It’s a particular pleasure to welcome Michael Hoyt to today’s Book Salon to discuss Reporting Iraq, which he edited. Mike is the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and the book he has brought to us is an wonderfully readable distillation of interviews conducted with 46 journalists for the 45th anniversary edition of CJR. The original report can be found here. With John Palattella, the literary editor of The Nation, our guest has done a remarkable job of weaving together the very personal voices of these reporters as they consider their experiences covering Iraq. The book also features photos which have not been published before and powerful examples of the best of photojournalism.
From the beginning of the book, I was struck by the clarity with which the journalists describe how wrong things were in Iraq even in the first days. And this honesty leads the reader to wonder why – so frequently – their reporting did not reflect the reality they saw before them or somehow deliver that reality to us.
Michael Massing offers one answer in his NY Review of Books look at several recent soldier first-hand accounts:
Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers.
The reporters in Reporting Iraq speak of the difficulties of telling the full story in the face of the “incredibly powerful spin machine” as Deborah Amos of NPR noted:
And Iraqis at that time believed that if they told us these things – that they were arrested in the middle of the night, that they were humiliated in front of their children, that U.S. soldiers came in to their wife’s bedrooms at three o’clock in the morning – if they told us these things, that somehow it would stop. And they told us and told us and told us and, of course, it didn’t stop. There was always a limit to what we could do in our reporting. And remember that in the early days we were up against an incredibly powerful spin machine that accused us of only telling the bad news and so it was very hard to get that information out.
"That information” was pretty horrific. Consider Peter Maass of the New York Times’ account of the movement of the Marines into Baghdad at the very beginning of the war. The Marines had dug in, camouflaged, by a road and bridge:
Civilians who were driving up the road to flee Baghdad over the bridge did not see any American military vehicles and thought “Fine, it’s safe” …So what happened was, civilian vehicles drove up this road and the marines shot them up…. But the marines, particularly the snipers who were on the front line, who were looking through scopes and could see faces in vehicles, knew what was going on. And the photographers were there. So the photographers heard the sniper commanders saying “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” The snipers would fire to disable the vehicles … Even though the orders were, let the snipers handle it, when the marines, the ordinary grunts, heard one or two shots from a sniper, they’d all open up. So, you had all these civilians, women and children, getting killed on that road.
Maass did report on these civilian shootings but others talk about hearing of abuses that never made it into their reporting. Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, whose comments in Reporting Iraq are often particularly thoughtful, notes:
Anyway, as far as reporting, Iraqis were telling me just fantastic stories about abuse, that I just kind of shook my head and blew them off. But I remember one guy was being so detailed about this stuff that I think I even wrote it down in my notebook – because it was remarkable and maybe the detail made me think: maybe there is something here. Like all of us, I didn’t follow up.
As I read Reporting Iraq, I sensed that many of the reporters themselves wonder why they did not “follow up.” Several mention coming home with PTSD and you begin to get a sense that many were not prepared for Iraq and what they saw there. They discuss the demands for “good news” and the criticism they faced when they reported accurately. Just as we are now hearing more and more of the psychological toll on so many US soldiers, the reporters too seem to be struggling to make sense of their experiences and their work – and the higher ideals of their profession.
My big worry is that the audience sometimes doesn’t know what they are missing and we as journalists didn’t always know what we were missing, because we were unable to function as we would anywhere else in the world. … You are unable to do the things you felt you should have been doing. And worry always was that we didn’t know how much we were missing. – Caroline Hawley, BBC
The one aspect of the book that I wish was expanded would be the discussion of Iraqi and Middle Eastern journalists — the original interviews did not include teams such as Voices of Iraq at Al Aswat Iraq or the staff of McLatchy’s Inside Iraq. There remains a distance between the American experience and Iraqi that is only really bridged by several of the freelance reporters and translators:
As an Iraqi, living inside Iraq, I cannot hear good news, and even if there is good news, you cannot hear it with the noises of explosions and the noises of the terrorists and the noises of the American military operations…. So there’s no good news about Iraq. There’s no good news as all. – Yusif Mohamed Basil, Translator Time (CNN)
In the introduction Hoyt and Palatella note that:
While reading the interview transcripts we were stuck by the fact that the conventions of journalism and the exigencies of reporting this war have sometimes muffled the passion and expertise of particular voices. We wanted to hear the unvarnished stories as well as the stories behind the stories, and, almost always, our interviewees were ready to talk.
The voices in Reporting Iraq are powerful and clear, the stories they have to tell are ones we need to hear – and ones we too often do not hear as readers and audience of these reporters. Reporting Iraq gets us thinking and listening closely as the reporters themselves explore these very issues — and that is a good beginning to a much needed conversation.
Related posts:
- FDL Book Salon Welcomes Dahr Jamail, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan
- FDL Book Salon Welcomes Richard McCormack, Editor of Manufacturing a Better Future for America
- FDL Book Salon Welcomes Jurgen Todenhofer, Why Do You Kill?: The Untold Story of the Iraqi Resistance
- FDL Book Salon Welcomes Ryan Grim: This Is Your Country On Drugs
- FDL Book Salon Welcomes Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name
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Mike, welcome to the Lake.
Let’s welcome Mike to Firedoglake – I’m sure we’ll have a great discussion.
