# Posted 11:59 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

JESSICA LYNCH 2.0: With the passage of time the story of Private Lynch has become much clearer.

The critical points made by the WaPo's investigative report are that initial reports of Lynch's resisting capture were based on intelligence reports that the army did not discover to be flawed until after Lynch's rescue.
Reports that Iraqi soldiers and/or doctors also seem to be false. While the Iraqi lawyer who alerted US forces to Lynch's presence insists he saw Fedayeen hitting her, the hospital staff who helped save Lynch's life denying the allegation vigorously.

As for the rescue itself, it was not staged, as the Guardian implied in its exposee. May 15. The hospital Lynch was in had, in fact, served as a military command post, with substantial Iraqi forces present until the morning before Lynch's capture. During the rescue itself there were no Iraqi forces in the hospital, but American soldiers involved did take fire from surrounding buildings.

All this, of course, does not mean that the Pentagon did its best to get the truth out. As far as I can tell, the Pentagon rushed to tell the story without doing enough fact-checking, because it recognized the propaganda value of putting a human and heroic face on a war that the media was describing as stalled, or even a quagmire.

No surprise there. Perhaps the more important question is whether the American media's coverage of the Lynch rescue story demonstrates that its presumed liberal bias often surrenders to a certain patriotic naivete in terms of war?

Or is does the media just suffer from split personality disorder, given its flawed descriptions of both the invasion and Lynch's rescue? Or is the media simply incompetent, given that it got both issues wrong (although its spin on the invasion wasmuch further off the mark than its coverage of Lynch)?

IMHO, the answer to all three of the above questions is 'no'. In order to understand the inconsistent coverage of the invasion and the Lynch rescue, one has to look at what kind of story each one is. The former is a diplomatic and military affair. The latter is a human-interest story.

When it comes to the former, the media are far more critical and are often desperate to demonstrate the government's failure, regardless of whether the current administration is Republican or Democratic. When it comes to the latter, the media is far less critical, since it thinks of itself as the defender and advocate of the common man (or in Lynch's case, woman).

Perhaps the way to sum up the media's behavior is to say that it is against the army but for the soldiers. It criticizes the generals and celebrates the privates. Unsurprisingly, this pattern of behavior goes back to Vietnam, where the media saw itself as siding with the common soldier against the military brass. In fact, this struggle within the armed forces is the theme of two of the best books ever written on Vietnam, namely Michael Herr's Dispatches and Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie.

This schizophrenic approach also resembles the media's coverage of domestic politics, where it rails against politicians while paying respectful attention to the man in the street (whose name is often Greg Packer.)

If memory serves, it was media critic Herbert Gans who first said that the media are for the office but against the office holders.

In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, this is the nature of the American media. All in all, it actually does quite a good job.
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