NEW YORK CNN's John Roberts, recently returned from a month-long visit to Iraq, was interviewed by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz for his CNN "Reliable Sources" program on Sunday. Much of the talk concerned media treatment of the war, starting with complaints by U.S. soldiers, and then the overall media coverage.
Roberts revealed that
despite some charges to the contrary, military personnel did not have a problem with the coverage and, in fact, the situation on the ground is an "absolute mess," worse than the media has shown. "The amount of death that's on the streets of Baghdad for U.S. forces and for the Iraqi people is at an astronomical level," he said.
"So, to some degree, what we're seeing is sanitized."The transcript follows.
KURTZ: The conventional wisdom is that American troops resent the media's coverage of this war as too negative. But there's a Zogby poll of U.S. forces that say 72 percent think they should leave within a year.
What did you find when you were in Iraq military people saying about the mission and the media?
ROBERTS: You know, I spent a lot of time with U.S. troops. In the month that I was there, I spent probably two weeks or a little bit more than that on the ground with them, north of Baghdad, in Baghdad, traveling with a lot of the Stryker units who had been there for 16 months now.
They were very optimistic on the unit level about what they were doing. They believed in the mission that they were undertaking -- you know, clearing operations, trying to secure thee streets of Baghdad, trying to get some of the weapons off the streets, trying to deal with these militia members who are the cause of so much of this sectarian violence.
When they stepped back, though, and took a look at the larger picture, there were a lot of questions about where the direction was headed, where they were going to go in the future...
....
KURTZ: And did they think the coverage, generally, on balance, was fair or unfair?
ROBERTS: You know, they didn't seem to have too many complaints about the coverage. They appreciated the fact that we were there, and anytime you're embedded with U.S. forces, you're going to see the bad along with the good.
They were always trying to put a positive spin on things from a command level. You know, taking us to certain areas to show us certain things they thought would play well. But by and large, I didn't hear any complaints about the coverage.
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