The news reports streaming out of Vietnam in the fall of 1963 were unsettling to President Kennedy, and in a White House meeting the talk turned to a particularly irritating young reporter named <>
“How old is Halberstam?” one of the participants asked, according to a recording unearthed by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
“About 25,” said William Bundy, a presidential adviser. In fact, he was 29.
“He was a reporter when he was in college,” said McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser and a professor at Harvard when Mr. Halberstam was a student there. “So I know exactly what you’ve been up against.”
He laughed. Mr. Halberstam, then working for The New York Times, went on to demonstrate through a series of forceful dispatches that the chaotic reality unfolding on the ground in Vietnam bore little resemblance to the upbeat accounts offered by American presidents and generals who were prosecuting the war. Journalism and, more broadly, the relationship between the American people and their elected servants in Washington, was never the same again. Mr. Halberstam, who died Monday in a car accident, set a standard for skepticism of official war-time pronouncements that carries on to this day.
During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic. Indeed, reporters who filed dispatches pointing out the pitfalls experienced by American troops sometimes found it difficult to secure an embed with an American military unit. Other reporters — including this one — were sometimes excluded from official briefings inside the Green Zone.
“Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors,” Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, said in 2004.'
“How old is Halberstam?” one of the participants asked, according to a recording unearthed by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
“About 25,” said William Bundy, a presidential adviser. In fact, he was 29.
“He was a reporter when he was in college,” said McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser and a professor at Harvard when Mr. Halberstam was a student there. “So I know exactly what you’ve been up against.”
He laughed. Mr. Halberstam, then working for The New York Times, went on to demonstrate through a series of forceful dispatches that the chaotic reality unfolding on the ground in Vietnam bore little resemblance to the upbeat accounts offered by American presidents and generals who were prosecuting the war. Journalism and, more broadly, the relationship between the American people and their elected servants in Washington, was never the same again. Mr. Halberstam, who died Monday in a car accident, set a standard for skepticism of official war-time pronouncements that carries on to this day.
During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic. Indeed, reporters who filed dispatches pointing out the pitfalls experienced by American troops sometimes found it difficult to secure an embed with an American military unit. Other reporters — including this one — were sometimes excluded from official briefings inside the Green Zone.
“Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors,” Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, said in 2004.'
Lees verder: http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/25/a-skeptical-vietnam-voice-still-echoes-in-the-fog-of-iraq/
En dat laatste gaat op ook voor de Nederlandse journalisten die Bagdad of Kaboel aandoen, zoals we recentelijk weer eens konden zien aan dat gesubsidieerde gehannes van onder andere Twan Huys van NOVA.
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