Monday, March 17, 2008

The under-reporting of the Iraq War

A few months back, I was watching one of the network evening news broadcasts. A reporter was traveling with US forces in Afghanistan, and when at least one of the soldiers was killed during an ensuing encounter with the Taliban, the emotional reaction of his comrades offered a visceral sense of what can come with life in a combat zone. Suffice it to say, however, that such footage has been remarkably rare on American television in the post-9/11 age.

Instead, we more typically get things like Lester Holt crowing, in introducing a piece last night about John McCain's trip to Iraq, about the dramatic reduction in violence there since the start of the surge. This reduction is relative, of course. As Joseph Stiglitz pointed out in his interview with the Peter Kadzis, the violence in Iraq has diminished only to the level of 2006.

In writing a sidebar for the Stiglitz Q&A, Vanessa Czarnecki makes this point:

This month, as Americans mark the fifth anniversary of the first large-scale military engagement of the Information Age, we are faced with the certainty of never before having waged a modern battle with so little idea of what is going on.

Even if the men and women stationed abroad have a more complete picture, their private knowledge is unlikely to reach those at home. This past May, the Department of Defense blocked 13 popular Web sites, including networking and media-sharing portals MySpace and YouTube, from computers on Iraq bases due to “bandwidth” concerns. (The military, however, has launched its own channel on the latter site, featuring videos of gunfights and gift-bearing troops.) In February, the Air Force announced that nearly every independent site with the word “blog” in its URL would also no longer be accessible. All servicemen and women who wish to publish a blog have long had to seek approval to do so; all content is pre-approved.

Perhaps the government has learned its lesson, having lost the info wars in Vietnam. Wisdom has trained it to thwart investigation. But public ignorance of the Iraq War is not the fault of the government alone.

For all the roadblocks that have been erected, numerous media outlets — including the McClatchy Company, which hosts the excellent Inside Iraq blog, written by local correspondents — have provided harrowing, violent, honest accounts of the war. Independent Iraqi bloggers have borne witness to raids, vanished neighbors, and devastating shortages of electricity and running water. Yet unfortunate — or worse, unknown — circumstances have silenced many of them, often before the public took note.

Now, even though much of the media was far too credulous in the march to war, TV is less interested than ever in reporting the Iraq story.

2008 presidential race | Broadcasting | Iraq | Media