Fol­low­ing on the curi­ous story of Paul Moran, the U.S. Army is admit­ting it used the media for its own ends. In one inci­dent, a tank com­man­der rounded up jour­nal­ists for what the arti­cle calls a “thun­der run” through Bagh­dad to show Iraqi troops, whose resis­tance had stiff­ened thanks to Iraqi media manip­u­la­tion, that the U.S. was in charge.

“I just wanted them to report what hap­pened. If hav­ing the media report accu­rately is using them, then they were used,” said Col. David Perkins, who as com­man­der of the 3^rd Infantry Division’s 2^nd Brigade had orga­nized the tank foray into Bagh­dad specif­i­cally to gar­ner pub­lic­ity for the U.S. advance.

Also inter­est­ing is the grous­ing by Marine Col. Glenn Starnes, who derides the cur­rent bad news out of Iraq as sen­sa­tional and says its “because we’ve lost the embeds.” The prob­lem, accord­ing to Col. Starnes, is that the mil­i­tary lost con­trol of the story, not the sit­u­a­tion.
Now, I can’t say for sure what is going on. I’m not there. _And that’s the problem._ If the mil­i­tary is admit­ting to gin­ning up pro­pa­ganda stunts that get trans­mit­ted both back home and to the enemy, then how can the civil­ians on the home front trust what’s being reported? Is the sit­u­a­tion in Iraq really as bad as it’s being reported? Or is it sen­sa­tion­al­ized as Col. Starnes charges? Granted, reporters do flock, vulture-like, to bad news, but I don’t think any think­ing per­son would deny the mil­i­tary — and its com­man­der in chief — has a vested inter­est in shap­ing the story, calm­ing the home front down, bol­ster­ing a flag­ging sup­port. And now they’ve admit­ted they’ve staged events to give cer­tain impres­sions. (But we already knew that, thanks to the whole Jes­sica Lynch embar­rass­ment.)
Maybe things in Bagh­dad really are OK, as SecDef Don­ald Rums­feld said the other day, but how can we know for sure? It’s pretty obvi­ous the mil­i­tary can’t be relied on to tell the straight truth — not that I totally blame them; for all my crit­i­cisms, I under­stand the need for media manip­u­la­tion in today’s glob­al­ized and net­worked world. How­ever, I don’t have to like it, approve of it, or par­tic­i­pate. Hence, my solo trek to the war.
Back­ing up the inde­pen­dent spirit, Orville Schell wrote in an essay in Sunday’s _New York Times Magazine_ that for­eign cor­re­spon­dents must becomes a “state­less peo­ple” in order to remain inde­pen­dent. By far the most telling exam­ple of this are the sen­ti­ments expressed by Mazen Dana, the Pales­tin­ian cam­era­man who was killed by U.S. sol­diers last month when they fired on him with tank shells. (The offi­cial rea­son was that the tank com­man­der thought his cam­era was an RPG.)

Dana rep­re­sented those reporters whose alle­giances are not pri­mar­ily to nation, patri­o­tism or ide­ol­ogy but to this new inde­pen­dent tribe of cryp­tic witness-bearing, the antithe­sis of embed­ded, pro­ducer reliant, flag-waving Ger­al­dos. ”Free­dom means to me to work free, no one bother you,” he told his C.P.J. inter­viewer in his game Eng­lish. ”We film, and we show the world what’s going on. … My motive is to con­tinue my work, even if it costed for me a lot of prob­lems and a lot of injury … even if it cost me my life.”

It did, trag­i­cally, just as it cost 16 other jour­nal­ists their lives. But that may be the nature of what’s required in future wars, in which the land­scape has changed and national alle­giances are lia­bil­i­ties — both for life and limb, and for the sake of truth.

What is evolv­ing is a form of con­flict not char­ac­ter­ized by armies of ”good guys” and ”bad guys” or ”lib­er­a­tors” and ”oppres­sors,” one cov­ered by jour­nal­ists who come from or iden­tify with one side or another. We have instead a new, almost grav­ity­less, world of con­flict in which the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary can kill jour­nal­ists with­out caus­ing great alarm and ”the enemy” can blow up U.N. aid mis­sions and other ”soft” civil­ian tar­gets with­out remorse. All that jour­nal­ists have to steady them in this bad dream is grit and a stub­born refusal to serve any of the con­tend­ing mas­ters. What gives their work mean­ing is a defi­ant com­mit­ment to inde­pen­dence, accu­rate report­ing and an almost exis­ten­tial belief that no mat­ter how debased the world and pol­i­tics become, the ”real story” some­how still matters.