ASNE panel on reporting in Iraq

Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner and New York Times deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner both disputed the notion that reporters in Iraq are somehow not getting the full story. While dangers there make the job difficult and force Western reporters to rely on Iraqi stringers (Spinner called the Iraqi reporters "heroes"), Bronner and Spinner said, journalists are still able to do their jobs.

"I think that we are, by and large, getting the story," Spinner said. Bronner said: "We're not reporting the story as we'd like, but it isn't quite as bad as it's been portrayed."

Spinner and Bronner spoke on a panel at the ASNE convention in Seattle this morning with Joel Campagna, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and security trainer Paul Rees. The panelists, with moderator Ed Foster-Simeon (deputy managing editor of USA Today), discussed the dangers and difficulties of reporting in Iraq.

Part of the difficulty stems from the high monetary cost of all the necessary safety measures. "It is an enormous cost--you can not imagine," Bronner said. "It is almost beyond belief how much it costs."

Bronner noted that the situation in Iraq is constantly changing. At the beginning of the panel, a clip from a Frontline program about reporters in Iraq was shown. Part of the clip showed Times reporter Dexter Filkins riding in a car to the airport--which was then an extremely dangerous journey. "The airport road is actually quite safe today," Bronner said.

There are also emotional costs. "Just like any soldier in a war zone, journalists can suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," Spinner said. "We would be computers if we didn't."

However, she added: "You come back from a war zone and the last thing you want to tell your editor is that you were scared. There is a lot of stigma attached to admitting that." She said it would help if more reporters would admit to the emotional difficulties they face after a war assignment.

Spinner said that she would go back to Iraq "in a heartbeat." "I miss the story," she said. "I miss Iraq. But I'm also very aware of the effect of war on a human being."

Bronner said that finding reporters willing to go to Iraq is "difficult. Not impossible yet, but difficult."

Lessons from the Gulf Coast

At the ASNE convention today in Seattle, a group of Gulf Coast editors discussed the impact the past few hurricane seasons have had on their newsrooms and communities.

The panel included Jim Amoss, editor of The New Orleans Times-Picayune, and Stan Tiner, executive editor of The Biloxi Sun Herald, who were both presented with ASNE Leadership Awards for their work directing coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Also part of the discussion were Ron Franscell, managing editor for features, sports and presentation at The Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise; Charles Hammer, executive editor of the Pensacola News Journal; and Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Eight months after Katrina, the hurricane is still a big focus for the Times-Picayune and the Sun Herald. "Not a day goes by the story does not dominate our page one," Amoss said. "We’re all Katrina, every day," Tiner said.

According to the Gulf Coast editors, the malaise that is plaguing the industry nationally seems to have swept away from their communities in the wake of the storms. With overwhelming amounts of encouraging feedback from their readers, none of them has any doubt about the value of their publication.

"Our newspapers are closer to our communities than they were before the storms," Hammer said.

Tiner said: "To see a reader run up to you to get a copy of the paper and for them to explain to you what it means to them—that will change your view of what a newspaper means."

Hammer noted that the circulation of Tiner's Sun Herald is only down four percent, even though about 75,000 homes were destroyed by Katrina. More people are reading the paper because it contains information that readers find "essential" to their lives. "I am so sick and tired of people wringing their hands about the death of newspapers," Hammer said, earning a round of applause. Instead of hand-wringing, Hammer urged editors to figure out how to "be essential" to their readers.

The "Retirement Syndrome"

Dart Center Advisory Council member Robert Jay Lifton has an interesting discussion with Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell about the retired generals who have been criticising US policy in Iraq.

Holding a battered community together

The Columbia Journalism Review profiles Radio Muzaffarabad, a Pakistani station hard-hit by last October's 7.6 earthquake. The station was back on air 15 days after the quake, which took a heavy toll on the staff: "Of its 115 employees, three were killed in the quake and forty-two others quit, too grief-stricken to stay on." Ayesha Akram writes:

It is now more than four months since the quake hit, and the station is the single, precarious thread that binds this wounded city of about half a million residents. More than just a source of news and information, Radio Muzaffarabad has been a way for people — most of whom are still living in tents — to talk to one another; it has helped families find missing loved ones, facilitated mourning, and inspired the desperate to persevere.

Pulitzers for Katrina-hit papers

The Biloxi Sun Herald and New Orleans Times-Picayune have won Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The Sun Herald was cited for its "valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need."

The Times-Picayune was cited for its "heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant."

The staff of the Times-Picayune also won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its hurricane coverage. The staff of the Dallas Morning News won the prize for Breaking News Photography for "vivid photographs depicting the chaos and pain after Hurricane Katrina engulfed New Orleans."

More on dangers in Iraq

In The New York Review of Books, Orville Schell gives a long, detailed account of his recent visit to Baghdad, which, he confirms, is a dangerous place for journalists.