As always, let’s remember our Book Salon manners – and please use the last post for any off-topic dscussions.
Does any serious journalist take the concept of imbedded reporters seriously?
Thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be here.
Are there lessons to be learned from pre-Iraq war reporting that can be applied to pre-Iran attack reporting?
Actually Kiddo, that section of the book is very interesting as the different reporters talk about embedding or not embedding and how they see that relationship.
I really appreciated the range of views that Mike’s included – and the chance to hear the different arguments and ideas – and the comments on embedding were really good.
Hi Mike, welcome. Thanks for being here today.
Welcome Mr. Hoyt.
I was pretty sure the U.S. had lost the Iraq war the moment the looting began. I kept an open mind for awhile to see if any learning was going on, but decided in less than a year that every day the U.S. stayed nade it worse for the Iraqis.
I am not surprised by any attrocity I hear about that the U.S. has perpetrated on the Iraqis. And I also notice any lack of official remorse, best manifested in zero aid for the 4 million Iraqi refugees. I am truly ashamed of my country.
Yes, they do. One of the people we interviewed in the book said he would no more try to cover Iraq without being embedded than he would try to cover it without visiting a mosque. You need the full spectrum of experience. Most of the reporters we spoke with recognize the possible problems with embedding, but also see the benefits, and in a very dangerous enviroment, the necessity.
Thank you Mike.
Reading the book, I was fascinated by the clearer sense of who these reporters are … when not “on stage” – a very interesting glimpse.
I was wondering if they had “stage fright” about appearing in the book or interviews?
Coincidentally, C-SPAN3 is covering the U.S. atrocities in VN this afternoon.
Mike – how many of the reporters involved in the book are still covering Iraq?
That’s a good question. A couple of them were somewhat guarded and, of course, some didn’t talk to us. But most reporters were eager to talk. They were and are going through a profound experience, and I think they were glad to talk about it.
We wanted to talk to them in a way that broke through the sometimes stiff formula of articles and newswriting, to talk to them as if we were in a late night conversation about what the war was really like, what the job was like.
Siun, I don’t know precisely, but a number of them still are — Anne Garrels of NPR, Elizabeth Palmer of CBS, Ali Fadhil, the doctor turned translator turned documentary maker, Richard Engle of NBC….
Chris Hedges in War Is a Force That Gives Life Meaning (or some title like that) confesses to being a war addict. Any of your reports fall into that category? Needing something of overwhleming importance to put everyday concerns completely in the background, adrenaline junkies (of course), a sense of heroism? Or other caracterisitics that might be relevant?
Nodding, I was struck by Chris Allbrittton saying he was done with the story – that comment has so much pain in it.
We don’t see – or realize – the very personal reactions these folks have as they report on Iraq.
Your comment about the looting is echoed by some reporters in the book. Some of them saw very early that there was not much of a plan for after the invasion, and that the looting and early chaos were clear indications that Iraq could go toxic. I think reporters began to realize this at different moments, especially as things happened to them personally, but the looting was a clear clue.
Greetings, Mike -
Throughout the ten year period of sanctions in Iraq, the invasion and even now, there are small NGOs on the ground. Until the insurgency got so bad they lived among the Iraqis but now operate out of Jordan and Syria. They continue to work with the Iraqi people as they confront the massive refugee situation. Their reporting is so very different from the imbedded journalist or broadcast news. Do you consult with these groups and include their perspective?
Something in the “imbedded reporters” concept seems to smack and taste of the idea of at least attempted governmental censorship. Am I off base here?
I don’t think you cover events like this for long periods without paying some psychic price. In the book, for example, Anne Garrels is very forthright about it. She covered the major invasion of Falujah, and saw some rough things. She describes in the book how she now has some anger problems, unexplained emotions, and how she fell apart once in Colorado when she heard loud noises. I met one reporter who said he sleeps like a baby in Baghdad, but gets restless and wired when he leaves.
I knew little about war when this invasion took place. But I was so astonished at the looting (esp since I’d heard on C-SPAN how the antiquarians had contacted the DOD in advance & carefully alerted them to the need to protect the museum and the archeology sites), that I started talking around. A U.S. taxi driver who’d been in Korea was livid. He asked: where are the MPs? In every war, the MPs come in on the heels of the fighting troops to establish order, he argued. I later learned that the MPs and other military with roles in civilian had been relegated to National Guard units & there weren’t enough of them & what there were hadn’t been called up to the extent that could have happened.
One of the iconic photos is U.S. troops guarding the oil ministry while everything was being ripped out around them.
Kiddo – I had the same reaction to the embeds – and I still have serious reservations but there is something to be said for seeing the war from all sides as a reporter – and the best mention that in their comments in the book, that you can’t report from just one perspective.
In fact, several mention how limited the view of the US troops is from inside their Bradleys … and how that must impact what they do. The reporters only understood this after their experieces as embeds.
QuakerGirl, we stuck with the jouranlists, not the NGOs. But it is worth noting that some of the journalists in our book clearly have done some good reporting on the NGOs. Deborah Amos, for example.
The photojournalists in Reporting Iraq are particularly interesting to read – their view is often so acute.
