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Wednesday, July 07, 2004

LA Times at the Edge of Insight 
LA Times staff writer comes tantalizingly close to figuring it out in this piece:

It is a sign of bravery, Skuta continues, for a Marine to enter a town smiling and waving after he was ambushed there the night before, and to do the same thing the next day.

But in turn, this altered 21st century version of Marine Corps gung-ho has created a different rub. The small, incremental gains that Marines believe, or hope, they are making in Iraq are not being acknowledged at home.

This is a nearly universal point of view among these infantry Marines at Al Asad. It is voiced not just in interviews, but also in casual conversations among themselves, often short-handed this way: "The media doesn't get it."


...And then falls right back into the mire:

The cliche comes easy, but the thoughts behind it are more complicated. In truth, Marines here have an exceedingly narrow window on the news: a morning BBC report on the chow hall television and random, usually stale, periodicals.

Well, thanks for dismissing it as a cliche. Think you can infantilize these Marines any more? I guess you've never heard of satellite internet and telephone access, and satellite television? I had better access to TV news in Iraq than I do here at home!

Has the reporter never heard of satellite radio? My own troops were tuned into BBC Radio, as well as FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and SkyNews 24/7. And this was well forward of Al Asad.

Additionally, Al Asad's periodicals are neither random, nor stale. Yeah, you'll find a lot of weird titles lying around the barracks. But Al Asad had one of the first fully stocked PX's in theater, and you can always buy Army Times, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and even The Economist magazine, usually 2 weeks to a month out of date, tops.

They also have internet access, via satellite. I sent my first email in country from Al Asad in May 2003. Al Asad always lagged behind the rest of the Al Anbar province in providing Internet access for soldiers, but many units have contracted with Iraqis for satellite internet access. That's what we did, and that's how I kept the blog going for months from Ramadi.

In addition, the Marines at Al Asad also have Stars and Stripes, which is trucked in every few days with the mail, and is usually just a few days old. Stars and Stripes generally carries many of the breaking news headlines from Associated Press and Reuters.

I hate to break it to this reporter, but soldiers and Marines are not as ignorant as he thinks. A lot of them are better educated than most reporters. And all of them can read an issue of Time or Newsweek, and still be able to tell when the media is clueless--even if the magazine's a month old.

Here's another newsflash: All of the Marines currently at Al Asad arrived there in January and February. They were home before that, and had unlimited access to media from home. The media didn't get it then, either.

Many of those Marines are actually on their second Iraq tours. So they fought the march to Baghdad, then went home for six months and saw how clueless the media was. And now they're back, seeing how things are now, AND how clueless the media is at the same time.

In addition, you have people like me, who spent a year in Iraq, and who still managed to keep up with the news via satellite, and had enough access to run a blog from Iraq, still telling you that you're not getting it. I wasn't the only one.

And now I'm back here, reading even more media, and you're still not getting it. In fact, you're getting worse!

If the townspeople are telling each other--almost UNANIMOUSLY--that the emporer has no clothes, it takes a pretty arrogant monarch to look down his nose at the unwashed grunts and haughtily dismiss their perception as 'a cliche,' or as the product of a 'narrow view' on the news.

Splash, out

Jason




Comments:
Well said. As Aaron Brown did last night while discussing Michael Ware's "embedding" and messenger status with terrorists, the media always fall back on how complicated the issue is when it truly isn't. They just don't get it. Ware's tapes obtained from terrorist sources have no news value whatsoever; they are just great visuals and propaganda for their side.
 
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