when we first heard about the horrific attack that wounded cbs correspondent kim dozier, and killed her crew of james brolan and paul douglas, we immediately thought about laura ingraham’s dismissal of journalists in iraq as reporting from a balcony in the green zone.
turns out we weren’t the only ones thinking about ms. ingraham’s condescending (and safe) approach to the news media. the nytimes said that steve capus, president of nbc news, mentioned ms. ingraham by name when discussing the recent tragedy (quote after the jump):
several executives said criticism by conservative commentators that the networks were playing it safe and not trying to cover the full story of iraq was unjust — and offensive.
“one thing i don’t want to hear anymore,” mr. capus said, “is people like laura ingraham spewing about us not leaving our balconies in the green zone to cover what’s really happening in iraq.” ms. ingraham made that comment on the “today” news program on nbc.
anaging director of cnn international chris] cramer said that when played against the injury to ms. dozier and the deaths of her colleagues, “for people to criticize what we do is just monstrous.”
the public eye, cbs’s media blog, examines other conservative critics of the msm’s reportage, and includes a quote from atrios in their smackdown of self-satisfied know-it-alls that are ready to complain but not to participate (tho to be fair, several conservative talk show hosts did pull a voluntary tour of iraq themselves, to witness things first hand).
our point, we suppose, is not a “told ya so,” so much as a “we wonder what laura has to say now?” which is, at least according to google, nothing. we would think that common decency demanded a condolence call from ms. ingraham to ms. dozier’s bosses, at least.
or, perhaps as latimes’ tim rutten suggests:
as the war ground on — and so much of the news became so inconveniently bad — the tenor of this commentary changed. more recently, there has been a drumbeat of criticism alleging that the press corps in iraq is misleading the american people because it is either too cowardly to leave the relative safety of the green zone, or too culturally biased to recognize what they see when they do.
the right-wing radio personality laura ingraham went on the “today” show and charged the baghdad press corps with simply “reporting from hotel balconies about the latest ieds going off.”
if dozier ever recovers the full use of her legs, maybe she and laura could go for a walk and talk the whole thing over.
addendum: our buddy from the right chuck simmons correctly pointed out, and we feel a bit remiss that we did not make this more clear, that ms. ingraham indeed spent time in iraq, and not in the green zone.
we never meant to imply that she never did. we, unfortunately, assumed that the readers of our blog knew this fact, and we failed to include it in our piece. we regret any erroneous conclusions drawn by our readers who were not aware of this information. we are not reporters, we are bloggers, which means we make mistakes, but then, unlike dead trees pundits and screeching head anchors, we own up to them.
we were merely trying to suggest that ms. ingraham, considering her attitude, might want to go back to iraq, or at least, offer condolences to ms. dozier. and let’s not forget that while ms. ingraham did spend a little under a week on the front lines in iraq, ms. dozier has been the cbs head correspondent in that country for the past three years (we assume since the beginning of the conflict).