Are we prepared to say the reason the Bush Administration conjured the idea of ‘imbedded’ reporters originated out of a concern, by the Bush people, solely for the safety of reporter?
I heard Ann Garrels on her book tour, perhaps in 04 or 05? She seemed to have a surprisingly flat affect. Is that a common response to so much horror?
I can’t recommend this book highly enough – for all of us who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about Iraq, it really does provide a very new and important view.
Mike and John did not aim to tell the whole story but instead a very specific story of what reporters experience and how they see that experience.
Mike — how did you decide which reporters to select — what made their stories the ones you wanted to report?
I haven’t read the book so this may be an unfair question.
How many of the unembedded reporters are totally dependent
1) Now.
2) Always were.
On stringers and on interpreters.
Dubhaltach
I suppose that stems from their gift of being able to “see” much better than the rest of us.
Can we believe this statement from the AP today?
AP – Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion, finally opening a window for reconciliation among rival sects, the second-ranking U.S. general said Sunday as Iraqi forces formally took control of security across half the country.
eCAHNomics, a number of the reporters in our book make similar points. Here is Jane Arraf of CNN:
“…it was extraordinary. We walked into the palace and there were no U.S. forces, really nobody in control, and the word had gone out that the Iraqi Army had gone and that the palace was there and it was open. And entire families came. They didn’t just come and tour the place. They came and they tore the door hinges off, they came and they took away the marble, and the place was really being dismantled in front of us….
Of course one might ask why don’t we just lift the reporter ‘imbed’ requirement and see what happens.
I suppose the bottom line question for me is ‘why have an imbed requirement’?
kiddo – I really think you’d find it useful to read Mike’s book. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion there that you’d appreciate.
and most of the discussion is about non-embedded reporting.
Siun, I agree. The photographers are particularly interesting. Of course the nature of their job means they get very close to the action, and they see a great deal. We end the book with an amazing story from one of them, Chris Hondros, about a photo that appears in the book of a child whose parents were killed at a checkpoint. A very tough story, but very revealing about what can happen in Iraq and about the difference between the military mission and the jouranlistic mission.
That photo is in the book along with a number of others, many of them not previously shown in the U.S.
Aside from giving country, freedom and honor as a reason for going to war, just why do some people love the excitement of war and others are repelled by it? Many writers throughout the 20th century have written about the romanticism of war until they are in the face of it and reality hasn’t an ideal shred it in. From either side: “All Quiet on the Western Front or The Razor’s Edge, the only people who seem to walk away enriched are the war profiteers. Please comment on how you see Iraq fit into this long observation by many many writers.
Mike – from your perspective and your work at CJR, do you have an opinion on the “sanitizing” of our news from Iraq, the discomfort with the hard photos like Hondros’?
Our friends at GorillasGuides (one of whom asked a question above) often publish very strong photos from Iraq (and since their team includes many Iraqis, these are at times their own photos)and we’ve discussed, here at FDL, the reactions and discomfort we feel at seeing the war up close like that.
I feel that if we do it (support, fund, etc) then we also need to look but many feel otherwise and I”m curious how that looks to a journalist.
Scarecrow, we wanted a range of types of reporters — newspaper, wire service, TV and radio, magazine, photographers. We wanted mostly Americans, but we also wanted European journalists, Arab journalists, and of course Iraqis.
We hired three interviewers, all experienced war reporters, one based in Lebanon, one in Paris, and one in New York. Most of the reporters work several weeks in Iraq and them come out to decompress, and we caught them on leave. As I said earlier, they were usually eager and willing to talk.
I appreciate your responses to my Qs & observations & don’t want to be a hog, but did you notice my 15? I found Hedges’ book to be very revealing on the appeal of war. Of course, he’s a journalist, but I guess his reaction is similar to that of military personnel.
The picture of the detainee being held in Saqlawiyah was very disturbing. I know we should be desensitized to this stuff by now but his complete demoralization is so emblematic of what we’ve done to the whole country.
Welcome Mr. Hoyt,
Re:
There is another understanding put forth by Antonia Juhasz in “The Bush Agenda” and considered in Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” that the looting, chaos and anarchic conditions imposed on the Iraqi people in the aftermath of the conquest was actually a planned “sociocide”. An extraordinarily cynical decision on the part of the war planners to tear apart civil society in Iraq so that the imposition of American corporate “market solutions” would meet with less resistance from organized and cohesive groups inside Iraq.
Thus, if this hypothesis is correct, we have a ready explanation for why reporters became targets for the U.S. military. We have an explanation for why intellectuals became targets and for why most of the administrators of Iraqi industries became targets. Intimidated reporters don’t like to get involved in discussing the American occupation as a war crime, they can see what can happen to themselves if they are too honest.
There are at least 4 million Iraqis displaced by the fighting. The refugee ranks skew toward the more affluent and influential members of Iraqi society. It certainly appears to me that the actual U.S. government policy is to permanently disable Iraqi civil society and subjugate the remaining Iraqi population to the will of America’s multinational corporations.
I suppose that until we get the equivalent of the “Pentagon Papers” for Iraq, that most reporters will continue to report on Iraq with little understanding of how the apparent chaos is actually part of the imperial script.
