In “The Big Picture(s),” I wrote about the isolation of Western journalists in Iraq and the risks posed by remote journalism’s reliance on local stringers and fixers:

Western journalists in Iraq are likely to not speak the language or know the culture in depth.  News consumers, however, have no idea how the establishment media vets the locals they entrust to translate or relay the events they ostensibly cover.  The risk of relying on biased stringers and fixers is heightened where (as here) the country in question has long been torn by religious and ethnic strife.

One of several examples was the case of Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein:

In April 2005, a CBS stringer was arrested as a suspected insurgent.  CBS revealed the man was referred to the network by a “fixer” in Tikrit — Saddam Hussein’s hometown and an insurgent stronghold — “who has had a trusted relationship with CBS News for two years.”  The stringer was ultimately acquitted, but was detained for a year after an investigative judge decided there was enough evidence to recommend the case be tried.  One would hope that the establishment media would have a higher standard for its employees than “not convicted as an insurgent.”

In a similar vein, Dan Riehl notes that Salih Saif Aldin, the Washington Post journalist recently killed in the Sadiyah neighborhood upon which the WaPo bases its latest bad news story, was a Captain in Saddam’s Army.  Riehl hastens to add:

For all I know he was a decent man who wanted peace across all factions in Iraq. But it’s also true that he enjoyed many advantages as an Army Captain from Tikrit in Saddam’s Iraq. And rather than pursue the dangerous, if not impossible career of journalism, in those days he was apparently content to take his marching orders from a vile dictator who killed Shiites by the hundreds of thousands. There was no one to report on the all too many silenced voices then.

It is also worth noting that neither the Washington Post’s report on his death nor its accompanying editorial  saw fit to mention his service in the Baathist Army.  Was that service related to any of the death threats he recieved in Tikrit before his transfer to Baghdad, or his eventual murder in the capital?  People who rely on the WaPo’s coverage of Iraq will never know, as it is a question completely off the Post’s radar.  Besides, such questions do not fit into the narrative of brave journalists dying to cover the Iraq conflict.