WaPo Feeling Very Inadequate Compared To Bloggers

WaPo attempted a hatchet job on two of the few people who are reporting what is actually happening in Iraq, by being with the US military. Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck of WaPo attacked blogger - reporter Bill Roggio of Fourth Rail with this article:

WaPo Attack

Finer & Struck make the follow basic assertion:

Headline Tells All: Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War

That Roggio (later lump in Michael Yon) are according to WaPo agents of the US Military's "propaganda initiative":

Roggio's arrival in Iraq comes amid what military commanders and analysts say is an increasingly aggressive battle for control over information about the conflict. Scrutiny of what the Pentagon calls information operations heightened late last month, when news reports revealed that the U.S. military was paying Iraqi journalists and news organizations to publish favorable stories written by soldiers, sometimes without disclosing the military's role in producing them.

The WaPo article is critical of two blogger journalists who are doing what WaPo and most other MSM are not doing, that being getting the real story from the front line. Roggio and Michael Yon have been turning out the best Iraq coverage for months while MSM reporters sit in hotel rooms and cut and paste AP bombing headlines. Marine Captain Jeffery Pool who was quoted by WaPo summed it up well when he praised Yon's work:

"His reporting was objective, credible and compelling. But most of all, it was independent," Pool said. "He didn't have to worry about some editor back in the States altering what he wrote before it got published. Plus, he had no competition from other news sources to churn out a 'marketable' product on a day-to-day basis."

(the exact same can be said of Roggio's coverage)

Spot on, Yon & Roggio are on the front line with the troops the MSM is not. They get to see what is really happening because they are frontline. Yon & Roggio don't have a political bias or editors with political biases that only want to report AP IED headlines. Yon & Roggio are reporting the whole story, the real story.

Yon & Roggio have provided more real reporting on Iraq in one post than hotel & Washington observers like Finer & Struck have in all their offerings. Yon & Roggio are not MSM reporters like Finer & Struck, rather they are bloggers that do something reporters are not doing in Iraq: telling the whole story - reporting the whole story.....................

Decide for yourself and read both blogs and then compare it to the product being produced by Finer, Struck, & WaPo.........................

Update:

Bill Roggio has responded to the WaPo hatchet attempt ( at his ThreatWatch site ):

There are three problems with this article which require a response: the use of incorrect facts which could have been easily checked; the portrayal of my embed as an information operation; and equating U.S. military information operations with al-Qaeda propaganda efforts.

Read the entire post is proves just how out of touch the WaPo gang is and why they don't want people like Roggio in Iraq covering the whole story that they refuse to cover....................................

I can already see WaPo using the old CBS 60 Minutes "Fake But Accurate" claim when they attempt to defend that they reported incorrectly that Roggio got his credentials via the American Enterprise Institute when he in fact got his credentials via the Weekly Standard. The other misrepresentations are going to be much harder to explain and essentially can't be defended such as this from Roggio:

I questioned Captain Pool about journalists being invited to embed with the military. He assured me that journalists have been invited to embed prior to operations, and

Mr. Finer himself was invited at one point in time, which he declined.

My invitation to embed with the Marines was neither unique nor special under these circumstances.

(you can not really report it if you report from a hotel or Washington Mr. Finer)

My God man, who has time for facts when you have an agenda to spread and attacks to launch against those doing the job you should be doing however you are not willing to go there and report the whole story...................