Ow! My head! Again! Tell me, why should I give even a quarter of a damn about a Baghdad bureau if the journalists you put there are either beholden to the Saddam regime or dedicated to demoralizing the United States?
Baghdad Bureau ---- It sounds so efficient and powerful. Try this major newsgathering effort....
Given the tsunami of news coming out of Iraq in the papers and on television, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that the media organizations of the world must have a battalion or more of reporters assigned to cover the war. But if you guessed "one or two battalions," you'd be far off the mark. If you guessed "several squads" you'd still be wrong.
Pajamas Media, in the course of a casual conversation with a Marine Corps information officer who tracks the number of embedded reporters in Iraq, learned the real number of embedded reporters covering the Iraq story on September 19, 2006. It was, according to the officer, a fairly typical day. To illustrate his point, he provided Pajamas Media with the illustration he uses to brief with on the state of media embedding in Iraq.
What was that number? Take a guess and then see the truth. No peeking.
If you guessed 9 reporters, you guessed right.
Here's the chart http://pajamasmedia.com/upload/2006/09/media_activity_9_19__nw_b_2.php
showing who the nine embedded reporters were covering all of Iraq on 9/19/2006. You'll see that of those 9 reporters, 3 were from the Armed Forces' Stars & Stripes, 1 from AFN (Armed Force Network), 1 from the Charlotte Observer, 1 from the BBC, 1 from the AP, 1 from RAI, and 1 from Polish Radio. All the rest of the "coverage" of the Iraq war on that day came from reporters hunkered down in the hotels and other locations under the rubric "Baghdad News Bureaus."
So the next time you hear the phrase "reported first hand," you might well ask, "Whose hand and where was it?"