If you follow this link, you'll find a New York Post op-ed from July 2, 2004 by Eric M. Johnson. It's a revised version of a piece that first appeared here on June 29, 2004. The revised version is entitled "How Media Get Iraq Wrong." Here are the first two paragraphs:
IRAQ veterans often say they're confused by U.S. news coverage, because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don't get much notice — or in many cases, any notice at all.Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq. Last week, he had a Pulitzer-bait series called "Promises Unkept: The U.S. Occupation of Iraq."
Mr. Johnson, a Marine Corps reservist who served in Iraq, recounts a visit from Chandrasekaran in the city of Kut and the story for The Washington Post that resulted. According to Johnson, Chandrasekaran got it all wrong, and continues to do so to this day. Johnson accuses The Washington Post of "substandard and superficial" reporting and vows never to believe any story coming out of Chandrasekaran's bureau.
But should we believe that the reporting is so bad? Here's how Johnson supports his claim:
Don't take my word for it that the Post's reporting is substandard and superficial. Take the word of Philip Bennett, the Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news. In a surprisingly candid June 6 piece, he admits that "the threat of violence has distanced us from Iraqis." Further, "we have relied on Iraqi stringers filing by telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation."Translation: We are reprinting things from people we barely know, from a safe location dozens of miles away from the fighting.
Here is the Bennett piece that Johnson quoted above. It paints a very grim picture of what journalists must brave in order to report the news in Iraq.
I'd like to point out something that should be obvious to everyone involved in this type of debate. A combat zone is bound to look different to soldiers than to civilians. Why? Well, if only because soliders carry heavy weaponry, wear body armor, and ride around in tanks and other types of metal-plated vehicles. Furthermore, they can call in airstrikes and artillery support whenever they need them. Not even journalists working for The Washington Post can do that.
But let's skip such niceties and return to Johnson's condemnation of The Washington Post. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Johnson is right about the Kut story, and thus that Chandrasekaran completely blew that one. (Since Johnson doesn't provide any documentation or links to other stories, we'll just have to rely on his personal testimony.) His op-ed, however, makes a much graver charge about Chandrasekaran:
Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: Basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don't know what they're doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.
Well, it seems to me — and I'm someone who supported the war, and I still do, in spite of everything that has happened — that, first, we've bungled quite a few things in Iraq, and that, second, a lot of Iraqis hate us by now, if they didn't already hate us in April 2003. These two large, unhappy facts are confirmed by story after story. Here's what Michael Hirsh of Newsweek wrote a little over two weeks ago:
The first survey of Iraqis sponsored by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows that most say they would feel safer if Coalition forces left immediately, without even waiting for elections scheduled for next year. An overwhelming majority, about 80 percent, also say they have "no confidence" in either the U.S. civilian authorities or Coalition forces.
If you read to the end of Hirsh's article, you'll see that Iraqis' sense of insecurity has increased over the last few months as their confidence in the U.S. has decreased. Certainly, this change in Iraqi sentiments has something to do with our clumsiness and foolishness — if that's how you want to describe what went on at Abu Ghraib, if that's how you want to describe our failure to secure the country, if that's how you want to describe all our other missteps. We shouldn't be surprised that hatred towards us results from all of this.
Perhaps Johnson is right, and the coverage provided by The Washington Post (and, presumably, other American news outlets) is substandard and superficial; but if he's right, then the reason is clear, and the Iraqis themselves are abundantly aware of it. Iraq is an unsafe place. It's hard to condemn reporters for refusing to take foolish chances with their lives. (See my earlier post on this issue.)
I'm confident that there is good news coming out of Iraq. We know this from what we read, if only because Mark Steyn never ceases to remind us. But the bad news is more important than the good news, because the bad news tells us what might cause Iraq to collapse into chaos and civil war. (My earlier posts on Iraq have tracked some of this bad news.)
Johnson's op-ed speaks of smiling, happy crowds, but his anecdotes are more than a year old. Are those crowds still smiling at U.S. soldiers? My question isn't rhetorical. I'd like to know. If you know, email me. As I said, I support the war. Johnson's op-ed doesn't describe the good news that we would be reading if the media were reporting the situation in Iraq as he thinks they should. That's why I wonder just how much of it there is to report.
The inability of the media to report the news from Iraq as Johnson thinks it should be reported is itself eloquent testimony to the very difficulties that the media face each day, and proves that there is much to be worried about.
Case in point: Here's an article about how dangerous it is to travel on the highway to and from the Baghdad airport. Journalists who enter Iraq by means of the airport outside of Baghdad are treated to a terrifying ride into the city. Is it any wonder that their coverage of events in Iraq isn't all that Johnson would like it to be?
Acknowledgment: Many thanks to Alex Kirk and Herbert Saperstein for alerting me to Eric M. Johnson's original op-ed.
