From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Whenever the United States is engaged in hostilities abroad, the media are at war too, with the Pentagon,

as they battle to extract more information from a defense

department institutionally predisposed to provide less.

A reasonable analogy for war correspondence would be sports reporters.

On one hand, their intense coverage of a team's players and on-field triumphs makes them

a de facto marketing arm of the teams they cover.

On the other hand, their inevitable hard questions and criticism are greeted with fear and suspicion

by the very same organizations.

Think of the build-up and early days of a war as baseball in the spring, when reporters uncritically

supply puffy profiles and the PR line,

but at some point, when the losses start piling up, tension between the press and those

they cover rapidly develops.

Only three weeks into the war in Afghanistan, the confrontation between the military and the media

is already mounting. Despite repeated admonitions from the government between the military and the media is already mounting.

Despite repeated admonitions from the government that the war could last years,

editorials have begun to ask for an end game, an exit strategy, and the defeat of the Taliban

before the rapidly approaching Muslim holy period of Ramadan.

The G-Wiz reports from the decks of aircraft carriers

are still there, but so is the second guessing. Here's a representative sample from a briefing this week

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