Ernie Pyle, the legendary correspondent, understood soldiers. He knew how they marched, how they mourned, how they endured. With few exceptions, the coverage coming out of Iraq today doesn't portray the grunts in the same deeply personal light. It is a different era, and most journalists have never served in the military and have only a passing acquaintance with the worlds that most soldiers come from. But for readers who want a taste of the soldier's life, a modern-day Ernie Pyle is no longer necessary; soldiers themselves are blogging their experiences from the front lines.

Since combat began in Iraq in March 2003, "milblogs," as they're called, have been cropping up in increasing numbers. Some are sophomoric and laced with obscenities, while others offer frank and poignant accounts of what it's like to fight this war. Their popularity has drawn the interest of book publishers, along with the scrutiny of military higher-ups concerned that milblogs could breach operational security. For the Pentagon there is also something else at play here: how to manage the flow of information from the field -- especially when the military's official version of events is contradicted by blogging soldiers.

In August 2004, a twenty-eight-year-old Army infantryman named Colby Buzzell, writing anonymously under the handle CBFTW (the last three letters stand for, alternately, "fuck the war" or "fuck the world"), posted his account of a vicious firefight with insurgents on his blog, My War. "We were driving there on that main street when all of a sudden all hell came down all around on us. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die. I cannot put into words how scared I was." The battle received scant media attention, and the Pentagon played down the extent to which Buzzell's brigade had even been involved in the fighting -- crediting Iraqi security forces with the victory. Days later, though, a report in the Tacoma, Washington, News Tribune, which covers Buzzell's Fort Lewis-based detachment, noted the discrepancy between Buzzell's version and the Pentagon's. This drew attention to Buzzell's blog, and soon his officers learned his identity. Buzzell was later briefly confined to base, an experience he details in his forthcoming book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, due out in October.

Since then, the military has paid closer attention to milblogs. Some have been censored, others ordered to shut down. The crackdown, though, may have unintended consequences for the military. The best of these blogs offer Americans back home a chance to connect with soldiers in ways that today's media coverage does not.

The bloggers themselves seem to be well aware that their sites are being watched. "Hey pencil pusher reading this, ready to censor/censure me, go on patrol, you Fobbit!" wrote Rusten Currie, a military intelligence officer in Baghdad, in a recent post to his blog, Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (Latin for, "If you wish for peace, prepare for war"). ("Fobbit" is military-speak for soldiers who spend most of their time on base.) Currie continues to post heartfelt ruminations about his time in Iraq and the prospect of returning to his wife of nearly two years. "An entire year will be missing from my marriage, and I don't know how to get that back," he wrote in July.

Some of the most powerful accounts come from bloggers who have recently returned from Iraq, such as those posted by the Army reporter/photographer Fred Minnick (one of his photos is above), who was stationed in Mosul and blogs under the name Sminklemeyer (In Iraq for 365). He writes about his struggle with recurring nightmares. "I also had the dream again last night," he wrote soon after his return. "This time, I called one of those 1-800 help lines the army provides. When I made the call, I realized my hands were trembling . . . I know I need help."

Sometimes it is the absence of a post that puts the war into perspective for readers left to speculate on the blogger's fate. Since January, the blogs of at least two soldiers have gone dark after their authors were killed in action.

The year was 1873, the beginning of the American Gilded Age. The nation was exhausted by the Civil War. Robber barons were stealing public lands, importing cheap workers from abroad to build (and die on) the railroads, committing bank and securities fraud, and hiring thugs to beat up the newly organizing labor unions. The nation's economic structure was shifting from a very rough equality to an hourglass, with most of the wealth up top and most of the people on the bottom.

In response to all this economic dislocation and misery, at least one reformer knew exactly how to restore America's moral greatness. At Anthony Comstock's urgings, Congress made it a federal crime to send "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material (i.e., pamphlets about contraception or sexually transmitted disease, condoms, "French" playing cards) through the U.S. mail.

Comstockery is alive and well in today's United States. When citizens distract themselves from economic disruption by focusing not on common matters of public policy but on personal matters of sexual purity, social historians call it a "moral panic" -- and, from the Starr report, which almost cost us a president, to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, the U.S. has had a runaway panic on its hands for at least a decade. Unfortunately, American journalism is making it worse -- in part by covering precisely the wrong stories about sex and politics.

Since Senator Gary Hart's infamous monkey business in the 1980s, there have been plenty of discussions about where the serious media should draw the line on coverage of public officials' sexual behavior. When is a scandal merely voyeurism, and when is it an invitation for investigative journalism? In theory, most of us agree: on the one hand, the media should never cover consensual and private adult behavior, even when it might seem unsavory. On the other, the media should always cover coercive or criminal behavior, especially when it abuses public power or reveals official hypocrisy. But in practice, for the last decade, the American media have been getting it backward.

Consider the appalling fact that only The Nation has given real coverage to serious allegations against Dr. David Hager, President Bush's controversial appointee to the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. According to the reporter Ayelish McGarvey, in October 2004 Hager took the pulpit at Kentucky's Asbury College chapel and told churchgoers that he had been persecuted for standing up on "moral and ethical issues in this country," persecution that was part of "a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians."

Here's what he meant: many people had opposed his appointment as the panel's chairman because he had worked with Concerned Women for America to block distribution of RU-486, the "morning after" birth control pill. While Hager did not become chairman, he was appointed to the committee, where, he boasted from the same pulpit, he had been influential in blocking over-the-counter distribution of RU-486. In May 2005, The Nation published McGarvey's article, in which Hager's ex-wife, Linda Carruth Davis, alleged that, during the years that he had been crusading to restrict women's medical choices, he had been raping her repeatedly, anally and painfully, often while she was drugged into sleep by prescriptions for a neurological problem. When McGarvey contacted him, Hager would not deny the allegations.

No other media outlet ran with this story. Yet anyone -- especially any public official -- who cannot respect another human being's bodily integrity can and must be called to account. Such acts matter still more when there's an intellectual link between the public figure's attitudes and behaviors and the public policies he promotes. That's precisely the case for Hager, who -- if the allegations are true -- publicly worked to deny women the right to make choices in their medical lives, while privately denying his wife choices about her physical life.

Were the allegations true? Ex-spouses say terrible things, and she wasn't under oath, both of which any editor must consider. But fact by fact, McGarvey constructs a careful story, not a casual he-said/she-said shocker. According to her lawyer and longtime friends, Davis's charges were consistent with what she'd told them at the time, as was her explanation that the reason she didn't go to court was that she had wanted to spare her sons the humiliation of a public airing. Very few women report marital rape, which, as McGarvey notes, is notoriously difficult to prosecute.

Anger added, "You can't run a newspaper to win Pulitzers," which effectively ended the discussion. Thus began my two-year odyssey on the advisory board.

And yet no media outlets followed up or demanded an explanation.

Now consider another case in which American journalism got things wrong, but in the opposite direction: the Ryan v. Ryan divorce filings. As Jack Ryan, a Republican senatorial candidate in Illinois, was sinking in the polls in his 2004 race against Barack Obama, the Chicago Tribune and the local ABC news affiliate WLS-TV succeeded in persuading a judge to release his divorce papers.

According to those filings, his wife, the actress Jeri Ryan, had wanted to get free of him in part because she found it repulsive when he repeatedly urged her to accompany him to a sex club and do the deed in front of others. Arguing, as Jeri Ryan did, that you want to divorce your spouse because your ideas of sexual intimacy are distressingly incompatible is entirely fair. But why should a citizen care? That story was domestic voyeurism, not political information.

You could argue that this story falls under the hypocrisy exemption, and that's generally how it was covered. Jack Ryan marked himself as a "family values" politician, promising to vote for some of today's biggest Comstockeries, like the Federal Marriage Amendment and restrictive "pro-marriage" policies. But this kind of journalism backfires, endorsing an essentially prurient vision in which personal sexual probity is a surpassingly relevant qualification for office. That's Comstockery all over, building up hysteria over individual sexual desires as a distraction from serious issues. Far more significant were the links between Ryan's Goldman Sachs millions and, say, his desire to cut taxes for his income bracket.

Finally, here's one recent story in which the media got things exactly right: the one about James West, the mayor of Spokane, Washington. West was accused of going online and soliciting sex from young men, sometimes in exchange for various office perks (like internships, baseball tickets, or autographed footballs). In some cases, he had offered these young men jobs and then harassed them for sexual favors. During his political career, West had vigorously opposed gay-rights measures. And yet, when the Spokane Spokesman-Review started publishing the results of its investigation into the solicitation and harassment charges, West had the gall to declare he was being persecuted for being gay. Please. Given that combination of criminal allegations and political hypocrisy, West deserved what he got.

So we know that the media can get this right. But perhaps we haven't quite understood the consequences for getting things wrong. It's about more than just the dumbing-down of the media; it's also about shrinking the space available for serious public conversation. Yes, sex sells papers -- but it can also sell out the nation. Not covering the right story (the Hager story or the West story) leaves scoundrels in public office. And covering the wrong stories shifts American attention away from the real meal of our shared public concerns and onto the mental junk food of private sex lives.

A century ago, groups like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Boston Watch & Ward Society, and various temperance societies were shutting down contraceptive clinics, urging police to round up prostitutes and gay men, and smashing saloons. They were right that something in the nation was morally amiss -- but wrong about what that was. Today's groups -- like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and the Concerned Women for America -- depend on journalists to help keep the public breathing heavily about illicit sex, so that they can gin up misleading moral panic. Too often the media go along. Anthony Comstock would be proud.

It has been nearly 20 years since comics could safely be dismissed as kids� stuff. In 1986 three books changed the way Americans saw the medium. Two of them � Alan Moore�s Watchmen and Frank Miller�s The Dark Knight Returns � brought a sense of gloomy realism to the superhero genre. The third, Art Spiegelman�s Maus, used cartoon conventions to tell of his father�s experience in the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Magazines were suddenly full of stories about comics �growing up,� and the term �graphic novel� entered the literary lexicon.

Somehow �graphic journalism� didn�t make the headlines. But since the renaissance of the mid-'80s, more and more writers and artists have been producing serious nonfiction comics about current events, from war crimes to hip hop. In the mid-1990s, Joe Sacco�s two books on Palestine were hailed as groundbreaking works and made Sacco the best known of the new graphic journalists. Now comics, or graphic, journalism is turning up in daily newspapers, where its inherent subjectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom�s dispassionate prose � another round in the debate over what journalism should be in the 21st century.



In the Shadow of No Towers: Art Spiegelman, courtesy Pantheon Books

In the Oct. 10, 2004, issue of The Edmonton Journal, for example, David Staples and Jill Stanton used the comics format to tell the story of Dave Eamer, a Canadian truck driver who lost the use of his legs in a highway accident and went on to become North America�s first paraplegic long-distance trucker. The Oregonian has adopted a regular comics column, called �CulturePulp,� in which M.E. Russell depicts, among other things, his experiences running a marathon, hunting wild mushrooms, and watching a risqué lounge act. Perhaps not to be outdone by the competition, Willamette Week, a weekly paper in Portland, adopted the comics format for record reviews and interviews with bands. Those newspapers are following the lead of magazines like The New Yorker, which had Spiegelman cover the 2004 GOP national convention, and Details, which featured Sacco�s coverage of the Bosnian war crimes trial in 1998, Peter Kuper�s depiction of the 1997 Burning Man festival, and Kim Dietch�s account of the execution of Ronald Fitzgerald.



Culturepulp, M.E. Russell, courtesy of the artist.

