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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on What We Don't See in Iraq

Since Guardian correspondent Rory Carroll was briefly kidnapped in Baghdad and the paper recalled its reporters while it reviewed the situation, there has a lively debate in the English press about the nature and limits of Western reporting in Iraq. Carroll himself, since being freed, has insisted that Iraq remains a story more capable of being covered than most people realize; that even "Green Zone" journalism has a positive side; and that "hotel journalism" is not the essence of what's happening if you're a press journalist:


"When asked about the suggestion that British journalists in Iraq just report from their hotel rooms, Carroll said: ‘I get quite annoyed when that perception is reinforced. For TV crews it is mostly hotel journalism, because they are bulkier and more visible than print people -- they have to travel in big convoys, and their insurance and bureaucratic rules are such that it's a huge deal for them to leave the hotel. The print guys, and this applies to all the other British papers, we get out of the hotel pretty much every day. Our security is contingent entirely on invisibility, which is why we try to blend in.'"

Peter Beaumont, his colleague at the Observer, also believes that reporting on Iraq, while unbearably dangerous, remains "still just possible":


"You learn in large measure to deal with it, adapting your behavior to the different kinds of threat. Many of the men grow beards, the women reporters wear abayas. Traveling around Baghdad, you move ‘low profile' in tatty but well-serviced cars. I take off my glasses as they look too ‘Euro' and wear stripy shirts that look ‘Mansour' -- the fashionable middle-class district of Baghdad."

On the other hand, veteran correspondent Robert Fisk, a man never lacking in reportorial bravery, recently announced that, given the outsized dangers now inherent in the situation, he wasn't sure he could still report from Iraq. He refers to what he now does on his visits to Iraq as "mouse journalism."


"If I go to see someone in any particular location, I give myself 12 minutes, because that is how long I reckon it takes a man with a mobile phone to summon gunmen to the scene in a car. So, after 10 minutes I am out. Don't be greedy. That's what reporting is like in Iraq… One of the delights of the occupying powers is that the journalists cannot move. When I travel outside Baghdad by road it takes me two weeks to plan it, because the roads are infested with insurgents, checkpoints, hooded men and throat-cutters. That's what it's like."

Just the other day, I heard an American freelance correspondent on a panel at Columbia University second Fisk on the sanity of his "12-minute rule." Similarly, the exceedingly brave former war correspondent, Maggie O'Kane recently leveled a blast in the Guardian at Iraqi coverage. Claiming she "lost nerve" in Afghanistan in 2002 after three of her colleagues were pulled from a car and, "in roughly the same amount of time as it takes to boil a kettle," executed by the Taliban, she then commented on present-day Iraq:

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 9:23 PM