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Media critic: Tell the whole story on Iraq
(CNN) -- Since before the first Gulf War, the Pentagon has banned media camera crews from recording the coffins of fallen service members arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, except on rare occasions. The ban, since extended to other installations, has again become an issue because of the mounting deaths in the Iraq war. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer talked about the ban with media critic Bernard Goldberg, whose new book is "Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite." A former CBS news reporter and producer, Goldberg also wrote the best seller "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," published in 2001. BLITZER: This little controversy brewing now over continuing the policy of closing Dover Air Force Base to the media. Is that a problem as far as you're concerned? GOLDBERG: Yes, I guess it is. I'm for more information, not less. I mean, if it were up to me, I would televise executions. And I understand why the administration doesn't want it. But the American people, you know, need to see that also. But there's a bigger point here ... and that is the general coverage of Iraq. I'm not one of those people who says there's too much bad news. I say, give us all the bad news you've got. When American soldiers are killed, put it on page one, lead the newscast with it, give us all the bad news you've got, then give us more bad news. But then -- then -- give us the rest of the story. It's the only way we're going to know what's going on there. There's other stuff going on that's quite positive. Now, journalists always say, "Well, we tend towards the negative. We don't tell you that the plane landed safely. We don't tell you that the First National Bank didn't get robbed." But you would have to be a moron not to know that most banks don't get robbed and most planes do land safely. How in the world are we supposed to know what's going on in Iraq unless they give us the whole story? That's called good journalism. And if they don't, ... I think this constant onslaught of negative images -- which I say are fine -- but without the balance of the positive stuff, I think that's going ... to show itself during the election campaign next year, and it's not going to be good for the Republicans. BLITZER: Are the national news media guilty, as the White House has suggested, of not giving the full story of what's happening in Iraq? GOLDBERG: Yes, I think ... the White House is absolutely right about that. As I say, bad news is legitimate. ... I get up every morning, I turn on the news and I see another soldier, another two soldiers, every now and then 15 soldiers, killed -- it's heartbreaking. It's legitimate news and it needs to be there. But it's also legitimate news when schools are opening, when roads are being built, when people are going back to work. You don't have to report in this country that the plane landed safely, but you do have to report the good news over there because otherwise we don't know what the whole picture is. And after a while ... you say I can't take this anymore. And that will affect how you vote in the election. BLITZER: Let's make a dramatic shift to this CBS decision not to air this mini-series on the Reagans. The network put out this statement -- "This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script." Do you buy that? GOLDBERG: No. And I don't want to start laughing out loud. But that's -- come on -- that's ridiculous. First of all, TV executives have more agility than they have backbone. These guys are clueless. Just as I think a lot of newspeople in the East Coast are clueless about how the American people think, the elites out in Hollywood are clueless as to how so many ordinary Americans could love this guy so much. So they let somebody write a ... screenplay -- making stuff up, making the Reagans look like two doofuses. And they don't get in the beginning that this is going to cause a major brouhaha in Middle America. But there is not a species on the planet Earth ... that is more fine-tuned to self-preservation than television executives. So once these guys saw that this was not going to go away, this was going to get nasty, I didn't have a doubt in the world that they would either take the controversial stuff out or dump it over to some other place like Showtime.
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