Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

US Military, not troops targeting reporters Newspaper Guild president says

Thomas Lipscomb:

Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley made a public statement on May 13 that journalists are “being targeted for real in places like Iraq.” She has been trying to slide out of it ever since. Pressed by E&P’s Joe Strupp, Foley offered a clarification on who specifically was doing the targeting: “I was careful of not saying troops, I said U.S. military.”

Everette Dennis, a former dean of a journalism school and founder of the Gannett Center for Media Studies, finds this a distinction without a difference. “A military without troops is inconceivable,” he told me this week. “One presupposes the other.” It is as logically impossible to separate the troops from the military as it is egg whites from an omelet.

But let’s go with her “careful” and very artful clarification. After all thousands of bumper stickers do not say “Support the U.S. Military.” So now, according to Foley, it is the “U.S. military” that is arranging for journalists “being targeted for real.”

Sound familiar? It should. Eason Jordan, president of CNN News, had to resign for making exactly the same accusation at Davos four months ago. He had a major problem--no evidence to back up his charges. And being a prominent person in the news business, once the word got out through the blogosphere, just as it had on CBS’s use of phony Bush records, Jordan was caught in a media firestorm.

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Foley had the advantage of seeing what happened to Jordan and, as the head of a powerful union of 35,000 journalists and media workers, she knew anything she said about targeting journalists would likely be scrutinized. So one would expect that she has a pretty solid case for her revival of the discredited Jordan charges? But one would be wrong. Her spokesperson, Candice Johnson, told me Foley can provide “no evidence” to support her charges either.

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Foley decided to improve the odds and issued another statement to me. In a further clarification of her clarification, Foley insists that she “doesn't believe that our service men and women would knowingly fire on journalists and innocent civilians.”

So follow the logic. It is the U.S. military, not the troops, who targeted journalists. But if an occasional service man or woman just might have fired a tank round or two into the Palestine Hotel and killed some journalists, or dropped a bomb on Al Jazeera’s studio in Baghdad using the coordinates from the U.S. military (both cited in her letter to President Bush of April 8 th demanding an investigation), they didn’t do it “knowingly.”

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If Foley is allowed to walk unchallenged from what Mencken might have called “a clear, simple, and” unproven statement, it will only accelerate the speed at which her members lose what is left of their credibility--and then their jobs. (Look at The New York Times newsroom downsizing this week.) If the press isn’t going to take its own standards seriously, it is hard to think of why anyone should take the press seriously enough to pay for it. In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch’s and Roger Ailes’s success offers a constant unpleasant reminder: the media market prefers dogs that bark.

This is where you get my statement on the ignorance of the media as to the effect of the enemy camoflaging himself as a civilian thereby endandering the lives of all civilians including reporters who now find themselves dressed just like the enemy. The reason the Geneva Convention does not grant POW status to unlawful combatants is that by dressing as civilians and situating themselves among the civilian population, they put non combatants at risk. If reporters were doing their job, the head of their union would know that. To be a lawful combatant, the soldier must wear a distintive uniform and openly carry his weapon. Foley owes it to her members to inform them of these facts to not only better inform the public, but to also better protect themselves. For my regular readers, you have probably seen this explanation many times on this blog. I intend to keep giving it until the mainstream media gets it. Judging by Foley's statement, it could take a while.