-win situation. The only way to get a true account of the horror of combat in this conflict is to put journalists on the ground, but to do that means putting reporters up to a buzz saw en masse.
Blood continues to be spilled. And the only thing covering the ever-growing puddle are political rhetoric, biased accounts, and a few press releases and wire stories that are floating in the breeze.
Is the true account of what’s going on worth the blood price that must be paid to get it? News organizations seemed to have already answered this. They said no, which is where the tragedy lay.
It’s an understandable tragedy, but one nonetheless. Truth is lost to the fungus, and lives lost to the black watered swamp that is Iraq.