Journalists at War

Each Sunday, Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, interviews the most influential politicians and most important press members in his Sunday talk show and it should come to no surprise that there is only one topic since the mid-term elections: Iraq.

In a recent episode, Russert talked to two columnists of The New York Times, David Broooks and Tom Friedman, about the current situation in the Middle East and their latest columns in which they paint a dark picture of the future of this critical part of the world.

Especially Tom Friedman gave some of the most distinct bullet points about the conflict in which he did not mince matters and illustrated the kind of dilemma journalists are facing while covering this national identity crisis.

On the question if we can even assess the situation, he answered: “They [the Iraqis] want justice before democracy. The Shiites want justice for the last 30 years. The Kurds want justice. The Sunnis want justice for a war that overturned their dominance. My fear about Iraq right now and the reason I wrote that column is that I get the sense that our vision of Iraq, a democratic, or democratizing pluralistic Iraq, is everyone’s second choice there.”

While American soldiers risk their lives each day to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, this would be one goal, but not the most important goal for the people there. Certainly an argument which most Bush-critics are pointing out these days. It is not the Americans that decide about the future of this country, but the Iraqis themselves. It is vital that they want democracy more than anything, because no military power can force it onto them.

About the issue weather we can call the conflict a “civil war”, Friedman argues: “We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human dignity and equality, about the right of one people to enslave another. They’re having a civil war in Iraq, only it’s not about ideas, it’s about tribal issues. There is no Abe Lincoln there. It’s the South vs. the South, that’s the problem with the fight right now.”

On the question what the Iraq conflict means to the rest of the region, he goes on, “if you step back, look at what’s been going on there for the last year. In Iran, they just had a conference on why the Holocaust didn’t happen. In Iraq, you have people fighting over who is the proper heir to the prophet Mohammed. And in Syria, basically, the government of Syria killed the prime minister next door, and wants to get off with a parking ticket. This is a freak show, OK? There’s no other part of the world that’s behaving like this.”

Iran is supporting the Shiite militia, Saudis are concerned about the Sunni minority and threaten with an invasion if the Americans should leave them behind, and the Kurds in Northern Iraq have banned the Iraqi flag and consider themselves a self-governed state.

This is where David Brooks jumps in and explains to Tim Russert, “A great historian, Michael Oren, says there are three authentic nation states in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran and Egypt. All the rest are phony nations. Sometimes with family—run by families with armies. And that’s—that is fragile. And that could all come undone and that could all be part of the spreading wave of chaos.”

In the week of the interview, First Lady Laura Bush and former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, criticized the media for focusing only on the bad news about Iraq and sending a wrong impression to the American people.

Friedman in defense of his coverage, “I wanted this to succeed, you know, as much as anybody, because I thought it was really important. But I thought it was really important and really hard. And to me, what history will damn these people for is they thought it was really important and really easy.”

And Brooks, asked about his journalist-colleagues on the ground in Iraq, adds, “They’re not biased about this. They want the best for the Iraqi people, they want democracy. Listen to what they’re reporting, they’re reporting chaos. You have 100–I don’t know what it is, 1.6 million people leaving Iraq. You’ve got 9,000 Iraqis every week who are moving to their Shiite homeland, or to their Sunni homeland. This is a country—it’s not civil war, it’s just disintegration. So the idea that this is some media concoction, you—I said that a year ago, two years ago. But at some point, face reality.”

At the end, we should face reality and take it for what it is. It is not the Americans who can solve this crisis, but the people that want to live in this region peacefully. And when an administration sees no way out but to blame the media for their reporting, then you know the times are bad.

Discussion:

1) What are the difficulties journalists face when reporting about a national crisis overseas and how can they avoid to focus on bad news only, but report accurately?

2) Should Tom Friedman and David Brooks be as open as they are about their reporting style or could that lead towards a credibility problem with their readers?

3) How does the element of embedded journalists add to the dangers of reporting from a war zone?

Additional Information:

> AP Story about Embedded Journalists
> Baghdad Correspondent Richard Engel’s War Zone Diary
> NBC’s Meet the Press

Works Cited:
“MTP Transcript for Dec. 17″ MSNBC.com 17 Dec. 2006. 27 Dec. 2006

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News without the filter

The so-called “citizen journalism”, in which normal citizens mutate to journalists with their cell-phone cameras, made another step forward lately. First, CNN started “I-Report”, in which it asks viewers to upload videos and photos to the CNN website, and now Yahoo and Reuters have started a partnership called “You Witness”.

The idea is the same. When someone takes a picture of snow chaos on the highway, or shoots some video footage during a protest in Lebanon, he can send this material to those portals and then they are either shown on websites or make it into the evening news on CNN.

This is another try, so a statement by Reuters, to convert viewers into “on-the-spot journalists”. Hereby, Yahoo seems to have a slight advantage towards traditional news agencies because of its already existing ties to a large, active Internet community. Flickr, a website for photo-uploads, which also belongs to Yahoo, is supposed to play a vital role in the overall “You Witness” concept. With Reuters, it seems like this project gained a serious distribution partner.

To people who ask themselves if they even have a chance to make the cut as an amateur in this profession, Yahoo and CNN already have an answer. Yahoo offers a small video course, in which the audience can learn about simple, but vital techniques. CNN helps out and lists which topics are of major interest to the news desk.

Whereas the videos are certainly not convincing, yet, due to a lack of professionalism, the pictures are an enrichment, and receive great feedback in the coverage of CNN TV. Even in Germany, RTL advertises its “Handy Reporter” segment in front of every news show, in which people can receive 100 EUR for every published photo and 500 EUR for every video broadcast on air.

At CNN, however, you get nothing for your effort, and Reuters and Yahoo are debating about how to pay off their best content providers.

In the near future, Yahoo wants to focus more on local issues and is promoting pictures and videos of high school sports. The “on-the-spot journalist” could also write articles about the latest game. Compensation will certainly become an even bigger issue with this strategy.

But even if no money is offered, it seems as if those projects will soon be part of mainstream media. Many authors of weblogs are already providing important and influential content and get no reward for it. This step is just taking the idea of print into the visual market. The result is a world with a better flow of information in which its citizens can identify more with “their” world and “their” news.

Stories will not go through the filter of media conglomerates, but go from source to receiver without any detour. An important step to a better understanding.

Discussion:

1) What are advantages and disadvantages of normal citizens reporting the news to each other?

2) Is “citizen journalism” as direct as advertised, or do new filters and gatekeepers appear in the process?

3) Is the idea by CNN and Yahoo limited to local topics because of the limited range of reporting by its contributors?

Additional Information:

> I-Report Portal
> Huffington on new citizen journalism portal Assignement Zero
> Washington Post’s Leslie Walker on Citizen Journalism
> OJR’s Mark Glaser on Hyperlocal Citizen Media

Works Cited:
Auchard, Eric. “Yahoo partners with Reuters on eyewitness pictures” Reuters 4 Dec. 2006. 11 Jan. 2007

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