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WHY OBJECTIVITY NEEDS DEFENDERS. To follow up on something we were discussing last week, via ThinkProgress comes word of this shift on the part of the U.S. military:
Rod Nordland, a former Baghdad bureau chief for Newsweek, says the U.S. military �has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements.� �They want to know your slant on a story - they use the word slant - what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don�t like what you have done before, they refuse to take you.�Now, it's hardly news that the military is interested in controlling the flow of information about the course of a war -- this certainly wouldn't be the first time it's happened -- but it is in the American public's interest to get an accurate picture of what's happening on the ground in Iraq. The idea that the military has, in Nordland's word, "blacklisted" reporters whose work it does not like should be anathema to us as Americans. This is not a political campaign -- it's a war whose outcome impacts all of us, and the fact that its being managed according to the press rules of political campaigns is extremely disturbing. Read the rest of Nordland's interview about the war, the press, and how members of the military have "become victims of their own propaganda" in Iraq over at Foreign Policy.
UPDATE: Marc Lynch has more.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