The move toward respectability began in earnest in the 1970s, when The Comics Journal � the genre�s leading trade magazine � began agitating for serious study of the art form. The underground comics of the previous decade had helped demolish some of the barriers to more adult work, and the emergence of �direct market� comics shops opened a niche for small presses, many of which were doing this kind of work. The creators increasingly experimented with new artistic styles and narrative strategies, and comics journalists have adapted these, searching for innovative ways to present the news.

Comics journalism entails a startling variety of approaches and styles. Something of that aesthetic range is represented by the two main pieces in the 1989 book Brought to Light. In one half of the volume, Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates tell of the 1984 bombing at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, which killed eight people and injured 28 others. The presentation is straightforward, using plain language and realistic illustrations, and drawing on the accounts of witnesses and the evidence presented in the Christic Institute�s lawsuit alleging CIA involvement in the bombing.

Flip the book over, and you find a story with similar themes told in a very different manner. The celebrated comics innovators Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz present a fable-like retelling of CIA history, narrated by a lonely, alcoholic eagle wearing an ugly checkered sports coat. Sometimes painterly, sometimes cartoonish, in places using techniques of collage, the piece outlines a record of atrocities culminating in the Iran-contra affair. The tone wavers between the confessional and the bombastic, and the imagery employs heavy symbolism, with human chess pieces, sprinting swastikas, and swimming pools full of blood.

But the facts are there, and the nightmarish surrealism seems to fit the subject matter. Indeed, the reader is forced to question the propriety of the standard journalistic conceits � the calm recitation of facts, the carefully hedged allegations, the measured tone. A drunken eagle swimming in blood may actually come closer to the point.

Brabner explained the strategy for Brought to Light: �There were two ways that people were relating to the story� of the CIA�s role in Nicaragua. �One was that people get wrapped up � too wrapped up � in the conspiracy stuff. The other was moral outrage, based on a historical analysis. And I thought, �We don�t have to sacrifice; we can do a topsy-turvy book.��

Such code-switching, the ability to alternate between the realistic and the symbolic, is a major strength of comics journalism. It is also one reason why editors are likely to shy away from it � or, as with the recent newspaper strips, to relegate comics journalism to cultural coverage and human-interest stories. When it comes to the front page, newspapers favor plain language, in part to protect the readers from the seductions of rhetoric, of art. And comics are irreducibly artistic.

But such reasoning also cuts the other way. The hard-nosed, facts-are-facts tone of �journalistic language� is also seductive. Plain-speaking is itself a kind of rhetoric, which wins trust precisely by seeming to leave rhetoric aside.

Art Spiegelman argues, �The phony objectivity that comes with a camera is a convention and a lie in the same way as writing in the third person rather than the first person. To write a comics journalism report you�re already making an acknowledgment of biases and an urgency that communicates another level of information.�

Spiegelman�s latest book, In the Shadow of No Towers, plays with the dissonance between subjectivity and objectivity and uses it to draw the reader into the events described. The book, which includes strips Spiegelman created for publications like Die Ziet, The Forward, Internazionale, and the London Review of Books, tells of Spiegelman�s experience seeing the World Trade Center towers fall on Sept. 11, 2001, and graphically depicts the atmosphere of paranoia and despair that followed the attacks. Appearing in cartoon form on the page, Spiegelman says: �I insist the sky is falling; they roll their eyes and tell me it�s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. ... That�s when time stands still at the moment of trauma.� As he speaks, the panel turns. It gives the impression of frozen time. And, turned fully sideways (twice), the frame itself forms the image of the twin towers. This image literally closes in on Spiegelman; it eclipses his speech.

At the end of the strip, the reader is left fully outside the frame, but inside the narrative. We see what the narrator sees. Not bad for a motionless series of two-dimensional drawings.

Of course, the effect relies on a disruption of the ordinary mechanics of the medium. Comics do freeze time with the still image; but by placing these images in sequence, they also provide a sense of motion, of change. Comics are not merely a collection of images, but a collection of images placed in deliberate � though not necessarily chronological � order. Unlike much of photojournalism, the images are not intended to stand alone, each seeming to capture the whole story in a single moment. And unlike video and film, with comics the entire series is available to view simultaneously.

This is not to suggest that there aren�t similarities with these other media: When photographs appear in a deliberate sequence, they share many of the narrative characteristics of drawn comics, as do video and film when they slow their presentation down and perceptibly reveal their underlying structure � a series of still images.

On the other hand, comics can also incorporate a complex sequence of events, an entire history, into a single composition. The cover of Seth Tobocman�s 1999 War in the Neighborhood, for example, shows a standoff between the police and protesters outside a squat on New York�s Lower East Side. The image wraps around to the back cover, which features a cut-away of the building. Each room shows a different scene from the squat�s history � repair work, a party, a meeting, a fight, a couple holding their newborn baby. Past and present are spliced together on the page. You can see at a glance what the protesters are seeking to defend.

While working in a very different style, Ted Rall also uses visuals to convey the experiential aspects of his stories. His 2002 book, To Afghanistan and Back, features a dozen war-zone dispatches and a forty-nine-page �graphic travelogue� of his trip. While the essays tell us more about Afghan culture and politics, as well as the progress of the war, the cartoon gives a much clearer sense of what it felt like to be there, what Rall himself actually experienced � the fear, the frustration, the sense of the absurd. He writes at one point, �I was in the most dangerous country on the planet, during a war, at the front. And I was bored.� His cartoon doppelganger stares blankly into space.

Of course, comic-book journalists face many of the same difficulties as those working in more conventional media � questions of bias, unreliable sources, language barriers, and ethical dilemmas. But their strategies for resolving them are quite different from those of standard newspaper reporting or broadcast journalism.

In Palestine: In the Gaza Strip, Joe Sacco remembers a conversation with two Israeli women. One asks, �Shouldn�t you be seeing our side of the story, too?�



Palestine, Joe Sacco, courtesy Fantagraphics

He reflects: �And what can I say? ... standing there with two girls from Tel Aviv, it occurs to me that I have seen the Israelis, but through Palestinian eyes � that Israelis were mainly soldiers and settlers to me now, too.�

He invites one of his new friends to the Arab market, to show her the Palestine he has seen. Instead, he discovers that walking beside an Israeli, surrounded by Palestinians, her fear is contagious. The Palestinians, who have been so kind to him, whom he has lived among for weeks, suddenly appear strange and hostile. Sacco feels himself near to panic. It is an enlightening moment. However briefly, he does see the conflict from the other side, and he realizes that the Israeli experience is not just about seizing land and conducting raids, but also about the quiet tension � the trepidation of a young woman walking through the market. Such ambivalence fits well with the complexities of the Palestinian territories.

Sacco recognizes that his perspective has been limited, perhaps even compromised, by his immersion into Palestinian life. More traditional correspondents covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might have the same insight, but are largely unable to deal with it in their stories. Sacco, meanwhile, does not deny the reality of what he has seen, or try to balance it by staying with settlers or embedding with the Israeli Defense Forces. Nor does he apologize for his views, even with their blind spots and contradictions. Instead, he shows us what he has learned � including those elements that frustrate any easy conclusions. �What I�ve seen before my eyes,� Sacco tells me, �isn�t often balanced.�

In comics journalism, more so perhaps than in any other medium, the reporter�s role is consistently emphasized. He is often present, not merely as a voice or a talking head, but as a moral viewpoint and as a participant in the events described. �You become part of a story if you�re a journalist,� Sacco says. �I mean, you can try to write yourself out of it, but you become involved. I think it�s more honest to show that your involvement affects people.�

As the reporter comes into focus, we see that he is not a neutral conduit for news and information, but a person like ourselves � a fallible human being, vulnerable to bias and ignorance and error. By acknowledging his own humanity, the writer can encourage the reader to think critically about what he or she reads.

Comics are well suited to that role because of the inherent narrative properties of the medium. They are not merely illustrated stories, or pictures matched with commentary. Instead, the narrative relies on both the words and the pictures; meaning is produced by the interaction of image and text. Yet each element remains to some degree independent of the other. For this reason, and because several sets of text-image blocks can appear side by side on the same page, comics are well suited to represent the fragmentation of experience during crisis, or the incommensurable views of opposing sides in the midst of conflict, or the kaleidoscopic chaos of a desert carnival like Burning Man.

Moreover, by mixing written words and images, comics have the inherent ability to juxtapose a literal retelling and artistic symbolism, or conversely, symbolic language and representational imagery. includes a short bit titled �Weapons of Mass Displacement,� in which Spiegelman (again appearing in cartoon form) sums up our national neurosis: �Remember how we demolished Iraq instead of Al-Qaeda.� As he speaks, his head changes places with a lampshade, and then his hand, and then his foot. He and his cat switch positions, and roles. All the while, the visual displacement heightens the sense of absurdity.

The independence of the words and the pictures allows for an overlay of subjective and objective storytelling. Tensions between the written word and the image can be used to highlight uncertainties, ambiguities, and ironies that other media might inadvertently play down or deliberately ignore.

All of this suggests, simply, that comics open possibilities for journalists that are less available in other media. And perhaps more importantly, they add to the options available to readers, who have lately demonstrated a hunger for voice and meaning in news coverage. Witness the proliferation of blogs and the continued popularity of zines. Like zines and blogs, comics drop the pretense of detachment and emphasize perspective. Furthermore, comics are visually engaging and famously easy to understand. They are, as Sacco says, �inviting. It looks like an easy read.� After all, as everyone knows, even kids read comic books.

Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes ... to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the 'authentic' document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible.

Weekends spent alone at home, drinking to the point of unconsciousness. Romances that always seem to crumble after a couple of months. Feeling too paranoid to go to a movie or too agitated to sleep. This is a story about the invisible wounds that journalists often suffer when covering war. Anyone who has covered violence is aware of the psychic damage it can wreak � the guilt, the sense of being a parasite, the unbearable pettiness of daily life. The tribe of war correspondents is notoriously macho, and to even admit the damage � let alone surrender to it � has always been considered a sign of weakness. We are dispassionate chroniclers, after all, protected by the talisman of the notebook and the camera. The standard practice has been to go forth with a bottle of Scotch, absorb the pain and fear, and never tell your editors.

This denial has by no means disappeared, but the collective trauma of September 11 ushered post-traumatic stress disorder into the national lexicon, and it is beginning to usher therapists into the newsroom as well. The public and the medical community have a better understanding of trauma and its impact than they did just a decade ago, and the growing number of women on the battlefield � with their willingness to share their anguish � has made it easier for male colleagues to open up. With a new wave of emotionally scarred reporters coming out of Iraq (many of them relative rookies), editors are realizing that it will take more than flak jackets and �hostile environment training� to keep correspondents healthy. Among other things, they are introducing confidential hotlines for journalists who need help, and scrutinizing e-mail for signs of distress. �The wall of resistance is just coming down,� says Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist based in Michigan who works with traumatized journalists.

It�s about time.

