[antimedia] antimedia: This you simply must....

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Posted by antimedia:
This you simply must....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1161829468.shtml


   ....[1]read. Michael Fumento tears the Baghdad press corps apart, in
   this scathing portrayal of their craven cowardice and braggadocio.

     Vietnam was the first war to give us reporting in virtually real
     time. Iraq is the first to give us virtual reporting. That doesnât
     necessarily make it biased against the war; it does make it biased
     against the truth.
     During my three embeds in Iraqâs vicious Anbar Province, Iâve been
     mortared and sniped at, and have dodged machine-gun fire â all of
     which has given me a serious contempt for the rear-echelon
     reporters. When I appeared on the Al Franken Show in May, after my
     second embed, it was with former CNN Baghdad bureau chief Jane
     Arraf â who complained about the dangers of being shot down by a
     missile while landing in Baghdad, and the dangers of the airport
     road to the International Zone (IZ) . . . and how awful the Baghdad
     hotels were.

   Fumento goes on to show how the media grossly exaggerates (and
   outright lies about) the danger of just getting into Baghdad and from
   the aiport to their hotel.

     Yet embeds perform a service beyond just their willingness to see
     combat, and to describe accurately the specific events they
     witness. âAlthough some journalism professors may worry that
     military embedding is subverting the media, I would argue the
     contrary,â Robert Kaplan wrote in The Atlantic Monthly. Kaplan, who
     has been embedded all over the world, went on to observe, âThe
     Columbia Journalism Review recently ran an article about the
     worrisome gap between a wealthy media establishment and ordinary
     working Americans. One solution is embedding, which offers the
     media perhaps their last, best chance to reconnect with much of the
     society they claim to be a part of.â
     The media-elite Baghdad Brigade and its stateside editors have
     forfeited this opportunity. Itâs not just that being with the
     soldiers puts them at risk, but that they donât want to be with
     those soldiers. They prefer the company of their fellow journalists
     and that, too, contributes to their unwillingness to leave their
     walled-in compounds.
     Itâs impossible to blame anyone for not wanting to report from the
     more dangerous parts of Iraq; over 99 percent of Americans surely
     would not want to. The trouble with the Baghdad press corps is
     that, in pretending to be war correspondents when the
     correspondence they engage in could just as well be done from New
     York or Washington, they may well be squeezing out from those
     positions reporters who actually want to do the job. Harry Trumanâs
     famous words, âIf you canât stand the heat, get out of the
     kitchen,â suggest wise advice to todayâs journos in Baghdad: If you
     donât have the guts actually to cover the war, stand aside for
     those who do.

   There are some fine reporters who have risked their lives (and some
   have lost their lives) trying to actually report what's going on in
   Iraq rather than sipping mint juleps at a Baghdad hotel and bragging
   about how dangerous the trip to the hotel supposedly was. (Hat tip to
   [2]Dadmanly.)

References

   1. http://www.fumento.com/military/brigade.html
   2. http://dadmanly.blogspot.com/2006/10/media-warriors.html