The Xsociate Files

Via War Room:

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Rod Nordland, the magazine's chief foreign correspondent and former Baghdad bureau chief, says that conditions in Iraq are 'much worse' than they're described in the U.S. press.

The reason? The Bush administration does a 'great job of managing the news,' and the military has begun to crack down on embedded reporters who might otherwise offer a clear assessment of facts on the ground. 'Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously,' Nordland says. 'They want to know your slant on a story -- they use the word 'slant' -- what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don't like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn't happy with the work they had done on embed.'

I guess the Bushies have taken that old "nothing nice, say nothing" adage to heart. Though in this case it's "if you can't report the war the way we want, you won't report on it at all."

Posted by The Xsociate on Friday, July 07, 2006 | Permalink