Reality and truth are hard to come by these days. I browse through the numerous TV channels, but it feels like they are all one and the same—and a really bad one at that. All the hype about the live action, continuous reports, and embedded reporters has proved disappointing. In fact it is downright frustrating to sit and watch all the reporters take a minute to tell us that the bombing has started in Baghdad but then take the next 30 minutes explaining how a cool gadget translates from English to Arabic. Do you see the ratio there? It’s like the war is disrupting the “war coverage.”
Aside from not really covering any news, some of the reports shown are inaccurate or outright wrong. Walter Cronkite, one of most respected journalists from the Vietnam era, said that he has never seen such bad and unethical journalism as he has of late. For example, on the first days of the war, the army said that the port of Umm Qasr had fallen to the coalition forces and that was reported as a fact by all the news channels. However, to this day we still get reports of intense fighting in that same place. Another example, at a news conference with U.S. President George W. Bush last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said two British soldiers had been executed by Iraq. The British government later backed away from the accusation after a relative of one of the soldiers told a newspaper that she had been told by the army that the soldier had died in action. There are a number of other examples, and the more you see them the harder it becomes to answer the question, “What is the truth?”
Then we come to the “embedded” journalists, or more aptly called the “in-bed” journalists who forgot the meaning of balanced reporting. Actually, at a very basic human level, how could you be objective when the soldiers you are with are the people protecting you hour in and hour out?
We only see one side of the action, the side where a bomb is dropped and then a big boom is heard, and “mission accomplished” is stated. Don’t we care where that bomb dropped, and who it dropped on? Hopefully it dropped on Saddam, but I am sure some of the 8700 bombs we have dropped fell somewhere that the government does not really want us to see. I know war brings casualties, but like most of us, I don’t like them. This does not necessarily mean I don’t want to hear about them. It is, after all, part of reality.
On the subject of casualties, I read something that I thought I would share with you. “I think the level of casualties is secondary,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael A. Ledeen told a gathering of war hawks. “I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say, but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war . . . What we hate is not casualties, but losing.” I don’t believe it, but it is something to ponder.
