Topic: Political Rant
Liberals and conservative love to talk about how the "media" tends to focus on the bad things happening in Iraq and never focuses on the good things happening in Iraq. Surprisingly, the Project for Excellence in Journalism recently reviewed nearly 2,200 stories on television, newspapers, and the internet and found that most couldn't be categorized either way. Twenty-five percent were negative and twenty percent positive, and fifty-five were even-handed.

However, I think the goverment is lucky that the press has been that friendly considering that it isn't doing a good job of explaining what is happening over here. Yes, the government has only obligated about 60% and disbursed about 15% of the $18.4 billion reconstruction fund. That isn't very good considering that we have been here for over two years. Yet, I don't see enough stories explaining why the US government has been unable to get the money out the door. We need more stories explaining how U.S. contractors building and renovating power plants have to waste a hour screening their workforce every morning to make sure they don't have weapons, how integrated projects with the Iraqi ministries fall apart because they don't have the money needed to fulfill their side of the bargain, or why some project require coordination with the military, which from time to time are a little busy fighting the "bad guys." (Thankfully, the press has done a decent job explaining how companies have been ripping of the government.) Maybe I?m naive, but I think the American public probably understands that reconstructing this country will be hard; I just don?t think they fully understand the complexities of the problem.

To make things ever worse, government employees don't really understand the role of public relations. Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I bet most government employees working in Iraq have never worked on projects operating under this much public scrutiny. They are doing the best they can under a very bad scenario. I just don't understand why they are afraid to share more information about what they are doing, especially the projects that aren't doing so well. Public relations isn't just "spinning" a story to get favorable press. Sometimes it is simply providing the public with information, such as instances of fraud perpetrated by contractors, which they deserve to know, and sometimes it involves making sure a negative story contains factually accurate information rather than wild conjunctures and hearsay. Even if certain information needs to be withheld for security or proprietary reason, you can still say a lot and help the public get a better understanding of what is happening here in Iraq.

Maybe government employees stationed in Iraq need to take Public Relations 101 before coming to Iraq.