Schell, who is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, writes:

There is undeniably a Blade Runner–like feel to this city. The violence is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think they are dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the everyday violence is horrendous, it does not take too many days before the deadly noises and the devastation everywhere seem to become just part of the ordinary landscape. Soon, quite to your surprise, you find yourself paying hardly more attention to the sounds of gunshots than a New Yorker does to the car alarms that go off every night...until, that is, someone you know, a neighbor, or just someone you have heard about, gets blown up, shot on patrol, or kidnapped by insurgents.

During his trip, Schell visited a number of news bureaus and spoke with reporters, editors and security personnel about their work.

Wherever in the city the news bureaus are, they have become fortified installations with their own mini-armies of private guards on duty twenty-four hours a day at the gates, in watch towers, and around perimeters. To reach these bureaus, one has to run through a maze of checkpoints, armed guards, blast-wall fortifications, and concertina-wired no man's lands where all visitors and their cars are repeatedly searched.

Schell offers a stark comparison between the conditions in Iraq to those he experienced during the Vietnam war.

In recent history, there have been few wars more difficult to report on than the war in Iraq today. When I was covering the war in Indochina, journalists went out into the field, even into combat, knowing that we would ultimately be able to return to Saigon, Phnom Penh, or Vientiane where we could meet with local friends or go out to a restaurant for dinner with colleagues. Although occasionally a Viet Cong might throw a hand grenade into a bar, the war essentially was happening outside the city.

I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner, there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.

The result is that reporters find themselves living in a strangely retro mode where their days end before sunset, and they are pulled back to their bureaus for dinner like an American family of the 1950s. Not a few have sought solace in cooking.

A captive reporter's story

Phil Sands, a British freelance reporter who was held captive by insurgents for six days in Iraq, tells his story in the Washington Post.

Sands, who writes frequently for British GQ, was kidnapped the day after Christmas:

A pair of sedans blocked the empty road I was traveling down with my driver and translator; men in balaclavas clutching AK-47s jumped out. Tied-up, blindfolded, my mobile phones taken, I was bundled into the trunk.

Sands goes on to describe his time in captivity, and describes the relationships he formed with his captors. He was freed on New Year's Eve when U.S. troops, on a routine raid, searched the house where he was being held. He writes:

Over the next days and weeks I learned more about the fate of the two men who were with me when I was kidnapped. My translator and friend, Salam, was taken hostage, too. Held separately from me, he was also found by the Americans, who treated him as a suspect. He endured six further weeks of custody in Abu Ghraib before being released. He talks of his time there as every bit as frightening as that spent with the mujaheddin.

My driver was apparently not a hostage, and investigators believe he may have delivered us to the insurgents. If so, I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had no other choice -- perhaps his family had been threatened.

I harbor no hatred toward the people who kidnapped and threatened to kill me. There was, and still is, a mixture of fear, sorrow, fondness and anger in my sentiments. If I think about them now, in all likelihood suffering the misery of Abu Ghraib, I pity them. They are almost certainly being treated worse by their captors than I was by mine.

Sands also answered readers' questions in a live chat on the Post website. An extended version of his story appears in this month's issue of British GQ (not available online, unfortunately).

Jill Carroll links

The Christian Science Monitor has a special "Jill Carroll: finally free" web page here. It includes a video of Carroll's visit to the CSM newsroom, as well as stories about her release, her reunion with her family and a statement issued by Carroll on Saturday, shortly after her release:

Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not. The people who kidnapped me and murdered Allan Enwiya are criminals, at best. They robbed Allan of his life and devastated his family. They put me, my family and my friends--and all those around the world, who have prayed so fervently for my release--through a horrific experience. I was, and remain, deeply angry with the people who did this.

I also gave a TV interview to the Iraqi Islamic Party shortly after my release. The party had promised me the interview would never be aired on television, and broke their word. At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn't threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times.

The Monitor also has a tribute to Allan Enwiya, Carroll's interpreter, who was killed when Carroll was taken hostage.

At Editor and Publisher, Joe Strupp has a story about what's next for Carroll:

"We don't have a plan and it is not a question we have posed to her," said Marshall Ingwerson, the Monitor's managing editor. "We are going to let her take the lead when she is ready." He said no plans have even been made for Carroll to tell her story in any kind of formal way, be it a written newspaper account or some other kind of extensive approach.

Fringe therapy in the disaster zone

Last week on NPR's "All Things Considered," Alix Spiegel looked at the use of unproven, "fringe" therapies such as thought-field therapy (TFT), which Spiegel reports is being used on victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Click here for the story, and here for a Q & A with Scott O. Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University and co-editor of the book Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.

Spiegel reports:

James Herbert, a psychology professor at Drexel University, recently wrote a review of what little research exists on the efficacy of TFT.

He found that the "scientific status of thought field therapy is basically nonexistent" and there is "no evidence it does what it claims to do."

The American Psychological Association agrees with Herbert. Their official statement describes TFT as an approach that "lacks a scientific basis." Nevertheless, in the chaotic aftermath of catastrophes like Katrina -- where need is great and conventional mental health providers are scarce -- fringe treatments like TFT often flourish.

In the last month, the therapy has been used to treat -- among others -- the staff of New Orleans' Charity Hospital, Children's Hospital and several other prestigious institutions in Louisiana.