Big News Orgs Who Gushed Over O'Hanlon Ignore Skeptical Op-Ed By U.S. Troops
August 20, 2007 -- 1:13 PM EST // //
Just stunning.
By now you've all almost certainly read yesterday's riveting New York Times Op-ed piece by U.S. troops in Iraq arguing that the belief that the American occupation can win this counterinsurgency is "far fetched."
By any reasonable standard, this should have been big news. A group of soldiers with a first-hand view of the situation stepped forward and publicly proclaimed not just that the prospects for success are "far fetched," but also that the press has been basically misinforming the American people about the situation there. As the soldiers wrote, they are "skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable."
You'd think that the people at the big news orgs who decide whether things are news or not -- the same people who lavished tons of coverage on Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack's Op ed -- would read this and say, "Hey, here is an alternative point of view being voiced by some of the troops themselves, and they say we're giving people the wrong impression about what's really happening here. Our readers and viewers deserve to know about this. Therefore, it is news, and we will cover it."
Right?
Nope -- of course not.
Rather, this Op-ed has been met with near-total silence. TPM intern Benjy Sarlin and I did an exhaustive hunt for coverage of this by the big news orgs. We only found one mention: CBS' Bob Scheiffer brought it up in passing in an interview with John McCain yesterday. The only other news-org mentions came in Editor and Publisher, on MSNBC's First Read blog, and on Time's Swampland blog.
That's all we could find. Nothing on CNN or any of the networks, no AP story, nothing on Reuters, nothing in any of the major papers. (If we missed anything, let us know at talk@talkingpointsmemo.com.) This is really staggering, particularly when you consider that this story has intense drama, too -- one of the authors, the piece says, was "shot in the head" during preparation of the article and is being flown to a military hospital in the U.S.
How the heck is this not newsworthy?
At first glance one is tempted to compare this blackout to the extensive coverage O'Hanlon and Pollack got for their Op ed, as I did above. But I've got a better thing to compare it to -- the media coverage that ensued the last time we heard from some of the troops in a similarly high-profile way.
Last December, newly-minted Defense Secretary Robert Gates held a photo-op sit-down with a bunch of soldiers to hear what they had to say about the proposed "surge." Mysteriously, every one of the soldiers picked for the highly-stage-managed event supported it. Here's a partial list of news organizations and shows that covered this at the time:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
Reuters
NBC's Today Show
CNN's The Situation Room (Wolf Blitzer)
Associated Press
ABC News
CNN Newsroom
CBS Morning News
Fox Special Report with Brit Hume
Now we hear from some of the troops again, and this time, what they said was genuinely counterintuitive and was decidedly not stage-managed by the administration. Yet no one at the big news orgs appeared to even blink.
Why is this? Digby accurately predicted yesterday that this would get little to no coverage, because Dems "don't seem to have any kind of apparatus" to "catapult the propaganda," so to speak. Of course, as Digby suggests, Dems themselves might consider doing some catapulting themselves right about now. Has any high-profile Dem issued a statement on this or pushed it in some other way? After all, every Republican from Dick Cheney on down waved the O'Hanlon-Pollack piece at every conceivable opportunity. Dems can do this kind of thing too, one imagines.
Nonetheless, even without the Dems pushing it, you'd think this would be seen by the big news orgs as an important story. Even if the administration didn't tell them that it was.
-- Greg Sargent
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2007/08/big_news_orgs_i.php
