Reality Check

Counterpunch carries Robert Fisk's latest report:

"Hotel journalism" is the only phrase for it. More and more Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices from which their editors refuse them permission to leave...

Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by reporters in so distant and restricted a way. The New York Times correspondents live in Baghdad behind a massive stockade with four watchtowers, protected by locally hired, rifle-toting security men, complete with NYT T-shirts. America's NBC television chain are holed up in a hotel with an iron grille over their door, forbidden by their security advisers to visit the swimming pool or the restaurant "let alone the rest of Baghdad" lest they be attacked. Several Western journalists do not leave their rooms while on station in Baghdad...

...why do not more journalists report on the restrictions under which they operate? During the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, editors often insisted on prefacing journalists' dispatches from Saddam's Iraq by talking about the restrictions under which they were operating. But today, when our movements are much more circumscribed, no such "health warning" accompanies their reports. In many cases, viewers and readers are left with the impression that the journalist is free to travel around Iraq to check out the stories which he or she confidently files each day. Not so.

"The United States military couldn't be happier with this situation," a long-time American correspondent in Baghdad says. "They know that if they bomb a house of innocent people, they can claim it was a 'terrorist' base and get away with it. They don't want us roaming around Iraq and so the 'terrorist' threat is great news for them.

Fisk also compares the situation in Iraq today with that in Algeria in the 1990's, when a brutal campaign was fought between the faux-leftist government and Islamic rebels, and actually thinks it's worse in Iraq (not that many people were even aware of the horrible conflict in Algeria--short version: the government "cancelled" the 1991 elections after it became clear that the FIS, the Islamic Salvation Front, was winning the vote decisively--the ensuing conflict killed thousands).

Aside: James Wolcott, where I initially saw the link to Fisk's article, has an excellent "kiss-off" to those who've coined the ugly term "fisking" (my understanding is that it was in response to an article he wrote about nearly being killed in Afghanistan--Fisk had the temerity to suggest that rage against westerners wasn't necessarily to be unexpected from a group of people who'd been subject to the western machinery of war. Warbloggers use it when attempting to refute antiwar articles line-by-line. Good luck). Wolcott writes:

Apropos, the neo verb "fisk" and its variations are terms that will never besmirch on this site. Slurs on the name of a great and brave reporter, they gained currency among warbloggers not only because they caricaturize an ideological enemy but because "f---ing" sounds so much like "fisting," a sexual practice that excites certain verboten latent tendencies in many of them. It gives them an illicit tingle, f---ing a post. Oh well, everyone to his own hobbies, but not under my roof, mister.

Hear, hear.