Greg Marinovich, a freelance photographer, felt a deep sense of impotence as he witnessed a gruesome period of South Africa�s history in the early 1990s, when his daily routine involved taking pictures of people being shot or hacked to death. When he won a Pulitzer in 1991, he found it difficult to celebrate. The winning photos, taken for the AP, were of a mob savagely murdering a man. Marinovich had been unable to save the victim as he was dragged from a train in Soweto by five men who then beat and stoned him and stabbed him in the head before dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire. �I felt shock, repulsion, fear, excitement, dread � always the dread,� he says. �Now, having said that, there is the issue of enjoying, and being excited at, getting good photographs. So all these weird and disturbing thoughts, combined with the fact that we were earning money, added to the guilt � terrific guilt.�

During the same period, one of Marinovich�s best friends, Ken Oosterbroek, also a photographer, was shot dead in a crossfire just yards away from him in Tokoza township. Marinovich took a bullet in the chest in that incident and nearly died. He recovered, went back to work, and later buried two more colleagues who had committed suicide. Marinovich escaped the numbing trap of drugs and alcohol that ensnared many of the journalists he worked with, but he endured terrible spells of depression and, as he puts it, �destroyed some relationships.�

Science suggests that a terrifying experience alters the chemistry in the brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain that researchers believe is tied to memory, releases cascades of stress hormones such as adrenaline. Such hormones change the way the mind processes information during times of stress, lodging images like snapshots in the memory. This can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, when vivid recollections return well after the event, evoking the initial horror. Classic signs include panic attacks, the avoidance of people or reminders of the incident, and flashbacks or nightmares.

These physical reactions compound psychological burdens such as guilt. Extreme stress can spawn other symptoms of distress, from insomnia to depression. Many mental health experts believe journalists should debrief as early as possible after the traumatic experience, so that disturbing thoughts don�t fester. This could be with colleagues at the hotel bar, or a couple of sessions with a therapist. The important thing is to process it. �It�s like carrying around a bowling ball if you don�t deal with it,� says Frank Smyth, the Washington, D.C., representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

He should know. Smyth was tormented by nightmares in 1991 after being held for two weeks in Iraq�s Abu Ghraib prison when he was covering the Kurdish rebellions that followed the first gulf war. While on assignment for CBS, Smyth drove straight into an ambush. For seventeen hours he hid in a ditch, listening as Iraqi soldiers executed a colleague who had been traveling with him. The soldiers eventually found Smyth and another colleague and locked them in a cellblock. There, Smyth had a prime view of guards torturing prisoners with electroshock and hitting them with wooden boards. Engraved in his memory was a boy named Jaffer, who yelped like a dog while guards beat him with a rubber hose. �He was so young his voice hadn�t yet cracked,� Smyth says.

After his release, Smyth says, going to sleep each night was �like a horror movie,� as the scenes replayed in dreams. Smyth eventually sought counseling and began to receive acupuncture treatments and practice yoga. The nightmares faded.

This does not mean that therapy will cure all. John Laurence, author of The Cat from Hue, a memoir about covering Vietnam for CBS, has sought help on and off since 1966, when he suffered his first combat stress. After Vietnam, Laurence, now sixty-four, covered fifteen more wars. Counseling helped him cope with the psychological costs of his career. He describes his old self as a �mess� � heavy drinking, sleeplessness, paranoia, dependence on tranquilizers. At his lowest points, he says, he would drop to the pavement at sharp noises. He was scared to leave his room, and had terrifying dreams of being trapped in a crashing cargo plane.

Still, he went to Iraq last year (for Esquire and National Public Radio) and the familiar demons of depression scuttled back. �I have never felt cured,� he says.

Photographers are among the most susceptible to PTSD, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002. Because photographers have to get close to capture their subjects, they must switch off their human instinct to help, and this can cause inner conflict. Mark Brayne, a former BBC correspondent who became a psychotherapist after experiencing his own anguish, hypothesizes that writers often cope better than photographers because they create a narrative. �When it has a beginning, a middle, and an end it can be put to bed,� he says. �But a photographer creates fragmented images, and the brain stores these fragments that cause distress.�

Corinne Dufka dealt with her distress by shutting down emotionally. Dufka, who has won nearly every major photography award for her macabre images of Africa, says she grew so desensitized that she began to lack feeling even for friends. She had an �epiphany� after the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998, when she agonized over missing the story rather than the fate of the victims. Dufka cried days later, when it dawned on her that real people had been blinded (her mother is blind). �I was ashamed about my lack of empathy and sense of humanity,� she recalls.

Soon thereafter, Dufka quit photojournalism to become a human-rights campaigner. (She won a MacArthur �genius� award last year for her activism in Sierra Leone.) These days she only takes snapshots of her five-year-old daughter, Eloise.

Experts note that trauma is often worse when violence is random and people are unprepared for it. In this respect, Iraq presents a dire scenario. There�s no relief from fear in Baghdad; reporters are living among a hostile population and bombs can explode anywhere. And since many reporters dispatched to Iraq have never covered conflict before, they have no practiced responses.

Steve Franklin, who has covered the Middle East for many years for the Chicago Tribune, was �stunned� by the anxiety permeating Baghdad when he was there earlier this year. �People were obsessed with security,� he says. �They had to have walkie-talkies, they sandbagged their houses. But they couldn�t tell the newspaper back home that they were too scared to leave the house.�

Adding to the reporters� isolation was that many editors seemed ill-prepared to lend emotional support. �We ask people to cover these wars on the fly, but we�re not trained to ask �How do you feel now, after you almost got killed today?�� Franklin says. �In the macho environment, we ignore it. We can�t show fear.�

There are warning signs to watch for when a reporter returns from covering combat. A common one is intense loneliness. The journalists often feel they can only relate to colleagues who have been in similar situations. How do you convey to others the guilt of leaving a besieged city, as children pull at your sleeves begging to be saved?

Paul Holmes, one of Reuters�s top war reporters, found it hard to reconnect with his now ex-wife and three children in between stints in Bosnia. He was on edge and would snap at minor things. �You�re expected to reinsert yourself into normal urban existence and it�s extremely stressful for your family,� he explains. �You go home and there�s a problem because the local supermarket runs out of cornflakes and it just doesn�t seem important.�

Plenty of war correspondents still suffer in silence, but a growing number speak out. David Loyn, the BBC�s developing-world correspondent, took six months off conflict reporting after a harrowing time in Kosovo in 1998. He has told his bosses he doesn�t want to go to Iraq for now. He sees no shame in seeking professional help, which he did after witnessing the execution of an Afghan man who allegedly stole a BBC camera. �I was no good to anyone after that,� Loyn recalls. �Very jittery.�

Loyn matter-of-factly describes trauma therapy as a technical process, like vacuuming a carpet: �If an ordinary sentient human being is exposed to a lot of violence, then you need a cleaning.� He�s blessed with receptive employers who are pioneering trauma awareness for the media. Last year, the BBC added trauma instruction to its safety training, and supervisors are being told how to deal with troubled colleagues in the field and after they return. Several stars have �come out� about their experiences to assure more junior people that it�s okay to have stress disorder. Former correspondent Brayne, hired as a consultant, holds regular seminars in London on the topic.

Reuters has followed suit, with managerial training and a telephone helpline. Ironically, for a country where psychotherapy is more widely accepted than in England, American media lag behind. There are a few notable exceptions, though. Chris Cramer, the managing director of CNN International, is one of the press�s loudest advocates for trauma training. Cramer, who suffered paranoia for years after being held hostage in the Iranian embassy in London in 1980, encourages informal debriefings, some of which take place in his office. He will intervene, too, if he feels one of his journalists is not emotionally ready to return to the field. �This kind of a dialogue didn�t happen ten years ago,� Cramer says.

CNN also provides voluntary, confidential counseling to its staff, in person or on the phone. The New York Times offers similar services, and recently consulted with a military psychiatrist about ways to further soothe its correspondents in Iraq. NPR and Hearst Newspapers conducted trauma training sessions earlier this year. Since it opened in 1999, The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at the University of Washington (www.dartcenter.org) has aggressively tried to raise awareness of these issues.

The stigma, though, persists. Journalists who are suffering sometimes fear that they will destroy their careers if they ask for help. The staff at the Dart Center says there has been too little systemic progress in combating trauma within newsrooms. Often the bosses may be on board, but not the assignment editors, for example.

We will know only later how Iraq will affect reporters� psyches, since often the damage bleeds out over time. For instance, in my own case, I put myself on autopilot when I was in Angola for a particularly rough six months in the early 1990s. I was nervous about a death threat, but distracted myself by working eighteen-hour days. When caught in sniper fire, I assumed a Zen-like state of denial. Landing at an airport that was being shelled, I busied myself with helping the wounded and collecting testimonies.

Months later, after leaving the country, I had disturbing dreams about limbless people whom I couldn�t save. I developed a phobia about roads that reminded me of an ambush. My catharsis came from writing a book about the war, which forced me to confront emotions. And, yes, I consulted a trauma expert.

It's a misty October morning in suburban Virginia and three middle-aged women are hatching a subversive scheme – one that would land them in prison if they were ever to set foot in their home country, Iran, again.

They gather at George Mason University, a cluster of brick buildings skirted by meandering footpaths and thick oak and maple groves, then file into a soundproof recording studio and start flipping switches. Jila Kazerounian, a forty-seven-year-old computer analyst and the group's leader, hunkers down in one corner next to a mound of crumpled newspapers and gutted recording equipment, and grabs a mike. "Salam," she barks, "testing, testing, salam."

Nothing.

The project's technical director, Ramesh Rad, fumbles with the mixing-board knobs, sending shrieks of feedback through the room. When this doesn't work, she plugs and unplugs cords, and checks the settings on the audio-editing software. Finally, she and the others huddle around the computer monitor blinking and scratching their heads.

Eventually, Parvin, a forty-eight-year-old insurance-claim processor who asked that only her first name be used because she is concerned about the safety of her sister in Iran, suggests a plan B. Half an hour later, the group shuffles into her cramped home office. Parvin switches on her Hewlett Packard desktop and launches her digital-audio software. Leaning close to the mike embedded in her computer, she introduces Kazerounian, who pauses before launching her opening salvo.

"Allow me to first say hello to my fellow countrywomen," she says in Farsi, "the Iranian women who have been living under tyranny for the past twenty-five years."

The crew is recording the first half-hour program for their new radio station called Voice of Women. They intend to stream it over the Internet to a German company, which for $75 will broadcast it via short-wave into Iran on November 6. The station, which is ultimately slated to broadcast live for an hour each week, will feature news, talk, and a call-in segment, during which Iranian women can air their views.

The relative ease with which shoestring operations like Voice of Women can now reach Iran complicates the Islamic regime's struggle to control public opinion. The government has closed more than a hundred papers, many for questioning its policies. And the broadcast media, the most popular source of information among Iranian citizens, remain in the grip of the nation's spiritual and political leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "It's mostly propaganda," says Nati Toobian, who monitors Iranian television for the Middle East Media Research Institute, of official programming. "Even the government admits it's a tool of the regime." But the ruling clerics can't control what airs on the dozens of stations that expatriate groups in the United States and Europe have recently begun beaming into Iran.

Most credit Zia Atabay, a sixtysomething former rock star known as the "Tom Jones of Iran," with starting the trend. In March 2000 he launched National Iranian Television, a commercial station in Los Angeles aimed at his compatriots in the United States and Europe. Six months later, an NITV host, Ali Reza Meybodi, received a call from a man in the Iranian city of Isfahan during his live show. The man said he was receiving NITV's signal. Meybodi didn't believe him, so he jotted down the man's number and dialed him back. Sure enough, the man answered. Still doubtful, Meybodi grabbed a piece of fruit from a wooden tureen sitting on the nearby coffee table.

"What am I holding?" he asked. By this time Atabay and others had filtered into the makeshift studio.

"An apple," replied the caller.

Before long, everyone in the studio was weeping, and calls began pouring in from all over Iran. It turns out NITV reached Iran as the result of a technical snafu; someone at Eutelsat, the French satellite company, had flipped the wrong switch.

