UPDATED - ColdType

engage. Ricks offered a mild dissent in the form
of a reality sandwich of an observation. He
pointed out that the war is still raging with more
US soldiers dead after the Saddam statue fell
than before.
WE ARE OUTTA HERE
IN the wake of the statue toppling (by US soldiers,
not the pre-assembled crowd), Victoria
Clarke noted that after that, there was a “flood”
of journalists de-embedding, splitting, and abandoning
the story. Many were anxious to call it a
win and get the hell out of there. Ricks suggested
that we now see that period not as the end of a
war but as a mere half-time, “like in a football
game.”
“We are now in the second half and it is not
clear who will win.” He said we could lose. This
was sobering coming from a military journalist
who is in and out of the Pentagon (a.k.a. “the
Building”) and who knows all the Big Brass –
who largely respect his work.
AS WAR INTENSIFIES,
COVERAGE SHRINKS
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
THIS prompted Kusnetz to ask why, if it’s worse
than ever over there, NBC has reduced its
reporting staff at a moment that demands more
coverage, not less. Brokaw explained the problems
and the complexities of covering a complicated
story. He cited the recent attack that
wounded an NBC employee at “our hotel.”
Clearly, this back-and-forth speaks to a debate
within the News Division about how many
resources to allocate to a story that is not now as
triumphalist as it was not so long ago.
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A study of how TV News plays into and does
not clear up the many misperceptions that TV
viewers have about Iraq, the WMDs and Al
Qaeda’s “link” with Saddam came out just yesterday
but was not commented upon. It sampled
the public and looked at the frequency of misconceptions
among the viewers of different networks.
It found that 30% of NBC viewers had
misperceptions on the terrorist link to Iraq. That
was not as bad as the 45% of Fox viewers or as
good as the 11% of the PBS-NPR viewer-listeners.
TO NBC’s CREDIT
I WAS surprised to learn from another study
that NBC actually featured more coverage of
anti-war protests than BBC during the run-up to
the war. It did offer diverse analysis by analysts
like Arkin, who quarreled with Clark last night,
and even General McCaffrey who pissed off the
Pentagon at one point by questioning their plan.
Reporters like the late David Bloom, who died in
Iraq, were offered inventive and gutsy reports.
Whatever good one can say about NBC cannot
be applied to its offspring MSNBC, which spent
the war dueling with Fox over who could be the
most obnoxious.
THE VIEW FROM THE ARAB WORLD
IF my own view of media reporting out of Iraq is
critical, it is low key when compared to how most
Arab journalists feel about it. I found that out in
mid-October when I took part in the Arab Media
Summit.
The Summit was held in Dubai sponsored by
the Dubai Press Club. The club invited me to
speak along with majordomos from CNN and