Independent reporter Bill Roggio, currently embedded in Iraq, has caught the attention of someone at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. In an article for the Christian Science Monitor, author Dante Chinni finds Roggio worthy of some left-handed compliments — not bad for a dilettante whose work "can sound a lot like government talking points filtered through war stories."
Chinni describes Roggio's work as "one-sided." Full stop. How is it? Before leaving for Iraq, Roggio was concentrating on analysis of failures of the Pakistani government to militarily engage the Taliban, and that is not at all a cheery undertaking. In theater, Roggio has described events, often instigated by the enemy, as they happened. Unlike mainstream accounts, Roggio — like freelancer Michael Yon and others — actually reports spontaneous and responsive actions of American and allied forces.
It is rare, very rare, to turn on the television or radio, or open the newspaper, and be informed of more than what the enemy has done. Unless military publications are accessed, we will read or hear "car bombing kills x," not "American and Iraqi troops capture and kill y." News, heartening news, is made daily by the defenders of Baghdad's elected government, but it seldom reaches the homefront. Here Roggio is one of less than a dozen embedded reporters in the whole of the country, and Chinni devalues a recent, direct conversation with Marines into "only a few voices and anecdotes."
On that, what is the "other side" Chinni speaks of, and how would a journalist substantiate it? Chinni doesn't explain what he means. So either the phrase is meaningless, a disparagement of an interloper; or that journalism's "balance" requires soliciting the opinions of those who violently act against freedom of the press itself, to whom truth and civility are valueless, in which case Bill Roggio knows better.