Good followup comment from a blogger about a post I put up recently.
Lieutenant's Notes
Both Instapundit and Iraq Now linked up this detailed e-mail recording observations of the media by a Lieutenant who had to occasionally ride herd on them in Iraq. Many good points here, and things I've read before. What I find extremely disturbing is this:
Another major contributor to inaccuracy is most reporters are only in country for a month at a stretch. Though some embedded reporters were around long enough to establish a rapport with their units (during the war, before I got here) that is no longer the case.
One of the primary contributors to our failure in Vietnam was the rapid "ticket punch" rotation of individual soldiers in and out of the theater. Just about the time an officer, NCO, or even line-level grunt got his bearings and figured out How Things Worked, he'd be rotated somewhere else and someone new would take his place. Basic mistakes were repeated over and over again because of this. Men died because of this.
In contrast, the media would leave correspondents there for months, sometimes years at a time, significantly contributing to the accuracy and depth of their reports. This allowed people like Neil Sheehan, Stanley Karnow, and David Halberstam to expose the incompetence and excesses of the leadership of that conflict when that leadership was claiming absolutely nothing was wrong. It's no exaggeration to say that without such reportage Vietnam would probably have been an even bigger debacle than it turned out to be.
Now it would seem the situation has been turned on its head. Units seem to be left alone and to their own devices without the constant disruption of individual rotations or over-controlling careerists looking for a ribbon. They seem to be passing on what they've learned to their replacements. They seem to be, in short, succeeding in this occupation.
I say "seem" because, as this report reveals, the media can't tell us for sure. Instead of good investigations we end up with press release parrots (BWAHK! POLLY WANTS A PULITZER!) who tell us only what the military wants us to know on the one hand, and what a bunch of 6th graders tell them on the other.
The media complained bitterly about the controls and constraints of the first (and to a lesser extent the second) Gulf War. Yet during the most important part of the current conflict they are allowing themselves to become the willing mouthpieces of a system with a proven track record for deception, concealment, and reactionary self-protection.
How can we possibly even tell if Iraq is a "quagmire" when the self-appointed watchdogs can't even be bothered to drag themselves out of their air-conditioned press briefings to find out? How can we know if our billions of dollars are being spent to set up a stable democracy when most reporters aren't there long enough to unpack? How can we be sure the loss of a soldier was for a better cause and not the result of some incompetent policy or leader when the only people able to tell us are too busy getting their ticket punched to investigate?
People are dying over there. I find it horrific (and horrifically unsurprising) that the media seem more interested in the blood than finding out why they die
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