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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (116827)	5/28/2005 3:02:28 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793623

Are you being wilfully obtuse? Nobody is telling the press not to report casualties! The objection is to a 30 second news framework that ONLY reports casualties. Nothing else. Not mission, not strategy, not situation, nothing. Just body count. Day after day. Michael Yon has the scoop: Finding or generating news can be costly. A good businessperson buys cheap, sells high. These points are obvious, but less conspicuous is how the media squeezes news cheaply from Iraq. ... From a media executive's perspective, where the CFO can occupy the same tier on the organizational chart as the managing editor, the math is easy: send a dozen journalists to Iraq, or hire one cheaply to live in Baghdad. The media gets a bargain rate on instant credibility from their "embedded journalist in the heart of the Sunni Triangle," who spends a few minutes a day paraphrasing media releases, then heads downstairs for a beer at the hotel bar. When real reporters really want to know something, they could teach the CIA a thing or two about digging up the facts. Having learned valuable lessons about being open--more or less--the military operates under the principle that by giving the press something, they have a fighting chance of getting their side of the story into the news stream. Yet, daily, when those SIGACTs are reduced into media-friendly releases, some have to wonder if they weren't very careful about what they wished for, because the easiest news to tell, in that 30-second summary, is a body count. michaelyon.blogspot.com On the same page he also publishes the name and picture of a Czech journalist working for the BBC, whose editors flatly refused to believe him when he reported that American troop morale was high. They thought he must be fraternizing with the soldiers and losing objectivity.