Democratic Congressman lashes out at Iraq media coverage

[theblackw0lf]

Jim Marshall, Democratic congressman, reports on his recent visit to Iraq, notices it's more positive then the media is reporting, and sends a stunning indictment to the American media.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/0903/22international.html?urac=n&urvf=10642377116960.8839345774896111


Falsely bleak reports reduce our chances of success in Iraq

On Sept. 14, I flew from Baghdad to Kuwait with Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg from Dearborn, Mich. He was in a body bag. He'd been ambushed and killed that afternoon. Sitting in the cargo bay of a C 130E, I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in his death.

News media reports about our progress in Iraq have been bleak since shortly after the president's premature declaration of victory. These reports contrast sharply with reports of hope and progress presented to Congress by Department of Defense representatives -- a real disconnect, Vietnam déja vu. So I went to Iraq with six other members of Congress to see for myself.

The Iraq war has predictably evolved into a guerrilla conflict similar to Vietnam. Our currently stated objectives are to establish reasonable security and foster the creation of a secular, representative government with a stable market economy that provides broad opportunity throughout Iraqi society. Attaining these objectives in Iraq would inevitably transform the Arab world and immeasurably increase our future national security.

These are goals worthy of a fight, of sacrifice, of more lives lost now to save thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands in the future. In Mosul last Monday, a colonel in the 101st Airborne put it to me quite simply: "Sir, this is worth doing." No one I spoke with said anything different. And I spoke with all ranks.

But there will be more Blumbergs killed in action, many more. So it is worth doing only if we have a reasonable chance of success. And we do, but I'm afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded, the Blumbergs. Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with "the rest of the story," the progress made daily, the good news. The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy.

During the conventional part of this conflict, embedded journalists reported the good, the bad and the ugly. Where are the embeds now that we are in the difficult part of the war, now that fair and balanced reporting is critically important to our chances of success? At the height of the conventional conflict, Fox News alone had 27 journalists embedded with U.S. troops (out of a total of 774 from all Western media). Today there are only 27 embedded journalists from all media combined.

Throughout Iraq, American soldiers with their typical "can do" attitude and ingenuity are engaging in thousands upon thousands of small reconstruction projects, working with Iraqi contractors and citizens. Through decentralized decision-making by unit commanders, the 101st Airborne Division alone has spent nearly $23 million in just the past few months. This sum goes a very long way in Iraq. Hundreds upon hundreds of schools are being renovated, repainted, replumbed and reroofed. Imagine the effect that has on children and their parents.

Zogby International recently released the results of an August poll showing hope and progress. My own unscientific surveys told me the same thing. With virtually no exceptions, hundreds of Iraqis enthusiastically waved back at me as I sat in the open door of a helicopter traveling between Babylon and Baghdad. And I received a similar reception as I worked my way alone, shaking hands through a large crowd of refinery workers just to see their reaction.

We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media. I'm afraid it is killing our troops.


-- U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) of Macon, a Vietnam combat veteran, is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

[Jason McCullough]

Why, everything looks fine when the VIP shows up!

[theblackw0lf]

Why, everything looks fine when the VIP shows up!

The point isn't whether the negative aspects that are happening in Iraq are true, the point is the media is failing to cover the positive aspects that are happening, and by doing that are boosting the moral of those who are against democracy in Iraq and are causing the terror happening over there. The more the media makes it seem that that America isn't doing anything beneficial in Iraq, the more it will embolden those who are terrorizing our troops and Iraqi citizens, and the more it will discourage other countries from trying to bring about democracy in their countries.

Are you trying to tell me that the postive things he reported arent' true? That we're not rebuilding schools and infrastructure? And while it might seem small and obvious that this would be happening, the point is the media isn't covering it. I can't remember one postive thing the media has reported on in Iraq. Now doesn't that strike you as a tad biased? And don't you see how that overly negative reporting can hurt our cause over there?

[Rywill]

Why, everything looks fine when the VIP shows up!
Right. In fact, he probably didn't go to Iraq at all, they probably flew him to some elaborate soundstage somewhere like in Capricorn One and fooled him into all that stuff. The folks he talked to were probably CIA plants or something.

Give it up, Jason. I wonder about the guy's agenda and all that, and I'm sure the Army is putting the best face on the occupation. But I find it hard to believe that you could simply sweep a whole country under the rug when a congressional delegation shows up. And actually, I doubt you think that either--this is just one of those idiotic one-liners that you're getting famous for.

[Jason McCullough]

Dude, Congressmen getting the dog-and-pony show from the military and then concluding Vietnam was going great happened all the time. I'm just saying that it's not dispositve.

Of course everything he said is true - but that doesn't mean the Iraqis in the refinery, or the ones that waved at his helicopter, are representative of what's going on over there.


