One Utah

By now, it has become a cliché to say that the journalists who are working every day in Iraq are risking their lives to keep us informed. An estimated 129 journalists and their support staff have been killed in Iraq since 2003. Meanwhile, journalistic wannabes like Michelle Malkin think they can impugn the honesty of front line reporters from halfway around the world.

Iraq Casualty Count has details on 109 journalists who have died in Iraq from March 20, 2003 to December 12, 2006. The most recent fatality was Associated Press Television News cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, shot execution-style by insurgents while attempting to film a gunbattle in the streets of Mosul.

CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who barely survived a car bomb attack last May that killed her cameraman, soundman, translator and a US Army captain, writes of her concern for Iraqi victims of the war:

I watch the near-daily video of Iraqi bombing victims, and study them as their crying family members drag them from the scene, or cradle them on a hospital floor, begging for a doctor. I see where the shrapnel ripped into their bodies, and think to myself: “Dear God. Those wounds are like mine. In an Iraqi hospital…they won’t survive the night.”

But the wounded can’t all go to American hospitals — that system is running at full capacity, and many of the doctors, nurses and corpsmen I met are battling exhaustion, burnout, and just plain heartache to keep going. Not to mention, for those in Iraq, battling the threat of mortar and rocketfire or roadside attacks.

Iraq is getting more dangerous and difficult for reporters trying to find the truth. According to CNN’s Michael Ware in Baghdad:

Where once you could rely on the general population to at least watch your back, to alert you to what danger may be around you, you can no longer, be it out fear and intimidation or a dwindling in sympathy or empathy for us and our position. In terms of the insurgency, we are seen as legitimate targets: part of the problem, not the solution.

Simply being seen with a foreigner is now enough to get an Iraqi killed by insurgents, reporters say. As such, normally talkative Iraqis are now more reserved. Many want nothing to do with the media.

On December 6, a roadside bomb killed Marine MAJ Megan M. McClung, the highest-ranking servicewoman to lose her life in this war. In her capacity as a public affairs officer, she escorted many reporters through Ramadi, the most dangerous city in Iraq. The Newsweek correspondent her convoy was protecting survived (in another vehicle). She had many friends among the media, and her death was covered everywhere except on Fox News Channel– which ignored the story. Ironically, she died just after dropping off Fox News commentator Oliver North, who later falsely claimed on air that Ramadi was getting safer.

UPDATE: Eric Boehlert on Media Matters: “[W]arbloggers, desperate for an Iraq scapegoat, are willing to invest whatever amount of time and energy it takes to advance their phony notion that the press is to blame for the Iraq fiasco.”

This entry was posted Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 2:18 pm and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), Iraq, Michelle Malkin, This Blog, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.