Brief Spark, then Darkness

As Jason Van Steenwyck reports, sometimes the media comes perilously close to enlightenment - as in this LATimes 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."

...only to have their biases come raging forth at the last minute.

Like here:

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.

Remember the scene from "All Quiet on the Western Front", where the protagonist returns home on leave? He's sitting at a sidewalk cafe, talking with a group of old men. They ask how things are going at the front. Protagonist says, basically, slow. The old men ask when the big breakthrough and drive to Paris is going to happen. The protagonist sighs, thinking of the carnage the goes along with taking 100 yards of enemy trenchline.

"Ah", say the old men. "Your problem is, you only see a small piece of the action from your trench. Now, if you had the big picture...like us...

As Eric Johnson wrote last week, the media seems to be the party looking at the war through blood-colored goggles.

Van Steenwyck continues:

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.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

Posted by Mitch at July 7, 2004 10:22 AM | TrackBack