When he realized he could reach into Iranian living rooms, Atabay's programming turned political. He wasn't the first to beam dissent into Iran. Since the early 1980s, expats had been staging sporadic assaults on Iranian airwaves, mostly via short-wave, which regular Iranian radios receive. But after NITV's launch, with the cost of satellite airtime dropping and dishes sprouting from rooftops throughout the Middle East, Iranian exiles flocked to long-distance broadcasting.

As a result, Iranians can now tune into twenty-six television and twelve radio stations produced by expatriates, if they have the right equipment – and many do. There are 17 million radios in Iran, and an estimated 3 million to 4 million houses have satellite connections, in spite of the government's longstanding satellite ban.

Like Voice of Women, most of the radio stations focus on political and social issues. The majority feature weekly hourlong programs sponsored by a particular faction, be it the Communist Party of Iran or the Mujahedin of the Islamic Revolution. In fact, Voice of Women, which is sponsored by a fledgling nonprofit called Women's Forum Against Fundamentalism in Iran, is the first Iranian expat radio station that isn't linked to a political party.

The television stations, in contrast, deliver round-the-clock programming, and only seven of the twenty-six focus on politics, while the others emphasize entertainment. Most of the political stations are run by monarchists who aim to enthrone Reza Pahlavi, the son of the American-backed shah who was deposed in the 1979 revolution that brought the current regime to power. While Atabay claims his station is neutral and independent, many people familiar with it say it has a clear monarchist bent.

There's been much speculation about where the stations get their funding. The television stations run advertising, but those with political leanings have trouble selling enough ads to cover their costs, which run upward of $1 million a year. Some suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency has served as their silent partner, but station owners insist this isn't so.

That doesn't mean the stations have escaped the attention of officialdom, either in Washington or Tehran. Last December, the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute launched a show on the Los Angeles-based station Radio Sedaye Iran, a move it hopes will help influence regime change in the Islamic Republic. Iran's President Mohammad Khatami, an embattled reformist, recently lent a deputy $400,000 to launch a satellite television station that will broadcast from London to Iran. Conservatives have blasted him for flouting the satellite ban and for blurring the boundaries between official stations and outside networks, which "sometimes go close to . . . harming national security and the moral health of society," according to the conservative paper Khorasan.

It's a bright morning in Woodland Hills, California, a leafy Los Angeles suburb filled with sprawling office parks. Kevin Jamshidi, a reporter and producer, is bounding through the atrium of NITV's studios – 18,000 square feet of clean lines with splashes of primary color – when the phone rings and he snaps up the receiver. Tomorrow the world will mark the third anniversary of September 11, and the caller, an NITV reporter, is on the steps of the U.S. embassy in Brussels where 350 candle-toting Iranian exiles have clustered to commemorate the 2001 attacks. Later, they plan to march on their home country's embassy.

When the call comes, a live talk show is on air, which in the world of Iranian expat television means a well-coifed man in a tailored suit sitting alone on a soundstage musing about politics, history, or Persian culture. Jamshidi orders the control room to break into the program, and the caller's voice is soon crackling over a speakerphone on the host's desk. "Down with the Islamic Republic," chants the crowd in the background. "Down with the Taliban, either in Kabul or in Tehran."

For Iranian dissidents, commemorating September 11, 2001, is also a way of lashing out at Tehran and its fiercely anti-American rhetoric. Partly as an act of protest, Atabay went on the air just after the attacks and urged Iran's residents to hold a candlelight vigil. Some six thousand heeded his call, and many landed behind bars as a result.

Next up on NITV is the news. Like many who work at the expat-run stations, the lead anchor, Noureddin Sabet Imani, an earnest-looking man dressed in a crisp suit and wire-rimmed glasses, started his journalism career in prerevolutionary Iran, where he worked in state-run television. He delivers the international news with an air of cultivated neutrality. The Iran report, which comes at the end of the program, is another story, however. The correspondent, who calls in live from Paris for the segment, blends fact with opinion. Today, for instance, he tells of a student in the city of Hammadan who died after being tossed out a dormitory window. No one knows who did it, but the correspondent notes, "When these things happen in Iran, it's usually the work of the Revolutionary Guard."

The caller is one of a handful of paid reporters NITV has scattered around Europe and the Middle East, according to Atabay. Many reports, however, flow from anonymous eyewitnesses who call from the scenes of unfolding events – including those that official media aren't covering. It was eyewitnesses who called on August 15 to say that a sixteen-year-old girl convicted of "acts incompatible with chastity" had been hanged in the northern city of Neka. The incident didn't make headlines in the United States or Europe until August 24; expat broadcasters had reported it within hours.

Some station owners worry that airing such reports could make them targets. Atabay has been known to hire armed bodyguards, and the station's studios are outfitted with fingerprint scanners, motion detectors, and cameras that he can monitor over the Internet from anywhere in the world. Local police have also been notified that the building is a potential trouble spot. "They know to come right away," Atabay explains, "so they don't have to bring the yellow bags."

While the Iranian government hasn't directly attacked any U.S. broadcasters, it has attacked their signals. NITV was kicked off its original satellite, Hot Bird 5 over France, because Tehran kept jamming it. NITV and the other political stations eventually migrated to Telstar 12, which sits above the middle of the Atlantic Ocean – too far away to jam from Iran.

But even Telstar 12 isn't entirely safe. For the last five years, Iranian dissidents have commemorated the student protests that wracked Iran for six days in 1999. Around the 2003 anniversary, students flooded Iran's streets once again. Jittery clerics closed universities, banned public gatherings, and announced that they had jailed more than four thousand agitators. But their efforts to preempt protest were initially scuttled, in part by expatriate broadcasters who urged people to take to the streets. That is, until Telstar 12 came under attack. The satellite was jammed from Cuba, and many Iranians believe Havana was simply doing Tehran's bidding.

Why would those who had poured into the streets demanding democratic reforms ally themselves with the mostly monarchist stations? After all, Iranians were subject to censorship, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and assassination under the shah, as they are under the current regime. Kazerounian suggests it's an alliance born of desperation. "They're just so fed up," she says. "They'll come out to the streets no matter who calls them." She isn't sure if anyone outside Iran should be pushing protest, though. "How can we call on them to risk their lives when we're sitting here in our safe homes?" she asks. "It has to be an indigenous voice calling for transformation."

Rather than incite unrest, Kazerounian's aim is to ensure that Iranian women – who have been flogged, raped, and stoned to death by the government – don't suffer in silence. She wants them to phone and fax in their stories, so she can call attention to their plight, both inside and outside Iran.

Back inside Parvin's office, soft afternoon light is filtering through the sheer curtains. Kazerounian leans toward the computer, a yellow pad tucked in her lap. She doesn't need her notes anymore. The words are just pouring out of her.

Finally, her pace slows. It's clear by her tone she is wrapping up. "The heavy weight of the struggle against the regime is on the shoulders of the women in Iran," she says. "For those of us in exile, our responsibility is to connect with you and ensure your voice is being heard around the world."

In the fall of 1974, in Kanawha County, W. Va., Christian fundamentalists enraged at the imposition of "blasphemous" textbooks in the public schools demolished a wing of a school board building with fifteen sticks of dynamite. When the board insisted on keeping the books in the curriculum, homes were bombed and school buses shot at. "Jesus Wouldn't Have Read Them," read one of the slogans of a movement whose leader, a preacher, would soon face charges of conspiracy to bomb two elementary schools.

Into this whirlwind stepped Paul Cowan, a shaggy-haired, bespectacled, left-wing New York Jew, trying to make sense of why he felt sympathy for the side that was laying the dynamite.

For people like Cowan, a 34-year-old staff writer at The Village Voice, it was a boon time for existential drift. In 1970 he published "The Making of an Un-American," the memoir of a raw and arrogant new-left punk who had taken a one-year leave from the Voice in 1966 for a stint in the Peace Corps that was supposed to be broadening, but ended up being wildly disillusioning. "When I read that the Viet Cong had attacked the American embassy in Saigon during the Tet offensive," Cowan concluded in Un-American, "I was almost able to imagine that I was a member of the raiding party." But by the time Cowan began his next project, in 1971, life inside the new left had become an emotional burden for him: diminishing returns, dashed certitudes, "intellectual claustrophobia." That was how, "gradually, half-consciously, without any theory or any plan, I decided to cross the sound barrier of dogma and test my beliefs against the realities of American life." The twelve chapters of "The Tribes of America" (1979) were the felicitous result.

A person of Cowan's inclinations and background was supposed to know exactly what to think about a howling mob gathered around a crucifix-emblazoned flag and expectorating demands to burn books of the sort the reporter would want his kids to study, books with chapters by Norman Mailer and James Baldwin and test questions asking students to interpret rather than parrot what they had read. It would have been easy to record the scenes of bonfires and leave it at that; certainly that would have satisfied Cowan's readers back in Greenwich Village. Instead, Cowan took the riskier step: wondering whether these criminals didn't also have a point.

The people responsible for the textbooks were bureaucrats who wrote blithely of pedagogy's power to "induce changes ... in the behavior of the 'culturally lost' of Appalachia," and identified teachers as state-designated "change agents" and schools as "the experimental center, and the core of this design." Nowadays the arrogance of this formulation is as grating to us as a chalkboard screech. Not then. It was an era when the language of universally applicable liberal enlightenment flew trippingly off cosmopolitan tongues. Which was why it came as such a shock when the "culturally lost" proved to have ideas of their own – that their culture had inherent dignity and value, and that textbooks suggesting that Christian revelation was on a par with Greek myth were, as protesters put it, "moral genocide."

It took a keen eye and an open mind to recognize that the cosmopolitans were pursuing a form of class warfare. Cowan noticed how urban and suburban professionals in Kanawha County – "Hillers," in local parlance – spoke nervously in private of how familiarity with names like Mailer and Baldwin would get their precious darlings into Harvard and keep them out of West Virginia Tech. The Hillers weren't about to risk having their upward climb impeded by the "Creekers," poor residents in the hollows who wanted "to protest corruption," as one suburbanite told Cowan, but didn't "even know how to spell that word." But some Creekers were motivated by similar dreams of upward mobility. Their version of it was just incompatible with the Hillers' impositions – like the kid who told Cowan "he wanted to go to West Virginia Tech, to be an engineer," and he felt he needed "a good basic education" to do it.

Dynamite wasn't the answer. But neither was a kind of cultural imperialism indifferent to the fact that 81 percent of the district opposed the textbooks. It was, in a word, complicated. Certainly more complicated than the portraits other journalists were creating for sneering consumption back home: death threats, double-barreled shotguns, Onward Christian Soldiers. The futile last stand of yokels against the inevitable march of progress.

It was at a time when, certainly to the left, local cultures were of keenest interest as obstacles federal judges eradicated in order to deliver social justice. But what Paul Cowan understood long before anyone else was that there was a new kind of story to tell about such conflicts: that attempts to "coax people into the melting pot" had costs as well as benefits, and campaigns to replace "our periods with your question marks," as one Creeker put it with aphoristic intelligence, must not simply be imposed by fiat. Cowan understood how "often, people I might once have written off as reactionaries were fighting to preserve their culture and their psychological and physical turf," and that this new argument over the meaning of democracy was defining the next frontier of political conflict itself. That America had tribes, and that sometimes – often – they would come to blows.

