Michael Fumento, a real war correspondent who willingly goes among our troops into the most dangerous places in Iraq, exposes the hypocrisy of Western journalists who pretend to cover the war, but only from their fortified hotels. Most of what you read in the newspapers is filed by journalists who don’t venture beyond their hotels, but only report what local stringers—some of them blatantly pro-terrorist—feed them.
During my three embeds in Iraq’s vicious Anbar Province, I’ve been mortared and sniped at, and have dodged machine-gun fire — all of which has given me a serious contempt for the rear-echelon reporters. When I appeared on the Al Franken Show in May, after my second embed, it was with former CNN Baghdad bureau chief Jane Arraf — who complained about the dangers of being shot down by a missile while landing in Baghdad, and the dangers of the airport road to the International Zone (IZ) ... and how awful the Baghdad hotels were.
Speaking of which, I’ve noticed a definite trend in Iraq war reporting in which day after day we see reports of civilian and military deaths. Something along the lines of this which I pulled at random off the front page of Google News: “Roadside Bomb Kills 14 Afghan Villagers”. What you won’t see is coverage—or at least headlines—of US success, such as this one taken at random from the Defense Department’s web site: “U.S., Iraqi Soldiers Uncover Weapons Caches”. Granted, the latter is from the official DOD press machine, but compare it to the war coverage from World War II, especially the columns of the famed Ernie Pyle. He didn’t whitewash the brutality and danger of war, but he didn’t revel in the body counts of friendlies that so many of our journalists of today seem to do.
Technorati Tags:Iraq, media bias
