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ENTANGLING RELATIONS. Apropos of my remarks on the Jamil Hussein controversy, and whether bloggers had endangered his life, Jonah Goldberg asked what I thought about the broader question of the press endangering troops' lives, which was not exactly what we were discussing. I'd be happy to comment on this if there's a specific example he wants to point me to -- where a specific news report led to specific deaths or changes in military strategy because of a blown operation -- but I'm not going to treat this question in the abstract, because I think that one of the problems on the right is that too many specific questions around this war are treated as abstractions, turning arguments with real consequences into a P.R. gotcha game designed to impugn people's patriotism, motives, and intelligence, instead of fix anything real. Frequent Tapped commenter SunBeltJerry, who's apparently a bit of a conservative himself, was also wondering if I was saying bloggers should not have raised questions about the A.P. report. I was not, as I made clear in my reply to him, in the comment threads:
I just think it's important for American bloggers to recognize that American-style media criticism is massively complicated in a war environment, in a dissolving nation where the rule of law doesn't work all that well, and where American and international media outlets have to increasingly rely on local stringers because of the danger to westerners outside the Green Zone. It's not a question of not raising questions, it's a question of having some respect for the difficulty of the reporting project in general under the conditions in Iraq, and how hard it can be for people in the media and in the military to figure things out rapidly and accurately in that environment. The fog of war absolutely impacts reporters, too, and there have been plenty of initial news reports that have been proved incorrect over the years of this conflict -- remember the Washington Post report on Jessica Lynch's heroic fight before she was captured? -- but the overwhelming presumption of bad faith toward the A.P. while they were trying to get this sorted out was unwarranted. The thing bloggers sometimes forget is that they have real power, too, and that in this instance there was, as it turns out, a real human being whose life was being impacted by the controversy.It is so easy in the virtual world to become careless with real lives, and so few of the riled up right-wing bloggers reacted with anything like concern for Hussein upon confirmation of his existence -- indeed, one is still denying that he's been located or exists -- that it certainly looked like they didn't care what befell him (with Greyhawk at The Mudville Gazette a notable exception), as long as they could still pursue their anti-media agenda. Had they reacted with something other than an unrepentant and redoubled assault on the A.P., I probably would have engaged in less tut-tutting myself.Perhaps visits to Iraq will help some of the right-wing bloggers better understand how deep the fear of reprisal for working with Americans goes. For example, Bill Ardolino of INDC, who is over there now, wrote a dispatch for The Examiner documenting how firemen just 800 meters from a tank hit by an IED refused to come to its aid. "The firemen had heard reports of anti-Iraq forces in the area, and were afraid that insurgents would kill them at the scene or later retaliate against them for working with American and Iraqi government forces," he reported. And also: "the Marines advising the police are trying to get regular Iraqi patrolmen to establish a presence on the street...But the patrolmen are afraid, and are even now taking casualties at a troubling pace."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
