Where Are the War Correspondents?

Did you catch Martin Scorsese's film on Bob Dylan on public TV? It was great stuff, especially the first episode. You can read a good review in the Guardian: Scorsese's stately four-hour Dylan biopic reveals a man who makes every word count.

The most striking piece of the film to me was a brief segment with Joan Baez singing a protest song while they showed footage of Morley Safer in Vietnam. Safer is smoking a cigarette and walking among the American soldiers and the crying and weeping Vietnamese. His cameraman shoots the soldiers holding up their Zippo lighters to the straw roof of the villagers' hut. Morley narrates: the soldiers are torching the hut because shots had been fired out of it towards them. Cut to women and children and old men weeping in a ditch. Four men, naked from the waist up and hooded, are marched away in chains by the soldiers, because, Morley tells us, they can't answer questions in English.

This was what was coming in to people's living rooms in 1965 and 1966 and 1967 and 1968. Why aren't we getting coverage like this now? Is the media totally cowed by the government? Why aren't war correspondents standing at the checkpoints in Iraq filming as the American soldiers flag down civilian cars and sometimes shoot the occupants? If the government won't let them do it openly, are there any real journalists willing to do it covertly?

Where are our brash young war correspondents?

And the corporate media holds up Judith Miller as their embodiment of a courageous journalist. What a crock of s**t.