Reporting on Iraq

Many of us gnash our teeth at various aspects of reporting or of particular articles as we pick up our daily newspaper. Outside of a very few large metropolitan newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, almost all newspapers rely upon news wire services for reporting outside their geographic area. The New York Times’ and Washington Post’s wire services are most often used by U.S. newspapers after the Associated Press. The AP’s 3,700 employees staff 242 worldwide bureaus to serve 1,700 U.S. newspapers and 5,000 radio and TV outlets, plus another 8,500 international subscribers in 121 countries.

Thus, what we’re often gnashing our teeth about is an article from the Associated Press. My molars are often sore.

Few subjects arouse the public more than war reporting. It’s difficult in any war. In Iraq it has been particularly difficult, as security conditions for journalists to travel about have led almost all there to restrict their purview to what they can see from their Green Zone hotel window and what they tell each other.

According to Mike Silverman, managing editor of the Associated Press, the New York Times reports today, at its July meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of Associated Press, “Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the death tolls.” The AP’s Silverman announced that one of its reporters would start to “write an overview every 10 days,” and “the wire service would make more effort to flag articles that look beyond the breaking news.” The AP does not just disseminate its own articles, but sometimes sends out articles generated by its member newspapers.

This is good news, welcome in itself although years late in coming, that a major news organization will increase its efforts to get out more news about what’s happening in Iraq. Too much of what comes out of Iraq reporting now is a recap of the U.S. death toll from Centcom press releases, without context, or various Iraqi public figures in Baghdad speaking about the political evolution in Iraq. At least my morning newspaper had on page 2 an AP report about the “Sadr City Success” in pacification of Baghdad’s former den of insurgent iniquity.

What is less encouraging is that, according to the AP’s Silverman there were 700 embedded journalists in Iraq during the start of the war but just about three-dozen now. The shrinking readership of America’s leading newspapers affects the economics of maintaining reporters overseas. Yet, hundreds turn out for a celebrity’s trial, or for a dead soldier’s mother who has become a political extremist. Surely our leading media can spare a few more dollars for reporting on this war that will shape the future of the MidEast and have lasting repercussions on American foreign policy.

The leading media might have noticed that there are hundreds of bloggers among the U.S. Military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are many knowledgeable natives of those countries with blogs. And, most are easily linkable to read from here, even from a hotel bar in Baghdad, in order to broaden coverage of what’s really happening. Further, there are freelance journalists who do roam outside the Green Zone, like Michael Yon, who could be tapped for articles.

As Peter Braestrup, former Saigon and Washington Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, wrote in his definitive 1977 published study of Vietnam reporting (Big Story), concentrating on the misimpressions conveyed about Tet ’68, there was a “prevailing accent on the negative, or on disagreement – however partisan, irrelevant, or uninformed – with the government.” Even as more accurate information emerged about the communists’ actual setback, there was a “persistent negative trend in the newspapers’ domestic reporting and commentary about Vietnam, which did not moderate.”

Peter Braestrup does not focus on overt media bias so much as its “mindset, from poor self-discipline by commentators in Washington and newsmen in Vietnam, from short attention span, from the traditional search for ‘drama.’ “

Thirty +-million Indochinese suffered during the war and after, and the severe weakening of both American will and respect for it by our adversaries contributed to additional deaths in the communist challenges elsewhere in the world post-1975. One might reasonably expect our leading media to have learned that quality reporting is a greater prize for Americans than Michael Jackson’s jury judgment, that many American and foreign lives depend upon it, and that the fate of entire regions of the world may well hang in the balance.