I think it was that great Democratic wit Gene McCarthy who described journalists and reporters as blackbirds on a telephone wire. When one flies to the telephone wire across the street, they all do. There’s also a non-bird name for this phenomenon. It’s called herd journalism. And just this week we’ve seen it pop up in stories about the pacification of Baghdad, crushing of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and almost complete end of the Sunni-Shia civil war. Taken together, these stories amount to a consensus that the surge of additional American troops and the counterinsurgency strategy adopted by General David Petraeus has worked – and worked brilliantly. The herd? It consists, so far, of the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Times, and Newsweek – and no doubt others that I have yet to come upon. And the herd is likely to grow larger because the evidence of success in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq is so palpable that reporters, regardless of their view of the war, were bound to acknowledge it at some point. Yes, they’ve taken a while to do so. For several months, the American press corps in Iraq merely – and sometimes grudgingly – reported the claims of American military officials that the number of American combat deaths, Iraqi deaths, suicide bombings, roadside attacks, and other forms of violence were declining precipitously. Now they’re reporting progress that they’ve seen with their own eyes. This is a big step for a media contingent that appeared to be as locked into the idea that the war is lost as Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is. No more. The Los Angeles Times story on Monday, written by Doug Smith and Saif Rashid, focused on a Baghdad neighborhood where Sunnis and Shiites are working together to defeat both al Qaeda and Shia militias. This grass-roots reconciliation “has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland,” they write. The Post entry was an editorial on Sunday that even praised President Bush for changing his strategy in Iraq against the advice of Congress and the foreign policy elite. The Post, of course, has been particularly derelict in reporting progress in Iraq. One of its chief foreign affairs reporters, Robin Wright, told Howard Kurtz on CNN recently that she was waiting for a trend to appear. Well, it has. The New York Times gave lavish page one coverage today to a story of a family that has moved back into its home in a once violence-wracked neighborhood of Baghdad. “The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real,” write Damien Cave and Alissa J. Rubin. Notice that they write this on their own authority rather than rely on an American official to say it. And in Newsweek, veteran correspondent Rod Nordland writes that in the past, when he returned to Baghdad, he had always found one “constant”: things had gotten worse. “For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable,” he writes. Newsweek, not surprisingly, turned quickly to the next problem in iraq. That’s the feeble central government, which has yet to take legislative measures aimed at reconciliation of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. “[The] biggest concern – other than a Qaeda resurgence – is that the Iraqi government has been slow to take advantage of the relative peace to restore services and speed reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis,” Nordland writes. Reconciliation, however, is already speeding ahead at the local and provincial level. The national government isn’t irrelevant in this regard. But while American politicians and press may be waiting for it to act, the people of Iraq, with help from American troops, are moving ahead. That’s the real story.
