Where WAS the Media?

Damning article (cover) in the New York Observer on the media and war coverage. At least, they're sorta kinda maybe starting to come back online.

“There’s a dearth of seriousness in the coverage of news,” said veteran war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, “at a time when, in my view, it couldn’t be more serious.”

• Dead troops are invisible. The Bush administration’s ban on capturing flag-draped coffins is echoed in the press’ overall treatment of American war dead. A May 2005 survey by the Los Angeles Times found that over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran “almost no pictures” of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners.

• Average monthly war coverage on the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, combined, has been cut in half—from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005.

...

“The problem is that people aren’t publishing the work,” said Stefan Zaklin of the European Pressphoto agency. Mr. Zaklin recalled taking a picture of a fallen U.S. Army captain during the November 2004 assault on Falluja. The soldiers, he said, “were O.K. with me taking that picture,” and it ran in Paris Match, the Bangkok Post, and on page 1 of Germany’s Bild-Zeitung, Europe’s highest-circulation newspaper. Its only exposure in the U.S., he said, was a two-hour spin on MSNBC.

...

“Corporations don’t want and don’t feel particularly a responsibility to aggressively rock the boat,” said Michael Kirk, a documentary producer working for PBS’s Frontline. “I think that’s certainly true. Why would Viacom want to rock the boat?”

At the networks, Mr. Kirk said, “the imperative is not to let somebody spend the time and the energy and the resources to really know it.

...

In 2003, after the invasion, media companies were warned not to feed the American news consumer too much material on the downside of war. The media-consulting firm Frank Magid Associates advised broadcast outlets that its survey results suggested that viewers had very little appetite for stories about casualties, prisoners of war and anti-war protests.

“There’s this kind of general, industry-wide view that Americans don’t like anything tough, don’t like anything complicated, don’t give a shit, don’t know how to spell the country much less care what’s going on there,” Ms. Amanpour said. “I find that a very patronizing attitude.”

...

It’s not only combat that’s lost its share of TV time as the post-invasion era drags on. When Iraq’s interim government was formed in June 2004, the top three broadcast networks devoted 139 minutes that week to coverage, according to Mr. Tyndall. During the week of the January 2005 Constitutional Assembly elections, the networks spent 146 minutes, as Iraqis happily gathered around cameras waving their purple-tipped fingers.

But last month’s constitutional referendum got only 36 minutes of air time in the week it happened, Mr. Tyndall reported.

...

In Vietnam, only 66 reporters were killed in 20 years of warfare. Both sides tended to respect the neutrality of the press, and the Viet Cong would go so far as to court reporters, said veteran correspondent Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer for his Vietnam coverage and is now writing a book about Saddam’s last years before the invasion. (Mr. Arnett was fired from NBC in 2003 after saying on Iraqi television that the American war plan had “failed.”)

Back then, “you had the impression that the Western media was not specifically targeted,” Mr. Arnett recalled.

Now, Mr. Arnett said, when he goes out, he often hides under a blanket in the back seat of a car.

For some reporters, leaving their security-patrolled, double-barricaded hotels requires permission from their employers. Last year, CNN instituted a rule limiting its Baghdad staff to correspondents and producers who have already reported from the area. When they want to leave CNN’s compound, they must get permission from the bureau chief.

Reporting teams from the three broadcast networks must also get clearance and must be accompanied by a security detail. “There is not a movement that we take outside of our hotel that is not carefully planned,” said NBC’s Mr. Verdi.

...

The insurgents aren’t the only ones behind the demise of the roving Vietnam-style reporter. The military, which at first reacted to the Vietnam experience by stonewalling the press, eventually discovered how to incorporate roving into the official agenda, through the embedding process.

Much was written at the outset of the invasion about the perils of embedding: how it could breed over-reliance on the official message, how it could lull reporters into uncritical camaraderie with the troops, how it could force reporters to trade accuracy for access.

A number of reporters now downplay some of those theoretical concerns. But some conceded that embedding does impede reporting.

“There’s commanders out there who, if you do an embed and they see your coverage or a particular story is too critical, they won’t invite you back for an embed,” said Ellen Knickmeyer, The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief. “There’s parts of the country you won’t be able to go to. There’s a lot of good commanders out in the field, but sometimes their view of how you should be reporting doesn’t always get with how we’re used to covering things.”

“The military hasn’t stopped us,” said Alan Chin, a freelance photojournalist who covered the invasion in 2003, then returned for three months this past spring. “But they have made it hard at times.”

...

“The press is going through a very difficult time,” said Vietnam correspondent David Halberstam, “because the technology is changing under our feet …. You go from three or four channels to cable and the fragmentation of the audience. So that has tended to change the dynamic. First print is in decline, then the networks are in decline. The networks are utterly corporatized, not interested in news in the way the networks in the 60’s still cared …. Now you have these giant corporations that don’t really care that much about news. It is a tiny tail on a very large dog.”

If the public mood about the war is turning, it is turning less on the work of the press and more on the outrage of Mr. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and combat veteran who called for the troops to be withdrawn as soon as practicable. The Bush administration, which never hesitates to lash back at critical stories in the media, was left praising Mr. Murtha’s credentials while trying to counter his complaint.

“I think this is a very important increment,” said Mr. Halberstam. “Murtha is a guy who is really speaking for the military. So if you lose someone like Murtha, that may be the equivalent, in this new kind of war, of 500,000 people outside the Pentagon.”

While Mr. Murtha is bidding to write history, what has the press been doing?

...

But Mr. Burns acknowledged that he worries how posterity will judge his and his colleagues’ work.

“I spend some time, as one who has some responsibility for shaping our coverage here, asking myself what are they going to be saying in the journalism classes of 2025, 2030, about the New York Times coverage here, against whatever the outcome is? … Were we too Pollyanna-ish and too optimistic? Or were we too pessimistic?” Mr. Burns said. “I think one thing we would all have to plead guilty to is having perhaps underestimated the degree of difficulty accomplishing what the United States set out to do here.”