By: Sgt. Rick Fahr A friend e-mailed a link to a recent National Public Radio report ("On Patrol in Iraq: Protecting Camp Victory," April 30, "All Things Considered") featuring a few of our colleagues in the Arkansas Army National Guard. I'm sure the story was informative and compelling, but I didn't listen past the errors of the first minute.
The correspondent, John McChesney, misnamed the unit he was covering (it's the "39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team," not the "39th Combat Brigade Team") and the spokesman he was talking to ("Maj. Craig Heathscott," not "Maj. Chris Heathscott" -- the two are brothers).
Alas, NPR isn't alone in making elementary mistakes. Most of us media folks need to take a hard look at the number and nature of our errors in military coverage. I don't mean the Geraldo moment, when an unwitting (or witting) media member jeopardizes a mission in order to get out front on a story. I mean the Journalism 101 mistakes that creep into armed forces pieces with more regularity than they do in other types of reporting.
Unfortunately, those bungles are not few, nor far between.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, entertaining and provocative, often refers to all troops in the armed forces as "soldiers." No, that's not a catch-all term for the men and women in uniform. There are more than a few sailors, airmen and Marines, not to mention Coast Guard personnel, who balk at the incorrect label.
Newspapers I've worked for in the past few years have not been immune, either. We once promoted a sergeant first class to captain in a front-page photo cutline and added a new organizational unit, an "attachment" instead of a "detachment" in a troop-comes-home story.
It may not seem like a big deal to jumble around some words in a convoluted military unit's name. It might not seem overly insulting to demote a major to sergeant major. It probably doesn't seem too important to know the difference between an M-4 and a MK-19, but all of those bits of information that we get wrong add up to a big credibility problem we have with the military -- and anyone interested in the military, an ever-growing constituency that includes families and friends across the country.
I can just imagine readers and viewers asking themselves, "If they don't know the difference between a specialist and a major, they can't accurately report the important stuff, can they?"
The answer isn't necessarily "no," but the only real answers to that question aren't too palatable: We can't do a good job with military matters because we're not familiar enough with them, or we won't do a good job because we don't care enough to learn.
Either way, we don't have the credibility we need to inform our customers with our news and persuade them with our opinions. To be sure, the military sometimes isn't the easiest outfit in the world to deal with. Having served in the Guard for a few years, one of them on the lovely rock that is Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I've seen up close the antagonistic relationship the military can have with the media.
But our customers deserve reporting they can trust and believe. They need us doing our best to work with the military to tell its stories as fully and accurately as we can because the military isn't a faceless, nameless entity. It's our moms and dads, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. It's active duty troops and National Guardsmen and Reservists. It's our friends and neighbors. They deserve our best work at home when they're deployed to combat zones around the world.
If that means that we all go back to school for a military primer, so be it. Within a few miles of nearly every newsroom in the United States, there is an armory, a recruiting office, or a military installation of some sort. There is someone there who would make the time for a workshop with media folks to review organization, rank structure and a few of the ground rules the military folks work from.
This is a matter that deserves our attention. To use a military term -- time now.
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