PressEthic

Donald Rumsfeld recently stated that the media is too negative in its coverage of the Iraq war, during an address he gave at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

He asserted that the press is so busy focusing on negative aspects like war casualties and bombings, that they do not focus on all the positive reconstruction work being done out there. However, he did try to maintain an engaging tone, and presented some theories on what could be prompting such coverage.

Columbia Journalism Review in a particularly caustic article ripped to shreds, his attempt to reach out to the press.

The first part of the address to come under attack in the article was Rumsfeld’s claim that he could sympathize with news reporters in Iraq, as they are being displaced from familiar surroundings and working in hostile territory, where they have to fear for their safety—as a result they get confused, and get it all wrong.

The Secretary of Defense seems to intuitively understand that all that negative coverage of massive civilian death tolls, daily bombings, kidnappings and beheadings is the result of reporters taken aback by being "in a country that is so different" from the strip malls back home in New York and California and Kentucky and Indiana.

The second shot was taken at his assertion that journalists are confined to certain areas in Iraq, and therefore are unable to present a comprehensive picture of the conditions out there.

If that were true, we would never have seen stories from the violent front lines of Fallujah, from the mountainous, Kurdish-controlled north, or from the more recent battles near the Syrian border -- all parts of the country that have been superbly-covered by both embedded and freelance reporters.

And then he made a claim that was simply asking for trouble—while speaking of the numerous positive developments in Iraq, he brought up the cultivation of a free and independent press.

Whereas, this would have been a pretty theory even as far back as two weeks, it was just bad timing to bring it up in this particular address. As expected, in light of the recent scandal CJR had quite an acerbic retort to this claim.

Pentagon pays off Iraqi journalists to write positive stories, and has under contract a private PR firm to place other positive stories about the American occupation in the Iraqi media. To be sure, not all stories in the Iraqi media are planted. But it seems to speak to a larger tone-deafness that Rumsfeld would trot these figures out right after the administration was caught redhanded manipulating the fledgling press that he is extolling.

It seems the government is just not going to have an easy time swaying the press from its anti-war stance. Even though Rumsfeld’s tone was fairly engaging, given the circumstances, such sugar-coated speeches are not going to pacify the press—rather they will just add fuel to fire