War and the Media

[Annie]

Austin Bay on a pet peeve of mine.
There is a lot more at the site:

http://austinbay.net/blog/?p=704

After my return from Iraq I received phone calls and emails from military friends as they either came back to the US on leave or finished their tours and re-deployed “Stateside.” The typical phone call went like this: “I’m back. It’s great to be home. What’s up? How are you doing?” Then, the conversation quickly moved on to: “What’s with the press and Iraq?” The press usually meant television. On tv Iraq looked like it was going to Hell in a handbasket of flame and brutality; however, the images of carnage didn’t square with the troops’ experience.

Today on StrategyPage, my good friend Jim Dunnigan takes on the subject of “troop/press dissonance” from his typically idiosyncratic angle. I’m going to quote from “There’s more going on in Iraq than a media event” at length. (As the essay notes, there is also more going on in Iraq than a war.) Visit StrategyPage and read the second story, “Journalism versus Reality.”

A column I wrote in early 2005 provides an illustration of Jim’s point . The column considers events in Iraq circa July 2004– and one reason I think the press coverage is all too often spotty, negative, and narrow.

A couple of key grafs in that Creators Syndicate column (dated March 2005):

Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, widespread violence destroying Iraq. But that was a false impression. Every day, coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq, and if the “insurgents” were lucky they blew up one. However, flash the flames of that one rig on CNN and, “Oh my God, America can’t stop these guys,” is the impression left in Boise and Beijing.

Saddam’s thugs and Zarqawi’s klan were actually weak enemies — “brittle” is the word I used to describe them at a senior planning meeting. Their local power was based on intimidation — killing by car bomb, murdering in the street. Their strategic power was based solely on selling the false impression of nationwide quagmire — selling post-Saddam Iraq as a dysfunctional failed-state, rather than an emerging democracy…

Here’s Jim Dunnigan, from StrategyPage November 20, 2005:

IRAQ: There’s More Going On in Iraq Than a Media Event

November 20, 2005: If it weren’t for Internet access to troops, expatriates and Iraqis in Iraq, you would think that coalition military operations in Iraq were a major disaster, and that prompt withdrawal was the only reasonable course of action. But the mass media view of the situation is largely fiction, conjured up in editorial offices outside Iraq, with foreign reporters in Iraq (most of them rarely leaving their heavily guarded hotels) providing color commentary, and not much else. So what do the troops and Iraqis say?

First, there is definitely a terrorism problem. Not an insurgency, not a guerilla war, not a resistance....

 

[Gunny]

I think the MSM has firmly established themselves as collaborators.