Joe the Plumber, PJTV's media correspondent in Israel, clearly does not know the first law of holes: once you are deep in one, you should stop digging. The other day Joe told us the media has no place in a warzone and harkened back to the days when war news was shown in theaters on grainy film. Yesterday, Joe told us that all information from a warzone should be filtered by the military, which doesn't need to be bothered by the media in the first place. ThinkProgress provides the transcript of the segment in question (PJTV requires registration to view the video; my recommendation is you don't subject yourself to watching it):
WURZELBACHER: you don't need to see what's happening every day, that's my personal opinion, you don't have to share it. But, you know, okay, you don't have to see, you know, 800 dead, 801 dead. It's like they drill that in your head. … They want you to sit there saying there are so many people dying. You know these are large, these are numbers, you know I don't want to take away from that. Let me, uh, think about how to say that again. Just essentially, they keep drilling it into your head, newscast after newscast after newscast.
I think the military should decide what information to give the media and then the media can release it to the public. I don't believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don't believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas.
Just think about how Joe's "media strategy" would have impacted the Iraq War. By late 2005/early 2006, it was clear the U.S. strategy to pull back and turn over security to the Iraqi security forces was premature and Iraq was sliding into chaos. The explosion of al Qaeda and Mahdi Army-led sectarian violence in the wake of the Samarra mosque bombing clearly showed the Iraqi security forces were incapable of maintaining order and defeating the insurgency.
Yet the senior U.S. military leadership, from Joint Chiefs of Staff (minus its chairman, General Pace), to CENTCOM commander General Abizaid, down to Multinational Forces Iraq commander General Casey, continued to push the "as they stand up we'll stand down" strategy. Had the U.S. military controlled the flow of information, the American public may never have known how close Iraq was to failing. Absent this information, the proponents of the Keane-Kagan plan would have had a difficult time pushing for a change in strategy. After all, the military was telling us everything is fine, right?
Instead, on-the-ground reporting showed that security in Iraq was rapidly deteriorating and that pulling back to the big bases was failing. Like it or not, the pressure from the media forced President Bush to recognize the problem, accept the change in strategy and overrule his military commanders. If Joe had his way, Iraq likely would have been a very different place today. To paraphrase Laura Ingraham: Shut up and report, Joe.
