Note to readers
Continuing to go through the notebook. Added new posts on the Information Trust, photography during the war, and former diplomat Joseph Wilson's remarks. It was a very, very full agenda.
Author Phillip Knightley has graciously provided the full text of his speech. I'll add that in its entirety at some point.
Confidential sources, access under attack
The Homeland Security Act and several legal cases now in the courts could negatively affect journalists' access to information, as well as their ability to protect confidential sources, according to Scott Armstrong of the Information Trust.
Section 892 of the Home Security Act says sensitive, unclassified information needed in the war against terror will be handed out to local law enforcement agencies, Armstrong said. That means more than 4 million people, from county sheriffs to local police to mayors and city councils may have to sign federal non-disclosure agreements.
That also means those same local officials could use the excuse of federal security to stonewall legitimate news investigations into corruption and incompetence, Armstrong said. Reporters asking tough questions about ghost employees on a sheriff's payroll, or lax security at a nuclear plant, could be rebuffed under a vague veil of official secrecy.
Almost a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, in October 2000, both houses of Congress passed an official secrets act, but President Clinton signed a hastily written veto, Armstrong said.
The case of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos nuclear scientist fired from his job and held in solitary confinement for allegedly spying for China, continues to loom over the journalism world. Lee is suing the U.S. Energy Department and the FBI for leaking details of the investigation to the press. Several news organizations are defying a federal judge's order to reveal their sources and reporters face the prospect of going to jail for that defiance. Armstrong said under the law, Lee can only win the case if he can prove the executive branch was the source of the leaks.
"(The government) investigated him through every orifice you can think of, and invented a few new ones," Armstrong said. "We may lose a lot of ground. (The press) got it wrong in the Wen Ho Lee case, but the answer isn't to lose the ability to protect a confidential source."
Two grand juries in Washington, D.C. are pursuing separate investigations of leaks to the press, Armstrong said. The first deals with information that intelligence intercepts received on Sept. 10, 2001 were not translated until Sept. 12. The second is about who gave the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, to the media after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, criticized the Bush administration about the Iraq war. The outcome of the cases may be more pressure on both officials and the journalists who talk to them.
Armstrong noted the example of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which caved to pressure after a series critical of Chiquita and gave up the name of a confidential source at the company.
"It's going to change our daily journalism principle of protecting our sources," Armstrong said. "I'd still refuse and go to jail, but it's not going to be fun, and it's going to (dry up) sources."
World view: Al Jazeera
Maher Abdallah Ahmad, a correspondent for the Arab television network Al Jazeera, contends a thirst for revenge after the Sept. 11 attacks was the main reason for the Iraq war, even if there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved.
The Bush administration needed to cover up for its failure to capture Osama bin Laden and divert attention from the faltering American economy, he said, and the American media went along.
"You pumped up the public so much, you had to do something," Ahmad said. "Saddam was the obvious idiot."
American journalists stationed at coalition headquarters in Qatar during the war often relied on Al Jazeera to get the alternative viewpoint. The network came under heavy criticism for its graphic footage, but Ahmad called this "pure racism." People didn't like to see Americans bleeding, but didn't complain about images of dead or humiliated Iraqis, he said.
A year after the war, no one knows how many Iraqis died, Ahmad pointed out later in an evening panel. "You make all these efforts to establish a democracy, and you don't give a damn how many people were killed?"
World view: Al-Ahram
Al-Ahram Weekly, a Cairo-based newspaper, has no love for Saddam Hussein or any other tyrants, said managing editor Hani Shukrallah.
But the Bush administration's argument that Iraq was a threat to the rest of the world struck him as "something from an alternative universe."
His newspaper didn't take part in the war against Islam argument raging in the Arab world, nor does it believe oil motivated the invasion, Shukrallah said. "It was clearly a plan to consolidate imperial power."
World view: A British perspective
U.S. journalists weren't the only ones torn between hawks and doves in their own country, or to run afoul of patriotic fervor. The British Broadcasting Corporation was pressured about its coverage early on by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, said Richard Sambrook, director of BBC News.
