American troops are developing a hate-hate relation with journalists.
The basic problem is that soldiers and marines in Iraq have access, usually via
the Internet, to what the mass media is saying about what they think is
happening in Iraq. These news reports, all too often, do not reflect what the
troops experience. It gets uglier when the troops realize that reporters are
spending most of their time in the Green Zone or some well guarded hotel,
leaving it to local Iraqi stringers to collect information and photos for the
reporters stories. Relations are a bit better with the few embedded journalists
who still travel with the troops out in field. But even the embeds are often
mistrusted and disliked, because some of them are blatantly out for dirt, not
an accurate story.



Few of the troops understand that the news business is driven by dramatic
events, not the tedious kind of process the troops go through every day to
defeat the terrorists. To the troops, the war is being won. They see bad guys
killed in large numbers, and few Americans getting hurt (it?s fairly common for
their to be about twenty enemy dead for each American loss). The troops see
tangible evidence, every day, of Iraqis having a better life. The troops cannot
understand why that is not news, and why journalists always seem to be looking
for a negative angle. To the average G.I., the attitude is, ?what are these
reporters looking for?? They are looking for a story, and bad news is a story.
Good news is not. As a result of this clash of cultures, reporters are
increasingly seen as a potentially dangerous enemy. For the troops, this is
already accepted as true for many Arab journalists. Some of those have been
arrested for hostile activity, or later revealed as al Qaeda agents. European
journalists are seen as particularly clueless, so wrapped up in their
anti-American fantasies, that communication is nearly impossible. But after
watching a CNN clip on the net, or viewing an online story from the New York
Times or Washington Post, it?s hard to view U.S. journalists as fellow
Americans.