Salaams, Ray
Yes, I’d like to reinforce Siun’s Q. The U.S. MSM heavily self-censors versus other countries. How did your phtogs & reporters feel about the fact that we’re not get a true picture of what’s actually happening. (Of course, that’s precisely the objective of any censoring, self- or imposed, but why do the reporters do the gov’s job without being made to?)
I confess to not reading the book. There are simply not enough weeks in the year for me to read everything I want to look at. I have a huge interest in imbedded reporting and freedom of the press and its ramifications abroad, and not incidentally, domestically. ;0)
Mike, I’d be interested in where the reporters you interviewed got the impression that americans really don’t want to hear the news from Iraq.
This isn’t intended to be a gotcha question, or rhetorical snark – I’ve seen this a lot these past seven or eight years, where there seems to be a disconnect between readers who say that they’re looking for more substantive coverage of issues and reporters who say that their readers aren’t interested in their coverage of issues. I’ve wondered a lot why we see it so differently
Is it feedback from marketing? Conventional wisdom? What they’re told by their sources? Polls? Readers’ letters?
Mr. Hoyt, thank you for joining us today.
In her introduction, Siun says this about your book:
2 questions, please.
Please tell us about your background. Do you have reporting experience, particularly in conflict areas?
And, editing this material had to be a heartbreaking labor. How long have you been at it?
QuakerGirl, this is a good question. I had dinner with young print reporter who had spent serious time in Iraq and her dad, who was an ex TV reporter. And he told about calling his daughter just before she went in to Iraq, riding with soldiers on an armored vehicle at the beginning. And he said he had two emotions–terrible fear for her for what could happen to her and for what she might see. But the second emotion was jealousy. He was an old reporter who knows the feeling of covering a such an immense story. History is unfolding in front of you, and, whatever else you can say about it, it is fascinating. I think that honestly motivates a lot of these people. But I also think a lot of them want to bear witness. To be the independent witness when our country does something so massive and risky in our name.
Somebody has to report back to the people.
I’m curious about the relationship between editors/producers “back home” and the reporters in the field. (In my opinion, getting EDITORS to share their impressions of their experiences in shaping their media outlet’s coverage of Iraq would make a great companion piece to this book.) Reporters write up their stories, and their editors shape their efforts — sometimes for the better, other times for worse — in presenting their work to the world.
How did these editors and producers deal with the “powerful deterrent” that Michael Messing mentioned in the quote at the top of this post — and how did the reporters react to their editors’ efforts?
Why have the rest of the Abu Ghraib photos not been published?
Hey Mike, it’s Jay Rosen. My question is this: Do you think the reporters you talked to for the book had trouble believing that something so go so wrong, that the US actually could invade with no viable plan for what to do once the shooting started, that a military operation could actually be undertaken with so little knowledge being applied, that we actually could go “blind into Baghdad,” as James Fallows puts it? My own sense is that screwing up on that scale is something they have a hard time grasping and accepting. What’s yours?
Re:
I subscribe to the view that the reason for embedding reporters was for the purpose of censorship. In the Viet Nam War the reporters were, by and large, unembedded and the Pentagon came to the conclusion that far too much of that war’s real nature got onto America’s evening news and turned the public off to the war. In early 2003, the “offer” to embed reporters was presented by the DoD to the corporate media as a double edge sword. Reporters could either embed in Iraq, or else the DoD could not guarantee the safety of the reporters. This was intimidation and censorship, presented as a veiled threat to the media.
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is very similar to the observations of NGOs in Iraq at the time of the US invasion. One NGO reported that as they fled from Iraq after the bombing they drove through small towns systematically boomed for the purpose of destroying civilian infrastructure: roads, hospitals, water tanks, electricity. These were towns Saddam never bothered about. Yet, they were deliberate targets of US bombing. The Iraqis were in shock.
When the NGO reached the Jordan border, the borders were wide open with people from Jordan freely flowing across. The US did not secure the borders. One NGO reported, “It was as though the US deliberately wanted fighters to cross the borders and make the country more vulnerable.”
Did the journalists you interviewed make similar observations?
Siun, this is a great question. I think any answer is complicated. On the one hand, you don’t want to be a voyeur, to show the lurid effects of violence just to show it. You don’t want to put terrible things in front of people while they are eating breakfast, when they have children, etc.
But on the other hand, you want to portray the reality of the war, and you don’t want to sugarcoat it, and you want to bear witness. So decisions are hard.
The American tradition is to show much less than Europe, for example. I think we are too timid with photos, personally. We rarely show the dead. There is a stunning and heartbreaking photo in Reporting Iraq of a dead captain in an Iraqi kitchen, nothing graphic about it but heartbreaking. And that photo was only shown in the U.S. in a story about journalistic self-censorship. If I had been a newspaper editor I’d have run it, once we know the family had been notified.
Sorry that was supposed to be, “Do you think the reporters you talked to for the book had trouble believing that something could go so wrong…?”
Well. Things are so good in Iraq, even our politicians are afraid to stay in the Green Zone. How about some reports on how life is is in the Green Zone. I can say this, in spite of what’s coming out of Iraq “through channels”, the view here is that this part of the Middle East is on fire.
Welcome Jay – and great question!
I found myself wondering if the reporters (and so many americans) have been a bit romanced by the “greatest generation” meme and Iraq sure doesn’t fit into that model.