We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media. I'm afraid it is killing our troops.

I'm getting pretty tired of the forming stab-in-the-back theory, too. The nasty media is telling Americans bad things about the Iraq occupation, and that'll make us lose! Rumsfeld has been pulling this shit lately too.

[JeffL]

Dude, Congressmen getting the dog-and-pony show from the military and then concluding Vietnam was going great happened all the time. I'm just saying that it's not dispositve.

Because what he saw and reported doesn't match what you want to believe - thus it just can't be correct. Just like when I told you what a group of Iraqis over here on training were saying, and you said basically that they didn't know what they were talking about either. I suppose if it had been someone on Slate opining a view you liked, it would have been unassailable proof.

[Jason McCullough]

It's not that I don't agree with him, it's that he mostly disagrees with every single other source, and all those other sources are professional journalists.

[Jakub]

It's not that I don't agree with him, it's that he mostly disagrees with every single other source, and all those other sources are professional journalists.
Professional journalists simply seeking the biggest headline. Just as this congressman is seeking name recognition for a Senate seat one day.

[bmulligan]

It's not that I don't agree with him, it's that he mostly disagrees with every single other source, and all those other sources are professional journalists.

Yes, we all know how professional journalists can be, especially when they are also trying to make names for themselves. Every source huh? Seems to me he is a source himself, yet he must be wrong because............well just because.

Perhaps you're right, on your next trip to Iraq, perhaps you can verify that we have done nothing to improve the country so far. Troops are just sitting on their asses next to the air conditioners playing video games, waiting for iraqis to pass by so they can murder them in cold blood. And then steal all their oil. That billion dollars a week is just spent on hookers and booze, right?

[triggercut]

Sorry, but to quote Ambassador Joe Wilson, "It's a fucking mess over there right now."

If the "media" (want to sound like a Rush Limbaugh dittohead dipshit? Start throwing around over-generalized terms like "it's the MEDIA's fault...") was *really* interested in telling you the truth, they'd tell you that Iraq is on the verge of a nasty civil war. The Shi'a are getting tired of Sunnis blowing up their Imams, and they've got buddies across the border in Iran who are encouraging them to take arms. And then you've got the Kurds, who are still looking for any chance to break away and have their own autonomous state in the north. This has the potential to be a mess for years and years and years.

Are there successes around that theater? Hell, I'm sure of it. But the big picture isn't going to be visible from a brief tour for a congressman. He's not going to see An Najaf or An Nasariyah or Tikrit, and the lawlessness in absence of authority that is happening there.

[bmulligan]

Nobody's claming it's the media's fault. Just that the media is being selectively biased by their reporting choices. Reporters are all competing with each other to get their stories aired, and must play to the ear of the editor who decides which stories get to run. Editors emplyed by companies who I'm sure get their marchiong orders from higher up or have an inherent bias in what to allow to go to press or be broadcast. Nobody wants to hear nice-nice.....that's not news. Blood and guts, strife, and conflict, that's what piques interest.

Of course it's fucked up there -- we just fought a war! and are still fighting it with mostly Ba'ath party loyalists who can't become regular citizens again and the imported lowlifes from all the other surrounding terrorist states.

[Brian Koontz]

Hopefully I can contribute a bit...

#1: Building stuff doesn't get covered in the US by the US Media. Building stuff is boring. Killing is exciting and adrenaline pumping. Bloody bodies are Dramatic. The Media likes Dramatic. This "fair and equal" stuff is BS... the Media sells stories, the stories that they think will sell the best. The Media has little to do with truth. Its completely silly to chastise the Media for not being fair. Fair has nothing to do with it. Only when the US populace rewards truth by watching that instead of rewarding graveyards by watching that will truth become possible in the Media.

#2: Breathing the word "Democracy" in conjunction with "Iraq" will quickly get you a case of asthma. The idea that constructing a few buildings is actual *progress* toward establishing stable democracy is like going nuts in celebration over a child who pours his quart pail of sand on some grass near a lake, lifting the child in the air and exclaiming "The Beach... the Beach is coming!"

[voltaic]

Can you imagine what Jason's response would have been if the dude was (gasp) a Republican?

[Brad Grenz]

It's not that I don't agree with him, it's that he mostly disagrees with every single other source, and all those other sources are professional journalists.

Those other sources aren't refuting any of his observations, they just don't bother to cover anything he's talking about. You're so full of shit. He's one of your guys! But I guess we can't trust anything until you read it in some left-wing blog.

[theblackw0lf]

Looks like more democrats are joining the chorus in saying the media is incorrectly reporting the war

http://www.thehill.com/news/092303/press.aspx


Journalists are giving a slanted and unduly negative account of events in Iraq, a bipartisan congressional group that has just returned from a three-day House Armed Services Committee visit to assess stabilization efforts and the condition of U.S. troops said.

