{"id":6696,"date":"2006-02-23T15:57:02","date_gmt":"2006-02-23T20:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6696"},"modified":"2006-02-23T15:57:02","modified_gmt":"2006-02-23T20:57:02","slug":"when-the-pentagon-helps-kill-a-news-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/when-the-pentagon-helps-kill-a-news-story\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Pentagon helps kill a news story"},"content":{"rendered":"

CBS News Pentagon correspondent David Martin seemed to have a pretty important scoop about Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq. We didn’t hear about it, of course, because administration officials convinced him to kill the story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“This week I killed a story about the battle against Improvised Explosive Devices after a senior military officer told me it contained information that would be helpful to the enemy. I didn’t find his argument about how it would help the enemy very persuasive, but because there’s a war on I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ve done that a number of times over the years, and each time it’s turned out that going with the story wouldn’t have caused any harm.<\/p>\n

“It’s always a difficult decision, made more difficult by the fact that it always seems to happen late in the day when you’re under deadline pressure. When I killed the story on Thursday, it was 5:30 — an hour to air — and I left the Evening News broadcast without a lead story which they had been counting on all day. Not a good career move.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What did Martin’s report say? We’ll probably never know the details, though he conceded that it “dealt with specific techniques and how well they were or weren’t working against IEDs.”<\/p>\n

It’s discouraging to think this practice is common. When Martin says he’s killed defense-related stories “a number of times,” and in each instance, he later concludes it was unwarranted, it points to a real problem with journalists keeping stories about the Pentagon and\/or the war under wraps just because the administration asks them to.<\/p>\n

In many of these instances, the Rumsfeld & Co. have no doubt been spared embarrassment by convincing a journalist to hide information from the public. But drawing the line between sensitive information that could put troops in danger and upsetting information that makes the administration look apparently isn’t easy.<\/p>\n

In war, you can make an extreme case that almost any accurate information about the U.S. military is news the enemy can use. A story about the Army being “stretched too thin” or even “broken” by the pace of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could be said to encourage the enemy to fight on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Martin concluded that, when it comes to news stories that genuinely include legitimate secrets, he “knows it when he sees it.” Why don’t I find that encouraging?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CBS News Pentagon correspondent David Martin seemed to have a pretty important scoop about Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq. We didn’t hear about it, of course, because administration officials convinced him to kill the story. “This week I killed a story about the battle against Improvised Explosive Devices after a senior military officer told […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}