If I dreamt of being a “war correspondent” I suspect the reality of Iraq would be quite unsettling to say the least.
Imbedded reporters in Iraq. Israeli reporters in the Gaza. Who in their right mind would think we’re not getting the truth.
I screwed up my own question… “that the US actually could invade with no viable plan for what to do once the shooting stopped…” is what I meant.
I am not sure I agree with the assumption in your question. Journalism did a terrrible job in the runup to the war, covering the debate about going to war in the first place. I think that once the war began, they by and large did a very responsible job of covering it. They covered it at great risk to themselves, and if you as a citizen wanted to find out how the war was going you could find it in the MSM. There was and is some stellar reporting.
Early in the war, especially, there was great pressure on reporters to tell the “good news” about what was happening in Iraq. This was a real pressure, from government and sometimes from editors. It is the kind of pressure brought by people who don’t want the facts, but a certain light on the facts. Yet I believe reporters resisted that pressure by and large. I think if you read the book you will see.
Re:
AP – Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion,
The inconvenient truth for this statement is that more U.S. soldiers have died in 2007 than in any previous year of the occupation.
This milestone was reached in early November, as reported by the Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/36ccko
Re, my background. I have not covered conflict. I’ve been a journalist for thirty years — newspapers and magazines. I’ve been the editor of Columbia Jouranlism Review for nearly five years. Yes, the book was a lot of work, but it was the kind of work we like to do.
Imbedded reporting IS the issue for me.
If it’s too dangerous for unembedded reporters to be in Iraq. Just say so.
I think they knew exactly what they were doing and intentionally created gross instability. The more unstable the country the better to justify take-over and stay and stay and stay.
It’s the issue for me too. I’d quite like a response to my question about how many of the unembedded reporters are utterly dependent on stringers and interpreters.
I think he’s already said that there were both.
I could say I love this kind of back and forth. Trouble is… there are children on the streets of Iraq, crying. They have no mothers. No fathers. No family. And this is Christmas.
I understand what you are telling me. ;0)
My sense, Kiddo, is that reporting in Iraq is completely a “dependent on” exercise– an embedded reporter is dependent on the soldiers who are ferrying him around Iraq, the dependence on translators and guides and drivers is total, the dependence on guards for security, the dependence on the military for information. It’s a story of dependence all around.
Mike — given the experiences of the reporters you cover, how do you think the Iraq reporting is different now, from what it was, say a couple of years back? Are we getting a better reflection of what’s going on? Or another way to ask, is whether the current crop of reporters must learn anew what those in your book learned. Is it being passed along?
Hi Jay. In Vietnam, people like David Halberstam went in believing in the war effort, and the hard facts they saw on the ground slowly turned them around about the viability of the effort, the possibility of winning it, the wisdom of it.
My sense is that in Iraq that process happened a lot more quickly. Reporting Iraq is mostly chronological, you know, and the fourth chapter we called Omens and Incidents. Early in the war, journalist were seeing things that gave them great pause.
I suspect there is something to what you say, that who could believe that there was no real plan, that the thing would go out of control so rapidly.
In the beginning, remember, reporters could go anywhere and talk to anyone, and they began to pick up things. And then, by later in 2003 and early 2004, it was very clear that Iraq was going toxic.
Just think. If we got out of Iraq now, we wouldn’t have to have this discussion.
To add to that is a massive immigrant population living in poverty trying to stay under the radar of the host country. The US has approved a thimble full of Iraqis who could get refugee status in the USA. Our war, our refugees, our lockout. Who’s left there to kill? Without enough people exterminated you have fewer and fewer to kill. Ahhh, stability, at last. What a winning formula!
Except Mr. Rosen that there are a large number of excellent Iraki reporters. So why not use them.
Just finished was an episode on C-SPAN3 on a photog from VN, doing a book signing: Vietnam at Peace & Agent Orange Author, Philip Jones Griffiths (2005). They had the same problem as in Iraq, though VN was probably not as dangerous. He told stories of going out of his way to get pics that were forbidden by the powers-that-be and argued you wouldn’t find the same thing in Iraq photojournalists.
Hi Julia,
I’m not Mike, but I’ve got a dollop of info to share re:
Even before the Iraq War most of the major news orgs in the country were closing foreign desks. Two considerations were working in tandem. It is true that Americans were becoming less interested in reading wonkish articles about foreign affairs, preferring to be mesmerized by distractions such as the O.J. Simpson trial and the other celebrity non-news. And corporations followed right on by seeing how shows like “Entertainment Tonight” were becoming better profit centers than the expensive-to-produce nightly TV news programs.
From a purely cynical point of view the corporate media executives were delighted by the advertising revenues to be generated by a quick winning war which described the period between March 19 and May 30 (”Mission Accomplished”). From that time forward, American audiences were looking for the next entertainment, and Iraq proved to be the opposite of entertaining.
Almost all the major news organizations rely very heavily on Iraqis to help report and go places western reporters can’t go. They don’t talk a lot about it, in part because they don’t want to get those people killed.
