Under fire in Iraq, at home
WHEN two CBS journalists were killed and a third was critically wounded this week, the war in Iraq officially became the deadliest ever for combat correspondents.
The car bomb that took the lives of cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan and badly injured reporter Kimberly Dozier pushed this conflict's journalistic death toll to 71. Twenty-six members of the news media's support staff also have been killed. By comparison, 69 journalists were killed during World War II, 63 in Vietnam and 17 in Korea. The majority of those killed in this conflict were Iraqis working with American or other Western news organizations.
As this toll has mounted, it's been curious to watch the change in attitude toward the press by the war's die-hard supporters. Initially, we were informed, the embedding process was going to produce a better sort of war correspondent -- more Ernie Pyle, less David Halberstam. The eminent military historian Sir John Keegan, now a military analyst for Britain's Daily Telegraph and a great admirer of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, informed us that the embeds' experience of training and serving alongside fighting troops would create a new generation of journalists, free of the skeptical and adversarial taint that has poisoned combat correspondence since the Vietnam War. Keegan's American confreres more or less agreed.
As the war ground on -- and so much of the news became so inconveniently bad -- the tenor of this commentary changed. More recently, there has been a drumbeat of criticism alleging that the press corps in Iraq is misleading the American people because it is either too cowardly to leave the relative safety of the Green Zone, or too culturally biased to recognize what they see when they do.
The right-wing radio personality Laura Ingraham went on the "Today" show and charged the Baghdad press corps with simply "reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off."
If Dozier ever recovers the full use of her legs, maybe she and Laura could go for a walk and talk the whole thing over.
In the New York Post, Ralph Peters excoriated Iraq correspondents for staying "safe in their enclaves protected by hired guns, complaining that it's too dangerous out on the streets. They're only in Baghdad for the byline
One suspects he meant "dateline," but perhaps he can explain that to Douglas' widow, when he pays a condolence call.
