February 10, 2006
As the "coalition forces" lurch toward the third anniversary of
the Bush administration’s ill-fated March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the
members of the media stand poised to embark on yet another round of
navel-gazing over their role in first helping to enable, and later make
sense of, this senseless war – a war that has proven as dangerous to
journalists as anyone else.
We began January with the Christian Science Monitor’s
Jill Carroll being abducted – and her translator killed – on a Baghdad
street, and ended the month with ABC’s Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug
Vogt being seriously injured in a bombing near the capital. In all, the
Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 61 journalists have been killed in Iraq
since March 2003 – 42 of whom, lest we forget, were Iraqi. In addition,
23 "media workers" have also lost their lives, bringing the total up to
84. That’s a rate of more than two a month since the start of the war.
One reason this astounding casualty rate may have been left off the
front pages here in the States (aside from the Woodruff/Carroll
tragedies) is most likely reflected in the ethnic breakdown seen above:
the majority of those killed have been Iraqis. And if you peruse the "media workers" list,
which consists of translators, drivers, fixers, and other media support
personnel, you’ll find that it is made up solely of Iraqis or Arabs. It
brings to mind the National Review Online's
John Derbyshire, who recently wrote that after seeing a headline about
the Egyptian ship that sank in the Red Sea, "A couple of sentences in,
I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians.
I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don't care about
Egyptians."
But if we didn’t already know of the dangers reporters in Iraq face,
the stream of editorials and first-hand accounts from reporters over
the past month have driven the lesson home. Hidden beneath this public
lament is another sobering fact: While the danger for reporters
increases day-by-day, many western news organizations have been
downsizing their staffs in Iraq due to the astronomical costs
associated with keeping a full staff in country for such an extended
period of time. With such a withdrawal, it stands to reason that the
daily coverage of the nuts and bolts of the war on the ground would
suffer – which is what the Columbia Journalism Review found when it sent a reporter to Baghdad last month to cover the coverage.
In late January, Paul McLeary (who used to co-author this column
with me before being hired by CJR), wrote that "from the anecdotal
evidence I collected [while in Baghdad] it's clear that news
organizations have scaled back so much that there are fewer and fewer
reporters to go out on embeds with the military. As a result, everyday
stories…are being lost."
Obviously, stories are still coming out of Iraq, but as more
reporters leave, as they did en masse after the November 2005 bombing
of the al-Hamra Hotel in Baghdad (one of the most popular among western
reporters), the quantity of the coverage has decreased. Paul wrote,
"the fact is that the grinding, day-to-day reality of the war is
essentially being forgotten…. With a dwindling number of people
assigned to cover the war, there is only so much that can be done,
resulting in coverage restricted to the 'big’ stories, while many of
the small, daily victories and defeats go unnoticed. And in that, the
enormity of the story itself gets diminished."
We’ve seen this pattern of waning concern and mounting indifference before, and as Nicholas Kristoff has been hammering home for months now in the New York Times,
we’re seeing the unwillingness of news organizations to commit their
people to dangerous situations showing up in the dearth of coverage of
the genocide in Darfur.
So, while we dwell on the danger reporters face in Iraq, we run the
risk of ignoring the fact that there are fewer and fewer reporters
present to cover the story. As a result, it slips further from the
headlines, and from our collective consciousness. As David Axe recently wrote in Salon,
the reporters who remain in Iraq are increasingly constrained by both
the danger and cost of extremely expensive security measures, which
have "sharply limited their ability (and in some cases their
willingness) to move around and provide accurate, comprehensive
coverage of Iraq…. The remaining handful of non-embedded reporters in
Baghdad are mostly holed up in a few besieged hotels, which, according
to one source, are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups.
Western reporters rarely venture out of the heavily fortified Green
Zone, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research
stories."
But as McLeary discovered, Axe is wrong to stoke the myth that
reporters are all taking refuge in the Green Zone, when in reality only
a few news organizations make their home there. Some of the biggest,
like Time, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,
NBC, CBS, the AP and Knight Ridder are all out in Baghdad itself, well
removed from the protective embrace of the American military.
But it hardly matters where a reporter lives if confined, for
reasons of security, to a hotel room. As for the dwindling number of
journalists actually living in those hotels and compounds, try as they
might, their corporate bosses aren’t giving them enough staff to cover
all the dimensions of the story. "[I]f news organizations won't invest
the money and manpower to cover it from top to bottom," McLeary wrote,
"it will end up becoming a story told only through its major disasters
and victories, without many of the small, personal narratives and
struggles that give the story its humanity." And without that, there
really isn’t much of a story to tell, at all.