The Military and the Media

Check out this report from Bill Roggio independent journalist who has embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on numerous occasions during the past three years. His account is fascinating not just because I've spent a good deal of time in each of the locations he mentions (Ali al Salim, BIAP, and LZ Washington), but because the dissatisfaction, nay, the hostility of servicemembers towards how badly the media has covered this war is nearly universal.

But that is okay. Judging from this piece by the New York Times on the AP/Jamil Hussein controversy, it appears the press is even more condescending and hostile towards the military. Key sentence:

It is also true that the institution conducting America’s multibillion gamble in Iraq — the military — says that this standout of atrocities never happened, while a venerable, trusted news agency has twice interviewed witnesses who said, in extensive, vivid detail, that it did.

Hmmm. No bias on this issue. (And apparently no memory that the Associated Press got caught using stringers staging phony photos in Lebanon in order to make it look as if Israeli forces were committing atrocities. But then again, that was a few months ago . . . ancient history for a newspaper).

Again, this is not to say that things are going well in Iraq right now, but rather that the media purposefully distorts the picture of what is going on here, making it far more difficult for Americans to objectively assess what needs to be done from here on.