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While I have problems with the overly simplistic nature of much of the criticism milbloggers toss at the press over its coverage of the war in Iraq, this post by Michael Yon–who has probably spent more time deployed in Iraq than most soldiers–provides an insightful glimpse of a missed opportunity by the press to put what’s happening over there in perspective.
On April 19, Yon was covering a ceremony in southern Iraq in which the British military was turning control of the Maysan province over to the Iraqi government.
This was a big deal. The British are drawing down their forces in Iraq and concentrating them in Afghanistan, and this shift has huge implications for the rest of the country, and the war in general. Yon takes note of all the Western journalists in the crowd, and then waits a couple of days to see how their stories about the handover match with the reality of the situation. What he found was dispiriting:
The transfer of authority did not even make the cut for news for most US publications and networks. Of those which included the story in their news reports, most mentioned it only as part of an overall report about the day’s activities in Iraq. Many of those included it in reports which were headlined or sandwiched with bad news about the violence in other parts of Iraq.
One exception, Yon notes, was Alex Zavis from the Los Angeles Times. Her piece, headlined, “British hand over province to Iraqi control,” was one of the very few in which the transfer, and its import, was the focus of the story.
I did a Nexis search to see how many times the word “Maysan” has cropped up over the past month, and Yon is spot-on, as he tends to be about the war and media coverage of it. The stories that did mention the handover concentrated almost exclusively on the bombings, killings, and mayhem that occurred in Iraq in the preceding days, and only briefly mentioned Maysan deep down in the story.
Obviously, the reporters covering this war know far better than I how to do their jobs. But especially at a time when their ability to do deep reporting and analysis is severely curtailed by the security situation, the handover of Maysan province to the Iraqi government seems like a great opportunity to sink their teeth into an in-depth exploration of the state of the war and how the transfer of power–in terms of governance, police strength, and military autonomy–is proceeding.
This brings me to a related story that came out yesterday which speaks to this situation. The Christian Science Monitor‘s Dante Chinni recently exchanged a series of e-mails with milblogger Bill Roggio, and published part of their conversation in the paper. The conversation revolved around how the press covers Iraq and Afghanistan, and Roggio’s–and much of the milblogging community’s–criticism of the coverage, which tends toward the by-now-absurd good news/bad news debate. Roggio says that, “as a whole, the coverage in Iraq lacks context, and reporters as a whole display a lack of knowledge of counterinsurgency and the role the media plays in an insurgency’s information campaign.”
He’s got a point about reporters generally not being experts in counterinsurgency, but then again, the last four years have shown that the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to explain just who it is we’re fighting and what the goals of that fight are. In that sense, it’s unfair to hold reporters to a higher standard when the Army itself is only now getting its collective head around how to wage a counterinsurgency.
Can the press do better? Without a doubt. But writing about war is a two-way street, and when the military isn’t sure what it’s doing, it is too simplistic a solution to expect a reporter to pick up the slack.
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