[lit-ideas] Re: beside the body count
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "lit-ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 17:57:24 -0400
Reporters are trapped in hotels, getting killed, but things aren't that
bad. Go figure.
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 8/15/2005 4:43:02 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] beside the body count
>
> [extract of
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/business/media/15apee.html]
>
> Editors Ponder How to Present a Broad Picture of Iraq
>
>
> By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
> Published: August 15, 2005
>
> Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune,
> has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year.
>
> "Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies
> in Iraq?" the anonymous polemic asks, in part. "Did you know that
> 3,100 schools have been renovated?"
>
> "Of course we didn't know!" the message concludes. "Our media
> doesn't tell us!"
>
> Ms. Goudreau's newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies
> largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So
> she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing
> editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these
> assertions and to put them into context. Like many other
> journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.
>
> "The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we're making
> progress in Iraq," Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not
> helping to answer that question.
>
> "It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is
> such a dangerous place," she said. "But there's a perception that
> we're not telling the whole story."
>
> Mr. Silverman said in an interview that he was aware of that
> perception. "Other editors said they get calls from readers who are
> hearing stories from returning troops of the good things they have
> accomplished while there, and readers find that at odds with the
> generally gloomy portrayal in the papers of what's going on in
> Iraq," he said.
>
> Suki Dardarian, deputy managing editor of The Seattle Times and vice
> president of the board of the Associated Press Managing Editors,
> said that the discussion was "a pretty healthy one."
>
> "One of the things the editors felt was that as much context as you
> can bring, the better," Ms. Dardarian said. "They wanted them to get
> beyond the breaking news to 'What does this mean?' "
>
> She also said that as Mr. Silverman and Kathleen Carroll, The A.P.'s
> executive editor, responded to the concerns, the editors realized
> that some questions were impossible to answer. For example, she
> said, the editors understood that it was much easier to add up the
> number of dead than to determine how many hospitals received power
> on a particular day or how many schools were built.
>
> Mr. Silverman said the wire service was covering Iraq "as accurately
> as we can" while "also trying to keep our people out of harm's way."
>
> "The main obstacle we face," he said, "is the severe limitation on
> our movement and our ability to get out and report. It's very
> confining for our staff to go into Baghdad and have to spend most of
> their time on the fifth floor of the Palestine Hotel," which is home
> to most of the press corps. The hotel was struck by a tank shell in
> 2003, killing two journalists.
>
> Iraq remains the most dangerous place in the world to work as a
> journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At
> least 13 media workers have been killed in Iraq so far this year,
> bringing the total to 50 since the war began in 2003.
>
> "Postwar Iraq is fraught with risks for reporters: Banditry, gunfire
> and bombings are common," the committee's Web site says. "Insurgents
> have added a new threat by systematically targeting foreigners,
> including journalists, and Iraqis who work for them."
>
> Mr. Silverman said The A.P. had already decided before the meeting
> that it would have Robert H. Reid, an A.P. correspondent at large
> who has reported frequently from Iraq, write an overview every 10 days.
>
> Mr. Silverman also said the wire service would make more effort to
> flag articles that look beyond the breaking news. As it turned out,
> he said, most of the information in the anonymous e-mail message had
> been reported by The A.P., but the details had been buried in
> articles or the articles had been overlooked.
>
> Before the meeting, The A.P. collected three articles by reporters
> for other news organizations who were embedded with American troops
> and sent them out over the wire to provide "more voice." Mr.
> Silverman said he wanted to do more of that but the opportunities
> were limited because there are only three dozen embedded journalists
> now, compared with 700 when the war began more than two years ago.
>
> Ms. Goudreau, for one, found the discussion useful. By the end, she
> said, editors were acknowledging that even in their own hometowns,
> "we're more likely to focus on people who are killed than on the
> positive news out of a school."
>
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