One of the best foreign correspondents writing for the SCLM is
Rajiv Chandrasekaran (WaPo). if I'm not mistaken, he actually tells us at times he can't get out and about in Iraq, so parts of the stories are from Iraqis who can. Check this out from the
Akron Beacon Journal's public editor discussing the paper's reporting of 'bad news':
"I used to jump in a car and drive out to places like Fallujah and Baqubah to write about attacks, to get a sense of what was really happening on the ground. No longer," Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, said in an online chat last week. "The roads are too dangerous, the threat of kidnapping too great."
Imagine another reporter admitting to that? Judith Miller, take notes.
Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.
Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital's Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.
In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.
Yesterday, we wrote how KR is makiing sure the heartland hears about it. This media fact-finding is way overdue, and just in time for Thursday's debates. As wonderful as Juan Cole is, this stuff needs to get out to those that don't read the blogs. Need I add there's more than a few of them?
Everything Bush is telling the American people about Iraq is crap. It's politically motivated fog, a smokescreen to obfuscate until after the election. The media needs to fact-check Bush's people all the time, every day about everything. And we need to make sure they do. Kudos to the Beacon Journal for acting like a free press:
My second question: Is it the newspaper's responsibility to instill hope and optimism about Iraq, even in the face of growing violence and daily deaths among American military?
For me, this clearly would be manipulating the news for a political agenda. The media's role is not to put a happy face on Iraq so that everyone can feel better about our presence there.
Nor does accurate, though discouraging, reporting indicate a lack of support for our troops there. No one is served by misinformation, including the brave men and women sent there to face death daily.
No, in a society that defines "reality" as who can survive for 39 days on a South Seas island, the real story of Iraq must continue to be accurately reported.
Even when it's painful to read and difficult to accept.
Amen to that. And about time.