By Bruce Kessler in Editor & Publisher:
(April 25, 2006) -- Journalists are reviled by many for alleged negativism and over-focus on bad news in Iraq. Or perhaps the problem is: Their employers are just trying to do it on the cheap. Ironically, the same media that criticizes the U.S. for sending too few troops to stabilize Iraq send too few reporters to cover much more than the dramatic bombings around Baghdad.
“I hope we keep out of the post-Vietnam thing that the press lost the war,” Joe Galloway, soon to retire military editor for Knight Ridder, recently told me in an interview. But discrepancies in what’s reported, or an imbalance, are daily highlighted by military bloggers in Iraq and conservative commentators here at home.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE:
From J.D. Johannes:
Most of the reporters I met in Fallujah were only doing fly-ins.
They would catch a ride on one of the nightly helicopter flights from Baghdad, interview the Commanding General, or the Regimental Commander, spend a few hours in the city, usally around the CMOC and fly out again.
That is not embedding. That is the definition of the drive-by media.
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