"I Was a Mouthpiece for the American Military"

From Ken Silverstein:

In an interesting interview published this week in Foreign Policy, Newsweek’s Rod Nordland spoke about the difficulties of reporting from Iraq. He said that the Bush Administration has been largely successful in managing the news “to the extent that most Americans are not aware of just how dire it is and how little progress has been made” and revealed that some embedded reporters “have been blacklisted because the military wasn’t happy with [their] work.”

I recently spoke with a former senior TV producer for Reuters who worked in Iraq between 2003 and 2004 … When insurgents attacked civilians, she told me, the American military would rush her to the scene so she could record the carnage and get shots of grieving Iraqis … But when this producer wanted to pursue a story that might have cast the war effort in an unfavorable light, the situation was entirely different.

She and the other journalists stationed at the base in Tikrit grew cynical about their work and came to believe that they were being used. “Other reporters in Iraq,” she said, “especially local Iraqis [working for Western outlets], were able to get both sides of the story, but we were getting only one side.” During her 45 days in Tikrit, she told me, she didn’t file a single story critical of the American project in Iraq. “There was no balance,” she said. “What we were doing wasn’t real journalism.”

(Image from Internet Weekly)

Tags: America, Bush, politics