The anguished relationship between the military and the news media appears to be on the mend as battlefield successes from the troop increase in Iraq are reflected in more upbeat news coverage.
This implies that, due to the recent successes of the surge and related positive reporting by the media about it, the military is now reducing hostility towards the media.
This highlights the fundamental misunderstanding (or another one) by the media in general, more specifically the media on the left, on this topic; the focus on the negative for the past several years at the cost of very little reporting on all the successes and other positive stories. The NYT article does finally acknowledge this, though there was almost no reporting on Gen. Sanchez’s (ret.) media related comments at the time:
“The death knell of [the media’s] ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas,” General Sanchez said in comments that earned far less coverage than his equally harsh statement that the Bush administration had mismanaged the war.
“What is clear to me,” General Sanchez told a media group, Military Reporters and Editors, “is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war.”
The military is not looking for preferential treatment and the recent positive response from the DoD is not for positive reporting concerning the surge; it is for fair reporting rather than the ideologically based (i.e., opposed to the war) reporting that has been standard fare since 2003.
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