The Media isn't covering the war

America’s War Correspondents: Missing in Action
By Daniel G. Jennings
I recently noticed something disturbing about news coverage of the Iraq War, there is no real news coverage of the Iraq War.
I’ve been watching some of the media outlets particularly, the big three TV network news operation s and I can’t remember when I last saw an actual news report from the war zone. Not coverage of some press conference in Bagdad but a TV reporter actually out with the troops on the front line trying to learn about the war first hand. We haven’t seen anything like that since the early days of the war when a lot of reporters got embedded and gave us a historic look at the war.
Instead of actual coverage of the war what see on the big three TV networks and the major cable news channels is a few seconds of stock footage of soldiers walking around in an Iraqi town. Followed by commentary from experts and pundits namely a bunch of middle aged white guys in three piece suits. Occasionally they throw a token black or Arab or woman into the mix but that’s about it. If they need the military point of view they talk to some retired general or colonel who’s never been to Iraq and probably hasn’t seen combat since Vietnam.
We get more coverage of the so-called peace movement and its antics than we do of our soldiers’ activities in the field. Instead of war reporting we get a commentator saying and by the way three soldiers died today in Iraq between news snippets. That’s not coverage of the war, it’s not reporting and it’s not journalism.
At least during the Vietnam War, the TV networks sent reporters and cameramen out into the field to see what was going on. They got the story wrong but at least they tried to cover it. In this war they do nothing of the kind, they don’t even go to Iraq. The self proclaimed journalists stay in New York and Washington and sit in their comfortable studios sipping their lattes and listening to the rantings of politicians.
The print media’s coverage of the war isn’t much better it consists of wire service reports that seem to be based upon statements from military spokesmen. The same can be said of much of the TV coverage of the war, instead of trying to get the story the journalists are simply regurgitating whatever the military says.
Or worse they rely on reporting from foreign news outlets and politically motivated organizations like self proclaimed human rights groups. Many of these groups are hostile to America and the war effort and are only interested in making us look bad. Much of their reporting is little more than propaganda yet it is being reported as fact. The deaths of American soldiers are ignored while non events like the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which nobody died, become “news.”
The saddest part of this is that the military isn’t censoring the news or keeping reporters away from the battlefields. No they’re giving reporters unprecedented access to the troops and the war zone. The so called journalists just don’t seem to be interested in covering the story.
Why aren’t the journalists in Iraq? Perhaps it’s too much like work, it isn’t glamorous there are no Starbucks and hair salons in the desert, no National Public Radio. Perhaps journalists don’t want to hang out with working class types like soldiers and Marines. Perhaps they don’t want to see what’s happening in Iraq because it might disprove their politically correct prejudices. Perhaps it’s too dangerous. Maybe they just don’t want to deal with the military and the Iraqi people as human beings rather than abstracts.
This lack of war reporting is representative of the decline of American journalism. Major news organizations and reporters no longer do basic things like verify sources or check out the information the stories are based upon it. Just ask Dan Rather? Remember how easy it was for political partisans to get fake documents publicized on a major national news show. Or to see if reporters are actually doing their jobs, remember the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times he was simply rewriting wire service copy and filing it as stories he was covering in the field while laying around his apartment in Brooklyn snorting cocaine. Yet he got away with it for months and nobody noticed.
The tragedy here is that we’re not getting the real story about the Iraq War, instead all we’re getting a lot of opinions and prejudices about the war from people who refuse to cover it. Worst of all, we have now have journalists for whom a war with an enemy that wants to destroy us, a war in which American soldiers are dying isn’t a story. If that isn’t a symptom of a dysfunctional media I don’t know what is.