British public opinion on the war was split about down the middle, Sambrook said. The opposition was extremely well-organized. Antagonism to the BBC was "hard wired" on Downing Street. The relationship plummeted following the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, who had been a BBC source for the claim that the government exaggerated intelligence about Iraqi weapons.
"When the nation is divided, the BBC is on the rack," he said. "That's where we've been for the past year."
Europe didn't feel itself to be at war after Sept. 11 and didn't buy the argument that Iraq was somehow linked to world terror, Sambrook said. Britain also has a different media culture that sees its role to relentlessly challenge power. That manifested itself when a BBC reporter grilled U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, adopting what the reporter viewed as a normal tone when interviewing government officials back home. They heard afterwards that Rumsfeld's advisers were "shocked" by the BBC's treatment and had no intention of granting further access.
"We were told to forget it ... we were radioactive," Sambrook said. "We were in Guantanamo, so to speak."
World view: A French perspective
It was easier objectively for French and other European journalists to cover Iraq because it wasn't their war and they didn't have to take patriotism into account, said Patrice Claude, foreign correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde.
Claude was too busy reporting on the war from Baghdad to know what the American press was writing, he said. But virtually no one in Europe believed that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
To Claude, the real war started when Saddam's statue was toppled. The day that photo opportunity happened, he walked through the streets of Baghdad, talking to Iraqis watching with anger as tanks rolled through their city. They told him they had no trust in the American enterprise. They compared themselves to the Palestinians and said they would never accept a long-term occupation. There's a widespread belief that America is waging a war on Islam.
"To me, the statue exposed the lie that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans," Claude said.
"For most of 800 million Muslims around the world, American might is associated with the oppression of the Palestinian people," he added later.
World view: An Italian perspective
On the night of the recent train bombings in Madrid, Federico Rampini, of Italy's La Republica newspaper, was surprised to see CNN run the official White House reaction as one of its first stories. He saw it as the opening salvo in a pattern of framing the news through the viewpoint of the American government and dismissing what the rest of the world thinks.
"To me, this was a strange way to prioritize news," Rampini said.
The American coverage, spurred by neo-conservatives, characterized Spaniards as cowards and appeasers of terrorists for turning out the ruling government in the ensuing election, accusing Spain of "striking a separate peace with al-Qaida," Rampini said. They missed the point that left- and right-wing politicans marched together in Madrid after the bombings, and that a greater United Nations role in the Iraq occupation might actually result in more European troops stationed in that country, he added.
In November, when 16 Italian soldiers were killed in Nasiriyah, the U.S. media didn't investigate very deeply, he said. His newspaper found the attackers came not from the so-called Sunni Triangle — the hotbed of much of the Iraqi unrest — but from a border area with Saudi Arabia — America's staunchest ally in the region.
Rampini said there's a deep difference between U.S. newspaper and television coverage of the war. The major networks and CNN dominate market share, crowding out excellent reporting by other news organizations. He also noted the "balkanization" of American media, with viewers choosing from an ala carte menu of media outlets that conform to their own opinions or prejudices.
"Your television is really terrible," he said. "Zipping around, it's hard to find any credible coverage of Iraq, or any world news."
He's amazed that Americans haven't dug deeper into Vice President Dick Cheney's role in the Halliburton scandal. Even in Italy, a country with a long history of corruption and conflicts of interest, such a story "would have been on the front page for months," he said.
World view: An Asian perspective
Few Asian reporters were accredited for the Iraq war, and most of the coverage in Asia consisted of stories from Western television and wire services, said Nayan Chandra, editor of YaleGlobal Online and former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
The dominant Asian opinion is that the war was illegitimate, fought for oil and world domination, Chandra said.
News approaches varied by country, Chandra said. Japan showed sanitized broadcasts from CNN and the BBC, showing a squeamishness about images of war. China, while reluctant to openly oppose the war in the United Nations and jeopardize U.S. trade relations, nevertheless focused on the death and suffering of the Iraqi people and compared the conflict to Germany invading Russia in World War II or Japan bombing Pearl Harbor.
