From the
Washington Post, via
Today in Iraq:
The Pentagon often whines about how the U.S. media only harp on the negative in Iraq. But there's some cheery, morale-building news about military-media relations in a recent internal Army study of its operations in the region around Mosul.
The Army's Stryker Brigade -- equipped with vehicles that have been criticized for bad design and components that don't work -- organized an event of the type the Pentagon says it wants the media to cover more often.
Seems the unit transported an embedded reporter to a site "where school supplies were to be handed out to needy students," according to the Dec. 21 restricted "Official Use Only" report for the Center for Army Lessons Learned.
An excellent idea, but when they arrived at the school, the unit was "surprised to find that no schoolchildren were present and that an Iraqi family was homesteading in the building," the report said. What's more, "the Iraqi police were unwilling to remove the family and no school supplies" could be issued because the children were nowhere to be found.
Could there be a silver lining to this dark cloud? Yes. The media come to the rescue!
"Fortunately," the Army folks said in their report, "the reporter elected not to cover the event, which could have made us look bad, since we didn't know what was going on with the school after we funded its construction." The reporter, who was not named, "understood what had happened and had other good coverage to use . . . rather than airing any of this event."
This is just unbelievable. It's bad enough that the Bush administration lead us into this war under ever-changing (and completely false) pretenses, but the American people have a right to know what's happening over there. Reporters have a responsibility and obligation to report good and bad things that happen in Iraq. Isn't it a violation of jopurnalistic ethics to ignore a story because it's potentially embarrassing to the Army?
I'd like to believe that if more Americans knew the truth about what's happening in Iraq, maybe they'd put some pressure on Congress and President Bush to pull out. The Bush administration is lying to us at every turn, and it's clear that the Fourth Estate has been replaced by the Rightwing Corporate Media. Is anyone keeping score? Do we know how many so-called journalists are on the government payroll now, spouting off propaganda? I bet you the number of actual shills is several times greater. We just haven't uncovered them, yet.
How are we going to get and stay informed? How are we going to inform our friends, family, and neighbors about what's really going on, when they are constantly lied to by the government and mislead by an irresponsible and lazy media, that trades real reporting for political theater?
That's not rhetorical. I'm serious. This system is seriously broken, and it's going to take citizen activists to fix it. How do we do that?