Posted on 12/03/2006 10:22:15 AM PST by Starman417
One group of Americans who can be proud of their work in Iraq are the print media correspondents based in Baghdad.
They were maligned by the White House and Pentagon as lazy, biased or worse, but their gutsy reporting turned out to be on the mark. Unlike U.S. officials, these journalists lived outside the protected Green Zone and risked their lives daily. Even as the media were being browbeaten by Donald Rumsfeld, print reporters got the trends right.
In a sign of the times (perhaps the gullible have finally realized Fox News is Fox Spin?), I'm no longer getting reader e-mail asking me to write the "good news" about Iraq.
This gives me no cheer. It just makes me wish President Bush read newspapers (he famously told Fox News he doesn't). The president might have learned years ago that we had too few troops, no counterinsurgency strategy, and no grasp of Iraqi social dynamics. (He would have learned little of this from TV networks, which have closed most of their foreign bureaus, or even from CNN, which focuses on breaking news.)
This vindication of print media underscores an incredible irony. At a time when the country is obsessed with the Iraq story, an obsession that drove the recent elections, foreign correspondents are an endangered species. There may soon be few left to sound the alarm if future U.S. foreign ventures turn sour.
It's expensive to maintain foreign bureaus that produce serious coverage, especially in a war zone. As newspapers suffer declines in circulation and advertising, and search for synergy with the Web, foreign coverage is the first casualty.
Mid-size papers such as the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and Boston Globe are shutting down foreign bureaus. At the moment, The Inquirer has one bureau left, in Jerusalem. More and more papers now take their foreign news from wire services.
Some papers may send reporters on occasional foreign trips, especially to pursue local angles. But parachutists who drop briefly into a big overseas story lack foreign experience and often get the story wrong. You could see the impact of inexperience when a horde of reporters rushed to cover Israel's recent mini-war with Lebanon's Hezbollah. The reporters who understood the story were mostly those with previous experience covering the Middle East.
The new mantra in the media industry is that mid-size papers must go local, local, local to grow circulation. Readers who want more foreign news can go to the Web. As The Inquirer's publisher, Brian Tierney, told Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz: "I can get what's going on in Iraq online. What I can't get is what's happening in this region."
But how long will readers be able to get substantive foreign news online? Content on the Web doesn't drop from heaven. So far, there are no Web zines that maintain correspondents abroad. If you want in-depth foreign reporting, you probably go to the Web site of one of the so-called national papers that still maintain foreign bureaus, such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.
Yet the same economic pressures driving mid-size papers to close foreign bureaus are also squeezing big papers; both the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune may soon be sold. Who knows how long these papers will maintain all their foreign outposts?
Get your news from blogs? Those that comment on foreign affairs also depend on mainstream media for their information. With more newspapers closing foreign bureaus, will we soon depend on a shrinking pool of foreign correspondents to inform the whole country? Or will most Americans come to view the world through the prism of partisan bloggers who don't feel the need for facts?
Perhaps I'm being alarmist. Maybe the last Americans who want foreign news will keep the New York Times afloat, or pay some Web site to open foreign bureaus.
But look back at the coverage of the Iraq story, and you'll see that some of the bravest, most informative analysis was done by correspondents from mid-size papers. Far from operating as a pack, correspondents complemented each other, often searching out stories overlooked by their colleagues. With fewer correspondents, readers will get a narrower perspective. Would you have wanted all your Iraq WMD stories to come from ex-New York Times reporter Judith Miller?
As this coverage shrinks, Americans' ability to assess government actions abroad will also shrink. As the pool of experienced foreign correspondents disappears, Web aggregators will lose their key source.
I can't believe that's what the public wants, given recent election results. If I'm right, newspaper readers will have to make their concerns known.
According to Trudy us bloggers and alternative media types are eeeeviiiiillll biased reporters of lies and the MSM are full of competent reporters.
Sure thing Trudy
Sorry for all of these webpage questions. If you use Internet Explorer or Opera, http://www.freerepublic.com/~jedimasterpikachu/ is very unorganized. If you know how to fix it, could you freepmail?
Are these the same reporters that spoke with fictional Iraqi commanders?
Hey Trudy I get majority of my news from FR, SKY news, Drudge report
You just acting like whiney little b***h nobody pay attention to you
I don't think Trudy realizes there are Freepers in Iraq.
" ... but their gutsy reporting turned out to be on the mark. "
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA
RFOLMAO
Ask the service men and women how gutsy these reporters were. MOST were GUSTY, not guTsy.
Embedded Reporter Upbeat About Iraq
I guess not.
An interesting quote:
........The Baghdad Brigade, as I call it, operating out of these hotels -- not only would you think that they don't deserve credence, but time and time again when you look at the stories they write about non-Baghdad areas, you find that they're wrong.
Q: You don't have to pull a name out of the hat, but give me an example of that.
This is actually quite important. The Los Angeles Times, right after my next to last embed in April, reported that apparently there was another Fallujah style, Operation Phantom Fury (type attack) about to be carried out any day against Ramadi -- and it talked about huge numbers of forces being brought up and this and that -- and, of course, we now know it never took place. But, the fact is at the time, there were five reporters listed as chief, secondary, and then contributors. Four were Baghdad-based and one was based in Washington, D.C. So, is it a coincidence that they were completely wrong about this? No, not really. If they had someone in Ramadi, they wouldn't have written the story. You can't do these things out of Baghdad and you sure as heck can't do them out of the District of Columbia (laughs).
Trudy smokes the good stuff.
MEANWHILE Mike Yon and Ollie North ACTUALLY go out and hang with the troops. Sorry but the Junk Media scores a perfect I as far as Journalism from Iraq goes. Incomplete, Incompetent and Incorrect
Let's tell Trudy what we really think here..
trubin@phillynews.com.
That article is pure rubbish!
Excellent!
Like those non-existent Muslims who were supposedly burned alive outside a mosque, according to equally non-existent "police captain" Jamil Hussein? That's the kind of work you're proud of? Are you proud that the US military finally had to set up a website to debunk your fraudulent/dishonest/slipshod stories, because nobody would report the actual facts? Puhleeze.
You really need a barf bag for this drivel.
Trudy does have a point. Long after we obliterate the Iranian and Syrian proxy armies, foreign terrorists, and all other enemies of the United States in Iraq, the media will continue to spread enemy propaganda with no basis in reality. Because the few American media personnel in Iraq all collude and lack meaningful competition, the American people never will hear any indication of our painstakingly slow and meticulous drive to victory, especially as it happens but even after it becomes plainly apparent to anyone not affiliated with the enemy propagandists.
The media give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States, rally their troops against us, and unite the American people in opposition to military measures necessary for victory.
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