Lawmakers charged that reporters rarely stray from Baghdad and have a “police-blotter” mindset that results in terror attacks, deaths and injuries displacing accounts of progress in other areas.

Comparisons with Vietnam were farfetched, members said.

Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee’s ranking member, said, “The media stresses the wounds, the injuries, and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. [Dave] Petraeus has 3,100 projects — from soccer fields to schools to refineries — all good stuff and that isn’t being reported.”

Skelton and other Democrats on the trip said they plan to reach out to all members of their caucus and explain what they observed.

The seven member congressional delegation (Codel) was briefed by U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer; Maj. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, overall commander of military forces in Iraq; and Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

The lawmakers said they worry that the overall negative tone of American press outlets’ reports did not do justice to the progress being made by an occupying force reconstructing a country after years of neglect and in the face of remaining hostile elements that profited under the old regime.

Skelton also trained his sights on the administration for its postwar policy. Joined by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at a Democratic press conference, Skelton said, “Failure is not an option.”

He warned that should the reconstruction effort fail, Iraq would become “a snake pit, a haven for terrorists.”

Skelton also demanded that the administration’s supplemental spending request receive hearings in his authorizing committee as well as in the Appropriations Committee.

But Skelton tempered his dire warnings with anecdotal evidence that progress is being made on the ground. He said he was impressed with the flexibility and innovative spirit of the American forces, as they shift their strategy from defeating the Ba’athist regime to earning the trust of the population.

It is precisely that innovative spirit, Skelton said, that gives him hope that Iraq will be stabilized. “Foreign troops would not have that kind of improvisation,” Skelton said.

Another member of the delegation, Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), agreed that the stabilization effort is making headway. “In fairness, the war is neither going as well as the administration says it’s going or as badly as the media says it is going,” Taylor said.

Republicans were left out of the press conference, but they stressed that they shared their Democratic counterparts’ assessments about the bravery of the troops and the innovative programs, especially in the northern part of the country.

Democrats concurred that the delegation of Armed Services Committee members was a model of harmony and bipartisan consensus. “We agreed on 99 percent of what we saw,” Skelton told The Hill.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said: “We were all like-minded in our conversations, not robotic at all, but we saw the real progress that is being made, that we are not at all mired.”

Wilson, once a print reporter, strongly criticized the balance of his former profession’s story selection. “Sure, show the bloody side, but get away from this police-blotter mindset. There’s much more going on, ” he said.

“Just on Friday, I heard a CBS radio report on the three deaths and then they had this analysis that just bordered on the hysterical,” Wilson said.

Adding, “CBS got it exactly wrong, the media portrayed it as an act of sophistication and a regrouping of Saddam’s forces, when in fact, it’s an indication of disorganization and desperation.”

Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) explained that the longer he was in Iraq, the more skeptical he became of his previous assumptions.

Some of the media reports led him to believe that “it was Vietnam revisited,” he said. But he said there was “a disconnect between the reporting and the reality.”

Marshall also claimed that there now are only 27 reporters in Iraq, down from 779 at the height of the war. “The reporters that are there are all huddled in a hotel. They are not getting out and reporting,” he told The Hill.

He added, “The good news is not being reported in the conventional press.”

Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), noting that the reconstruction effort includes over 6,000 projects, said, “The positive nature of that is just not being reported back here.

“We came away with the realization that a lot of the debate back here is really irrelevant.”

Reps. John Spratt (D-S.C.) and Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) also were on the trip.

[Jason McCullough]

Interesting. Thanks.

[Machfive]

It's not that I don't agree with him, it's that he mostly disagrees with every single other source, and all those other sources are professional journalists.

On my first day in a "Writing for News and Magazines," class, or, Journalism 101, my professor boiled it down for us.

"The motto in the news industry, "If it bleeds, it leads," may sound like some sort of stereotype, but it's true. A professional journalist will seek out the bloody and negative stories, because he knows that those things are exactly what the public wants to see, what his editors want to see."

After I took that class, I had a refreshing (and disgusted) view of journalism as a whole. Though I still read the newspaper on a daily basis, I take a lot of it with a grain of salt.

[Rywill]

[Rep. Ike Skelton] said he was impressed with the flexibility and innovative spirit of the American forces, as they shift their strategy from defeating the Ba’athist regime to earning the trust of the population. It is precisely that innovative spirit, Skelton said, that gives him hope that Iraq will be stabilized. “Foreign troops would not have that kind of improvisation.”
What a weird, impolitic, inflammatory thing to say.

I'm glad to hear that the reconstruction is going better than what's reported. It doesn't really surprise me, but it's good to hear some good news coming out of the region.

[triggercut]

Ike Skelton, Democrat? Hey, I'm an old Missouri boy, y'all can't sneak that one by.

