I am pretty appalled by the performance of our corporate media in general.
It's coverage of the Iraqi Invasion & Occupation in particular is substandard to say the least. Most so called Journalists cower behind the walls of the Green Zone in Baghdad, and what you read comes off US Army Press Corps briefings. Some news.
The relatively few that do venture out generally fly somewhere, do a brief report, then fly back. They are flown by the US Army or Air Force (or the Brit's), to where the Army wants them to go. They see what they are allowed to see.

One of the major derelictions of duty however is the lack of reporting and scrutiny of how many reporters and cameramen have been killed, seriously injured, incarcerated or roughed up during this conflict. The article below summarises a few of them- there are more, and I invite you to add other examples.

Corporate media sucks.

"Trouble came early on April 8, 2003. At 7:45 a.m., Tareq Ayyoub, chief Baghdad correspondent for the Arab news service Al-Jazeera, was standing on the roof of the network's Baghdad bureau, intently narrating a pitched battle between Iraqi troops and two American tanks that had earlier appeared on the nearby Al-Jurnhuriya Bridge. Ayyoub's cameraman, an Iraqi named Zuheir, was panning back and forth from the battle to the reporter for the accompanying shots.

Suddenly, the sound of gunfire was drowned out. An American fighter jet came swooping in low across the city. Ayyoub and Zuheir instinctively looked up and saw the jet bank its wing and head straight for where they were standing. "The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof-that's how close it was," recounted Ayyoub's colleague, Maher Abdullah, to Robert Fisk of the London Independent.'

Inside the bureau, Ayyoub's other colleagues could hear the rocket launch from the plane. There was a high-pitched whine, followed by the thunderous roar of an explosion. "It was a direct hit-the missile actually exploded against our electrical generator," Abdullah recalled. Colleagues frantically scooped up the shattered body of 35-year-old Ayyoub and carried him out in a blanket to an ambulance. But it was too late. "Tareq died almost at once," said Abdullah. The cameraman was injured, but survived.

Moments later and less than a mile away, the journalists and staff of Abu Dhabi Television-which is written in large blue letters on the roof of their building-took cover in their offices. They had just heard that the United States had bombed Al-Jazeera. Twenty-five staff members huddled in the basement, phoning and pleading over the air for someone to help save them. Again, their pleas fell on deaf ears. U.S. soldiers battered their offices with artillery. Miraculously, there were no serious injuries.

Just before noon, it was the turn of the international press corps. At the Palestine Hotel, where a hundred unembedded reporters were staying, many watched in horror as a U.S. tank positioned on the Al-Jumhuriya Bridge slowly rotated its gun in their direction. A French television crew filmed the armored behemoth as it took aim and suddenly, with no warning, unleashed a round into the side of the towering hotel. The bomb struck the fifteenth floor, making a direct hit on the room serving as a bureau for Reuters, the international news agency. A veteran Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters, Taras Protsyuk, 35, was killed instantly. Jose Couso, 37, a cameraman for Telecinco Spanish television, who was filming one floor below, was also killed. Three other international journalists were seriously injured .

That afternoon, as the news began to buzz across international datelines, spokesmen at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar offered justifications. They claimed the tank had been responding to "significant enemy fire from the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad."' A parade of military spokespeople repeated this claim, saying it was the fault of Iraqi forces that had been attacking from civilian locations such as the Palestine.

American networks chimed right in. Speaking on Larry King Live that night, CNN military commentator General Wesley Clark assured viewers, "It's a case of a very unfortunate accident of war. People were in the wrong place at the wrong time.... You can't tell the troops that they can't shoot back when they're being shot at.... The United States wouldn't deliberately kill journalists .

Wrong place, wrong time-in their offices?

The foreign media treated these incidents very differently than their American colleagues. "We can only conclude that the U.S. Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists," declared the international press watch group Reporters Without Borders. Robert Fisk of the London Independent was even more blunt, declaring that the attacks "look very much like murder." After all, the U.S. military was well aware that reporters were working from the Palestine Hotel. And in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Obseruateur, the unit's tank commander made no mention of hostile fire from Iraqi civilians in the area of the hotel.'

Journalists who saw the attacks scoffed at the claim that gunfire had come either from the hotel or from Al-Jazeera's offices. Besides, they asked, if people had been shooting from the streets, why had the tank targeted the fifteenth floor? Al-Jazeera noted that on February 24, it had delivered a letter to Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke giving precise coordinates for its bureau.

It might have been the Arab news service's biggest mistake.

Victoria Clarke was unmoved by the evidence. "Our forces came under fire," the Pentagon flack insisted. The American troops simply "exercised their inherent right to self-defense.... Baghdad is not a safe place, you should not be there."

That explanation confirmed what many journalists feared: Rather than ensure this would never happen again, the Pentagon was using the journalists' deaths as a pretext to warn other reporters-those who were not embedded with the U.S. military to leave the battlefield.

'We were targeted because the Americans don't want the world to see the crimes they are committing against the Iraqi people," said Al-Jazeera Baghdad reporter Majed Abdel Hadi. David Chater, Baghdad correspondent for Sky News in Britain, wondered aloud whether unembedded journalists would be able to continue reporting from Iraq. "How are we going to continue to do this," he asked, "if American tanks are targeting US?

That may be exactly the message the Pentagon wanted to send."

Link- Killing the Messenger, Sanitized excerpted from the book The Exception to the Rulers Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman with David Goodman

The excerpt is from a book:
The Exception to the Rulers

by Amy Goodman with David Goodman