Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Damien Cave wrote an article for The New York Times on Aug. 26, 2007, Hear a General, Hug a Sheik: Congress Does the Iraq Circuit. They’re getting warmer but still have a lot of work to do. Hope they keep it up.
All you see among the talking heads is that another soldier was killed today. It must be taken into perspective. How many people were killed in Washington, D.C., at the same time? — Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., criticizing media coverage of Iraq after his visit there when rockets damaged an American-occupied hotel in Baghdad (Bucks County Courier Times, Sept. 29, 2003).
Perspective?
According to this chart, Washington, D.C., had about 250 murders in 2003. That’s 4.8 people killed every week.
In 2003 in Iraq:
That’s 12,930 people who died in Iraq, or 248 a week, the equivalent of people killed in D.C. in the entire year. What exactly was his point anyway? When just “another soldier was killed today,” what does he want the “talking heads” to report?
Maybe someone who works for the Ministry of Truth government can answer that.
Susan Phalen is a senior adviser for Iraq communications for the U.S. Department of Stateand oversees the Global Outreach Team for the U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Section. She has been to Iraq nine times as a public-affairs team leader. Phalen spoke Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., at a luncheon held by the Conservative Women’s Network of the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute. The speech aired on C-SPAN. (I can’t get the video link to work, but maybe it will show up in the archives.)
She talked about “what’s happening in Iraq that you’re not getting from the media.” She described her work as “fun” several times.
In an interview published April 9, 2007, in the Omaha World-Herald, Phalen said:
Our goal is to try to show the American taxpayers what’s happening over here and what the story is beyond the bloodshed and the car bombs.
Almost in the same breath, she described living in the Green Zone where “rockets and mortars sometimes fly inside and explode.” She said that a rocket recently blew up just outside of a building where she was, killing several people and wounding several others.
Those of us on the inside tried to rush back out because we could hear screaming. But we couldn’t get out. They locked the building down. It was a very intense and emotional little while.
Yeah, sounds like fun! to me.
In an interview published April 26, 2007, by the Lincoln Journal-Star, the story Phalen told went “beyond the blood and the bombs” to the “good news” of Iraq. On this particular day, she visited the Army hospital in the Green Zone and found six children:
Hold on. I just lost my train of thought there for a second. Someone help me out here (because the reporter certainly didn’t). What was the “good news” part of this story again?
Back to her luncheon speech, Phalen criticized journalists for not leaving Baghdad to cover the rest of Iraq, which she does regularly, under full security by the U.S. military. They’re missing out on some good stories, she said.
Sigh. Tsk, tsk. Those journalists. They just don’t know how to have fun!
Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi was removed from Iraq for a “scheduled vacation” after she described an unfun Iraq in an e-mail to family and friends in 2004. It leaked and made the rounds in cyberspace. She wrote a diary for Columbia Journalism Review, eventually returned from vacation (newly assigned to Lebanon) and wrote an article about Iraq in 2006.
Sig Christenson, a military writer for the San Antonio Express-News, was in Baghdad the day Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., toured a Baghdad market in April 2007, declared it fun! and then later complained in the Washington Post about how journalists reported only bad news. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said the Baghdad market was just like a normal outdoor market back home in Indiana.
Christenson called bullshit in an Aug. 6, 2007, article on Nieman Watchdog. He said nothing in Iraq is normal, except death:
You can’t put lipstick on this little pig and pass it off as life in Indiana.
Yeah, but is it fun?
Metro section, page 1 (above the fold, 4-column photograph)
Local soldier, killed in Iraq, comes home (photo credit: Chris Urso/Tribune).
Page 1
Teaser to metro front-page article about soldier.
…
The St. Petersburg Times covered the story, and it has a section called “Our Casualties of War.” A local television station also covered the story.
…
Well done.
The Wall Street Journal published “General Petraeus Needs Time,” a commentary by Peter Wehner, deputy assistant to the U.S. president and director of strategic initiatives, today. In the article, Wehner wonders why “some critics of the war are unwilling to hear good news of any sort” coming from Iraq.