We call those fights the "culture wars" now, and we have a more richly variegated vocabulary to describe the Hillers and the Creekers: red state and blue state. Redneck and yuppie. New Class and white working class. "Evangelical" and "liberal." We describe our nation's dueling dreads over such concepts with a casualness that once marked cocktail party chatter about the inevitability of consensus liberalism. Writing in the 1970s, however, Cowan had no such clichés to lean on. He had to figure it out for himself. He did so brilliantly – eyes open, with a courage I can scarcely believe. He traveled all over the country: to Boston during the busing wars; to Forest Hills, Queens, where he was shocked at the racism of immigrant Jews fighting the construction of a low-income housing project; to the southernmost border of the United States, where the sacrifices Mexicans were making to preserve their families looked like anarchy to the Americans patrolling the border with shotguns. Cowan's reporting from these places left him "with a profound respect for the stability of religion, of ceremony, of family life: of customs I'd once regarded as old-fashioned and bourgeois." His travels also found him realizing that "those same longings, translated into political terms, have produced the vicious fights I've witnessed for the past seven years and recorded in this book." His agonized sensitivity to battlefields then barely emergent makes for one of the most remarkable books I have ever read by any journalist.

It was courage that allowed him to achieve it, though courage of a certain sort. Paul Cowan was a journalist who threw himself into situations that might just change his mind, and how many of us dare to do that? In the deeply humanizing portrait of illegal aliens, he notes how "I'd always included braceros" – Mexicans who traveled back and forth on legally sanctioned work contracts – "in my private litany of the oppressed." Instead, he found "they talked nostalgically, not bitterly, about their adventures" north of the border. He calls the chapter "Still the Promised Land" – a self-reproach to someone who once proudly called himself an "Un-American." In a profile of Jesse Jackson, he encounters a man on the verge of apostasy from the left: Jackson, who was then deeply opposed to abortion, was the keynoter at the 1978 meeting of the Republican National Committee. Cowan sat and listened, relegating his own voice to the background. That quiet and reflective voice may account for a mystery regarding Cowan, whom I had never heard of at all when I encountered this book by accident last year. Flashier contemporaries went on to greater fame. Cowan's willingness to play down his own ego – indeed, to mock his own ego – accounts for some of his obscurity.

The more famous names often seemed more macho; there is something about the male journalist and the trope of physical courage. Though Cowan was no chicken. Covering a nationwide transportation strike, he thumbs a ride with a trucker through Ohio where strike supporters are shooting scabs from overpasses. But then comes the characteristic Cowan move: the introduction of a discordant image. He describes a group of college students goofing around in a truck stop's game room, himself "oddly envious, as they chatted cozily about the plays they planned to see during a weekend in New York." He would rather be with them. It is a meditation on a deeper meaning of courage. What journalist, reporting a story, forcing yourself on strangers, attempting to convince yourself that you have something worth saying about a world not your own, hasn't felt the desire to be somewhere else – anywhere else? And what, really, is more difficult: admitting that to yourself (and the world: Cowan wrote of his "fear that I'll appear a fool"), or placing yourself in the way of a "dangerous" situation that renders moot the question of whether what you're doing is worth writing about? The latter course is a way to banish the real fear. Sometimes you realize, reading The Tribes of America, that physical courage and psychic courage are inversely proportional.

The book is not just a collection of published articles. Cowan revised and extended the articles by revisiting the places where he'd reported them. You want scary? Imagine catching up with the people you originally thought you'd turned into heroes with your stories, and who you now know think you've sold them out.

In 1974 Cowan was among the onslaught of outsiders – students, politicians, scribblers, filmmakers – who descended on Harlan County, Kentucky, to chronicle a coal miners' strike. He arrived bearing fantasies. The locale was legendary: "Bloody Harlan," site of the Depression-era strike that inspired the song "Which Side Are You On?" "Some of the journalists I admired most – Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and John Dos Passos – had been part of a committee that investigated working conditions in Harlan in 1931," Cowan explained. They had left as heroes, or so he thought. Why couldn't he? He overlooked the arrogance of some of those earlier reformers, who had distributed copies of the Daily Worker to miners and then stood by as those very possessors of the Daily Worker were removed to jails in remote hamlets reachable only by mule. In Harlan, Cowan partnered with a young miner with leadership ambitions, Jerry Johnson, who seemed more cosmopolitan than all the rest: "I began to fantasize that we were a latter-day version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, pledged to cleanse the mining town of its heritage of corruption." Sure, some of Jerry's values were different, such as his devotion to the land and his traditional marriage. His motivations were different, too. Jerry was moved less by abstractions of justice than by a passion to recover the folkways of his ancestors' Appalachia, before it was commandeered by the greedy overlords of coal. Cowan, the left-wing universalist, emphasized their commonality and romanticized the differences. "I began to think of them as the lost tribe of the working class," he wrote of the miners – arrogating himself, dangerously, a role as their anthropologist.

It couldn't end well.

Jerry hated the story that was meant to lionize him and ended up hating its author, too – who Jerry thought had rendered Harlan's traditionalism in the Voice as titillating local color incidental to the political struggle, when to many in Harlan their traditions as they understood them were the point of the political struggle. Only upon returning did Cowan realize that these friendly people "felt a smoldering resentment toward outsiders" – even, or especially, outsiders who parachuted in and styled themselves as saviors. He had made a terrible botch of things. "Harlan County: The Power and the Shame," he titled this chapter. Part of that shame, he suggested, was his own. He had "indicated a set of commitments – and an unquestioning acceptance of Jerry's view of the strike – that my articles didn't really reflect."

That, he says, "helped me distill the argument that was the genesis of this book": that the passions of reformers can sometimes betray a contempt for the common sense of ordinary people, leading in turn to a dangerous narcissism that could transform someone like him into a close kin of those arrogant school bureaucrats in West Virginia.

Cowan reckoned with that danger most explicitly in his book's concluding chapter. In 1972 "the urban journalistic and political elite" – a tribe in its own right – had flooded another parochial locale, the Middle District of Pennsylvania, where Richard Nixon's Justice Department had staged a politically motivated conspiracy trial designed to neutralize the bands of Catholic radicals trying to end the war in Vietnam by disrupting the draft system. Cowan's tribe came with "visions of jurors lifted from the pages of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street." So did the tribe of John Mitchell, Nixon's attorney general, whose Justice Department was counting on these terrified Silent Majoritarians to sentence the defendants to an eternity underneath the jail.

Well, the yokels saw that the government's case was patently absurd, so the yokels had no trouble acquitting. "How stupid did those people in Washington think we were?" one juror later asked Cowan.

That was how Cowan ended the book. The Harrisburg experience, he concludes, "left me feeling that my attitudes toward that group of Americans (like the attitudes of most lawyers, reporters, and defendants – members of the urban elite who were connected to the case) were just as narrow and parochial as their attitudes toward us." He vowed to do better.

By the time I read that, around Christmas in 2003, I had an aching question I wanted to ask Paul Cowan. I wanted to know what had become of him ideologically. After all, in the mid-1970s, other writers were also raising criticisms about the urban journalistic and political elite and their self-serving condescension toward "heartland" people and their values. These writers were also discovering a newfound "respect for the stability of religion, of ceremony, of family life." They recognized the habits of a former radicalism as a set of blinds, just as Cowan had, and embraced what Cowan called "the more primal part of oneself" and the conviction – as Cowan wrote – that "cultures aren't clay that you can sculpt to your liking." These writers called themselves neoconservatives. Had Paul Cowan become one of them?

I couldn't ask him that question; he died of cancer in 1988. So I called Paul's widow, Rachel, his frequent companion in many of these chapters. What Rachel Cowan told me was that her husband was just as proud to write from the left at the end as he was at the beginning. He continued to work for The Village Voice; one of his last big stories was a profile of the victims of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, also in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Politically, the answer made sense to me. It shows in Paul Cowan's ultimate judgments – for example that the border guards whom he also deeply humanized in his portrait of illegal aliens, otherwise decent men and professionals, ultimately suffered from a racist inability to recognize the full humanity of the "wets" they hunted. It shows in his conclusion to the West Virginia chapter, in which he faces a moment of truth with the Creekers' charismatic leader: he has to grant her point that "maybe there is no school system that can provide for your kids and mine," but concludes, "I would like to think there is room for fundamentalists in my America. But I'm not sure there is room for me in theirs."

The answer also made sense to me as someone on the hunt for good writing. His ability to probe where those he disagreed with were coming from while still understanding why he disagreed with them – he knows which side he's on – was a token of his moral seriousness and his comfort with moral complexity. He was equally allergic to moral relativism as to moral dogma, which is exactly what made him a great journalist. I came to this realization while thinking of another book published in 1979. It was written by a bad journalist, who in his previous book had proved himself to me a very a good one. That previous book was called "Making It," and its descriptions of subterranean social forces that no one had described before – in this case those shaping the New York literary world – were in their way as astonishing as the journalism in Cowan's The Tribes of America. But Norman Podhoretz's next book, "Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir," one of the most famous and influential books of neoconservatism, was a very lame one. Podhoretz told "the whole story of how and why I went from being a liberal to being a radical and then finally to being an enemy of radicalism in all its forms and varieties." Podhoretz had picked the wrong side. So he rejected it root and branch, right down to its core principle: social solidarity: "The politics of interest," Republican-style: that, he wrote, was "the only antidote to the plague" of sixties radicalism.

You can agree or disagree with the politics. I think it's hard to disagree that Podhoretz became a much worse writer, much less skilled at describing the world. In Making It, self-examination was the taproot of social observation. In Breaking Ranks – and his subsequent work – Podhoretz recognized only demons that existed outside himself. The left left him; he always stayed the same. Podhoretz claimed a courage – he called it moral courage – that was inversely proportional to his actual courage, which was sorely lacking. For perhaps it wasn't the left that was dogmatic, but himself – and dogmatists make terrible journalists.

Paul Cowan took a different course, and that is the meaning of his work. He looked inside himself. He found sins – his own sins, not the sins of some abstraction called "the left," to be rejected as such – and he reckoned with them. Which is hard work. He tested his prejudices against reality, about as deeply as anyone could test them; he embraced new principles, cleaving to the ones worth keeping. He saw virtues in bourgeois virtue. But that didn't paralyze his conscience. He saw that America had tribes, and that the left-leaning Ivy League professionalism he inhabited was one of them, with its own characteristic inanities. That wasn't the end of the story for Cowan, but rather a new, richer beginning.

Okay, maybe the sound of prayer issuing from a journalist�s mouth is not so bizarre � what reporter on deadline hasn�t beseeched a higher power? But this was different: in a bland khaki-colored room deep in the bowels of the Empire State Building, fifteen aspiring journalists sat in front of their laptops with their heads bowed. �Thank you, Lord, for loving journalism,� intoned the morning�s instructor, an AP reporter who would soon give a lesson on constructing leads. �Thank you, Lord, for cherishing words, for loving good, clear writing.�

They were all evangelical college students taking part in a month-long summer seminar of the World Journalism Institute, a J-school with a mission to prepare young evangelicals to enter the mainstream media universe.

The students, here in New York from as far away as Lookout Mountain, Georgia (population: 1,581) and schools like Vision Bible College in Marsing, Idaho, are mostly in their early twenties, clean cut, earnest, and deeply religious. They laugh at the notion that they are a cadre of religious zealots being trained to infiltrate the newsroom and violate the sacred doctrine of dispassionate, objective journalism. Yet the students themselves aren�t entirely clear just how the journalistic and spiritual parts of their identity fit together. Are they evangelical journalists, or just journalists who happen to be evangelicals?

Robert Case II, who directs the program, has his own answers to these questions. A former philosophy teacher at Central Washington University, in 1997 he was on the board of God�s World Publications, a publisher of evangelical newsletters and books, and helped conceive of, as he puts it, �a boot camp for aspiring journalists of faith.� The institute opened in 1999, and the next year Case moved from Washington State to Asheville, North Carolina, to run it.