Indonesia, a predominently Islamic country, was the only nation to broadcast Al-Jazeera on a regular basis, Chandra said. That included pictures of a Muslim woman digging a grave for her relatives with her bare hands.
"That, for them, was a more iconic image of the war than the Saddam statue coming down," he said.
Embedding in the classical sense
Embedding reporters with the military really isn't a new concept, according to Victor Davis Hanson, author of "Ripples of Battle" and "Between War and Peace." Reporters always have had to operate on one side or another when covering a war.
Alexander the Great brought scribes on his campaigns to report on what he was doing and even killed one who didn't send back a favorable report, Hanson said. Thucydides, an Athenian who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece, wrote that he had no way of getting accurate information from the Spartan side because of tight censorship by the Spartan military leadership.
"All military history of the classical world was in some sense the product of embedded reporters," Hanson said.
Some of the issues faced by those ancient writers continue to this day, Hanson said. Some developed a bias or affinity for the side they were writing about.
The concept of bad press existed back then too, he said. The First and Second Punic wars between Rome and Carthage, while bloody, were generally viewed by contemporary writers as human events within the context of the times, Hanson said. But the Third Punic War — when Rome razed Carthage, slaughtered its inhabitants and salted the surrounding earth — was generally viewed as a horrible thing.
No more heroes?
Is there such a thing as an independent war correspondent any more? Phillip Knightley doesn't think so.
Knightley is the author of a seminal book on war reporting entitled "The First Casualty: The War Correspondent As Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo." His remarks at the seminar came on the 150th anniversary of the day the first modern war correspondent, William Howard Russell, took to the field to report on the British Army's operations in the Crimean War.
Until Russell, throughout history, generals had generally reported their own wars and controlled the flow of information from the battlefield. The notion of a civilian observer filing independent, critical reports was an alien concept to military officers. Whose side was Russell on, they asked?
Shortly afterwards, the Civil War turned America into a nation of newspaper readers, Knightley said. The advent of the telegraph allowed citizens to read yesterday's news, instead of last week's. Unfortunately, he said, "newspaper journalism was not up to the task."
The 20th century saw the military clamp extreme controls and censorship on war reporters, with the exception of Vietnam — the military to this day thinks public opinion cost it the Vietnam war, Knightley said. Subsequently, information was tightly controlled and access to the battlefield nonexistent in Grenada, Panama and the 1990 Gulf War.
While Iraq was the "best reported war in the history of the world," Knightley questions whether correspondents have enough freedom to paint an accurate picture for readers. Embedded reporters are married to their units, unable to move independently. So-called "unilateral" reporters working on their own face great risks — 17 killed at last count, he said. The unilaterals also don't have access to military decision makers and plans unless they sign agreements to play by the military's rules.
"Given the increased danger, greater manipulation and control by government, the fact that the military may no longer need them and the new emphasis on seeing the war through the eyes of soldiers, the age of the war correspondent as hero is clearly over," Knightley said.
"Whether they wish to continue as propagandists and myth makers and ply their craft subservient to those who wage wars is a decision they will need to take for themselves."
Former diplomat blasts Bush, war
Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former U.S. diplomat in Iraq, gave a keynote address to a packed house (see "Arabs will blame U.S. 'forever' if Iraq falls apart, critic says").
This is the same Joseph Wilson whose wife, Valerie Plame, was publicly revealed as a CIA operative, allegedly in retaliation for his public criticism of the Bush administration and the Iraq war. He's writing a memoir about the incident, he said.
Wilson argued that Iraq's threat to U.S. national security was not great enough to require an invasion and occupation. He criticized newspaper editorial boards for beating the drums of war along with President Bush. Dissenting voices, or those like Wilson with actual experience in the region, were ignored or ridiculed, he said.
"Instead of having a thoughtful debate, we insulted our allies," he said.
Wilson said the media coverage of the war, with its televisions of bombs going off in Baghdad, was "something to behold ... what we didn't get was the point of view of those who were shocked and awed ... we ignore at our peril the effects of our actions on those in other societies."
The press is under a great deal of stress and pressure trying to report stories because of the administration's refusal to answer questions, he said. The term "Guantanamo" — usually referring to the American military base where prisoners are held indefinitely without formal charges — is now a metaphor for news organizations and/or reporters that fall out of favor with the administration.
