Thread by @RickPetree

Do you remember the firestorm WaPo touched off with this ? Nor do I. A weak echo of the Pentagon Papers, its reception illustrated how little attention Americans were paying to Afghanistan by then (2019). Major media had largely lost interest long before.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1203998904121004033

Afghanistan had become a 'side show' to wars in Iraq and Syria. Relatively few Americans had a personal connection to the war (unlike Viet Nam, with the draft), and we weren't asked to fund it. It wasn't regular fare on TV. There was no visible anti-war movement.

Many are asking how USG could have been caught napping by the Taliban's swift advance. My feeling is that *most of the country largely napped through the entire war. If we're going to spend $2.6 trillion on some national project, shouldn't we keep better tabs on how it's going ?

When the dust has settled, we need to ponder why U.S. media coverage of Afghanistan was, for most of the war, (i) scant, and (ii) relatively uncritical. Some first thoughts: (1) U.S. news organizations' international coverage, generally, has been dramatically hollowed out.

Hard news, as a consumer product, especially international news, has lost out to 'infotainment.' As demand for the news product declined, budgets were cut. The resulting deterioration in the product further reduced demand. A cycle.

(2) I worry that the relatively new practice of 'embedding' journalists with troops undermines objectivity. The journalist starts to identify with the mission of the troops she's with, and empathizes with their hardships.

Embedding also creates a micro-focus on that small part of the war the reporter is seeing. It's harder to see the 'big picture' of the overall war effort when you're hunkered behind sandbags in a fire base on some mountaintop.

In VN, reporters helicoptered into the field on a daily basis. They returned to Saigon in late afternoon, filed their stories, and then attended the command's daily briefings. Dissonance between what they'd just seen in the field and what the command was saying bred skepticism.

Reporters like Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Kate Webb and Malcolm Browne (to name only a handful) moved from optimism about the war, to skepticism and, finally, to outright opposition. Their critical reporting was fundamental in shaping U.S. public opinion.

We have not been served as well as that in our most recent 'adventure.' Americans should understand that, in order to play our part as citizens and responsibly ride herd on our representatives, we need much more and better news coverage of international affairs. End.