The Media and Iraq

The New York Post today reprints an email from Eric Johnson, a Marine in Iraq. Johnson identifies one of the leading causes of media disinformation on Iraq as Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. He points to, as others have done, the fact that most of these journalists sit in their hotels and use stringers to actually report on what is happening. Many of these stringers are former Ba'athist media minders who can not be considered trustworthy to report what is actually happening/

The grizzled foreign-desk veteran — who until 2000 was covering dot-com companies — now sits in judgment over a world-shaking issue, in a court whose rulings echo throughout the media landscape.

He finds the Bush administration guilty. Such a surprise. Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the U.S. operation a failure.

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.

How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.

Meanwhile Diane West writes about the Battle of the Humvee and how US forces are battling not only the terrorists and insurgents.

Ever hear of the Battle of the Humvee? That's what I'm calling a May skirmish fought by soldiers of the 37th Armored Regiment's 2nd Battalion in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. In what became a six-hour firefight, Americans battled militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr to secure the hulk of a burning Humvee. It's not that our soldiers fought because the flaming wreck amounted to a tin can's worth of military value. They fought,as Capt. Ty Wilson of Fairfax, Va., explained to The Washington Post, because "we weren't going to let them dance on it for the news. Even [with] all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them victory."