All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The reports from Iraq and Afghanistan come to us stateside with a troubling monotony of body counts and acronyms, like “IED,” that we’d rather not know.

It’s difficult to report over there, and it’s also extremely difficult to find “good news” stories that can compete with the harrowing tales for news merit.

But who knew the military was actually making the search for “good news” more difficult?

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Say the words “Sports Journalism” and chances are you either think about funny beer commercials or “Boo Yah!”

You don’t think of determined “All The President’s Men”-style investigative work.


But you should. Don’t believe me; ask Mike Fish.

Mike Fish is the ESPN.com reporter who dug and dug into the Pat Tillman fratricide story and came up with a 19,000-word journalistic gem, one called “the most important story ESPN.com has ever done” by the copy chief at the site.

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In his continuous quest to avoid the mainstream media filter, President Bush sat down last week with 10 influential military bloggers last Friday to discuss the war in Iraq and his decision to implement General Petraeus' suggestions. According to the Washington Post's report of the session:

[T]he hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.
"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.
Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote.

(Note to readers scoring at home: Bush was the first president to meet with bloggers. So if you had James K. Polk in the president/blogger pool, bad news.)

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In his continuous quest to avoid the mainstream media filter, President Bush sat down last week with 10 influential military bloggers last Friday to discuss the war in Iraq and his decision to implement General Petraeus' suggestions. According to the Washington Post's report of the session:

[T]he hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.

"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.

Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote.

(Note to readers scoring at home: Bush was the first president to meet with bloggers. So if you had James K. Polk in the president/blogger pool, bad news.)

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Everybody has an idea of “How to Fix Nightly Network News.” Go younger! No, wait, go older! Do more Paris Hilton! Show more Wayward Whales! Show Some Leg! But today – like those whales in that story from a month ago – J. Max Robins of Broadcasting and Cable swims upstream and tells the newscasts his secret:

More war.

That’s right. More war. In a world where fluff, cotton candy, and pop culture are bleeding into most newscasts, Robins has decided that hard news – not to mention, harder to watch news – is the next big thing in niche broadcasting. And he suggests that more coverage, and more graphic coverage, is both responsible journalism and a value-added component of a nightly news broadcast:

My suggestion to all in the nightly-news game, even leader World News, is that they get a lot more aggressive in their coverage of the Iraq War and related stories. I’d advise them to provide even more graphic coverage of what’s actually going on in Iraq and to never shy away from the gruesome toll the war is taking.

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Questions about the war in Iraq continue to divide America. What’s going on, exactly? Is there good news that we aren't getting? Why can’t we make even an educated guess about the effectiveness of the “surge?”

The bad news continues to come unabated -- last week’s headlines blared about May being the deadliest month in years – and the fog of war endures, despite our efforts to make sense of what's happening on the ground. At last night’s Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani made this point about the surge:

And I'd just like to ask, I'd just like to ask one question I didn't get to ask before, when you said, if General Petraeus comes back in September and reports that things aren't going well, what are we going to do?

But suppose General Petraeus comes back in September and reports that things are going pretty well. Are we going to report that with the same amount of attention that we would report the negative news?

Giuliani’s media criticism occurred on the same day that the Associated Press held a panel discussion about Iraq in which AP Iraq Bureau Chief Steven R. Hurst said this:

It’s hard to give a very positive report of what’s going on in Baghdad right now for a number of reasons. I think, first and foremost, the United States puts a great deal of hope that the so-called troop surge would start having an effect. Immediately after it was announced, there was a significant drop in violence, in February and March, but that lasted a very short time. Now, we’ve seen a number of people being killed there, which is sadly the Baghdad story right now.

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Yesterday, we detailed criticism by a number of right-wing bloggers of the Associated Press's reporting from Iraq. The criticism focused on a story about Shiites burning six Sunni worshippers alive in Baghdad. CENTCOM issued a press release disputing the legitimacy of the source of the story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, and asking for a retraction or correction if the organization did not have "a credible source" behind it's reporting.

Now the AP is hitting back. As we noted in an update yesterday, AP International Editor John Daniszewski released a statement arguing that the "attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question." He also promised a "more detailed report about the entire incident soon, with greater detail provided by multiple eye witnesses."

That report came last night. Here's a portion:

Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.

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This week, the Army announced that it would open a new investigation into a possible cover-up in the death of former pro football player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. The embarrassing announcement comes after other instances in which the military has come under fire for misleading or withholding information from the press and public, most notably in the cases of the rescue of Jessica Lynch and allegations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. I spoke to reporters and military analysts about what kind of impact these revelations have had on the relationship between the military and the press, and how each party views the other.

"There's an irony here, because when you had embedding, there was a sense that the reporting was better than ever," says Dan Goure, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute. "But since the end of major combat operations, the relationship has really gone to hell. There is a strongly held perception in the military – particularly the Army – that the media is doing the enemy's work. You guys are seen as the Jane Fondas of the Iraq war. And so the military attitude is, 'why should we level with you, because you're going to screw us.'"

That attitude apparently goes all the way to the top: Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that "the steady stream of errors [by the media] all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq."

Goure says the relationship between the press and military has been bad since the time of the Vietnam War. In World War II and the Korean War, he says, the military had a sense that the press was on their side. But today, he argues, "both the military and the media have unrealistic expectations of each other," as they have for the past 40 years. "The military expects the media to be a kind of public affairs arm, and the media expects the military to move faster and more agilely on these kinds of issues than they can. When the military is dealing with a problem, it has to go through the chain of command, there are reviews – it's a very laborious process."

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