The media war reports get better

NY Times:

The anguished relationship between the military and the news media appears to be on the mend as battlefield successes from the troop increase in Iraq are reflected in more upbeat news coverage.

Efforts from the new Pentagon leadership, as well as by top commanders at the headquarters in Baghdad, have also eased tensions between reporters and those in uniform. Positive or negative, the troops’ view of the news media is set as much by the tone of commanders as by the tenor of individual news clips.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American officer in Iraq, and his subordinates have worked hard to convey the rationale for their strategy and the evidence that persuades them it is succeeding. Adm. Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has engaged reporters in a variety of venues: at the Pentagon, on travels across the United States and overseas, including the Middle East.

And, perhaps most important, their boss, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, has stated a view never heard from his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. “The press is not the enemy,” Mr. Gates tells military audiences, including at the service academies, “and to treat it as such is self-defeating.”

At the start of the Iraq war, decades of open hostilities between the military and news media dating from Vietnam were forgotten, if only for a brief and shining moment. One reason was the embed program for the Iraq invasion that placed hundreds of reporters from across the journalistic spectrum into combat units. Soldiers and correspondents shared tents, meals and risks, and both sides said that perhaps their differences were not irreconcilable after all.

Then, however, the success of the lightning-quick invasion became not the full story, but merely the early chapter of a frustrating and deadly narrative of war in Iraq.

As insurgent violence rose in 2003, echoes of that earlier conflict in Southeast Asia could be heard. The downturn accelerated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004. The credibility of the armed forces fell even further in the eyes of reporters when it was disclosed that military contractors in Baghdad had paid Iraqi reporters for stories in the local news media.

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There are some other things that happened to cause the problem. Al Qaeda had a very effective media strategy which the US media never really challenged in the same way they challenged Rumsfeld. It was at least two fold. Al Qaeda drove the US media from the battle space and left them hunkered down in Baghdad hotels. This caused them to rely on local stringers who were not as intelligent or as independent. They tended to rely on unreliable Iraqi sources that themselves may have been connected with the enemy. Another aspect of the al Qaeda media strategy was to stage attack/PR events where one of their members would explode around non combatants in a blatant war crime. Rather than accuse al Qaeda of these war crimes the US media tended to attack the US and Iraqi forces for not stopping al Qaeda's mass murder disguised as warfare.

One of the reasons that coverage has improved of late is that the surge did for the media what it did for the Iraqis. By focusing on protecting the people, they also protected the media who wanted to report on the Iraqi people. As more and more of the reporters stuck their heads outside their hotels they found a very different Iraq than they had been reporting on while hunkered down. In effect they were able to re-embed with US forces and tell their story in a much more effective way. This had the effect of also getting the good news out.