Reporting Iraq: Journalists' Coverage of a Censored War

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted February 8, 2008.

The late British journalist James Cameron, known for his coverage of the Vietnam War, said of his journalism, "I may not have always been satisfactorily balanced; I always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than truth." Perhaps in times of peace, objectivity naturally hews closer to truth. But when leadership misleads (or, euphemisms be damned, lies to) the public, journalists bear a greater responsibility. "Reporting" can all too easily translate into providing a megaphone for intentionally misleading information.

It is these issues that are at the forefront of Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It. Comprised mainly of interviews with over 40 journalists who covered the war, Reporting Iraq offers a candid view of the difficulties and complexities of working in an environment so hostile to reporters.

In one episode Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post recalls the difficulty of getting any relevant information from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): "Well, off the record," CPA advisor Dan Senor told him, "Paris is burning, but on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq." Such double-speak motivated reporters to take great risks to find the facts -- and spurred a wartime environment where journalists have now come to rely heavily on Iraqi stringers who, unlike western reporters, are able move more freely around the country. Reporting Iraq takes a close look at the triumphs, challenges and regrets of reporters working to cover the first three years of the occupation of Iraq.

Mike Hoyt, co-editor of Reporting Iraq and executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review recently sat down with AlterNet to discuss some of the major themes raised by these war-time journalists. He also explains why he thinks we may have to push beyond the conventions of journalism to ensure that we're getting at the truth of war.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: What was the impetus for the project?

Mike Hoyt: We had assigned Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal a first-person piece on the war. We were really impressed with the work she did for us. It just told you more than the formal basic journalistic prose we were getting out of Iraq. It really filled in the blanks. These people have been there for a long time, and they had a lot to say that wasn't coming through in the standard journalism. We wanted a whole lot more of that, so we got ourselves a grant and hired experienced war reporters to do the interviews.

OR: Was it surprising for you to see how drastically reporters' optimism immediately declined following the invasion?

MH: It was. There's something about hearing it in the first-person voice. It's almost as if you're at a bar in a private conversation. The pace of change and the way that everybody experienced [the decline] in a different way was really surprising. They all talked about the "golden age" right after the invasion, when they could go anywhere and talk to anybody. And Iraqis wanted to talk. A couple journalists said they couldn't shut them up -- stories were just pouring out of them. They'd been through so much and were just released from under Saddam. But I was really struck by the depth of the chaos shortly after the invasion. I knew it on some level, but to hear these reporters talking about it really brought new light to it.

OR: For many of the journalists interviewed, there is a distinct turn toward chaos in early to mid-2004. Can you talk about this time period?

MH: That's around the time they hung the guys in Fallujah. But people began to realize that Iraq was going toxic in advance and behind that event, depending on their own experience. Dexter Filkins, from the New York Times, has this story where he and his driver happen upon a site where a car bomb went off and the crowd suddenly turns on him and blames him, and they're nearly killed. They get in the car, but the crowd almost physically holds the car back. They get stoned as they drive away, and later Filkins finds 17 bricks in the car.

There are so many stories like that. Alissa Rubin from the L.A. Times was at a morgue -- in an abayah and a hijab, but a relative of one of the people killed hears her talk and puts a gun to her head. I think Farnaz Fassihi was chased twice. Her stories are riveting -- getting chased and lying on the floor of the car and she ended up getting away simply because she happened to have a car that was a little faster than the car full of gunmen. One by one they realized that reporters were no longer neutral and that Iraq was truly toxic.

OR: Deborah Amos of NPR says, "... in the early days we were up against an incredibly powerful spin machine that accused us of only telling the bad news, and so it was very hard to get that information out." A lot of journalists interviewed talk about this pressure to report "good news."

MH: When you're at war, there's this tremendous patriotic force that wants the journalist to sort of enlist in the army and tell stories favorable to the war effort. People want to hear that it's succeeding and that things are going well. As a matter of fact, they were not going well; they were going really south. There was a real tension between the reporters and the government spokesmen -- especially in the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was in charge. This is universal. Everybody we talked to said this.

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Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a San Francisco-based writer and editor. She has written for AlterNet, the American Prospect, Salon, Mother Jones, Truthdig, In These Times, Huffington Post and Women's eNews.

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