By way of
Ken Silverstein, there comes this interview in
The Passport with
Newsweek's former Baghdad bureau chief, Ron Nordland, who has this to say about covering Iraq:
The restrictions on [journalists'] movements are very severe. It is extremely dangerous to move around anywhere in Iraq, but we do. We all have Iraqi staff who get around, and we go on trips arranged by the U.S. State Department as frequently as we can.
But the military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a story--they use the word slant--what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don't like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn't happy with the work they had done on embed. But we get out among the Iraqi public a whole lot more than almost any American official, certainly more than military officials do.
(emphasis added)
I know there is some degree of media manipulation to be expected from the military (if you want to see a great movie on this check out Control Room), but this is the first time I've heard a journalist with in-country experience use words like "censoring" and "blacklisted." Nordland goes on to add that Iraqi government officials are rapidly becoming reticent to give interviews.
If members of the media think they have been stone-walled on ideological grounds, they have to come out and report it. That's a story. The embed program was very successful for the military during the initial invasion, but it also set a precedent that the Pentagon should continue to honor and to renege on journalists now when things are going bad is a pretty large blow to the transparency we expect from our government.
Because it could be that the people who need to hear to bad news in Iraq are the soldiers that are already there. Nordland offered this exchange toward the end of the interview:
FP: Are journalists and the military seeing two different pictures in Iraq?
RN: Sometimes it's hard to say. Many in the military are here on their second or third tour and they don't want to feel that this is all a doomed enterprise. I'm not saying it is, but to some extent they are victims of their own propaganda. Two reasonable people can look at the same set of information and come to different conclusions. A good example: I traveled recently to Taji for the handover of a large swath of territory north of Baghdad to the Iraqi Army's 9th Armored Division. This was meant to be a big milestone: an important chunk of territory that has lots of insurgent activity, given over completely to the control of the Iraqi Army. But when we spoke to the Iraqi Army officers, they said they didn't have enough equipment. They are still completely dependent on the U.S. Army for their logistics, their meals, and a lot of their communications. The United States turned territory over to them, but they are not a functioning, independent army unit yet.
(emphasis added)
"...To some extent they are victims of their own propaganda."
That's a scary thought.