Troops Want to Know How to Get Around Bad Press

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MOSUL (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday took a delighted dig at the media after troops he was visiting in Iraq complained their good works were ignored by the press while disasters grabbed the headlines.

A soldier at his first stop in Mosul asked Rumsfeld how the “propaganda” worked?

Rumsfeld, under attack since he appeared to brush aside a question about poor equipment from a U.S. soldier in Kuwait that later turned out to have been composed with help from a reporter, jumped at the opportunity to turn the tables.

“That doesn’t sound like a question placed by the press,” he told his audience to loud applause.

A few hours later in Tikrit, the same frustration surfaced with another soldier complaining that she had a hard time explaining what they were doing in Iraq when she got back home and asking what could be done to get past the bad press.

Rumsfeld said the message was getting through anyway.

"I think the country does understand that we lost 3,000 people on September 11th and the fact that those people were operating in this part of the world … You’ve seen the evil up close and personal, you know the danger that this poses. “What you’re doing is important. I think the American people get it.”

 

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“How do we win the war in the media?” asked one soldier in Mosul. Another soldier in Tikrit wondered why there is not more coverage of reconstruction efforts going on in the country.

“I guess what’s news has to be bad news to get on the press,” Rumsfeld responded to the first question — after supposing, with a big grin, “that does not sound like a question that was planted by the press.”

“I think the American people get it,” he responded to the second. “I agree with you, I wish it was possible that more of the good works you’re doing here … were considered newsworthy and were reported in a way that people would understand the progress that is being made, and it is being made because of you,” he told the woman in Tikrit.

But he said in Mosul that the full picture “gets through eventually” and that “people do understand the acts of kindness and that large parts of the country are peaceful.”

“We are a great country and we can benefit from having a free press,” said Rumsfeld. “From time to time people can be concerned about it, but look where we’ve come as a country because we do have a free press.”

He said he has great confidence “in the center of gravity” of the American people to sort through all the coverage to come to their own conclusions, but that “what hurts most” is “vicious” misrepresentations by the Arab media.

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