Marvin Kalb Hosts Panel On Reporting From Iraq
A respectable crowd of college students and other spectators gathered Thursday in a lecture hall at George Washington University for “Reporting From Iraq: The View from the Ground Up,” a panel moderated by Marvin Kalb. Panel participants included Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post; Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent of The New York Times; Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and
Josh Rushing, military and current affairs correspondent for Al Jazeera English. The panel was co-hosted by Stephen Hess, Distinguished Research Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
Full story after the jump.
Hess began by expressing his belief that being a journalist in Iraq was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and lamented that Western journalists were unprepared to deal with Iraqi culture. Likewise, Iraqi journalists aren’t always skilled in Western journalism.
After a brief introduction, Rosenstiel reported the findings of a survey conducted by his organization. Taken by 111 journalists from 29 organizations in Iraq, the survey, Rosenstiel explained, was not merely intended to do content analysis of coverage of and from Iraq, but to find out what limitations there were for such coverage. There were scattered snickers in the audience when Rosentiel mentioned that Fox News chose not to participate in the survey.
According to the survey, an overwhelming 87 percent of respondents believed that Iraq was too dangerous to travel. More than half thought Baghdad itself was too dangerous. Some 57 percent had experienced a killing or kidnapping of a staff member in the last year. 44 percent of respondents reported that they don’t feel that they cover the domestic side of Iraq well enough, but most felt that they covered military issues well. Only 30 percent were concerned about the embedding restrictions of the U.S. military. Despite their reservations, 70 percent believed that their picture of Iraq was accurate.
When it came to the actual coverage from Iraq, Rosenstiel reported that 50 percent of stories were about events such as attacks. Such stories, however, only made up only about a quarter of total news coverage, meaning such stories were often short and lacking in depth. Conversely, only three percent of stories were about Iraqis.
Even though 86 percent of stories about Iraq’s future were pessimistic, Rosenstiel reported that the press was not anti-Bush or anti-military “in any way that we could measure.”
Each of the panelists agreed to varying degrees that the survey was in line with what they had experienced or heard from colleagues. Chandrasekaran pointed out that coverage has changed with the recent increase in security, as well as because of the recent shift in the U.S. to domestic politics. He also explained that journalists in Iraq get no special status when it comes to their safety — if anything, it made them more likely to be targeted. “Targets first, journalists second, third or even fourth,” he said.
“How do you know how good an Iraqi journalist is?” Marvin Kalb asked of Michael Gordon.
“That’s almost a patronizing question,” Gordon replied. “It’s their country. They speak the language. You work with them,” he said. “How do you know how good a Western journalist is?” he asked semi-indignantly.
Josh Rushing went on to explain that his organization, Al Jazeera English, tries to get locals to be “Western” journalists, rather than vice versa. It provides a different dynamic with the local population, he said. He also explained that television coverage of the situation in Iraq is becoming difficult because the story isn’t changing much day to day, so editors are moving on to other stories. Rosenstiel interjected that such coverage is also difficult because some journalists can’t be seen with a notebook, much less a news camera.
The question was then posed to the panel, “What is not being covered in Iraq?”
Chandrasekaran said he would like to see a better picture of the fundamental change in Baghdad. Before, he said, Sunnis and Shia lived side by side. Now, however, the city is much more divided along religious and ethnic lines.
Gordon would like to point out how the presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle staked out positions on the surge before the strategy had played out, and how the candidates now seem to cling to those positions regardless of the facts on the ground.
Rushing warned against unintended consequences from the surge. He recalled an exchange he had with a local Sheik from the now-infamous town of Abu Ghraib. After asking the Sheik how he felt about a U.S. withdrawal, the Sheik — who, months before had been fighting against the very forces with whom he was now working — said that the U.S. presence was protecting the Sunnis against the Maliki government and Iran, apparently equating the two. The increased security, therefore, could be serving as an opportunity for Sunnis to arm and organize for what Rushing called a civil war with actual “unit on unit” fighting.
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