In the Loop No News Is Good News
By Al Kamen Friday, April 8, 2005; Page A23
The Pentagon often whines about how the U.S. media only harp on the negative in Iraq. But there's some cheery, morale-building news about military-media relations in a recent internal Army study of its operations in the region around Mosul.
The Army's Stryker Brigade -- equipped with vehicles that have been criticized for bad design and components that don't work -- organized an event of the type the Pentagon says it wants the media to cover more often.
Seems the unit transported an embedded reporter to a site "where school supplies were to be handed out to needy students," according to the Dec. 21 restricted "Official Use Only" report for the Center for Army Lessons Learned.
An excellent idea, but when they arrived at the school, the unit was "surprised to find that no schoolchildren were present and that an Iraqi family was homesteading in the building," the report said. What's more, "the Iraqi police were unwilling to remove the family and no school supplies" could be issued because the children were nowhere to be found.
Could there be a silver lining to this dark cloud? Yes. The media come to the rescue!
"Fortunately," the Army folks said in their report, "the reporter elected not to cover the event, which could have made us look bad, since we didn't know what was going on with the school after we funded its construction." The reporter, who was not named, "understood what had happened and had other good coverage to use . . . rather than airing any of this event."
Apparently, there was always something else negative to harp on.