It strikes me that Penraker's castigation of journalists in Iraq is a tad disingenuous. His claim is essentially that they are slanting their reporting negatively because they are either intimidated into doing so by the insurgents or because they are so intimidarted by the insurgents that they refuse to investigate things themselves and rely instead on Iraqi stringers.
What doesn't seem to be occurring to Penraker is that if the insurgents are able to exert this much influence, it suggests that they are actually really powerful and not on death's door as the pro-warriors would have us believe.
But in reality, I think that Penraker is aware of this. What he really is upset about is not that the reporters in Iraq don't go out and find their own stories and report on them truthfully. What he is upset about is that they use Iraqi stringers to get their news rather than taking it all from military press statements. What he would really like to see is a good docile reporter who dutifully asks the generals what is going on, gets a good, government-approved answer, and equally dutifully reports whatever they tell him.
That is all.
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