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This week, Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware appeared on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. (You can read the transcript of the interview here, or listen to the MP3.) Ware, a native Australian who I spoke to in September, has lived and worked in Afghanistan and Iraq since shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He has spent far more time in the region than the vast majority of foreign-born reporters, and has covered not just coalition forces but also Iraqi insurgents and Islamic jihadists.

In the interview, Hewitt asked Ware about the "morality" of spending time with and covering the insurgents and jihadists, and said he "would prefer that [Ware] not report on the insurgents." Here is one of Hewitt's questions:

No, but it does, however, get to the question of whether or not media from the West should be...what's the right word, Michael Ware? It's not assisting, but providing information flow to the jihadis about whom I'm quite comfortable, and I think most Westerners are quite comfortable, just declaring to be evil, because they kill innocents, and that killing of innocents is evil, is it not, Michael? (ellipses in transcript)

Putting aside Hewitt's construction, in which he turns a question about what the media should be doing into one about whether or not the "killing of innocents is evil" – and, full disclosure here, I've tussled with Hewitt in the past – I think it's worth exploring Hewitt's larger point, which has to do with the role of Western-affiliated journalists in a war.

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First, some plain set-up so as not to prejudice you readers:



Earlier this week, Hugh Hewitt, the conservative blogger and radio host objected to an item in Public Eye listing some journalists who blog on his blog. He didn’t post anything about it in our comment section but some of his readers seem to have. Hewitt did invite the author of the piece, Brian Montopoli to his radio show (the transcript is here).



Hewitt and I have a mutual professional friend. Public Eye had also invited him to write one its “Outside Voices” pieces. Though I felt he had very deliberately distorted the Public Eye item and then refused to listen to a word Brian said in their interview, I had also been told that Hewitt was a terrific guy. So I wrote him a personal e-mail. He responded (copying our friend, by the way) and we went back a few times. Eventually, Hewitt suggested that we both publish the e-mail train.



I agreed, but uncomfortably. I don’t know about Hewitt, but I intended the correspondence to be private. Whether it serves any purpose to publish these notes, well, judge for yourself. If you’d like to comment, you’ll have to do here since Hewitt’s blog does not post comments.



My goal in contacting Hewitt was to bring him into the conversation here in a civil, honest way. This wasn’t how I anticipated it would happen, but I hope it is useful or enlightening in some way. I won’t say anymore until later on and will let these e-mails speak for themselves for now. And by the way, my e-mails don’t necessarily reflect the views on Vaughn Ververs, the editor of Public Eye, or anyone else around here.



I’d suggest reading from the bottom up. The only editing I did was to remove e-mail addresses. I left the typos and mess-ups in both our e-mails. I don’t know what Hewitt did on his site.



Here it is:




Hi Dick:



Sorry for the delay in responding. I was taping a piece for the Newshour on the collapse of the media's levees in New orleans --the throat slashed 7 year old, the stacks of bodies in the freezer etc.

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