Case is a charismatic man with a football player�s neck and gray hair closely buzzed, and was dressed, the two times I saw him, in red, white, and blue suspenders and shiny black and white wing-tips. He doesn�t come off as particularly fanatical, and his initial objective for the institute does not sound radical.

He thinks evangelicals have closed themselves into what he calls a �ghetto� of their own making. They have fled mainstream culture rather than engage it. But if evangelicals expect to be depicted fairly and fully by the elite media, Case says, they need to get their hands dirty and play a role in the institutions that define the larger culture. This doesn�t mean he wants journalism to be done differently. He just wants enough evangelicals to be at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post so that reporters begin to see them as living, breathing people and not backward bible-thumpers.

�The homosexuals are our role model in this,� Case says. �They had the same problems we do twenty, twenty-five years ago � a despised minority hiding in the closet, and all the stories in the media looked to point out their weaknesses. They overcame this by integrating into the mainstream.�

Case�s other, longer-term objective is, by his own admission, more controversial. It is to bring �an evangelical or biblical perspective to the newsroom.� Case thinks that evangelicals, seeing the world as they do through the ethical and moral lens of religion, could make much-needed adjustments to journalism�s focus. The institute was not necessary fifty years ago, he says, when �Judeo-Christian values were regnant in America and something like Roe v. Wade would never have become an issue.� But now that we live in a �postmodern, post-Christian world,� Case says, newsrooms are once again in need of a moral compass. He doesn�t want to dismantle the principles of good journalism, which, he says, are �eternal.� He doesn�t want to evangelize. He just wants the �religious aspect of life� to be articulated in stories, and for issues like abortion or gay marriage to be framed in a way that allows for more than just a secular perspective. It boils down to this: �Most of the elite media are tone deaf to religious concerns,� Case says. �They just don�t see the value to any issue that has a flavor of religion. A secularist will always ignore the religious side of life and way of thinking. Evangelicals won�t.�

Case insists that his vision doesn�t involve trampling on journalistic objectivity. And the content of his courses reinforces this. The two times I visited the seminar I saw standard J-school instruction, all nut graphs and inverted pyramids. I heard no talk of using journalism as a tool for evangelical propaganda.

But once I spoke with the students, it became clear that the divide � between the imperatives of their faith and those of their chosen profession � was much blurrier for them than Case�s vision assumes. One afternoon, over a lunch of bologna slices on hamburger buns with ketchup, four students told me how journalism was a �calling� for them. As Adam Belz, a blond twenty-year-old who attends Covenant College in Georgia, put it, �God is the originator of reality, so knowledge of him is knowledge of reality. If I look to God as the source of truth, that helps me in my profession.�

All acknowledged similar motivations for choosing journalism. But they also insisted that, more than anything else, it was the love of writing that had made them want to be reporters. And then I asked what they would do when, in the course of their reporting, they met someone who was impoverished or hungry or in mourning. Would they be able to keep from bringing Christ to this person? This was a tough one. They debated for a few minutes. But the conclusion was unanimous. �All the teachers tell us to not mix faith and work, not to use your position to tell everyone about Christ,� said Lauren Jones, twenty, a journalism major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. �But if we care about people, have a burden in our heart for them, we cannot hold in truth which is within us.�

Belz jumped in: �If salvation and heaven and hell are at stake,� he said, �it�s going to be necessary for me to say something.�

Case would not be happy to hear his students sounding like missionaries. Earlier this year, Jack Kelley, the disgraced USA Today reporter, brought some unwanted attention to the World Journalism Institute that made its mission look more fanatical than Case would like it to appear. Kelley, a Pulitzer finalist in 2002 for coverage of international terrorism, was arguably the highest-profile evangelical journalist in the country. �I feel God�s pleasure when I write and report,� Kelley was quoted as saying in the May 2001 issue of Connection Magazine, an evangelical publication. �It isn�t because of the glory, but because God has called me to proclaim truth.� He was slated to speak at a luncheon during the summer seminar this year. But when his editors at USA Today discovered that he had fabricated more than a dozen stories during the past ten years, Case told Kelley he could still speak if he used the occasion to explain his misdeeds. Kelley declined and Case removed him from the list of speakers. In the meantime, through the magic of Google, many bloggers looking for information on Kelley found their way to the institute�s Web site and its mission statement, written six years ago by Case.

The sprawling, angry statement, peppered with biblical citations gave the impression, Case now says, �that we wanted to create a theocracy in the newsroom.� A typical line: �There was a time when the major newspapers of this country reflected the truth of God�s existence. But because we Christians did not fight for God in the newsrooms, these cultural institutions went the way of the flesh.�

Case says he is �ashamed� of the mission statement�s militant tone. It cost him a few of his instructors and guest speakers, whose connection to the institute, and thus the mission statement, circulated on the Internet. People like David Cho at The Washington Post, Rod Dreher at The Dallas Morning News, and Barbara Bradley Hagerty at NPR. Many wanted nothing to do with WJI anymore, Case says. Some just wanted their names removed from the public list. Case immediately replaced the mission statement with a more benign version that he now says should have been there all along.

But this raises the question: What kind of journalists does Robert Case really want to produce? Evangelical crusaders or quality reporters indistinguishable from any other? There is one man Case raises up as a shining example for his students to emulate: John McCandlish Phillips. To younger journalists, Phillips�s name might not ring a bell, but for the eighteen years he worked as a reporter for The New York Times, from 1955 to 1973, he was considered one of its very best writers. Gay Talese, who was at the Times during the same period, has said of him, �There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.�

He also was, and still is, a devout evangelical who kept a Bible on his desk at the Times �as a statement of who I was and what I believed,� he says. He doesn�t like the term Christian journalist. He sees himself rather as a journalist who happens to be Christian. �You are not out on a campaign for a conversion of souls; you are out on a very direct campaign to get information for an organ of public knowledge,� Phillips told me.

His work at the Times was distinguished by a fine, almost sensual attention to detail that was the envy of other journalists. He wrote features that depicted ordinary people with the richness of Technicolor � a Brooklyn high-school principal who was also a ragtime piano player, a homeless man and his social life at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and, famously, a Jewish boy from Queens who became an American Nazi and a Ku Klux Klansman. But in the newsroom, Phillips largely kept his distance from fellow reporters, staying clear of the gambling and heavy drinking that engaged some of his colleagues after work. He says it�s an �absurdity� to think there should be any contradiction between being both an evangelical and a professional journalist. �I found them rather well coordinated,� he says.

His belief played a role in his work only insofar as it provided him with God as a �helper� as he searched out facts. �Exercising faith in a living being who cares is not an exercise in futility,� Phillips says. �God simply is with those who repose their trust in him. I was given advantages in reporting all the time that I could not have had apart from a living trust in the living God. I would go to a news scene. There would be fourteen other reporters. It would be a confusing scene, hard to know your way through it, who was who. Again and again and again, I would come back with more story than other reporters. Yes, I was acutely alert, but I was also given advantages.�

Phillips teaches at the institute for free, as opposed to the $250 an hour most instructors receive. He doesn�t talk to students about theology. Rather, he tells them what books to read, tries to inspire them about the newspaper life, challenges them to be keen observers of the world � advice one could imagine hearing from any legendary journalist.

Phillips typifies the first half of Case�s vision, a gifted reporter sustained by his relationship with God. Ultimately, though, the kind of journalist the institute strives to produce might be found somewhere between the staid model Phillips presents and the religious idealism of the students. First, endeavor to be extraordinary journalists, Case insists to his charges. Then, he tells them, you will have earned the right to bring your evangelical perspective into the newsroom, and offer an alternative to the godless and cynical atmosphere that he and most evangelicals believe predominates in the press.

You've seen the stories: lethal germs on your doorknob, secrets of child abductors, what your nail salon operator won't tell you, sleeping through smoke alarms, the deadly mold in your house, cell phones and cancer, or, yikes! your thong and your mental health.

Such stories show up like the seasons on local TV news -- but only during the months of February, May, July, and November, the so-called sweeps periods, during which Nielsen Media Research measures the audiences of TV stations and cable systems in all 210 markets across the U.S. The idea is to schedule shock-and-awe stories during those four months to boost ratings for those periods and thus raise advertising rates and profits. Everybody, inside the industry and out, knows that this system is a fraud: advertisers are cheated, and the public is either frightened out of its wits by alarmist, hair-raising news features, or inured to real news, or both. "It's a horrible way to do our business," says Forrest Carr, news director of WFLA in Tampa, Florida. "Completely artificial. Cheap ratings ploys, sensationalism, turning handsprings during those four months." Many Americans are fear-ridden, according to Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, in his book The Culture of Fear. He cites evidence that news media are both the cause of people's fears and the reason they're convinced those fears are valid.

But don't despair! Help has arrived. Nielsen is rolling out a new process for measuring local TV audiences that will abolish sweeps periods in the markets where it is used. Boston has had it since January 2002. Before the year is out Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and New York will have signed on. The other top ten cities in the U.S. -- Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, Atlanta and Dallas-Ft. Worth -- will get it during the next few years.

The secret weapon? A streamlined iteration of the People Meter that provides instantaneous, continuous ratings and demographics -- every single day all year round, instead of just four months of the year. Think of it. Stations will have an avalanche of tabulated, overnight data not only on how many people watch their news programs, but also who: men 18-39, women with incomes of $40,000-$60,000, folks who prefer oatmeal to cornflakes, religious fundamentalists. That's high-priority information for advertisers and for TV news directors trying to shape their newscasts to attract the most desirable (and the most) viewers. ("Advertisers who want to reach left-handed Lithuanian Lutherans will be able to do so," jokes Jon Currie, a Los Angeles-based consultant to TV stations.) That is crucially important because local news broadcasts are by far a station's biggest source of revenue. So: goodbye sweeps stunts, hello sanity in the newsroom. Things are looking up, right?

But wait. Two flies swim in that ointment. Stations, in their competitive zeal, may now be tempted to stunt 365 days a year instead of just in sweeps periods, making local TV news a lot sillier and more angst-ridden than ever. That's possible but not likely; it would exhaust news staffs, and cost too much. Second: Nielsen has no immediate plans to expand local People Meter service beyond the top ten cities, which account for only 30 percent of U.S. households. That means that 70 percent of all homes will still get the same old fear mongering during four months of the year. CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox will continue to bloat their affiliates' ratings with extravaganzas in sweeps months: Oscars, Grammys, drama show cliffhangers, finales of reality shows, docudramas ripped from the headlines (Jessica Lynch, Elizabeth Smart), bigfoot celeb interviews (Monica, Barbra, Britney) on the primetime newsmagazines, and lesbian kisses, à la Ally McBeal. (A few Hispanic and African-American groups fear that local People Meters will under-report viewing by minorities, and thus eventually reduce the number of shows reflecting their interests. Nielsen insists that minorities will be counted more accurately, not less.)

In Boston, which pioneered the new system, TV news is stunt-free. "It's been beneficial," says Paul La Camera, president and general manager of WCVB, the ABC affiliate. "It's a much more rational way to run a news operation. We spread our intensity now across the entire year."

He can't remember, La Camera says, when his station last broadcast a news story about salad bars that kill.

Neil Hickey is CJR's editor at large.

