Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post has two long, brilliant, staggering stories in the paper, one yesterday and one today, about the fighting between US Marines and insurgents along the Iraq-Syria border. Knickmeyer is embedded with the Marines, and narrowly missed being blown up by a land mine along with most of the squad she was traveling with.

Contrast her coverage with that of the New York Times reporting on the same operation. The Times piece gives no hint of the savagery Knickmeyer saw during the fighting, or of the exhaustion of the Marines involved, and for good reason: it was reported from Baghdad and Washington.

Contrast Knickmeyer’s coverage too with David Sirota’s comments on ABC’s influential political blog, The Note, and their take on war coverage. Here’s The Note:

“Brides gotta run, planes gotta stray, and cable news networks gotta find a way to fill a lot of programming hours as cheaply as possible…We say with all the genuine apolitical and non-partisan human concern that we can muster that the death and carnage in Iraq is truly staggering. And/but we are sort of resigned to the Notion that it simply isn’t going to break through to American news organizations, or, for the most part, Americans…What is hands down the biggest story every day in the world will get almost no coverage.“

Sirota at first took the comment as an acknowledgement by ABC that they weren’t going to devote the coverage to the war that it deserves, but it appears to be more along the lines of The Note capitulating to what they see as the inevitability of subpar coverage.

So while Knickmeyer is quite literally risking her life to provide war coverage of an immediacy that we haven’t seen in perhaps a year, and rarely saw before then, The Note’s conventional wisdom factory is signalling that her work is pointless, and we can expect other pundits to pick up and expand upon the theme in such a manner as to forgive themselves and their fellows for what amounts to a complete abdication of journalistic responsibility. And in the process they’ll find a way to mock people like Knickmeyer — not that there are many of them from the US — who are risking death to report a story of profound importance to our country’s present and future.

I don’t expect every journalist to pick up a camera or a laptop and head off into a firefight. I do expect every journalist to respect the few who do it and to make sure their work gets the attention it deserves. The people at The Note deserve every bit of scorn they get for ducking that responsibility, and so do all the other journalists who consistently underplay the story.

Every member of Knickmeyer’s squad is now dead or wounded.

(Sirota via Eschaton)

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