Being a Journalist in a Time of War: Discussions on Iraq and War

Being a journalist isn't always the easiest career to make a profession in. What you give is your opinion, how you see things, and people are bound to disagree. In deciding to write an article on journalism in a time of war, I thought it necessary to interject that I am a young adult whom is prime for the army if there ever was a draft. I even came close to joining the army after 9/11 rocked the world, but was talked out of it by myself and family.

Writers have always been important in times of war. They weren't called journalists in ancient times, sometimes not even writers, historians was the terms often applied to those who wrote the ballads of wars in Rome and Greece. Historians like Herodotus observed what happened by hand instead of one a typewriter or laptop computer.

Today, writers for the New York Times and USA Today can give spread the word immediately on news via the internet or wait a few hours until the presses start rolling.

As a journalist and a would-be historian, I think it would be rather divisive to state the war in Iraq is wrong. It would also be easy to compare it to the Vietnam War.

Too many have already fallen to bombs from fanatics who believe God is on their side. It seems, from reports I've seen on Television that even many soldiers are losing faith in the war.

That is one side of the argument: Television sways the masses but shouldn't form a writer's opinion. What can be said is the reasons for going to Iraq are just, but some of them are patently false. Were there any Nuclear Bombs in Iraq? The answer would be no on all accounts. Was Saddam Hussein supporting the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? It seems that, if I were bombed to the stone age, I just might support the enemy of my enemy.

Being a journalist the numbers are always telling. Too many people have died fighting for a cause to similar to the Vietnam War. To avoid a second affair, we must make the same mistake we made in the first Gulf War, we have to pull out of Iraq to save America lives.

The situation in Iraq is at best chaos. The fighting involved has brought scathing opinions from many commentators.

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