Left with very little in their rhetorical quivers, war supporters seem to rely on a trump card: everything we think and believe about conditions in Iraq is wrong. The media isn’t reporting the wonderful news out of Iraq — like all of the cars that didn’t explode in Baghdad.
It’s always been a fairly dumb, and rather desperate, argument. But the NYT’s David Carr highlights a related problem today: fewer journalists are reporting from Iraq, and those who are do so under increasing burdens from the military.
Working reporters say the soldiers in the field are not overly concerned with media coverage — they have more serious matters in their gunsights. The journalists also suggest that the current regulations have allowed the military to take concerns for the privacy of soldiers and their families and leverage them into broader constraints on information.
Ashley Gilbertson, a veteran freelance photographer who has been to Iraq seven times and has worked for The New York Times, (along with Time and Newsweek among others), said the policy, as enforced, is coercive and unworkable.
“They are basically asking me to stand in front of a unit before I go out with them and say that in the event that they are wounded, I would like their consent,” he said. “We are already viewed by some as bloodsucking vultures, and making that kind of announcement would make you an immediate bad luck charm.”
“They are not letting us cover the reality of war,” he added. “I think this has got little to do with the families or the soldiers and everything to do with politics.”
This isn’t complicated. It isn’t even new — the same thinking that prohibits journalists from photographing returning caskets of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and prohibits the troops themselves from blogging also leads to regulations that restrict media coverage of combat.
Obviously news outlets should show respect and restraint when dealing with casualties, but Carr paints a far more sweeping picture. For example, two weeks ago, “the Iraq Interior Ministry said bombing sites would be off limits for an hour after an event; just days later, Iraqi police forces fired shots over the heads of working press to enforce the decree.”
James Glanz, a Baghdad correspondent who will become bureau chief for The New York Times next month, said that although he and others had many great experiences working with the rank-and-file soldiers, some military leaders seem determined to protect something besides the privacy of their troops.
“As the number of reporters there dwindles further and further because of the difficult conditions we work under, the kind of work they are able to publish becomes very important,” Mr. Glanz said. “This tiny remaining corps of reporters becomes a greater and greater problem for the military brass because we are the only people preventing them from telling the story the way they want it told.”
Capturing the brutal realities of war is a tradition in this country dating back at least to Matthew Brady, and it is undoubtedly part of why Americans, regardless of their politics, have come to know and revere the sacrifices that generations of soldiers have made on their behalf.
When this war began, the government attempted to manage images by banning photographs of coffins returning to United States soil. If the government chooses to overmanage the wages of war in Iraq, there is a real danger that when this new generation of veterans, whose ranks grow every day, could come home to a place where their fellow Americans have little idea what they have gone through.
Well said.