Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff - New York Times

Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff - New York Times: "Call the P.R. strategy 'attack, clear and hold': the administration attacks the credibility of reporters covering the war and tries to clear troubling Iraq images from American TV screens so that popular support might hold until a miracle happens on the ground. This plan first surfaced when the insurgency exploded in spring 2004: Ted Koppel was pilloried by White House surrogates for reading the names of the fallen on 'Nightline' and Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that 'a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors.'

Upon being told that 34 journalists had been killed in the war up to that point, Mr. Wolfowitz apologized, but the strategy was never rescinded. Mr. Bush routinely chastises the press for reporting on bombings rather than 'success' stories like Tal Afar. His new top domestic policy adviser, Karl Zinsmeister, has called American war correspondents 'whiny and appallingly soft,' and he declared last June that 'our struggle in Iraq as warfare' was over except for 'periodic flare-ups in isolated corners.' That's the news the administration wants: the insurgency is always in its last throes. We'd realize that this prognosis was 'basically accurate,' Dick Cheney has explained, if only the non-Fox press didn't concentrate on car bombs in Baghdad."