Iraqis have long memories and view America as just another foreign occupier, Wilson said. "If we fail, we will be blamed for that failure forever. The mess that's left over is our mess. We own it."
Note: Wilson has written a series of three perspective articles for the San Jose Mercury News — "Seeking honesty in U.S. policy," "How Saddam thinks," and "After Saddam."
What images will we remember?
Susan Moeller of the University of Maryland questioned the way photographs of the war were distilled and presented to the public.
Her beef was not with the photographers in the field who took the images, but with the editors back home who chose which ones to present and how they were packaged, she said.
Moeller presented several examples of newspaper layouts in which powerful photos were chosen for artistic value, rather than their relation to the news being reported. She also brought up the oft-heard complaint that the U.S. media sanitized its coverage by not publishing images of graphic blood or gore.
U.S. censors at first wouldn't allow publication of American soldiers bleeding and dying in World War II, but reversed that policy in 1943, Moeller said.
In Vietnam, three of the photos most associated with the anti-war movement were in fact taken by photographers with no political agenda, she said. Those were of a monk immolating himself, a young girl running naked down a road after a napalm attack, and a man being executed with a pistol during the Tet Offensive.
The photograph, since its invention 150 years ago, has been the mechanism by which the public sees and remembers war, she said.
Moeller has written a book on compassion fatigue. Many editors have told her they just can't show photos that would show genocide, such as from the Rwanda massacres, she said.
"Photography still matters desperately, and the person who controls and frames the images matters desperately too," she said.
Moeller also is the author of a study entitled "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction." You can download it in PDF form (summary) (full version).
Documenting misery for world readers
Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas talked about the challenges of photojournalism in areas of the world that don't attract the world's attention.
Meiselas went into Kurdistan in 1991 after the first Gulf War, documenting villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein and producing a book called "Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History." The world took little notice at the time despite massive evidence presented to the media and governments, she said.
It's important to show misery and engage readers with photographs rather than leave them at a distance, Meiselas said. The appetite for the most powerful images varies widely in the commercial press.
"It's not that we don't take the images. It's just that you realize they won't travel well with certain customers," she said.
Meiselas also was a photographer in Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, "self-embedding" herself with either guerrillas or governments, she said. The logistics in that region were relatively primitive, in contrast to the Iraq war, in which news organizations compared their preparations to military mobilizations.
"We were like a guerrilla operation, in terms of infrastructure," she said of her Central American experiences.
In one respect, however, photographers faced the same hurdles in Central America and Iraq — it was impossible for a single photographer to record more than a snapshot of what was going on.
"My photographs (in Central America) were limited in that I couldn't show the scale of war, particularly things I couldn't see," Meiselas said.
LA Times goes to war
Los Angeles Times staffers talked about their planning for the Iraq war. Foreign Editor Marjorie Miller compared the newspaper's preparations to a military operation — mustering the troops, training them, and arranging logistics, down to the chemical suits.
The Times had 25 reporters in the field, including those in countries surrounding Iraq. Two editors manned a rewrite desk in Doha, Qatar. Miller went to Baghdad before the invasion began to try and convince Iraqi authorities to let her station correspondents in that city, she said, and one reporter was allowed in.
Photographer Rick Loomis and national correspondent David Zucchino related tales of frustration, as they were embedded with military units nowhere near the main battles. Loomis, who had seen action in Afghanistan with U.S. Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne, bemoaned taking pictures of Marines digging holes in the sand and dry-shaving in the desert. Zucchino hitched rides with six different Army outfits trying to get to the front, only to miss the battle for the Baghdad airport by one day. Along the way, he lost his equipment and nearly his life when his Humvee plunged into a canal at night.
"When you're sitting on your a-- all day doing nothing, you really get frustrated, because you know the war's going on out there," Zucchino said.
Foreign correspondent Tracy Wilkinson was wounded in the New Year's Eve restaurant bombing in Baghdad. Reporting is very difficult due to the increasingly volatile security situation, combined with the lack of cooperation from the American occupation authorities, she said.
