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Last week I wrote a Newsbusters article titled Bias Against Fox News Has A Negative Impact On The Troops. In it I detailed how Fox news was reporting news that other mainstream media outlets were ignoring by publishing some dispatches from Michael Yon online.

The premise was simple. Micheal Yon is an independent journalist who has been embedded with many different units in Iraq over the last 4 years. His reports tell the stories of our fighting men and women with an honest assessment based on his personal experience. These dispatches report on all aspects of the war, its progress and the various hardships we face in the ongoing battle to liberate Iraqi’s and defeat the terrorist elements concentrated on such a small piece of land. Fox was covering these stories and as a result the message of the troops was breaking through into the often barren land of the MSM.

Unfortunately Mr. Yon’s honest assessment has not been fully met with open arms by some people in the Army who have threatened to have the independent journalist removed on numerous occasions. Today is another such occasion. (h/t Captains Quarters).

Michael’s latest report details the difficulties he faces on a recurring basis.

For a military that is the first to gripe about not getting enough press–in a kind of war where the press can determine the outcome–it seems fairly obvious that the first step would be to at least make sure there is a place for the press to work. If this were a few months into this war, I could understand it, but to not even be at square one this far in?

A general emailed in the past 24 hours threatening to kick me out. The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called “Gates of Fire.” Some of the senior level public affairs people who’d been upset by “Proximity Delays” were looking ever since for a reason to kick me out and they wanted to use “Gates of Fire” as a catapult. In the events described in that dispatch, I broke some rules by, for instance, firing a weapon during combat when some of our soldiers were fighting fairly close quarters and one was wounded and still under enemy fire. That’s right. I’m not sure what message the senior level public affairs people thought that would convey had they succeeded, (which they didn’t) but it was clear to me what they valued most. They want the press on a short leash, even at the expense of the life of a soldier.

Some readers might recall that LTC Barry Johnson denied my embed requests in 2006, but after I wrote “Censoring Iraq,” somehow the door opened up. Strangely, a couple days ago, LTC Barry Johnson invited me to be a panelist at a symposium in Washington D.C. on ”the role of blogs and bloggers in the news environment today. The intent is to help PAOs better understand the issues involved.” Call me suspicious, but my whiskers tingled on that one.

I’ll post a major dispatch within the next 18 hours. Lots of photos. I worked very hard for you. They’ll probably say I broke some kind of rules. Fact is, as soon as the public affairs people will start being part of the solution and not part of the problem, I can start writing about the successes and the soldiers like Q who are out in Baghdad even now, trying to make this work.

This is another terrible part of the mismanagement of the war. We often search for success stories only to find that the mainstream media is not interested. Yet when someone like Mr. Yon does the job that the mainstream media refuses to do he is shut down whenever the message isn’t exactly the way the Army wishes it to be. Why have embeds in the first place?

I have run into issues with CENTCOM myself. They contacted me about their dispatches and wanted me to be aware that they release information on a regular basis and was hoping I might use their information in some of the articles I wrote. I thought this was a great idea as I am often searching for information that clearly isn’t out in the open. I read their press releases just like I read as many other sources as possible but have yet to report based on them because I prefer the independent sources such as Mr. Yon. However, when I contacted CENTCOM about an article I was writing concerning the way terrorists manipulate information as part of the war on terror I was met with silence. I just was looking for some simple facts but nobody bothered to get back to me. As a result the story was shelved; it makes no sense to write something without the facts.

Wars are difficult, people die, mistakes are made and hopefully they are corrected. If Mr. Yon can’t be allowed to be honest about the state of affairs on the ground then nobody but the military is to blame for the distrust that the mainstream media has for the information coming from the front. If we are to win the war of misinformation we need to have better lines of communication; the kind that people like Michael Yon provide on a regular basis.

This is a terrible precedent. Hopefully someone with authority is paying attention and these problems can get corrected.

Others: Pundit Review, Conservative Times

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