Our book was about the sweep of the war. In the beginng, reporters could go anywhere, faluja, wherever, without much fear. They needed embedding less. As time went on, their ability to move around became greatly circumscribed. They realized this in different ways, but often around an incident–they were chased by gunmen, beaten, threatened with guns, narrow escapes (a nytimes reporter had an angry crowd nearly hold his car back, and then stoned it as he broke free).
Now the situation is such that if you want to see large swaths of Iraq, you need to embed. You combine that with reporting by the (very brave) Iraqi staffers who are still able to get around and report.
What do U.S. reporters in Iraq think about the local ones who appear on Al Jazeera & other local media?
I understand what you are saying to me. Is it then a fair statement to make that Iraq is now in a state of chaos?
Gorrillas, we have a chapter on embedding that I think you would find interesting. Reporting in Iraq has been a very difficult assignment for a long time now. The things we describe in the book, reporters wearing disguises, wearing burkas, etc., to get the story, are more difficult now. Yes, I think reporters are dependent on embedding and on their Iraqi stringers to a much larger extent now. It is worth saying that by now those stringers are often highly trained journalists by now, who do some great work.
One day someone say this about the current situation in Iraq. The next day someone else says something much different. Who has it right?
Mr: Rosen I am well aware of it as UNLIKE you I am thoroughly familiar with Irak and do NOT need an interpreter you’d know that if you’d read siun’s comments above or clicked through to the site where I’m one of the writers.
Scarecrow, some of the reporters address this question in our book. It is tough to break into the country now, without that knowledge that people gained from the days when they could get around more easily. Of course, there are far fewer journalists in Iraq now, given the expense and the danger. The New York Times annual budget for its Iraq bureau is $3 million–and that doesn’t even count salaries. It’s very expensive to try to continue to do comprehensive reporting, and only a handful of outlets still do it. They should be commended.
Mike and Jay -
I appreciate your efforts to bring another prospective on Iraq, through journalists. So many have given their lives to witness, record and report on history. I cannot help but reflect on Ernie Pyle and his reporting to the American public. Tired and burned out, he continued to dedicate his life to bringing news to the American people. While some of us here may have a different perspective on Iraq, in speaking for myself, I respect journalists who put themselves in harms way to record history.
My take on it is this. If you are an American reporter, and want to report on Iraq, you must be imbedded. Am I wrong on this?
Dependence – interesting theme Jay.
Reading Mike’s book was a very good reminder that the reporters are simply a diverse group of very human folks – some so courageous, some so frightened, some both. And they are surprisingly honest about themselves.
One of the sources I rely on a great deal is the site run by GorillasGuides (http://gorillasguides.com) where Iraqi bloggers report on what they see around them. It’s a very different view from the ones we normally get and quite valuable for understanding beyond the western lens.
Thanks – yes the journalism “scene” in Irak is a fascinating one. When Saddam’s regime fell a slew of papers started. Most to be frank were dreadful and very badly written (as in grammar etc) and deserved to go under. But the ones that have survived divide into party rags and fiercely indedpendent very good papers. One of my favourites (Diyala Today) stopped printing a few weeks back. A great loss.
Incidentally Amar Al Hakim’s bodyguards beat the living daylights out of some journalists today in Karbala.
In that case I don’t understand your question. I thought you asked why they don’t rely on Iraqi reporters.
I wonder, though, about “the public preferring” gossip. A different crowd shows up for a circus, and I don’t doubt that crowd swelled the news audience. Unfortunately, the decision to focus on circus acts is very discouraging to people who aren’t interested in them.
Isn’t it, to some extent, blaming the victim to say that consumers aren’t interested in good reporting? People who only tune in for Brittney news probably aren’t. It’s a bit hard on the rest of us to say we aren’t either.
We’re not the ones who decide what gets covered.
AAR, I wonder who’s telling people who are half a world away from their readers/viewers/listeners that no-one cares about a war soldiers and innocent civilians are dying in, and what reason they have for saying so.
Perhaps the situation is a matter of philosophical divergence revolving around freedom of the press and imbeddedness. If the government can get away with imbedded reporters abroad, what then are the ramifications?
My sense is that we are in a strange almost spooky moment of relative quiet there, and nobody can be sure which way its going. The statistics that show declining deaths of both Iraqis and Americans are solid, real. One reason is because some Sunni tribal leaders seem to have decided that the Al Qeda terrorists are a bigger problem for them than the U.S. invasion. Another is that the Shiite leaders seem to have called a truce, at least temporarily. And the surge has put more boots on the ground. How long this will last I don’t think anyone knows. Some fear it’s temporary. I hope not.
Mike – did any of the reporters speak about the situation of Bilal Hussein and his jailing?
Another question for Mike: Is it your sense that reporting in Iraq has made American reporters feel more American–more like Americans first, journalists second–or has it reinforced the feeling of being journalists and a transnational class of observers?
A real challenge for journalists is to make interesting what is significant. To try to make it compelling. One of the things doing this book persuaded me is that we should loosen the reins on journalists who have earned the right to speak more freely, and let them do so. Many of these reporrters have spent years in Iraq, and they are experts. When they speak in this more relaxed manner, we learn more. Why not let them write and report that way? I don’t want a lot of loose opinion, really, but when you have earned authority, I think you should use it.
Why not loosen the reins on reporters?