"I'm not sure we're getting the complete picture (of what's going on in the country), because stories take 100 times longer than normal," Wilkinson said.
Journalists murdered with impunity
Everyone knows covering warfare is a dangerous business. Well, just how dangerous? Frank Smyth, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, offered some statistics:
CPJ offers a handbook entitled "On Assignment: A Guide to Reporting in Dangerous Situations." (You can download a PDF version here.) The organization recommends it "be read not only by those in the field or covering dangerous assignments, but also by the media managers who send journalists on those assignments. For managers, the safety of their journalists should be paramount. This means discouraging unwarranted risk-taking, making assignments to war zones or other hostile environments voluntary, and providing proper training and equipment."
Smyth stressed the need for security training, such as that offered by Centurion — even for veteran journalists.
Insurance is vital. If you're deploying to a war zone, demand that your human resources department provide you a copy of your company's insurance coverage and read the fine print. There were several examples of reporters going to Iraq who found out that their company's policies did not cover war casualties or routine injuries overseas. This review is especially important if you're a freelancer.
Preparing to report from the battlefield
Many journalists deploying to Iraq prepped for the mission by training with Centurion Risk Assessment Services . The British company teaches civilians how to think, act and plan in a combat zone.
Centurion's director, Paul Rees, a former Royal Marine, led an extended discussion of some of the challenges reporters should prepare for. Those include situational awareness, logistics, emergency first aid, vehicle security, how to dress, whether to wear body armor, recognizing mine fields and booby traps, and dealing with hostage situations and ambush scenarios.
The company is highly regarded. More than 6,000 journalists have completed the course in the past seven years. My employer, Knight Ridder, will not send anyone to Iraq without Centurion training. The clientele is expanding to include humanitarian workers.
Many media companies are hiring armed security guards — including Centurion's — to escort their reporters in Iraq, given the deterioriating security situation there. Several fellows at this conference are due to go there soon. Rees advised them to never, ever pick up a weapon, even to examine it.
"You make all other journalists a target," he said.
Journalists and the military: Friend or foe?
The successful embedding of journalists in Afghanistan showed the military that it shouldn't be too concerned about the media following its every move, according to Lt. Col. Richard Long, public information director for the U.S. Marine Corps.
"If you're well-trained, and know what you're doing, you should stand at the top of the highest tree and sing it out loud," he said.
Operational security is the primary concern. Fortunately, no soldiers died in Afghanistan or Iraq as a result of media information leaks. Long said there were several "moderate" security breaches during the Iraq war — he cited the example of a CNN correspondent broadcasting live the actual location of a moving convoy. CNN voluntarily cut off the broadcast at the military's request and the correspondent was recalled.
More than 700 journalists were embedded with military units in Iraq, Long said. Only 26 had to be removed, and most of those were "unilaterals" working independently. In several cases American troops had to shelter or even rescue unilaterals who found themselves in trouble spots. Both the Army and Marines gave commanders on the ground wide discretion in how they handled non-embedded reporters who got in the way.
Relationships thawed as individual reporters demonstrated that they could be entrusted with classified information without jeopardizing military operations, Long said. One crusty old Marine colonel, whom he declined to name, told a reporter at the beginning of the war, "If I see my name in print, I will hunt you down and hurt you." By the end of the war that same colonel walked into a press trailer to ask about getting a profile of himself written.
One key to building those relationships is the approach, Long said. Soldiers can see a sales job coming a mile away, yet respect journalists who are genuinely interested in what they do. Professionalism and objectivity are important. The biggest conversation-enders? Leading questions slanted towards a predetermined conclusion. Also, reporters who make assumptions about a situation or suddenly present themselves as experts on a topic. Any journalist who gets a chance to train with the military should take the opportunity to do so.
The media embedding procedures for future wars will likely change, Long said, but he couldn't predict exactly how. They may change after the planned June handover of power in Iraq, for example, to account for host nation sensibilities, even though the U.S. military presence likely will be a robust one for some time.
