If you look at the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s page A5 story in the March 16 edition, “Five Years in Iraq: Soldiers Talk About How It Felt,” you immediately think that even soldiers currently serving in the armed forces oppose the war. That’s because the AJC shamefully misused and actually distorted quotes used as the pullquotes—the boldfaced quotes placed under the pictures of the soldiers they interviewed—in order to express the AJC’s own stand against the war. Pullquotes should express the general disposition of the person quoted. Anyone who's graduated from journalism school knows that. But the AJC doesn't let ethics get in the way of its agenda.
Witness, for example, the quote under Jose Mercado’s name, “Everybody comes back different.” What did Mercado actually say? “You’re not thinking of the innocent people you will kill and the after effects it will cause you when you come back home. You aren’t the same. Everybody comes back different. It changes you completely.” Read a little further and Mercado defends U.S. involvement in Iraq, saying “It was worthwhile. We did the right thing.” But you can bet your sweet moderate butt that the AJC isn’t going to make that the pullquote—that doesn’t support the picture the AJC is trying to paint on this page, a maudlin wallpapering of clichés. But, it doesn’t end there. The next guy over, also in uniform like Mercado, is Brett Waterhouse. The pullquote placed under his name is “It was like the war was over.” This is the AJC’s way of using Waterhouse to scold the Bush administration with the old line about how we were fooled by Iraq. But what does Waterhouse actually say? He talks about how immediately after the invasion the Iraqis were bringing the U.S. troops food and sweet tea, “The whole time we were there it was like one big family…it was like the war was over.” He didn’t think we’d be there still, but read on a little further and he says of the war, now, that it “seems to be going in the right direction.” But the editors at the AJC can’t use that as the pullquote, because they’ve already staked their claim to writer Robert W. Gee’s theme, which is stated in the intro: “The initial invasion’s shock and awe, and the 85 percent approval ratings that followed for President Bush, long ago gave way to new narratives of administration missteps, a bloody insurgency and rising numbers of Iraqi and American dead.” Really, Robert? Have you checked the stats since last summer? They’re not rising anymore. According to the Dept. of Defense, combat-related deaths in Iraq dropped by half between November 2006 and November 2007. The AJC has enough ink to continue cranking out old information, but it can’t spare any to update the readers on the very situation to which Waterhouse was referring. Why not? If the man says it’s on the right track now, why didn’t the AJC feel compelled to expand on that and give the readers the latest stats instead of sticking with its fallacious intro? Because the AJC, like most of the media, has decided the fate of this war, and the facts be damned. But, it gets worse. The next guy in uniform, Jibari Williams, is presented as some kind of bloodthirsty monster. The pullquote placed by the AJC editors under Williams’ photo is “The guys knew how to kill.” Wait a minute, is this about Williams, who seems to admire violence, or is this a statement of admiration for the Iraqi insurgents? Read on and it turns out it’s neither. It’s a distortion of what Williams said. At the very beginning of his statement, Williams explained that it’s his job to train soldiers under his command and that he felt they were ready for combat. His outfit didn’t lose a single soldier. Not one. Good job, Williams—you deserve a lot of praise, not this smear job the AJC foisted on you to carry out its anti-war agenda, an agenda that it supports by sending its own columnists to speak at anti-war events. Here’s what Williams actually said, within the context of having trained his troops well: “As master gunner, I was confident the guys knew how to kill.”
That’s his job. He did it well. I wish I could say the same for the AJC.