Willem Marx’s article about his summer as an intern for a US "media" company in Iraq appeared in Harper’s in September. I read it on the plane to Cairo. I shared his reasons, which were nearly confessions, for why he wanted to be a journalist.
"[John] Simpson recounts his many adventures as a BBC reporter: lying in a gutter at Tiananmen Square in 1989, his camera rolling as bullets zipped by; being arrested during the revolution in Romania; and broadcasting from Baghdad in 1991, with U.S. bombs exploding around him. Inspired, I began writing for my high school paper…"
The entirety of "Misinformation Intern" is now available online.
"It was easy to find Iraqi reporters who would write U.S. military‒friendly op-ed pieces for a little extra cash. But hiring those who would go to the dangerous Anbar province was altogether a different matter. The reporters, cameramen, and sound operators we spoke with all said the same thing: they would work in Ramadi and Fallujah as part of a Rapid Response Cell only if they were embedded with U.S. troops. But because the whole point was that they were to report news that at least appeared to be independent of the military, this was impossible. We even explored whether we could embed our reporters with Iraqi troops there. But this also proved to be untenable."