In the Jan. 19 issue of The New Yorker, Karl Rove told the writer Ken Auletta that President Bush thinks the press is "elitist," that "the social and economic backgrounds of most reporters have nothing in common with those of most Americans." For decades now, the political Right has made considerable hay out of the liberal elite bogeyman, and such a sentiment from Bush might be dismissed as mere culture-war blather. But class, which is what the president really means, will play a role in the coming election: tax cuts, unemployment, corporate greed, health care, the echo of John Edwards�s "two Americas."

And Bush is right. Sort of. The class divide between journalists and the poor and working-class Americans many of us claim to write for and about is real, though it has little to do with political ideology and is more complicated than the faux populists of the Right would have us believe. Russell Baker, the former New York Times columnist, got closer to the mark in the Dec. 18 issue of The New York Review of Books. "Today�s top-drawer Washington news- people ... belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well," he wrote. "The capacity for outrage had been bred out of them."

So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. As Baker points out, we are the comfortable. The demographics confirm it. We are part of the professional class, reasonably affluent and well educated. By 1996, for example, the last time the American Society of Newspaper Editors conducted a broad survey of the U.S. newsroom, 89 percent of journalists had finished college. Meanwhile, only 27 percent of all Americans have four or more years of college, according to the latest census.

Yet numbers alone can�t explain the uneven and often subtle contours of this story. The press has the power to shape how people think about what�s important, in effect to shape reality. But whose reality is being depicted? This is how the class divide between journalists and a large swath of the populace comes into play.

Just one example: Andrew Tyndall, a media analyst who began measuring the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1987, finds that since then coverage of economic issues has steadily skewed away from stories of poverty and toward stories concerning wealth. Thus, the poor have become increasingly invisible. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the social justice arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, reported in 2002 that its annual survey of American attitudes toward poverty showed that "the general public substantially underestimates the dimensions of poverty in the United States." Most respondents, it said, "maintained that poverty affects some one million people in this country." The real number is thirty-five million.

This divide, this inability of one America to see and understand the other Americas, has something to do with the collective howl from the mainstream press over the "offshoring" of white-collar jobs -- turning Lou Dobbs into a protectionist -- after years of writing off blue-collar job losses as the price of progress. And with why the Democratic candidates� anti-poverty policies were all but ignored, despite the fact that both John Edwards and John Kerry had extensive "urban America" proposals on their Web sites. And with why Philip Hersh, a Chicago Tribune sportswriter, wrote in January that the disgraced skater Tonya Harding "grew up in an environment that ... reeked of white trash," and when called on it by a reader and the Tribune�s public editor, replied that he had "thought long and hard before using it. The term fit Tonya Harding perfectly."

The divide helps explain why Frank Gilliam, a political scientist at UCLA who studies issues of race and local TV news, was told by residents in both a poor black neighborhood and a poor white neighborhood in Indianapolis that the press "only focused on the bad stuff, that they had no access to the media, and were not treated with respect by the media." It also helps explain the growth of ethnic newspapers. And it has something to do with why Abby Scher, who runs the New York Office of the Independent Press Association, got the following response from a magazine editor in Chicago when she told him, after graduating from college in the eighties, that she couldn�t afford to take a job for $8,500 a year: "Can�t your parents help you out?"

We in the press have a responsibility to engage everyone, not just those readers and viewers with whom we share cultural and economic touchstones. The good news is that the best reporters and serious news outlets find ways to bridge this divide. The bad news is that we don�t do it often enough, and our reluctance to talk about class -- in the newsroom and elsewhere -- makes it hard to change the equation. There are consequences to the fact that millions of people in this country see little of themselves and their lives in the media, unless they are connected somehow to a problem. It may have something to do with why the press is so disliked and distrusted; or why daily newspaper circulation has been in decline for twenty years. Every reporter has his blind spots. But when we all share many of the same blind spots, it makes it difficult to see the forty-four million people who lack health insurance in this country, for example, as anything but the face of failed social policies -- important but abstract.

In Search of the Working Class

Anthony DePalma, who has been a national correspondent and a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and now covers environmental issues, says that for years he felt as though he had "snuck my way into the paper." DePalma grew up the son of a longshoreman in Hoboken, New Jersey. He recalls seeing his father sitting at the kitchen table at the end of a workday, in T-shirt and reading glasses, paging through the Jersey Journal. "I never saw my dad read anything else, but he would spend forty-five minutes with the Journal every day," DePalma says. "It sent a semiconscious message about a newspaper�s ability to reach a wide audience."

DePalma graduated from Seton Hall in 1975 (the first in his family to go to college), married, and went to work unloading trucks for UPS on the overnight shift. During the day, he freelanced. In 1986, after doing quite a bit of work for the Times over the years, he was hired as a reporter in the real estate section. "The lowest rung, the backdoor, whatever you want to call it," he says. Inside, DePalma felt the divide. "The Pulitzers, the Ivy Leagues. I felt it very strongly," he says. "You have to understand, the Times never crossed the threshold at our house, growing up."

The very idea of class makes Americans, including journalists, uncomfortable. It grates against the myth, so firmly ingrained in our national psyche, that ours is a society of self-made men, with bootstraps. This idea persists even though upward mobility, in any broad sense, is becoming a myth. It adds a moral tinge to discussions of poverty, a notion that the poor must shoulder much of the blame for their plight, and the corollary, that the wealthy should be credited for their success.

Class is also difficult to discuss because it has become so connected to the polarizing issue of race. When Alexis Patterson, a black seven-year-old from Milwaukee, and Elizabeth Smart, a fourteen-year-old white girl from Salt Lake City, vanished within a month of each other in 2002, the press turned Smart into a national crusade while few people outside of Milwaukee ever heard of Patterson. Race had something to do with why, as did the circumstances of each case; Elizabeth�s abduction from her bed, which was witnessed by her terrified little sister, arguably made for a better story than Alexis, who vanished on her way to school. But class played a role, too. Patterson came from a poor neighborhood, and her stepfather had done time on a drug charge. Smart�s father is a real-estate broker, and her uncle a photographer with the local newspaper.

Class is problematic, too, because we don�t agree on how to define it. Is it about education? Income? Where do the swelling ranks of the working poor fit in? Under the headline "What is Rich?" a Houston Chronicle article last year illustrated how "in one of the world�s most affluent countries, few seem to see themselves as rich, even if they�re in the upper-income brackets." Michael Zweig, an economist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who directs the Center for Study of Working Class Life, defines class based on power. Using data from the census bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he designated occupations as working class, middle class, or capitalist class by the relative power each job affords. A truck driver is working class, for example, but a truck driver who owns his own rig is an independent contractor and is therefore middle class. By this measure, Zweig says, 62 percent of the country�s workforce is actually working class. "That�s eighty-five million people, hardly a special interest group," he says.

Zweig�s formula resonated with Paul Solman, an economics reporter on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, on PBS. In the spring of 2003, Solman was doing a series of reports on the jobless recovery, and he interviewed Zweig. With the camera rolling, Solman said to Zweig, "By your measure, I am middle class, right?" Zweig agreed, then nodded to the cameraman behind Solman, "And he is working class." Solman looked over his shoulder at his well-paid cameraman, "Is that true, Kevin?" Kevin thought for a minute and said that it was. "Why?" Solman asked. Kevin answered, "Because I can�t say �cut.�"

Says Solman: "I was struck by that because it suggested that the variable wasn�t income, but power, and to a lesser extent security."

Yet in our national discourse, we are a middle-class country, period. In polls people tend to identify as middle class, regardless of what they do or how much money they make. (Zweig notes that poll respondents are rarely given the choice of "working class," but when they are, more choose that than "middle class.") From a journalistic standpoint, the working class has historically been linked to organized labor. As labor�s numbers, and thus its political power, declined, so did our coverage of it. With its most important public countenance fading, the working-class perspective largely disappeared, too.

DePalma recently got a taste of just how difficult it can be to recapture that perspective in any consistent way. When the Times began its "Portraits of Grief" project on those killed in the World Trade Center, DePalma volunteered. "They were people I knew," he says, "and I realized that this is a world I had been running away from all these years." DePalma wrote a portrait of someone who had gone to his high school. He wrote six portraits of fellow Seton Hall graduates. Afterward, he discussed his experience writing portraits with Jonathan Landman, then the paper�s Metro editor. "Jon said there are all these people out there who we never write about," DePalma recalls. "People who basically play by the rules, don�t make huge demands on public services. We ignore them except when they die in a tower." Together they decided that DePalma would take on a new beat that sought to fill this gap in the coverage, a working-class beat.

From June 2002 to August 2003, only two of DePalma�s stories from this mini-beat -- he was still a general assignment reporter -- made page one. The centerpiece was a series about a block in Ozone Park, Queens. DePalma wrote about Rosemere and Danny Messina, who were struggling to save ten dollars a week to celebrate their son�s first Holy Communion; about Joseph Raia, retired on permanent disability, who agonized over whether to raise the rent on his long-time tenants -- a couple with two young children whom Raia is close to -- in the face of the city�s property tax increase; about Antoinette Francisco�s frustrating effort to care for a neglected tree, which the city eventually cut down.

In September of last year, DePalma got a fellowship at Notre Dame, and handed the beat off to a fellow reporter to tend in her spare time until he got back. When he returned in January, no stories had been done, Landman had been promoted, and interest in the working-class beat seemed lacking. "It had tremendous support from the Metro desk, but it is hard to see how that support was carried out more broadly in the paper," DePalma says. "I always took that to mean there was a discomfort with terms like �working class�, and attempts to define class in meaningful ways." DePalma chose to move on.

Landman, now an assistant managing editor, disputes the notion that the beat had little support beyond Metro. "I never heard anybody express or signal discomfort with the idea of reporting on class," he said via e-mail, noting that "support in Metro is what you need to succeed in Metro," anyway. As for why the beat was dropped, Landman says that DePalma asked for the environmental beat when he returned from Notre Dame.

For his part, DePalma doesn�t hide his disappointment.

"The idea was to expose our readers to a world we normally ignore, the same way we would with villagers in, say, Suriname," he says. "It is fairly pitiful to compare the working class in this country to villagers in Suriname, but they are almost equally unknown."

'A Secure Lodgement'

Contrary to the comforting notion of the press standing firmly behind the little guy, there was never a Golden Age when American journalism consistently sided with the powerless against the powerful. By 1927, H.L. Mencken was already lashing the press for what he saw as its upwardly mobile ambitions. "A good reporter," he wrote, "used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant; he now makes as much as the average doctor or lawyer, and probably a great deal more. His view of the world he lives in has thus changed. He is no longer a free-lance in human society, thumbing his nose at its dignitaries; he has got a secure lodgment in a definite stratum, and his wife, if he has one, maybe has social ambitions."

There was once, though, a prominent strain of American journalism that was much more organically connected to the poor and the working class. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, for instance, Appeal to Reason, a socialist weekly out of Kansas, drew hundreds of thousands of readers with its scathing indictments of the inequities of unfettered capitalism by the likes of Upton Sinclair and Eugene Debs. In the 1940s, the short-lived New York paper, PM, was a more mainstream incarnation of this same spirit. Its motto: "PM is against people who push other people around." In the years before Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1976, the New York Post made something of a last stab at bottom-up journalism. By the 1960s, though, TV was on its way to becoming the dominant journalistic force, the newspaper business began hitching its star to Wall Street, and the age of corporate media was under way. The path to a journalism job led, increasingly, through journalism school, and thus began a new round of professionalization in the business.

