I just watched MTP and my eyebrow raised at the following response by General Meigs to a question Russert posed about the responsibility of the media in reporting the good vs. the bad about the war, bla bla bla:
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MR. RUSSERT: ...General Meigs, General McCaffrey, everybody, we in the media are covering the reality. Are we not obligated to do that even though it may not, in fact, "encourage," quote, unquote, the American people to support the war effort?
GEN. MEIGS: Wrong question, Tim. Look, there is a very complicated phenomenon here, and we in the media tend to go to the extremes. We tend to go to the most controversial, the most exciting event. So the problem is, in an insurgency, progress comes from dogged, hard, sweaty, dangerous work. It's very slow business. And it's hard to get the complexities of this kind of an operation into soundbites and above the full paragraphs. It's very difficult work. That is compounded by the fact that reporters down range have a very difficult time getting out of that Green Zone and getting down into the grass roots of what's going on politically. So the frustration I have as a former soldier is I will talk to people who've just returned from Vietnam. And you saw Chris Matthew's "Hardball" program. There are commanders...
GEN. McCAFFREY: Iraq.
GEN. MEIGS: ...Iraq--there are commanders who believe very strongly that their soldiers have made tremendous progress...
The transcript doesn't do this justice--the others actually said "Iraq!" several times before Meigs realized his error.
A telling moment, I'd say.
FULL TRANSCRIPT