S.O.S. Redux

So, there is now a tempest surrounding how a snot-nosed Chattanooga newspaper reporter named Edward Lee Pitts engineered the pointed question that a Tennessee soldier asked Donald Rumsfeld earlier this week in Kuwait. As a result of the revelation, many White House defenders are scoffing at the whole incident as if it has been sufficiently debunked as another insidious scheme of the liberal media elite.

Please. Gimmie a break.

Kudos to The Moderate Voice for rightly separating the issues at hand:

"There already seem to be some who suggest that because a reporter suggested the question, it somehow undermines the issue's validity. There are two separate issues here: the ethics of having a soldier be in effect a reporter's surrogate (even if he agrees with the reporter) and the validity of the question being asked. It can be difficult to compartmentalize these two - but it's vital."

Absolutely. Pitts undoubtedly stumbled in failing to reveal his role in staging the question from Spec. Thomas Wilson, who on Dec. 8 asked the Secretary of Defense why National Guard troops were being denied enough armor to protect military vehicles.

Maybe "stumbled" is being too kind. If Pitts hadn't been such an idiot as to brag about it in an email to a friend back home (a missive subsequently leaked to the Drudge Report), it's unlikely that Pitts' employer, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, ever would have been upfront about the reporter's involvement.

As a former journalist and professor of journalism ethics at the Janet Cook School of Mass Communications, I personally do not consider it a gross ethical lapse for a reporter to plant a valid question with a third party. The caveat, however, is that a big part of this story involved just who was doing the questioning -- the drama of U.S. troops grilling a Defense Secretary caught off-guard. That, my friends, is nothing less than staging; it is bad and Edward Lee Pitts should get a time-out and sent to bed without any supper.

But -- and it's a big but (with apologies to J-Lo), the question itself, and the insufferable response from Rummy, are legitimate for review and dissection. After all, the troops roundly cheered and applauded Wilson's question, bolstering our conclusion that, yep, there is serious dissent in the ranks over the armor shortage. And more questions followed, prompting Rummy's cantankerous "settle down" directive amid all the rumbling that spread through the audience (is there a single member of the Bush Administration who is more patronizing than Grandpa Rummy?). More information on the concerns is available at Operation Truth, a web site created by a group of Iraq War vets concerned about Pentagon management of the conflict.

One journalist's ethical shortcoming does not -- and cannot -- obscure the mounting concerns about a woefully mismanaged Iraq War. Still, Pitts' foul-up does nothing to help the reputation of the news media, which apparently is now a notch above crack whore in terms of credibility and respect.