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Tomgram: Orville Schell on Journalism under Siege in Baghdad

Back in September 2004, the Wall Street Journal's Farnaz Fassihi, then covering Iraq, wrote an email to friends that began: "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest." A year and a half later, it's still a striking account to read, because the grim news she was delivering both as a reporter -- "One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if anything could salvage it from its violent downward spiral…" -- and on the ways in which reporting was becoming so restrictive there would prove sadly prophetic. It was exactly the slice of reportorial reality that had somehow not made it into any of our normal mainstream media outlets, though it was -- and remains -- the daily experience ("being under virtual house arrest") of western reporters in Iraq. This wayward email, thanks to the pass-on phenomenon of the Web, became a "public document" and it was exactly what we should have been reading all along in our major newspapers but weren't.

As the Houston Chronicle put it in an editorial, after the email burst into public view on-line and brought Fassihi's "objectivity" into question in a modest firestorm of comment and criticism: "Though the missive apparently does not contradict her reportage, it is blunt, bleak and opinionated in a way that mainstream coverage generally avoids." And that, it turned out, was, for many, a negative. Fassihi's WSJ editor, Paul Steiger, when queried by the New York Post, "supported" her with a classic defense of the status quo: "Ms. Fassihi's private opinions [as seen in the email] have in no way distorted her coverage, which has been a model of intelligent and courageous reporting, and scrupulous accuracy and fairness."

It's worth considering, though, why Fassihi had to write this to friends and not to her editor to be published for the rest of us. Why was this story relegated to the world of "private opinion" and evidently not fit for American readers? We have to assume, after all, that editors back in New York or Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles deal daily with the difficult dilemma of ensuring their reporters' safety and so would have found Fassihi's comments no surprise. But amid all the news that's fit to print, news that would make sense of Iraqi reportage clearly wasn't in September 2004.

At the time, journalistic critic Jay Rosen at his PressThink blog put the matter this way: "What makes the piece resonate (for some of us) is the simple question: why can't this be the journalism, this testifying e-mail? Why can't reporters on the ground occasionally speak to the ‘public' like this one occasionally spoke to her friends?"

In England what has become known as "hotel journalism" has been argued about bluntly and at length in the press. In the United States, however, the situation remains -- with a few honorable exceptions, including Under the Gun, Fassihi's recent, sad goodbye to all that (she's been reassigned to Lebanon) -- largely unchanged. TV journalists still get up nightly on those picturesque Baghdad balconies never saying that they weren't the ones who went out that day to get the information they may be "reporting"; the most basic conditions under which reporters work in Iraq -- now far worse than when Fassihi wrote her email -- are seldom alluded to in news accounts, nor is there much sense that most of Iraq remains largely beyond our view. It's true that news junkies here have gained a sense of what reporting conditions in Iraq for westerners are really like, but most Americans probably have no idea. How could they, given the lack of coverage?

That's why the following report by Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley (where I teach every spring), is so valuable. Appearing in the April 6 issue of the New York Review of Books, and available here thanks to the kindness of that magazine's editors, it offers a vivid, rolling, roiling description of journalistic life, such as it is, in Baghdad today. Its length -- and it is long --is meant to make up for everything that is so seldom published on the subject. Guarantee: You won't think about those daily reports from Iraq quite the same way again. Tom


Baghdad: The Besieged Press
By Orville Schell

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 4:35 PM