David Axe’s Salon.com article on the increasingly rotten situation for the Baghdad press corps is now up. Go check it out: You’ll dig the juicy quotes from one of America’s leading war reporters. Below is a sort of rough sketch of that story — looser, more opinionated than the finished Salon piece.
The abduction of 28-year-old Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll in Baghdad on Jan. 7 has had a profound effect on the city’s Western press corps. More so than ever, unembedded media in Baghdad are fortified in a handful of besieged hotels that are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Few Western reporters ever leave these hotels, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories. And some reporters are finally throwing in the towel, forever abandoning this relentless and unforgiving city.
I’m on assignment for Salon.com to report on the worsening security environment in Baghdad and its effect on media coverage of the war. Of the long list of experienced Baghdad correspondents that I’ve contacted, only three have responded at all to my queries — and only one has been willing to talk. Off the record, Baghdad journos describe a place where fear and frustration make their jobs almost impossible. Now, their fear and frustration is making my job almost impossible too.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson has some sound theories about the insurgents’ media strategies. While stressing that he “can’t speak for insurgent groups,” Col. Johnson says these strategies “boil down to influencing the media environment … to get attention away from progress.“
Whether there is much progress in Arab Iraq is certainly debatable, but it’s apparent that the increasing inability of media to cover ANYTHING, much less coalition successes, is hurting the war effort. Iraq is a big, complicated problem, and as media flee or hunker down deeper in their hotel fortresses, the Western world’s understanding of Iraq can only suffer.
There is a workable solution, and it’s called embedding. No one protects journos as well as the U.S. and British militaries, but many media refuse to embed because they fear losing their objectivity. This is a valid fear, one even U.S. officers acknowledge, but what’s better: slightly biased coverage? Or no coverage at all?
THERE’S MORE: Xeni points out this eerily prescient story that Carroll wrote for the American Journalism Review last year.
The sense that I could do more good in the Middle East than in the U.S. drove me to move to Jordan six months before the war to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began. All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent, so when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen. There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn’t want to be a part of that…
It isn’t easy to fulfill such a lofty mandate when people are out looking for foreigners to behead. The days are long gone when car bombs and attacks on military convoys were so infrequent we could keep track of the date and place of each one.
Iraq became terrifyingly dangerous almost overnight last spring. Everything changed during the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah the first week of April 2004 and the simultaneous Shiite uprising led by firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It wasn’t safe for foreigners to walk the streets, and car bombs became an almost daily occurrence.
The anger and violence have only gotten worse since then, and a new terror has been added: kidnapping.
Shoot the savages
What’s better, no news or biased news? Well… that depends. And the answer is debateable. Biased news is potentially more harmful than no news. We can all agree that, in the context of reporting the situation of Iraq to the West, both biased news and no news suck. So I guess the $64,000 question is: does embedding threaten objectivity, and how much?
I’m not going to pretend I can answer that question. I guess my only point is that your question is not as rhetorical as I think you meant it.
I don’t read Iraq news anyway so they should all feel free to do what they think best. I still won’t read it, the place bores me. Call me when you’ve all won.
The journalists in Iraq are the best source of what is really happening. The Bush administration has demonstrated time again that they lie and cover up issues. We, the citizens, are responsible for the actions of this country even when we are horrifed by the actions of the president. We need to know.
The current news we are getting is already biased. So, embedded reporters will simply report with a different bias. How can accurate reports be made by reporters holed up in hotel rooms?
Embedded reporters would provide a more accurate view of what progress is being made. Most reports right now are from Baghdad, which is not the only city in Iraq by far.
The only reports worth anything right now are from embedded reporters. Anything else is just speculation and assumption.
The “media” has had three years to work out the problems of how to cover this war.
They have failed — catastrophically.
Here’s a question nobody is asking: How do you accomplish anything in a land where people have spent the last 1000 years learning that violence is the solution to all problems? The Arab Nations have no history of debate or discourse, only decree.
The fact that they are “targeting” journalists shouldn’t surprise anyone. Who better to target? Who receives more coverage than a kidnapped/slaughtered journalist? And I use the word slaughtered on purpose. What the terrorists are doing is not murder. In their own minds they are slaughtering animals that have no right to live.
While it is possible they have legitimate grievances, no one will ever hear them over the screams of slaughtered innocents.
One of the worst injustices to a War Reporter is how the press decides to “edit” their material… And I believe that “selective edits” become the dangerous and unnecessary obstacles to a War-reporter’s safety…
To get an idea of an MSM editor’s motives, view this recent event:
–A Tree Falls In the Forest–
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/10/018743.php
AN ARAB PROVERB STATES — “Four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past, the neglected opportunity.” –General Sanchez
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Bottom line: If we don’t raise the standard of the industry with respect to press fairness; we loose the important words of journalists who provide integrity to convey world events; only later to see them compromised.