I’m guessing the answer is quite simple, and it involved editors giving up at least a part of their control. Good editors can do that — and likely already do do that; insecure/mediocre editors, on the other hand, would see that as a threat to their own power.
Jay,
A good question. People are who they are. And I think that who you are is gong to inform your reporting, no matter what. If you are American, it is hard to be not American. But at the same time, if you are a good journalist you are going to try to see the world from a variety of perspectives and to try to see things the way others see them, and try to incorporte that into your work. In other words, to try to see the world as a citizen of it. And secondly, your job is not to report for American authorities, but to the public, to be a truly independent witness.
Please excuse Americans and our limited understanding of history. We tend to think every country begins at chapter 39. We do the same with Iran, the Palestinians and certainly Iraq. Ignore the previous 38 chapters and it’s amazing how one’s observation changes. We do the same thing with China, Indonesia, East Timor to mention a few.
Well, I’d certainly prefer that what they know not be edited out of their stories. Online diaries would be good too.
It’s kind of sad to watch compelling writing migrating to monthlies and radio while dailies and TV concentrate on the cute story of the day.
Some truth to that, Peterr.
Good point – yet it’s quite interesting to see how many times many of the reporters talk about the criticism they faced … there’s a bit more sensitivity there than I expected to see. One thing we probably need to do is be more clearly supportive of the reporters who do seriously try to be “truly independent witnesses.”
You are competing with….everything. So you have to make it compelling. And I agree that not editing the reporter out of the story would help.
We’re nearing the end of the official Book Salon time – as always folks are welcome to keep the conversation going as long as they like but I wanted to thank Mike for his time with us today and for Reporting Iraq. It’s a very good book and one that folks really should read for both a better understanding of Iraq and a better understanding of journalism.
Mike, Thank you for coming to the Lake and sharing.
Thank you Mike, and also Jay.
And as always, thank you Siun!
Thanks for coming, and also for all the efforts of CJR to bring out these voices.
Reporters definitely felt the pressure, the “good news” pressure. We have a chapter on that as well. Especially in the Bremer era. The reporters describe press conferences that contantly embarked from reality, that were essentially propaganda aimed back home. And of course, there was a whole strain of argument that reporters were simply unpatriotic, biased, liberal, etc. It would have been better for all of us if Bremer and company had listened to the reporters who were reporting the troubles that they saw with their eyes, rather than try to hammer them into submission.
Thanks to all of you. I appreciate the chance to converse. And I will check back in a little later to see if folks still want to talk a little.
Mike – Bremer certainly did not make a good impression on the reporters, eh? the accounts of the CPA press conferences are great.
My reply to that is learn history fast or be doomed to go down into a very nasty quicksand and fast too :-)
WRT to peterr – I think a lot of it has to do with how astonishingly concentrated your media is and as nothing is more cowardly than big money — editors don’t want to upset the advertisers.
Re:
I will respectfully disagree with you. A large measure of the current “peace” in Iraq has been bought with U.S. taxpayer money flowing into the hands of warlords and tribal elders who, among the Sunnis, are labeled the “Iraqi Awakening”. To be completely cynical about this, what has happened in the past year, starting in Anbar and now spreading into Baghdad and elsewhere is that the U.S. military has offered to pay a higher price than the Resistance for the foot-soldiers who would put out IEDs, wear suicide bomb kits or act as snipers. The cover story, that the Awakening has “seen the light” and is not ideologically opposed to AQI, al Qaeda-in-Iraq is simply a fabrication that Washington hopes to sell to the American public.
Recall that a cynical George Bush told his “base” at the Gridiron Club in 2001 that the way to win elections was that “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the onese to concentrate on”.
Let’s not fool each other here. Bush & Co. can ramp up the violence in Iraq in an instant. And they will do so when and as they see a political or economic advantage to do so.
A surprisingly large amount of the fighting that has occurred over the past 5 years has been based on the simple expedient that the Resistance has offered to pay men who were displaced from the Iraqi military or other stable work situations.
So the situation is completely in the hands of the decision makers in Washington as to whether and for how long they intend to continue to bribe the Iraqi resistance and keep the peace. You and I will only know after the fact when a new decision is made.
In the meantime, the permanent bases continue to be constructed, and the oil continues to flow.
And quiet flows the cash.
RayDuray – I think you underestimate the strenght of simple nationalism in the resistance (I’d highly recommend viewing Meeting Resistance btw) and the decimation of Iraqi neighborhoods that has occured. Ethnic cleansing does decrease violence in a way over time … sadly.
Sorry to miss this interesting salon. I’d like to note that Irak lost another journalist just yesterday: Ali Shefeya of Alive in Baghdad. His father and brothers were killed earlier: only his mother and sister, now in Syria, survive. Contributions are being requested by the staff at Alive in Baghdad to help defray funeral expenses and support the family:
Thank you Siun
(hi Dubhaltach!)
I appreciate that reporters are between a rock and a hard place, with the support they’re getting from news organizations decreasing and 24-hour cable news to compete with.
I just wonder to what extent the decision to not challenge readers is a response to the dwindling of newspaper circulation and to what extent it’s a cause. It seems to have been driven at least partly by factors that had little to do with what readers are looking for and more to do with media consolidation and profit targets.
Anyway, thanks for your answers. I read CJR religiously online.
