How Quickly They Forget; The Pentagon Gives Big Media A Big Wet Kiss

Like all those embedded (and censored) journos who made up the bulk of the reportage from Iraq were (or were allowed to be) so anti-war? Or is it the stateside journos who reported the lack of success in Iraq because there was so little worth shit? Violence may be down insignificantly at our expense (or maybe the insurgents are waiting for the end of the untenable "surge") but the native government has yet to get its act together, the society is still a shambles and nothing has been done to deal with the fact that free Iraq consists of three factions who hate each other and don't want to be united.

Here, have a laugh at the idiots running things....

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.

Efforts from the new Pentagon leadership, as well as by top commanders at the headquarters in Baghdad, have also eased tensions between reporters and those in uniform. Positive or negative, the troops’ view of the news media is set as much by the tone of commanders as by the tenor of individual news clips.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American officer in Iraq, and his subordinates have worked hard to convey the rationale for their strategy and the evidence that persuades them it is succeeding. Adm. Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has engaged reporters in a variety of venues: at the Pentagon, on travels across the United States and overseas, including the Middle East.

And, perhaps most important, their boss, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, has stated a view never heard from his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. “The press is not the enemy,” Mr. Gates tells military audiences, including at the service academies, “and to treat it as such is self-defeating.”

Link.