A news photographer told me that when he was covering the war in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, he discovered that the Army color-coded photographs that appeared in newspapers and magazines: Green meant that they liked the picture and that it reflected well on the troops; yellow meant that they had mixed feelings about the picture; and red meant that the photograph showed the troops in a bad light. The people who were guilty of taking too many red-coded photographs found it harder to get access to soldiers. That was back when Donald Rumsfeld was in charge -- a man who was, of course, hostile toward the media and tried to guilt-trip them into presenting a positive picture of U.S. forces in Iraq. When he left office, those days were supposed to be over. Except that they are not over -- not by a long shot. An article in today’s Stars and Stripes, a publication that receives federal funding but is editorially independent from the Pentagon, said that one of their reporters, Heath Druzin, was told that he would not be allowed to embed “with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division that is attempting to secure the violent city of Mosul.” Why not? Because his newspaper has “’refused to highlight’ good news in Iraq.” Specifically, Druzin had written -- surprise, surprise -- that “many Iraqi residents of Mosul would like the American soldiers to leave.” People who work in the public-affairs offices at the Pentagon can be helpful and professional, and some of them are a pleasure to speak with, but they can also be petty and controlling, behaving like small-town officials denying reporters access to documents and interviews. They have, for example, Googled my name and then canceled interviews that I had scheduled at military installations in the United States, because they did not like some of the articles I've written. Whether public-affairs officials are color-coding war photographs, determining the good-news level of the image, or banning a reporter access to troops, they are antagonizing the people who report on their activities -- not, it would seem, a good way of getting the kind of positive coverage they are after. --Tara McKelvey