Laura – thank you. What sad news … damn.
Bother. Here’s the link to Alive in Baghdad
A rhetorical question. The second in command in Iraq is Ray Odierno. Odierno is an idiot. The surge is almost a year old and political reconciliation has gone nowhere or backwards during that time. What’s up with that, Ray? The factor that the Bush Administration and its generals don’t get is that talk about civil war was not just talk. The civil war is still there. It remains unresolved. As I have said before talking about political reconciliaton in the middle of our own Civil War would make as much sense. The Iraqi civil war has to be resolved before any reconciliation is possible. Odierno is way too dim to key in on this.
Hi Laura :-)
Siun,
Re:
In my DVD activism I’ve included a 15 minute “Message from the Iraqi Resistance” as a second feature on discs I was freely distributing of “Iraq For Sale”. (Yes, I did check with Robt. Greenwald and its fine with him.)
The short film that I appended was essentially a snuff film, showing Hummers, Bradley vehicles and Abrams tanks getting destroyed by I.E.D.s and lots of images of American soldiers getting shot by sniper fire. The musical score was militant, as was the message which was clearly being delivered by an Iraqi resistance fighter. This film was essentially showing what the war meant to our enemies, and there is no way in the world that anyone could watch this film and believe that the insurgency was going to end any time soon.
Generally, war/occupation planners figure on a period of 8-10 years before an initial insurgency burns itself out. Imperial Britain had a lot of experience with this in India and on the African continent. Heck, even our own insurgency lasted from 1775 to 1783, a period of 8 years. (speaking as a provincial of the American Empire)
So I do not discount nationalism at all. In fact, I’m certain it is the key driver of the resistance in Iraq. But the point I was trying to make is that the current lull in the fighting is really a matter of Washington deciding to do in Iraq exactly what was done in Afghanistan starting in October, 2002. That is to say, what we did then and what we are doing today is to deliver suitcases stuffed full of Franklins ($100 bills) into the hands of the very same people who were our enemies a year ago. Eventually things will change. But we have reached a point of accomodation. As long as you and I are willing to be the chumps in this racket, we’ll continue to pay the warlords, pay Blackwater and pay for our bloated military, all the while postponing the pain by imposing on our grandkids. As long as George Bush can sell this slop to the American public oil corporation will continue to have record profits, ditto for the military contractors and instead of creating an economy in Iraq to employ Iraqis, we’ll continue to provide the able-bodied fighters there with the welfare people can no longer get in the U.S.
Call it the ‘Milo Minderbinder effect’ on steroids.
Thanks for doing this and ably guiding it, Siun.
Some comments occasioned by this thread.
I think on the whole the journalists on the ground in Iraq have done a great job and deserve a lot of applause, and thanks, and credit for what they accomplished under brutal and dangerous conditions. The news organizations that have kept fully staffed teams in Iraq, at great expense, deserve a lot of credit too.
It’s the reporting on the Bush Administration and its politics at home, especially in launching, explaining, defending and describing the war, that the press has fallen down. Mike’s example of Bremmer and the unreality of what he was saying, compared to what the reporters were seeing, touched on it a little.
I’d love to see a book interviewing the reporters who covered the Bush wars at home.
Thank you Jay – it would be very valuable to see the companion volumn on the war at home!
Julia,
This is a central question for journalists now. As you put it:
“I just wonder to what extent the decision to not challenge readers is a response to the dwindling of newspaper circulation and to what extent it’s a cause.”
In a way, it’s the question of our time.
Some of the most important reporting from Iraq has been done by John Burns and Michael Gordon at the NYT, and both pretty much backed the Bush line.
Maybe we’ll do one. Good idea.
Words fail me.
Dubhaltach
Julia,
one thought — thanks for reading CJR “religiously” online. But consider a print subscription too?. You get more and you help us continue to do what we do, online and in print.
I guess I should, shouldn’t I, and be part of the solution…
“Some of the most important reporting from Iraq has been done by John Burns and Michael Gordon at the NYT, and both pretty much backed the Bush line.”
I think that is true for Gordon, who in my view is guilty of journalistic malpractice under Bush. It’s amazing to me that he still works there. Burns is more complicated and I don’t think it’s correct to say he backed the Bush line. He did however think the war was justified. I’m sure he would say it was appallingly conducted, as well. Which is not the Bush line.
Mike: if you do the book with reporters who have covered Bush and the political “wars” he and his crowd fought at home, I think you would have a much harder time getting candor and perspective from the journalists involved. I don’t believe the press is even close to confronting its multiple failures in domestic reporting.
Indeed, it intends to move on without ever staging that confrontation, thinking the subject well chewed over by now. When in fact, like steroids in baseball, the accounting hasn’t even begun. Thus, a much harder book.
Burns after a certain amount of handwringing invariably ended by saying that we had to stay in Iraq. For me that is the Bush line, Bush’s bottomline. The same could be said of Ricks.
Gordon certainly irritates because of his sycophancy and stenography, but I found it equally aggravating for reporters like Burns and Ricks to lay out everything that wasn’t working in Iraq and then to conclude lamely that was why we needed to stay. Somehow I don’t think that qualifies as great reporting to define a quagmire and then opine that the thing to do is stay in it.