Roland Hedley: Man and Myth

As some may know, I have long been a huge Roland Hedley fan over at Twitter, and now my colleague at E&P, Joe Strupp, has interviewed Roland's alter-ego, Garry Trudeau, about his new book, a collection of tweets. Here is an excerpt:

Q. What do you think Roland Hedley does to present the image of war
coverage?

A. He improves it by making everyone else seem wildly competent in comparison. For Roland, it's all about dressing in desert camo and being able to use words like "downrange" and "robust" on-camera. While obsessed with imaginary dangers, he's oddly oblivious to actual ones, eschewing all things Kevlar, which he derides as a "nanny" fabric.

Q. How has war cover improved or worsened since the invasion of Iraq?

A. Hard to make a generalization, because conditions on the ground have changed so much. War coverage is always about access. When you have none -- as happened on the ground during the sectarian strife -- coverage suffers. It was simply too dangerous for many journalists to get about and do their jobs, which is now also true in Afghanistan. But access to the US military piece of the story has probably improved. There's been more embedding, more transparency generally helped along by the internet, which has empowered thousands of soldier bloggers to tell the story from the grunt's POV.