The war in Afghanistan is the subject of just 4% of the nation's news coverage these days (and before the surge, it was just about 1%).
The danger, cost, and difficulty of reporting from isolated Afghanistan are mentioned. Also mentioned is the idea that Americans are weary of war coverage, with only a quarter following news from the war closely.
Given my views at how awful our press is on reporting or discussing military matters, I tend to think of this low percentage as good. Too little coverage by reporters without a clue to get in the way of winning; but enough coverage to keep the military from failing to confront real problems in the conduct of the war. That's my hope, anyway, notwithstanding my annoyance that much of the coverage consists of the "we're doomed!" variety.
But what really got me was this so-called lesson:
Privately, some television executives say the Afghanistan coverage is an outgrowth of the self-evaluations made by news organizations in the wake of the Iraq war, when many were faulted for not broadcasting sufficient skepticism.
At the same time, there are antiwar voices who say the news media has been “compliant” with regard to Afghanistan — the word that Joe Scarborough used on Friday on his MSNBC program, “Morning Joe.”
He asked Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, “For years, we have had journalists wringing their hands and editorialists lashing out at the profession for not asking the tough questions leading up to Iraq. Ten years from now, won’t we be saying the same thing about Afghanistan?”
Are you kidding me? This is the lesson about their professional conduct in the war that our professional journalists have learned?
Insufficient skepticism? About the pre-Iraq War coverage? Presumably this means the questions of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and not the vast number of other reasons our Congress set forth for war. One, on the issue of WMD, there is no question that at the very least, Saddam maintained the scientific and technical skills in place as well as critical infrastructure and raw materials to pick up again on chemical weapons production as soon as sanctions crumbled. At worst, he had them in some quantities to cover his bluff that he maintained large stocks, and he managed to smuggle them out of Iraqi into Syria (a strategy Saddam has tried to do with critical military assets in past wars) or even bury them somewhere in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.
But what would increased journalistic skepticism about our worries about Saddam's WMD programs in 2002 have gotten the media? If they had interviewed the heads of intelligence of every major intelligence outfit and had access to WikiLeaks documents about what they said internally, that increased skepticism would have shown that Saddam definitely had chemical weapons and was pursuing nuclear weapons. Even the UN's Hans Blix--famously against war--had to conclude that Iraq failed to prove they had eliminated all of their WMD programs, as the UN had required as a foundation of the Persian Gulf War ceasefire. Heck, every leading Democrat in the Senate publicly agreed that Iraq had WMD programs based on the information that they had gotten not from Bush, but from the recent Clinton administration (and President Clinton signed into law Congressional language making regime change in Iraq our official foreign policy goal because of our fear of Iraqi WMD programs).
Plus, the continued bizarre focus on redebating the 2002 debate on going to war with Iraq is astounding given how badly the press got the initial Afghanistan campaign (brutal Afghan winter, the need to halt operations during Ramadan, the Dr. No underground lairs that Osama bin Laden had built); Iraq War (failing to understand the basics of counter-insurgency and repeatedly reporting that we were doomed to defeat until even our press could not ignore the signs of our victory; ignoring Iranian and Syrian involvement as a Bush fantasy just trying to get an excuse to hit them; denying al Qaeda in Iraq was al Qaeda; portraying the insurgencies as brave nationalists resisting us rather than paid Baathists, Iranian agents, and invading jihadis; calling the Sunni Arab suicide bombings versus Iranian supported Sadrist death squads as a "civil war'; reporting on the enemy as 10 feet tall and unbeatable (fighting them just creates more); the failure to report on the successes of the 2007 surge; and the infamous Charge of the Knights coverage that portrayed a sound victory over Moqtada al Sadr as a defeat for the Iraqi government, to name a few off the top of my head); and general war on terror where even naming the religious motivation of the jihadis is considered politically insensitive!
Our press corps doesn't understand how to report on and analyze war, and their major lesson they take away is that they were insufficiently skeptical of the pre-Iraq War claims about weapons of mass destruction? Really? Are they freaking kidding me? Less poor quality war coverage is a blessing, given this record of ineptitude.
What a convenient lesson for our press corps to learn: They should be more critical of American government claims about our enemies. What a shock that a bunch of left-leaning people would conclude that they need to be a bigger road block when we want to defend ourselves from enemies.
