I Cogitate

Another way to tell a war story
Frustrated by the public's disconnect, CBS' Allen Pizzey turns to blogging about Iraq.

By Matea Gold
Los Angeles Times
April 7, 2007

NEW YORK ­ Allen Pizzey, a 60-year-old veteran war correspondent who considers himself a bit of a Luddite, never imagined that he would embrace blogging.

But the CBS newsman found himself turning to the Web during a recent stint in Baghdad after he noticed the numerous pieces on the network evening newscasts devoted to the pet food recall in the U.S.

"There seems to be an inordinate amount of time spent on what started out as 12 dead pets," said Pizzey, who can catch the American newscasts every morning on the Baghdad bureau's grimy television monitors, beamed in via satellite like day-old dispatches from another world.

Don't get him wrong: Pizzey is an animal lover. (He and his family have four cats, two dogs and a terrapin at their home in Rome.) But he was disheartened by the disconnect between the horrors of the war and the preoccupations of American viewers.

Rather than stew quietly, he vented his concerns in an online reporter's notebook, posted March 22 on CBSNews.com.

"What is depressingly clear is that what seems important here is far removed from what viewers in the U.S. seem to be concerned about," he wrote, adding: "How 12 dead animals in a country the size of the U.S. rates with the sliding scale of mayhem here is what I'm finding hard to gauge. When only 12 human bodies are found on any given morning in Baghdad with marks of the kind of torture the ASPCA would quite rightly have a pet owner in court for, it is judged as 'progress' for the security plan..."

"...It's nice to be able to have that outlet," he said in an interview this week from Rome, back home after a five-week rotation in Iraq. "One of the things that blogs provide is an opportunity for people who are interested in the news to understand a little bit about what it feels like. I don't think I should personalize everything I do. But if you're sitting in the middle of the kind of horror that is Iraq today, you sort of wonder, 'How do I make these people understand?'"

...But Pizzey's dispatches are often notable for their frank, personal assessments. They share a common theme: a deep-set frustration that the real story of the war is not getting through...

..."We the media gave the Bush administration a free ride for this war," he said. "We did not question sufficiently the statements made by politicians. I'm as guilty as anybody else. We climbed on board, and that's not what we should do..."

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