Sunday, April 01, 2007

Drudge making shit up gain...which is not newsJohn and Lindsey's Excellent Adventure

During a live press conference in Bagdad(sic), Senators McCain and Graham were heckled by CNN reporter Michael Ware. An official at the press conference called Ware’s conduct “outrageous,” saying, “here you have two United States Senators in Bagdad giving first-hand reports while Ware is laughing and mocking their comments. I’ve never witnessed such disrespect. This guy is an activist not a reporter.”

“These and other indicators are reason for cautious, very cautious optimism about the effects of the new strategy,” said McCain, who was leading a Republican congressional delegation to Iraq that included Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Members of the delegation spoke at a Green Zone news conference after they rode from Baghdad’s airport in armored vehicles and under heavy guard to visit the city’s largest market. They said the trips were proof that security was improving in the capital. Prominent visitors normally make the trip from the airport to the city center by helicopter.

The congressmen, who wore body armor during their hourlong shopping excursion, said they were impressed with the resilience and warmth of the Iraqi people, some of whom would not take money for their souvenirs. They were accompanied by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

While the capital has seen a recent dip in violence as extra U.S. and Iraqi troops have flooded the streets, an Iraqi military spokesman said that militants fleeing the crackdown have made areas outside the capital “breeding grounds for violence,” spreading deadly bombings and sectarian attacks to areas once relatively untouched.

We wrote here about CNN's report on Iraq, in which Senator John McCain gave a positive report on progress there, and was followed by CNN correspondent Michael Ware. Ware not only disagreed with McCain, he was unprofessionally derisive, calling McCain's comments "ludicrous," offering to "bring [the Senator] up to speed," and wondering "what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about."

Now, Ware has gone even farther overboard. Drudge reports that John McCain and Lindsay Graham gave a press conference in Baghdad, at which Ware heckled the Senators, "laughing and mocking" them, according to an official who was present.

Maybe Ware was drunk; that would be consistent with his own description of how he spends his time in Baghdad. But he is an extreme manifestation of an all too common phenomenon--the journalist as advocate rather than neutral observer. One of the many problems with a reporter who becomes an activist, agitating for a particular side of a public issue, is that he loses any hope of objectivity. Having publicly committed himself to the proposition that everything that happens in Iraq is a disaster, having publicly ridiculed those who pointed to optimistic developments, how can anyone trust that Ware's future reporting is giving us anything like the straight story from Iraq? And what does his conduct say about his employer, CNN? How much confidence can we have in their reporting from Baghdad, or anywhere else?