You need to know the law
What's a war crime? What's acceptable? What's legal? What's criminal? Common sense will take you a long way, and you don't need to take a lawyer with you into a war zone. But knowing the Geneva Convention and other international protocols can help you recognize stories and identify whether laws have been breached.
For example, Newsweek correspondent Roy Gutman said that while interviewing wounded combatants from both sides in a hospital in the Balkans, he discovered that the hospital itself had been fired upon. Four other hospitals had been shot at as well. Was that a war crime? Further investigation proved it was. But the Red Cross wasn't going to call it that, because relief personnel routinely have to cross warring lines and can't risk offending one side or the other.
"If it looks and smells awful, there's probably a violation," Gutman said.
The nature of war crimes is different from domestic criminal activity. In the latter case, governments are charged with catching and prosecuting offenders. In war, states or their agents carry out the crimes and have a vested interest in keeping them secret. States are rarely punished, but journalists can shine the spotlight on what they do.
"You'd better get your facts right, because they will come back at you," Gutman said. "You may have to leave after writing your story."
Shaming governments into action
The Crimes of War Project opened Tuesday's sessions with a brief, intense, moving film, in which journalists who covered genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda argued that reporters can make a difference.
In the case of the Kosovo conflict, governments cited for the first time crimes against humanity as a basis for unprecedented international action, i.e. going to war.
Justice Richard Goldstone, the first prosecutor for the international tribunals for Yugoslavia, said in the film that journalists "shamed governments into action with their words."
Christiane Amanpour, who covered the siege of Sarajevo for CNN, said journalists "wield more power than they know." Reporting the war did not force action ... it wasn't until journalists described what they were seeing as war crimes under international law that the world noticed.
Roy Gutman, a Washington-based correspondent for Newsweek and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said after the film that keeping the world's attention can be a challenge. He first reported in August 1992 about deadly concentration camps in northern Bosnia, for example, yet three years later, when news of the Srebrenica massacre surfaced, the world seemed surprised.
New warfare: Preparing for the right war
The old adage that generals are always fighting the last war might not ring so true in today's U.S. military, said Rone Tempest, senior correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.
Many lessons learned in Iraq have already been incorporated into tough, realistic training at the U.S. Army's training centers at Fort Irwin, Calif., and Fort Polk, La., Tempest said. The emphasis now is on occupation duties that soldiers may be expected to perform in Iraqi cities or villages. They've even hired Iraqi-Americans as role players to taunt soldiers as they practice their training missions.
Tempest questioned whether journalists are as equipped to adapt to a changing battlefield as the military is. Are we fighting the last war? Did we gear up our Iraq war coverage for the big battle — which lasted the "blink of an eye" — and not adequately prepare for the possibility of a long-term occupation?
Conditions are extremely grim for journalists covering the occupation. Security is so much of an overriding concern that it's difficult to get real reporting done, Tempest said. Armed guards usually follow reporters everywhere. Translators working for Americans are threatened. It takes 3-4 days to cover a one-day story. Just getting across town is an intimidating experience. The Los Angeles Times is rotating reporters in and out of Iraq every three weeks, in part due to the stress and sleep deprivation. He worries that news organizations afraid to send their own people into danger zones may rely on so-called "proxy" reporters who may not be as experienced or reliable.
"If things get too dangerous, they just don't get reported," Tempest said, referring to one of the "dirty little secrets" of war reporting in general.
One question that will reverberate throughout the week is whether journalists asked tough questions of the Bush administration in the months leading up to the war. Tempest specifically mentioned an article by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books, entitled "Now They Tell Us," which slams the U.S. media for waiting until after the war to dig into the questionable intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, the "heart of the President's case for war." (Full disclosure: I work for Knight Ridder, which is credited for hard-hitting reporting on the issue.)
A sophisticated reader of major U.S. metropolitan newspapers before the war "could have got the picture," Tempest said. "Problem is, the stories didn't stick."
So what's this blog about?
My name is Jim Van Nostrand, and I'm a fellow at "Covering Conflict: The Media at War," a week-long professional seminar offered by the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.
This blog is one way of sharing the lessons and discussions with a geographically diverse network of colleagues. I plan to update it daily, as often as the agenda and my wireless connections allow.
