Some US troops question Woodruff coverage

monsters and critics ^ | Feb 1, 2006, 0:10 GMT | By Pamela Hess

[danamco]

What happened to Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt sucks, and I hope they both make a complete recovery, but getting blown up is just as much an occupational hazard for war correspondents as it is for the troops. I think Woodruff and Vogt understood that. The rest of the press needs either to make peace with it or at least stop whining.


Interesting, as I heard NO other in that vehicle were injured???

[danamco]

I wonder how he got to use military hospital facilities. He's just a civilian. ABC said that ABC was paying for his treatment at Bethesda, but no other civilian can get treated at Bethesda just by paying for it. When I go abroad I have to carry extra insurance just in case I need to be medevac'ed back to the U.S. in an emergency. But he got treated in Iraq (OK, I understand this one), got evac'ed with military troops on a military airlift to Landstuhl in Germany, treated at the Army hospital at Landstuhl by Army surgeons, evac'ed on a military flight to the Naval Military Hospital at Bethesda, and is currently being treated at the Naval Hospital at Bethesda by tax-paid DoD military doctors. How is this possible?


Maybe that is a very good thing, so they themselves can see how excellent our troops are cared for. They cannot later come and say he was NOT treated the same way. However, would be nice if they would expose sheehan and pink-code demonstrating against our soldiers outside a hospital for injured soldiers!??!

[bnelson44]

Can't blaim the troops on this one

[bnelson44]

I always thought one of their commandments was not to make themselves the story.

[bpjam]

ED Hill said the exact same thing as this Sgt on Fox & Friends a couple of days ago. O'Reilly was just ripping her for disrespecting Woodruff. I think it is complete hypocrisy. The soldiers who die are only important when used as a political prop for the media when their death reach round numbers (ie, 100, 1000, 2000, etc). But no stories about how much their families sacrified. Just stories about Woodruffs wife and kids and how much this is going to hurt them. Hello, MSM!!!! Woodruff isn't more important than the thousands of servicemen who have also been wounded in theatre but didn't have their own media condolence campaign. Get some freaking perspective and a little more respect for those who are risking their lives every day.

[FreedomCalls]

Maybe that is a very good thing, so they themselves can see how excellent our troops are cared for. They cannot later come and say he was NOT treated the same way. However, would be nice if they would expose sheehan and pink-code demonstrating against our soldiers outside a hospital for injured soldiers!??!

That's an angle I hadn't thought of. Every cloud has a silver lining.

[phoenix0468]

Hey, don't sweat. ABC is paying for it, and it could give some good press to those military institutions. Let's just hope that some good comes of it.

[phoenix0468]

If that were true they would do many more voice over reports showing the soldiers in action while reading the report. No, they have to have the cameras on them, with the action in the background. Like I want to see their pug little smiling faces as they feed us a bunch of crap.

[FreedomCalls]

"The San Diego Union-Tribune's James Crawley, an embedded journalist who fell ill four days after the fall of Baghdad, was evacuated from a surgical unit to a Navy hospital, and then to an Army medical center in Kuwait. Though he spent several days under the care of military doctors, Crawley says he was never asked to pay a dime."

That's curious, because military retirees are for damned sure "asked to pay a dime" via enrolment fees and co-payments to Tricare every time.

[FreedomCalls]

Hey, don't sweat. ABC is paying for it

ABC is taking up two hospital beds and lots of doctor's resources that could be used by some other wounded soldier. I can understand the military treating them in Iraq, and possibly even a case could be made for Germany. But there's no reason for them to be in Bethesda when there are plenty of top-rate civilian hospitals in the DC area. I'll take a wait-and-see attitude on it though.

[muawiyah]

No doubt there's been command interference in the normal processes, but other than just leaving the two "newsies" lieing there in the dirt and blood to be picked up later by their own ABC people, not sure what should be done.

Leastwise, what should be done that doesn't scare these guys off completely. Remember, they don't stop writing about it just because they're not there. In Nam some of the most important news stories were concocted over cocktails at a hotel in Saigon.

[oxcart]

Insurgents Regret ABC News Friendly-Fire Incident

By Scott Ott, Editor-in-Chief, ScrappleFace.com
News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher.

(2006-01-30) — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, today expressed his regrets to ABC News for the injuries sustained by anchor Bob Woodruff and a videographer in what Mr. Zarqawi called, “this tragic incident of friendly fire.”

“The American news media has always treated us well,” the al Qaeda leader said in a printed statement. “We were trying to kill U.S. and Iraqi soldiers when this unfortunate accident occurred. We pray to Allah for the swift recovery of the injured, and hope they can be back on the job soon.”

A spokesman for ABC News said a preliminary investigation showed that the improvised explosive device (IED) which wounded Mr. Woodruff and his colleague Doug Vogt, was triggered by “an imperialist occupation of Iraq after the U.S. overthrew the nation’s duly-elected president, yet failed to find weapons of mass destruction.”

[phoenix0468]

You know I agree with you on that note. Let's just hope that something positive comes out of it. Like the media actually saying something good about our military and their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What's really disturbing is all the negative news out of Iraq, yet nothing is said about Afghanistan. It is probably more successful than we could have ever imagined, yet the press won't touch it.

[Osage Orange]

The media should just pull-out........