Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists who Covered It - Softcover

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9781933633343: Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists who Covered It

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933633344 ISBN 13: 9781933633343

Publisher: Melville House, 2007

The world's best known reporters tell the story of what really happened in Iraq in a gripping and gritty narrative history of the war.

Included are contributions from fifty international journalists, including Dexter Filkins, The New York Times correspondent who won widespread praise for his coverage of Fallujah; Rajiv Chandrassekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his war coverage; Richard Engel of NBC; Anne Garrels of NPR, and other star reporters from both the print and broadcast world, not to mention their translators, photo journalists, and a military reporter.

All come together to discuss the war from its beginning on, and they hold back nothing on the violence they faced—Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal talks about her near–kidnapping by "five men with AK–47s" chasing her car. ("I kept thinking, 'This is it.'") Nor do they hold back discussing how this impacted their work—British reporter Patrick Cockburn of The Independent notes that "One had to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about one's own security," and NPR reporter Deborah Amos observes that it was even more complicated for women: "As time went on we had to dress as Iraqi women, in the most conservative costumes Iraqi women would wear."

But perhaps the most fascinating—and chilling—observation is that most saw a disaster in Iraq unfolding long before they were allowed to report it. As Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker puts it, various governmental authorities and the media's own fears combined "to keep bad news away from the public," an observation supported by over 21 stunning, full–color photographs—many of which have never been published before due to such censorship.

Collected by the editors of America's most prestigious media monitor, the Columbia Journalism Review, such revelations make Reporting Iraq a fascinating and unique look at the war, as well as an important critique of international press coverage.

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About the Author:

Mike Hoyt is the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, the monthly magazine and website that is the country’s most esteemed media monitor, and is affiliated with the Columbia University’s prestigious Journalism School. Hoyt has worked at the magazine, both as a writer and editor, since 1986. Prior to that he was a newspaper reporter, a copy editor at Business Week, and a freelance journalist. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he now resides in New Jersey.

John Palattella is the literary editor of The Nation and former editor at large of the Columbia Journalism Review, as well as a former special projects editor at Lingua Franca. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Washington Post Bookworld. He lives in Brooklyn.

From The Washington Post:

Reviewed by Anthony Swofford

Reporting Iraq grew out of a magazine project to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Columbia Journalism Review. Reporters Vivienne Walt, Judith Matloff and Christopher Allbritton were hired to interview about 50 journalists who had reported extensively on the Iraq war.

The resulting oral history -- composed entirely of the journalists' thoughts and recollections, presented verbatim and without commentary -- is a searing document, one of the most revealing chronicles of the war yet published. It is as though correspondents are talking late into the night, trying to explain what it was like, what sights and smells haunt them, what they're proud of and what they regret, what they saw coming and what they didn't. Here's Guardian/Getty Images photographer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad recalling an explosion in which he was wounded by shrapnel:

"Up until this moment I was separated from the scenes of car bombs by my lens: It was something else, it was not reality because I see it through this viewfinder, and all you care about is the light, where it's coming in, the composition, the light. So you are separated. But the smell, the smell is always there."

This is the kind of book that the hawks who pushed the Iraq war on America could never have imagined. After reading these story-behind-the-story accounts, the easy war fantasy built on fictionalized intelligence and willful blindness seems more than ever like an impeachable offense. But this is neither an anti-war nor a pro-war book. In these pages, men and women who have spent more time in Iraq than most U.S. soldiers deliver intimate, street-level views of all sides of the conflict: of an Iraqi mother grabbing a reporter by the vest and demanding, "Why have you killed my son?"; of opposition fighters debating whether to kill a photographer because he's not a Muslim; of U.S. troops coming to blows over the shooting of a dog.

These vignettes are presented chronologically, creating a lucid narrative from the start of hostilities, through the reign of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to the hope and promise of national elections and finally to the bloody spring and summer of 2006, when most of the interviews took place.

Close readers of the national print press are already aware of the danger and difficulty of reporting from Iraq. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 124 journalists and 49 media support workers -- drivers, interpreters, fixers, guards -- have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. But the psychological toll of war reporting is often forgotten or denied, even by journalists themselves. In Reporting Iraq, Anne Garrels of NPR confesses, "I still have nightmares, truth be told; posttraumatic, whatever you want to call it. . . . Anger -- all of us -- I know I've had anger issues; they're hard to describe."

By nearly all accounts, during the first six or seven months of the occupation, journalists were able to move easily around Iraq. "You could go out all day in a place like Ramadi -- where I think now your life expectancy would be about 20 minutes," says Dexter Filkins of the New York Times. He first noted the changed environment in the fall of 2003, when he went with two photographers to the scene of a suicide bombing in a Shiite neighborhood. "About 500 people turned on us instantly and surged. I remember there was an old man saying 'Kill them, kill them, kill them!' " The reporters were beaten by the crowd, their car was pelted with bricks, a photographer had his head split open, and at day's end Filkins counted 17 bricks in the battered car. This was the new Iraq.

The danger wasn't just physical. There was a concerted effort by some members of the Bush administration and the military to undermine the authority of the press, most notably by accusing reporters of covering only bad news.

"In October 2003, I think that was when the first salvo in this good news, bad news debate started going on. And I started questioning myself," says Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid, who admits that the pressure for good news affected one story he filed. "And I regret that story. . . . It came out of that thing of, again, not sticking to what you're hearing, not sticking to what you're seeing," he says.

The pressure wasn't just from the military; sometimes it came from editors. Patrick Graham, a freelance writer, says, "A friend of mine who was working for a British paper kept getting a lot of pressure to write 'good-news' stories. I can remember him saying, "I've written a good-news story in Hillah; I hope they print it before Hillah blows up."

Many of these reporters are remarkably critical of their own work. While Iraq is "certainly very, very dangerous," says Walt, an interviewer for the book who has also covered the war as a freelancer, "I think in some ways its uniqueness is a little bit exaggerated. . . . I was just in Kurdistan; Kurdistan is not totally safe, but it is an important part of Iraq and you can more or less operate there pretty well." A translator for Time and CNN, Yousif Mohammed Basil, responds to the good news, bad news debate this way: "As an Iraqi, living inside Iraq, I cannot hear good news, and even if there is good news, you cannot hear it with the noises of explosions and the noises of the terrorists and the noises of American military operations."

It is said that if you ask 100 soldiers to tell you about the same firefight, you will hear 100 different stories. The same can be said of journalists. Many Western reporters now work from walled compounds in or near the Green Zone, coordinating Iraqi stringers by phone and e-mail. When they leave their compounds, those who report for major news organizations often, though not always, move with armored vehicles and guards; freelancers, on the other hand, have little choice but to dress up as Iraqis and drive through neighborhoods in beat-up, thin-skinned cars. The war the two groups see will inevitably be different. And there is no attempt in Reporting Iraq to gloss over the differences, or to make journalists look good. That may be why they come off so well.

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