Ike *is* a member of the Democratic party...but he's probably one of the last of the Dixiecrats who never bothered to switch party affiliations in the Sixties. He's probably at least as conservative, if not more so, than many of his GOP colleagues in the House.

Ike is a Democrat the way Lowell Weicker or Jim Jeffords used to be Republicans....

[theblackw0lf]

Interesting article about reporters disagreements with how the war in Iraq is going

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030923/5523696s.htm


Is the cup half full or half empty in Iraq?

Just as opinions about the war and its aftermath vary widely, reporters in Baghdad disagree about what it's like in Iraq these days.

Although some paint a picture of recovery, with U.S. armed forces making progress in getting the country going again, others sketch a bleaker scene, in which bombings, ambushes and looting are the rule, not the exception.

Reporters agree on this much: Bad news -- not good -- sells.

''It's the nature of the business,'' Time's Brian Bennett says. ''What gets in the headlines is the American soldier getting shot, not the American soldiers rebuilding a school or digging a well.''

The Baghdad that Bennett sees is a city where gunfire erupts every night and dozens of Iraqis are reported dead in the morning. Looting and robberies are common. ''There is a mounting terrorist threat, and the people who want to kill American soldiers are getting more organized,'' he says.

But he also sees a city where restaurants are reopening daily, where women feel increasingly safe going out to shop, where more police means intersections aren't as clogged as they were this summer. ''My neighbors are nice,'' he says. ''My street is a pretty quiet place.''

When Bennett visited the USA a few weeks ago, he realized that, five months after the U.S. invasion, the Iraq he lives in doesn't mesh with the bleak picture that friends here are getting from the media.

''I'm not saying all is hunky-dory,'' Bennett says. ''But in the States, people have a misperception of what's going on.''

Which is why Bennett plans to pitch a story about the improving scene in Iraq, where electricity is being restored daily and people are getting back to work. ''There's been a lot of improvement that I and my colleagues noticed when we came back here. People in the States just don't see it.''

CNN correspondent Nic Robertson has a much different take and describes the U.S.-led coalition as tight-lipped. If anything, he says, the picture is bleaker than reported by the coalition, and there is widespread resistance to the United States and its allies.

''The coalition tends to brief us only on incidents where soldiers are wounded,'' Robertson says. ''Many, many incidents (against coalition forces) go unreported.''

And though the coalition is making efforts to address the Iraqi concerns, ''until the Iraqis see improvement in their lives, it's going to be very hard for them to think the coalition is doing a good job.''

CBS' Kimberly Dozier is increasingly pessimistic. She has made an effort to find some ''good news'' stories, sensing that her supervisors and viewers are tiring of ''bash the Americans'' reports.

That said, ''each time you come back here, it feels more dangerous,'' she says. ''We travel everywhere with security. We refer to our hotel as the 'bat cave' because basically you do not go outside without a security guy, a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a planned escape route.''

Says the Los Angeles Times' Alissa Rubin: ''We tend to report on areas that are most problematic, because news almost demands that. But that doesn't reflect the whole story. This is not a happy face/sad face story. It's just a very long slog.''

Though some areas in Iraq are peaceful, others are not. And because most news organizations have significantly cut back on staffing in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, they can't be everywhere at once.

So if a news organization has reporters traveling with troops that are attacked, that's the image that is sent back home.

And after any war, ''it's usually chaotic for a year or two,'' MSNBC's Bob Arnot says. ''I contrast some of the infectious enthusiasm I see here with what I see on TV, and I say, 'Oh, my God, am I in the same country?' ''

ABC's John Yang draws another comparison: Bombers in Israel are indiscriminate; ''here, the target is fairly well defined. They're going after American soldiers.''

Fox News' Greg Kelly just returned to Baghdad. ''This time around, it seems considerably on the road to normalcy,'' he says. ''It's still dangerous. You still hear gunfire, but a lot less of it. There's less hostility and the streets are cleaner.''

CBS' Dozier sees it differently. ''When I was here right after Baghdad fell, I found a lot of people who were very happy that the Americans had come. Now in places like Tikrit, I expected to find the die-hard Saddam supporters. But what surprised me were the number of ordinary Iraqis, people I spoke to right after the city fell. I speak to them now and they're turning. . . . When you start losing the middle class and the educated, I'm just worried about the number of people who are going to follow.''

So it looks like in some ways the coverage is too negative, and in other ways it's not negative enough

[Jason McCullough]

http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002224.html

Kevin Drum is much better at arguing this than I am.

[Jason McCullough]

Oh, forgot to mention this especially enraging quote, but Marshall's new stuff reminded me:


Sitting in the cargo bay of a C 130E, I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in his death.

Really? So the media just stood there and watched him die? This is warmed-over Weimar Republic/Vietnam stab-in-the-back theory.