Iraq, Diplomacy and the Press

The Columbia Journalism Review asks a pair of important questions in its latest issue about media coverage of the State Department's effort to try to keep doing its job in war-torn Iraq:

The press ... has been more interested in the Pentagon’s effort to blame the State Department for the bungled nation-building effortâ€"that somehow the lack of civil engineers, electricity-grid experts, and other specialists is due to State’s failure to, as President Bush said, “step up.” But this is not what diplomats do. They talk to people, negotiate, build relationships, and the like. Here are two basic questions that reporters need to unpack: Is it possible to perform effective diplomacy under such circumstances? And if not, then why is our government risking so many lives this way?