THE TRUTH AS TED RALL SEES IT

Ted Rall, gadfly columnist and raging iconoclast cartoonist, lately of the wilds of Afghanistan’s fly-infested deserts where he spent the month of August with two other crazed cartooners, Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, is back to plague his country with the Truth As He Sees It (several acres of which we share as common ground). In his journalist garb, Rall took to the pages of the venerable Editor & Publisher to assail the highly dubious practice of embedding reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Embedded reporters can’t report on Afghanistan, Rall said: they report only what they see “through the carefully monitored lens of the U.S. military.” Traveling with soldiers, they become battlefield buddies with the soldiers—a plus: they see the horrendous difficulty of the military assignment and ordinary acts of heroism; but they don’t talk to Afghans—a distinct minus: they can scarcely report on the status of the military mission, which is to win the hearts and minds of the country’s citizens, if they don’t talk to any citizens.

“Embedding is a dubious idea at best,” Rall said. “It magnifies the media’s inherent bias for the fighting men and women from ‘their’ side, and it exposes journalists to the accusation that they are shills for the occupation. ... Important stories—those that don’t involve U.S. military operations—never get covered.”

The embed program is not just bad journalism: it’s bad for the allied mission itself.

The Rall trio stumped the country unembedded. Unlike embedded reporters, they saw and talked with Afghans. “Not talking to Afghans is part of the reason the U.S. military is losing the war,” Rall said. “They don’t ask Afghans what they want. We did. Their answer was usually the same: ‘Please, no more soldiers. We don’t need them. We need help.’ By help,” Rall concluded, “they mean reconstruction and jobs programs.”

For more (much more) on the cartoonists’ Afghanistan adventure, visit the Usual Place, Opus 267 and Opus 270.