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Media Matters

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Of course, the Washington Post was not to be denied. The award for international reporting went to Anthony Shadid, the Post's man in Baghdad. When the prize was announced Shadid was covering the uprising of radical Muslims in Fallujah and Ramadi. Here's the headline that ran over his dispatch yesterday: "U.S. Forces Take Heavy Losses As Violence Spreads Across Iraq."

The lede: "Sunni Muslim insurgents killed about a dozen U.S. Marines in heavy fighting Tuesday in the western city of Ramadi, a military spokesman said. Troops from the United States and several allied countries also came under fire from militiamen loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a militant Shiite Muslim cleric, in cities across southern Iraq."

A grim picture. But you have to wade through six more grafs for this from Shadid: "Iraqi casualty figures were incomplete and impossible to verify, but hospital officials have reported dozens killed in clashes in Baghdad and central and southern Iraq since the weekend. Sources quoted by the Associated Press put the number of Iraqi dead at more than 60."

"Heavy Losses," anyone?

THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH QUAGMIRE coverage for the Pulitzer Board, which handed its investigative reporting award to a three-reporter team for the Toledo Blade. The team looked into documentary evidence that during the Vietnam War members of Tiger Force, an elite U.S. Army platoon, committed numerous atrocities against civilians. The cases had been looked into by the Army, which took no action against alleged perpetrators.

It's hard, after three decades, to know the truth of this story, though the Blade simply accepts the testimony of witnesses, both Vietnamese and American. Certainly I don't deny the possibility of the atrocities, but I do wonder why the government didn't act. Today's mindset assumes official inaction resulted from the worst motives. But the Blade's series, and I've not read it all, does seem to leave room for the explanation that the evidence was not complete.

What's curious about this is its timing, which seems to offer cover for John Kerry's 1971 slander of American forces in Vietnam, who, he told a congressional committee, committed wholesale and widespread atrocities as policy. CNN and Peter Arnett were already burned for doing such a story (not involving Tiger Force), which turned out to be false. If I were on the Pulitzer Board, I'd have demanded assurances that this entry was not politicized.

But then that's an unrealizable hypothesis. I'd not join a board I consider to be a travesty -- a travesty made a laughable relic by the burgeoning new media.

topics:
Bill Clinton, Television, Environment, Military, Iraq