After the Michael O’Hanlon/Ken Pollack op-ed appeared in the NYT a few weeks ago, the political response was overwhelming. It was read, repeatedly, on the floor of Congress; it was cited frequently by administration officials and its ideological allies; and O’Hanlon and Pollack became fixtures on the talking-head shows. The piece, and the story behind, was practically ubiquitous.
Flash forward a few weeks. A couple of days ago, the NYT also published an op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division, who will soon be returning home frustrated and jaded. The piece, “The War as We Saw It,” was a sweeping condemnation of everything we’ve heard of late from the Kristol-McCain-Lieberman-O’Hanlon-Pollack crowd.
As these seven troops explained, U.S. forces are an unwelcome occupying force, the U.S. mission is built on bogus assumptions, and “recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable” is grossly exaggerated. The authors didn’t just swing through the Green Zone for a few days as part of a carefully-scripted tour; these are active-duty soldiers in Iraq right now (one of whom was shot in the head while helping write the piece).
Surely, given the vast coverage of the O’Hanlon/Pollack piece, the powerful perspective of these heroes would be immediately picked up everywhere, right? Wrong. Greg Sargent explained yesterday, that the op-ed “has been met with near-total silence.”
TPM intern Benjy Sarlin and I did an exhaustive hunt for coverage of this by the big news orgs. We only found one mention: CBS’ Bob Scheiffer brought it up in passing in an interview with John McCain yesterday. The only other news-org mentions came in Editor and Publisher, on MSNBC’s First Read blog, and on Time’s Swampland blog.
That’s all we could find. Nothing on CNN or any of the networks, no AP story, nothing on Reuters, nothing in any of the major papers. (If we missed anything, let us know at talk@talkingpointsmemo.com.) This is really staggering, particularly when you consider that this story has intense drama, too — one of the authors, the piece says, was “shot in the head” during preparation of the article and is being flown to a military hospital in the U.S. How the heck is this not newsworthy?
For what it’s worth, the op-ed got a little more attention last night, after Greg’s post was published. Unfortunately, it wasn’t positive attention.
On MSNBC last night, Tucker Carlson devoted a six-minute segment to the troops’ op-ed, but the discussion centered around why the authors of the piece aren’t credible (“they’re looking at the world through a straw”), and why speaking out about realities on the ground in Iraq is a “detriment to the moral authority” of the military.
O’Hanlon and Pollack become media darlings, including benefiting from false assertions that they’re war “critics,” but seven members of the 82nd Airborne Division are derided — when they’re not ignored altogether.
Yes, the troops got a high-profile forum; the op-ed page of the NYT is as prestigious a piece of media real estate as exists in the U.S. But as Atrios and Digby noted, there’s a difference between the news and discussion about the news: “The latter is how most people ultimately get their information, how conventional wisdom and subsequent coverage is generated, etc. No matter what the circulation of the New York Times, if an op-ed lands on its pages and Wolf Blitzer doesn’t hear about it one cannot conclude that it made a sound.”
It’s possible that the August recess isn’t helping. If Dems were in DC, and Congress were in session, there’d be more Democratic officials around to help, to borrow Bush’s phrase, “catapult the propaganda.” Dems might be waving this op-ed around in their home districts, but CNN isn’t noticing that.
Having said that, the media picks the issues it wants to cover, whether Dems raise a fuss or not. For some reason, seven U.S. troops challenging the conventional wisdom with a perspective that bolsters the Democratic perspective just isn’t newsworthy.