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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

3/29/2003

Who Is Reporting on Our Troops?
Karl Zinsmeister, editor of The American Enterprise, is embedded with the 82nd Airborne in the combat zone. He writes that, for the most part, the journalists traveling with our troops in Iraq are disdainful of the troops and against the war.

I personally have not met a single journalist here who supports this intervention by our commander-in-chief. I know there are a few present, like Michael Kelly of The Atlantic, and some of those I've met could not be clearly categorized on the basis of gentle questioning. But the vast number of the reporters I've spoken to are openly scornful of this war's aims and purposes.

In the first days of battle, the only thing that got the sustained respect and attention of the fellow scribes I'm bumping into each day was the apparent death of four journalists on March 22. At a lower level, there was astonished pique that the writers traveling with the Marines in the initial ground offensive had not been been given an opportunity to sleep for two full days! Of course, the Marines who were doing the fighting were not sleeping either. And a lot more than four servicemen have been killed. But they're from another species.

Typical reporters know little about a fighting life. They show scant respect for the fighter's virtues. Precious few could ever be referred to as fighting men themselves. The journalists embedded among U.S. forces that I've crossed paths with are fish out of water here, and show their discomfort clearly as they hide together in the press tents, fantasizing about expensive restaurants at home and plush hotels in Kuwait City, fondling keyboards and satellite phones with pale fingers, clinging to their world of offices and tattle and chatter where they feel less ineffective, less testosterone deficient, more influential.

When the press covers the death of a journalist in the combat zone as if it is the most important part of the story, I change the channel. Journalists who die in the commbat zone are not worthy of more coverage than the soldiers who, along with prosecuting their mission, have the added responsibility of trying to keep the unarmed journalists from getting killed. I was especially pleased to see the other day a report from NBC's Chip Reid, who described how the soldiers he was traveling with had to dig a new trench to sleep in each night. It was hard work, he said, adding he and his crew also had to dig their own trench. Good for them. Nice to know they aren't be coddled out there.