Rick Atkinson speech on the media

We had a really good media panel to talk about military media relations. The best speaker was Rick Atkinson who writes for the Washington Post. He's also a military historian (won the Pulitzer prize for "An Army at Dawn". More recently he was embedded with the 101st in Iraq. He wrote a good series on IEDs in Iraq. Washington Post Article - Left of Boom He also mentioned a piece called "Night of 1000 casualties" about Somalia - although I couldn't find any links to that article on the web.

He cut the ice with a great self depreciating joke about journalists. A man went into the doctor for a brain transplant. The doctor told him it would cost $100/oz to get the brain of army officer, $200/oz for the brain of historian, and $1000/oz to get the brain of journalist. The man was taken aback by the high price for the journalist and asked why. The doctor responded, "Do you know how many journalists it takes to get 1 oz of brain?"

A quote he attributed to Omar Bradley reference dealing with the media jumped out at me. He said he had "80k soldiers which meant about 250k family members. Those family members had a right to know what kind of man was leading their soldiers." Really we do owe it to the public to be open with the media. They have entrusted us with the lives of their sons and daughters.

Another interesting comment although I can't remember who he attributed this one to was that "the military officer is continually fighting a war on two fronts. A war with the enemy which is intermittent and a war with his own government which is continuous." This also points to a great need to tell our story to the media.

The best advice he gave was to that we military officers then to down play our accomplishments. Bad news sells. We have a culture of "It's just our job". However, just doing your job isn't a very exciting newspaper article. So to get the good story told and published about the great accomplishments your unit has made in Iraq or Afghanistan, tell the reporter how hard it really was to make that good news story happen.

The most impressive story he told was about The Death of CPT Waskow - Ernie Pyle. The writing was incredibly eloquent about the death of CPT Waskow and the honor and respect his peers and soldiers showed. One of the literary themes that is repeated throughout the work is the line, "Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road." I highly encourage you to follow the above link and read the article. The question I would ask is whether such a powerful piece of journalist could ever be written in today's era of 24 hour news coverage which seems to only have time for the 15 second sound bite? If written would it even be published? We have lost a great deal of emotion, depth, and power when mass journalism changed from print to TV and now Internet.

Some final media thoughts of of my own is the tragedy of the government blackout on pictures of all the coffins coming home. That is news just like any news from inside Iraq. The public has a right to see that visible reminder of the human cost of war. War is not sterile and antiseptic. War is bloody and messy. People get wounded and die. The American public needs to know that.