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Covering Roggio's coverage

Washington Post:

Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey less than two months ago when a Marine officer half a world away made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

Frustrated by the coverage they were receiving from the news media, the Marines invited Roggio, 35, who writes a popular Web log about the military called "The Fourth Rail" ( http://www.billroggio.com ), to come cover the war from the front lines.

He raised more than $30,000 from his online readers to pay for airfare, technical equipment and body armor. A few weeks later, he was posting dispatches from a remote outpost in western Anbar province, a hotbed of Iraq's insurgency.

"I was disenchanted with the reporting on the war in Iraq and the greater war on terror and felt there was much to the conflict that was missed," Roggio, who is currently stationed with Marines along the Syrian border, wrote in an e-mail response to written questions. "What is often seen as an attempt at balanced reporting results in underreporting of the military's success and strategy and an overemphasis on the strategically minor success of the jihadists or insurgents."

Roggio's arrival in Iraq comes amid what military commanders and analysts say is an increasingly aggressive battle for control over information about the conflict. Scrutiny of what the Pentagon calls information operations heightened late last month, when news reports revealed that the U.S. military was paying Iraqi journalists and news organizations to publish favorable stories written by soldiers, sometimes without disclosing the military's role in producing them.

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This story is woefully out of date. Roggio moved his postings to ThreatsWatch.Org before he went to Iraq. Roggio left Iraq a week ago to return home. While his post in Iraq were interesting, I think his analysis before he left was better. The benefit of his reporting in Iraq was his interaction with the Marines and the coalition forces that gave a truer picture of what they were doing. Since he had a greater understanding of warfare than any of the reporters in Iraq, his accounts were more perceptive and accurate.

The media attacks on the placement of accurate information in Iraqi media must have something to do with their own attempt to thwart this side of the story in their own publications. The complaint that the stories may have been one sided is laughable when you consider their own one sided reports of doom and gloom from Iraq while suppressing accurate information about positive events in Iraq.

The media has not done a poorer job of reporting a war since the Tet offensive in Vietnam where they turned a rout of the communist forces into a victory. They are making the same mistake again. They are attributing significance to the fact of an attack rather than the results of an attack. One of the easiest things to do in war is launch a failed attack. Anybody can do it. Yet in their reporting of the war, the violence of a failed attack is treated as a failure of US forces to prevent it. This is an impossibly stupid standard, but it seems to be the one that all the major media follow. Roggio is a rare exception. That is what makes his reporting so important.

Update: Roggio responds to the Post.