Yeah, everyone is tired of the war, he says, which has been full of mistakes, misjudgments and 3,600 deaths of American troops. But, hey, that’s the nature of war, he says. Besides, Baghdad is returning to normal, he argues, with “soccer leagues, amusement parks and vibrant market places.”
To emphasize that point, the above photograph of a soccer fan celebrating Iraq’s win over Vietnam in the Asian Cup on July 21, ran with the article. (Photo credit: AP/Khalid Mohammed)
But what about the celebrations of Iraq’s win over South Korea on July 25? The ones that turned tragic with two suicide bombings that killed 50 people and injured 130 in Baghdad?
I guess running a photograph of that might have messed up the whole point of the article.
Update: In other news, Iraqi leaders apparently don’t want to give Petraeus more time, and the prime minister has asked George W. Bush to remove the general.
A national newspaper in Norway ran this photograph of a flag-draped coffin of a Norwegian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. This is how the newspaper covered it on the Norwegian pages.
This has not yet been mentioned in U.S. newspapers.
Local Marine, 25, shot and killed … in his hometown.
I am not saying this story does not belong on the front page. As I said before, though, I wonder what is behind the decisions about story placement. Did someone from the newspaper attend the funeral, which was held this morning? Will they run that on the front page tomorrow? With a flag-draped coffin? Would that be OK because he did not die in Iraq?
In other news, a Florida soldier who died in Afghanistan was mentioned in an Associated Press brief on page 11.
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Metro section, page 4
Local soldier, 20, dies in Iraq.
Metro front page
Page 1
Nothing but teasers
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradition in terms.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor of Journalism
Discuss.
Television news reporter Amy Jacobson lost her job at Chicago’s WMAQ-Channel 5 this week after another news station released a video of her in a swimsuit at the home of Craig Stebic, the subject of a news story Jacobson was working on. Stebic’s wife, 37-year-old Lisa Stebic, has been missing since April 30, and Stebic has been named a “person of interest” in the case.
Jacobson said she was invited to Stebic’s house to discuss the case on her day off. She was on her way to take her children, ages 2 and 3, swimming. After checking with her husband and her managers at the station, she and her children went swimming at Stebic’s home. WBBM-Channel 2 (another Chicago station) videotaped the visit from a neighbor’s house.
“My kids were in the car with me,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday. “It was a way for me to do my work and have fun with my kids. I never get to see them. I’m always working.”
Jacobson was reportedly fired for getting too close to the story or for briefing police on her interactions with Stebic without telling her bosses, depending on who you ask. People have been weighing in on the issue, including some journalism professors, who were asked, “Did she step over the line?” Here’s what they said:
While it is true that many journalists have friendships — often unwise friendships — the magnitude of this case, where there is a missing-person investigation, possibly a homicide investigation, is not the same as somebody who is covering the Knights of Columbus or the local Big Brothers. In this case, where it’s a missing-person investigation of this magnitude, any kind of friendship with someone involved in the story seems exceptionally unwise. — Bob Steele, Nelson Poynter scholar of journalism at the Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, Fla.
You just don’t do that. [The reporter] may be thinking she may get better material by getting close to these people … but you just don’t become part of their family, you don’t become their friend and you don’t go swimming in their pool. You don’t become part of the story — it’s unprofessional. — Joe Saltzman, journalism professor, University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications
If getting into a bathing suit is covering the story, I guess that might be OK. She has to weigh the information she is going to get against questions that will be raised [by those] who see her behavior. I don’t know the value of the information she might get for her story. — Felix Gutierrez, journalism professor, USC
What do you think?
My newspaper published an article about a local soldier’s funeral (sans flag-draped coffin) on the front page … of the metro section.
What was on the front front page?
1) An article about the cost of copper.
2) The presidential race.
3) A Washington Post article about security.
4) A Los Angeles Times article about Lady Bird Johnson.
5) Teasers to the life and sports sections.
Thirty U.S. troops have died so far this month, yet this is the only article written in-house. The newspaper ran an Associated Press article about a sailor from the other side of the state, and numbers of deaths may or may not be mentioned in wire stories picked up about “incidents” in Iraq.
