As troops do better on Iraq battlefield, relations with the media improve
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WASHINGTON: The anguished relationship between the military and U.S. news organizations appears to be on the mend as battlefield successes from the troop increase in Iraq are reflected in more upbeat news coverage.
Efforts by the new Pentagon leadership, as well as by top commanders at the headquarters in Baghdad, have also helped to ease tensions between reporters and those in uniform. Positive or negative, the troops' view of the media is set as much by the tone of commanders as by the tenor of individual news clips.
General David Petraeus, the senior American officer in Iraq, and his subordinates have worked hard to convey the rationale for their strategy and the evidence that persuades them it is succeeding. Admiral Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has engaged reporters in a variety of locations: at the Pentagon, on travels across the United States and overseas, including in the Middle East.
And, perhaps most important, their boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has stated a view never heard from his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.
"The press is not the enemy," Gates tells military audiences, including those at the service academies. "And to treat it as such is self-defeating."
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At the start of the Iraq war, decades of open hostilities between the military and the media dating from Vietnam were forgotten, if only briefly. One reason was the embedding program for the Iraq invasion, in which hundreds of reporters from across the journalistic spectrum were placed with combat units. Soldiers and correspondents shared tents, meals and risks, and both sides said that perhaps their differences were not irreconcilable after all.
Then, however, the success of the quick invasion became not the full story, but merely the early chapter of a frustrating and deadly narrative of war in Iraq. As insurgent violence rose in 2003, echoes of the earlier conflict in Southeast Asia could be heard. The downturn accelerated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004. The credibility of the armed forces fell even further in the eyes of reporters when it was disclosed that military contractors in Baghdad had paid Iraqi reporters for stories in the local media.
In return, the military's familiar complaints resumed: There is no coverage of the good news from Iraq, officers said. The focus is on violence and daily casualty counts, and not progress. Reporters cannot or will not get out and about in Iraq to tell the whole story. Editors and reporters are biased.
As recently as October, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who had served as the first commander of the Iraq occupation, came out of retirement to condemn coverage of the war.
"The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas," Sanchez said in comments that were given far less coverage than his equally harsh statement that the Bush administration had mismanaged the war.
"What is clear to me," Sanchez told a media group, Military Reporters and Editors, "is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war."
Just days earlier, in his valedictory address as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace used his final minutes as the nation's highest-ranking officer to describe how his interactions with Congress and the media had soured him on both.
"In some instances right now, we have individuals who are more interested in making somebody else look bad than they are in finding the right solution," Pace said.
But as the tone of news reporting from Iraq has shifted in recent months, so have the views commonly heard from officers in Iraq. Recent interviews with dozens of military officers in Iraq found a sense of frustration that the war was receiving less coverage than they would like - but a sense nonetheless that the coverage was forthright and balanced.
"The media in general is doing a pretty good job portraying the situation," said Lieutenant Colonel Rodger Lemons, operations officer for the 1st Cavalry Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team.
Interviewed last month in Mosul as he was completing a 15-month tour, Lemons said: "Spectacular attacks still get the big media attention. I would like to see more good news. Who wouldn't? But the reporters who have embedded with us have been fair."
In a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism of news reports published last year, more than half of all coverage of Iraq was found to be pessimistic. The view of American policy and military progress was mixed overall, with 4 in 10 pieces offering mixed assessments, one third offering negative views and one quarter more optimistic.
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