You, Don Rumsfeld and the president have something in common: you haven't figured out that you take on the mass media at your peril. Attack them and they will drop everything to defend themselves and shine the spotlight right back on you. In the case of your typically snide but atypically outrageous charge that the reason no good news is coming out of Iraq is that journalists there are too pampered to emerge from their hotel balconies to bother to "talk to the troops on the ground," you might want to call for a rewrite.
See, it turns out it takes more guts to spend a year or in some cases two or three, as a reporter, photographer or bureau chief in Baghdad -- even in the Green Zone -- than it does to jet in for a two-week PR junket with "the troops" to do your lame talkshow. In this case, the media's natural tendency toward self-absorption is justified. The major outlets may indeed have gone to sleep after 9/11 and in the run-up to war, treating the administration like Franco during the grande years and the administration's every inaccurate or misleading utterance as gospel, and they still sometimes fall for the okey doke... but the reporting from Iraq has been quite good. And they've delivered it at considerable risk to their own skins (while you've been safely in your studio, but for that little PR junket...)
CPJ: the number one threat to journlists in Iraq today, is murder...
CSMonitor's Jill Carroll is still missing... Bob Woodruff is still recovering, and David Bloom is still dead...
Major hat tip to Keith Olbermann (and TV Newser). Helluva commentary Wednesday night:
"A note about Laura Ingraham's comments. I've known her a long time. I'll in fact give you the caveat that I've known her socially. But that hotel balcony crack was unforgivable.
It was unforgivable to the memory of David Bloom. It was unforgivable in consideration of Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt. It was unforgivable in the light of what happened to Michael Kelly and what happened to Michael Weiskopf. It was unforgivable with Jill Carroll still a hostage in Iraq. And it was not only unforgivable of her -- it was desperate and it was stupid."
Couldn't have said it better. You can get the video at the above TVN link or on Crooks and Liars... although this link is funnier. C'mon, Fox, you can do better than that! BTW as a caller to Randi Rhodes' show said tonight, if there were all that good news to talk about in Iraq, it would be running on the Fox News Channel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, possibly without commercial interruption. The fact that it isn't, and that even the president's favorite news channel is reporting on the bombings and bloodshed -- tells you something.
Interesting sidebar: Newsbusters offers a rundown, but not much of a defense for Ingraham, who as Olbermann noted, later tried to clean up a bit during an appearance on Ted Baxter's show, by noting that David Bloom had given his life covering the Iraq conflict (Yeah, Laura, from his hotel balcony, right? Riiiight... BTW about those hotel balconies...) while simultaneously serving as the perfect foil for Baxter's quite insane obsession with attacking NBC News... call it a case of severe Olbermania...
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%>
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
