Out of the Loop

This story fits in pretty well with what I wrote yesterday:

The networks spent considerable time and money flying in high-priced talent to cover the handover, which had been scheduled for tomorrow. But when U.S. officials decided that an earlier handover might minimize the chances of violence aimed at overshadowing the ceremony, the cloak-and-dagger stuff began. At 12:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. Baghdad time), the Coalition Provisional Authority began calling journalists and telling them that they had half an hour to get inside the heavily guarded Green Zone for a background briefing by U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer.
. . .
When about 30 journalists and photographers, including a Washington Post correspondent, arrived, they were not told anything about a transfer of sovereignty.
At 2 a.m., authorities took the reporters’ cell phones and placed them in brown envelopes to prevent them from calling their news organizations. The journalists were then told that the handover ceremony was about to unfold, but that the news was embargoed until 4 a.m.

In other words, journalists were bent because they were left out of the loop. And in their minds these events are largely about the journalists.
Oh, and that “surprise” handover really wasn’t that surprising:

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said from Baghdad that he was not that surprised. “We’d been getting word that June 30 was just a date, more of a deadline,” he said. U.S. officials “had been very reluctant about the details. There was definitely a sense that it wasn’t necessarily a June 30 event.” The turn of events produced “an incredibly exciting day from a coverage standpoint,” Cooper said.

So since they got caught with their pants down, they had to hype the unexpected nature of the story. That’s how that after a fourteen month occupation, a two day change in the official phasing out became a big, big deal.