The MSM is increasingly falling short RE: military reporting
Posted by editor-at-large on 20 June 2008 at 10:53 pm UTC
(AFP)
The MSM is increasingly becoming a joke when it comes to military reporting. That’s not to say there aren’t some good ones — publications and reporters — in the literal trenches, doing great work. There are.
But far too many of the world’s largest English-language publications have reporters in the field who completely screw the stories up (because they have no historical frame of reference, no grasp of military science or combat operations … thus no way to effectively put the latter into context). They report around the edges of the story, perhaps hype them (I know of some examples), distort them, or — at the other extreme — under-report them. Unfortunately, as has been determined by not too few counterterrorism experts, some of those reporters are bought and paid for by either the enemy or those with a political agenda. Many times, the reporters miss the story altogether when there was — or is — no reason for it to be missed.
Case in point, the reporting just today of a more-than-sizeable Israeli air-combat exercise that took place < ahem > nearly three weeks ago.
The fact that it it took the top English-language media this long to discover and report this is — as one of my colleagues told me today — “truly pathetic.”
And quite frankly, I see this all too often with the reporting coming out of Lebanon (where much of my focus is), even Iraq and Afghanistan where we have troops on the ground.
I remember last year when the “Anbar Awakening” in Iraq’s previously bloody Anbar Province was first being reported; and the success in Anbar was wrongly being attributed to “the Surge.” It’s still wrongly being attributed to the Surge, though the Surge certainly contributed in a huge way to the success of the “Awakening.”
Fact is, the “Anbar Awakening” began in 2005 following Operation Steel Curtain. But because the MSM either didn’t understand the dynamics of Iraq (or they were trying to keep the lid on the counterinsurgency successes in Anbar), the Awakening was reported to have begun in 2007.
And for anyone who might have picked up the paper this morning — or logged on to their favorite news site this afternoon — a cursory read might have led them to believe a hundred or so IAF fighters were roaring out over the Med last night.
— Visit W. Thomas Smith Jr. at uswriter.com.
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