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Correspondents in Baghdad
- John Burns The essential truth about Iraq was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play was to pretend that it was okay. There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to take out the director of the ministry of information for long candlelit dinners, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents, who then behaved as if they were in Belgium, never mentioning the minders, never mentioning terror. In one case, a correspondent with a major American newspaper printed out copies of his and other people's stories - specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was. From Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History, by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson. (Editor and Publisher)