Meanwhile, in the late 1960s the Republican Party began recasting itself as the party of the hardhats, those angry white men (mostly) -- real Americans -- who resented the decade�s emphasis on the struggles of blacks, the poor, and the spoiled hippies who were against the Vietnam war. Part of this strategy was to portray the press as members of a liberal elite, the New Class, that was out of touch with these real Americans. This charge, remarkably, has kept the press more or less on its heels ever since. The soul-searching on display in a column Joseph Kraft wrote in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention -- "Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans ..." -- echoes today in the press�s paralyzing fear of being accused of liberal bias. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected and began vilifying the poor, the press -- increasingly corporate and cowed -- was in no position to resist.
In the 1980s, the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened -- and journalists were increasingly among the haves. The middle class split, as blue-collar manufacturing jobs disappeared and were replaced by a tide of low-paying, insecure service sector jobs and an expansion of the professional class. Under Reagan, the country sprinted into the ample arms of a shiny new money culture, offering salvation through free markets (and later through technology). Media deregulation launched a leap-frogging series of media mergers that culminated -- for the time being -- in the ill-fated AOL purchase of Time Warner in 2001. So as journalists joined a broader professional elite, the companies they worked for swelled into corporate behemoths.

In the 1990s, the Internet economy and its overnight millionaires sharpened the wage envy of the new generation of journalists for their professional-class counterparts. David Denby�s new book, "American Sucker," about his own sad money chase, lays bare this phenomenon of irrational exuberance. So many journalists either bolted for the Internet ether, or threatened to, that some newspapers began offering stock options to hang on to their talent. The divide got a little wider. "A world where money is a marker and all comparisons are directed upward makes it hard to understand people for whom a million dollars would be a fortune, or those for whom $10,000 would be the difference between affording college or not, not to mention those for whom $246 is a full week�s earnings, before tax, at the minimum wage," wrote James Fallows in an essay called "The Invisible Poor," published in the Mar. 19, 2000 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Later in that same piece, he wrote, "Compared with the software elite, the professional-class American finds it easier to imagine financial ruin .... But there is a great similarity between the view from the top and the view from the next few tiers: the increasing haziness and �Oh, yes, now that you remind me� nature of the view of the poor."

The evolution of journalism as a profession -- with its higher ethical standards and emphasis on expertise, good writing, and analysis -- was crucial for the press to keep pace with the world. But it came at a cost. When the barriers to entry into journalism were lower, newsrooms were open to people who brought a wider range of life experiences to their reporting and editing than we have today. To be sure, that era had its problems. It was inhabited almost exclusively by white men, for one. But an interesting thing about that ASNE survey, mentioned earlier, is how so many attitudes cut across age, race, gender, or ethnic lines. What diversity there is, it seems, is only skin deep.

Empathy and Imagination

The opening scene in Alex Kotlowitz�s 1991 book, "There Are No Children Here," offers a hint as to how we might begin to bridge this divide. It starts with a group of boys from a Chicago public housing project hunting for garter snakes in the weeds beside some train tracks. Even for someone who didn�t grow up in public housing, this is a familiar scene. And that, says Kotlowitz, is the point. "The obvious place to open it is with a scene of violence, because there is violence all through the book," he says. "But instead I began with this benign moment, to show that even kids whose lives are so precarious find refuge in some of the same things we all did."

Kotlowitz�s subjects were poor, not working class, and in some ways the press does a better job of covering poor people and their issues. The poor have agencies and policies and activists to create pegs for stories. We have a public discourse about poverty in a way we don�t about the working class. Still, that discourse is too often one-dimensional: The poor are a problem, victims and perpetrators, the face of failed social policies. Such stories need to be done, of course; news is often about problems, things that are broken. Yet for those of us who are lucky enough to have health care, plenty to eat, a home, and a job that gives us discretionary income, the news has a lot to offer besides problems. We see our lives reflected in the real estate section, the travel section, the food section, the business section. When was the last time you read a story about how to buy a good used car for less than a thousand dollars?

The press has difficulty seeing, as Kotlowitz puts it, what is familiar about the poor. "There are so few reporters who spend time in these communities, that when they are there it seems exotic and foreign," he says. "We are so appalled by what we see that we are only looking for what is unfamiliar." This makes it hard to empathize.

Fear, too, makes it difficult to see what is familiar about the poor. Most people working in journalism today grew up in a society that taught us that housing projects were only dangerous places to be avoided. As Jamie Kalven, a Chicago-based writer and public housing activist, put it in Slate in 2002, fear "blocks our capacity for perception, for learning. When mediated by fear, ignorance can coexist with knowledge, blindness with vision. As a result, decent people find it possible to support indecent policies." In an interview, Kalven amplifies the point. Fear, he says, makes us hostage to a "one-dimensional moral geography" composed of good places and bad places, and "somehow people who are decent and morally sensitive are able to read The New York Times and listen to NPR every day and still hold this notion."

This flattened coverage is evident in the press�s treatment of Chicago�s massive "transformation plan," which began in 1996 and involves razing all of the city�s public housing high-rises and replacing them with mixed-income developments. The plan represents a fundamental shift in the way the city houses its poor, and a number of cities around the country are following Chicago�s lead. There has been a fair amount of coverage over the last seven years, both local and national, and some of it has been important and thoughtful. For example, a series by the Chicago Tribune in 1998 showed how, contrary to the goals of the plan, many displaced public housing residents were ending up in neighborhoods that were just as solidly poor and racially monochrome as the ones they left.

But much of the coverage is top-down, focused on the problems and the process, and heavy with official sources. It is full of middle-class assumptions and fears, including this from a Nov. 10, 1999, USA Today piece on the new mixed-income developments: "The wealthier families bring a greater work ethic and sense of community pride to once-desolate neighborhoods, officials say."

Against this backdrop, Mary Schmich�s columns in the Tribune on Cabrini-Green, one of Chicago�s most famous projects, stand out. Since May 2000, Schmich, a Metro columnist, has written two dozen columns on various characters tied to the closing of Cabrini. Those characters -- from three black girls saying goodbye to their old school and hello to a new one, to a young white couple who bought into the new, mixed-income Cabrini community -- spring from the page fully formed.

As one of the schoolgirls, referring to her anxieties about going to school with white kids for the first time, said to Schmich, "We the same kind of people inside." It was impossible not to feel a connection to these people, partly because Schmich refused to romanticize their situations. But she also showed us their insecurities, their prejudices, their joy. "Too often reporters who want to write about public housing have very fixed ideas of how to write these stories," she says. "They have the characters in their heads, because they watch too much 'Law & Order'."

Schmich, who has been at the Tribune since 1985, says three things allowed her to feel as if she weren�t writing about "someplace else" when doing the Cabrini columns. For starters, she lives in an affluent neighborhood that abuts Cabrini, and has been "hanging out" around Cabrini for ten years. She also grew up in Georgia near people who were poor and black, and her own father had, as Schmich says, "numerous jobs and we were often broke. The differences between me and the people in Cabrini is that there were patches in my childhood when I wasn�t so poor, my parents were educated, and I was white, people helped me out," she says. "When I did these columns it wasn�t anthropology, but rather from a sense that these were my neighbors."

Her main criticism of how her paper covers the poor in Chicago is really a criticism of journalism broadly. "I think this paper has a very deep commitment to covering the whole range of people and issues in Chicago," Schmich says. "But it is a question of how we do it. We bite off a huge project every few years, and that has the effect of reducing the poor to a problem. Then they disappear largely until the next big project."

'What If'

There are consequences to covering the poor in this one-dimensional way, consequences that the more affluent subjects of news stories can avoid. "You�re dealing with a population that has extremely limited resources for self-representation," says Jamie Kalven. "They have no mechanism for holding folks accountable." In a Newsweek article on the Chicago transformation plan from May 15, 2000, for instance, Mayor Richard M. Daley is quoted as saying, "What people want is education, jobs and job training." But in a survey that Kalven�s organization did in 2000 that asked residents of the Stateway Gardens housing project what they most wanted for their neighborhood, three of the top five answers were related to better health care, but the other two were "more activities for children" and "more cultural activities," like theater and music. Says Kalven: "These people were asserting their dignity as human beings. Our entire discourse defines them as problems, and they quietly resist it, but no one is listening."

All this would seem to suggest that if we want more nuanced coverage of the poor and the working class, then we should hire more reporters and editors who come from poor and working class backgrounds. But, as many good reporters continue to prove, you don�t have to be a coal miner�s daughter to write well about Appalachia. Kotlowitz, for example, grew up comfortably middle class on New York�s Upper West Side. In fact, being an insider can bring some unexpected problems. Wil Cruz, a Newsday reporter who was born and raised in the LaGuardia Houses, a public housing project on New York�s Lower East Side, knows something of this. "If you and I were to go cover a story in the south Bronx, they would see you as official and treat you with some respect," he says. "They would be more comfortable with me, but I�m not sure that works to my advantage. They might see me as showing off my success."

Reporters do, however, need to be motivated to get beyond our assumptions. To do that it helps, as the St. Paul Pioneer Press�s Maja Beckstrom says, to be able to imagine "What if?" An interesting thing emerged as I interviewed reporters for this piece: A large number of them were raised by single mothers, including Beckstrom, the author David Shipler, The Washington Post�s Anne Hull, and The Guardian�s Gary Younge. All said something similar, that experiencing the fragility of a broken family -- no matter how quickly or comfortably things settled -- allowed them to imagine how close they are to those in society whose lives seem, from the outside, to be nothing but problems. Hull, a national features writer at the Post, isn�t sure just how her background shaped her as a reporter, but says this: "I�m much more comfortable around these people than I am being at, say, the courthouse, or places where everyone wears a suit. Maybe I�m intimidated by power. I don�t know."

"These people" Hull refers to include the young immigrants and children of immigrants in Atlanta whom she wrote about in a four-part series in late 2002. The original idea, not surprisingly, was a piece on the growth of Latino gangs in Atlanta -- a problem. But Hull came back with a richer story about kids who were caught between their desire to escape the world of their parents and an American society that often failed them, either in the classroom or on the streets. "A lot of writing about immigrants today is really precious, and reduces them to a single dimension: hard-working," Hull says. "But they�re real people, with flaws. They make bad decisions."

It takes time for outsiders to write these stories; Hull spent sixteen months on her Atlanta series. That may be an extreme, but to do these stories right requires that such coverage be a newsroom priority.

The Obstacles

Spurred by its 1998 project on poverty, the Pioneer Press created a poverty beat and gave it to Maja Beckstrom. In 2002 she went on maternity leave and the beat died, a victim, she says, of the paper�s "effort to rethink priorities of coverage given a tight budget." Once back at work, she was given the choice of a twenty-something lifestyle beat or one on parenting and families. Beckstrom chose the latter.

Even if reporters are attuned to the complexities of life for the poor and the working class, they face a number of obstacles to getting those stories in the paper or on the air. The profit expectations of newspapers and television news operations have had a dramatic and well-known effect on the quality of journalism: shorter stories, fewer reporters, and a focus on those readers who appeal to advertisers. "There aren�t too many publishers who come striding into the newsroom demanding more coverage of the ghetto," says Walker Lundy, a former editor of the Pioneer Press and The Philadelphia Inquirer, who is now retired. "You can�t sell many ads when your readers don�t have credit cards, and thus some readers are worth more than others."

The priorities of corporate media aside, the very ways we define and deliver news today work against the kind of coverage Hull, Schmich, and the others are after. Our devotion to the ideal of objectivity produces too many stories that are so concerned with "balance" that they end up saying very little. The pace of the news cycle, as well as the shrinking newshole, foster a way of thinking about the news that doesn�t lend itself to nuance and complexity. We are trained to find the quick hit, not to connect the various dots and reach conclusions. For example, a new study of how New York City�s daily newspapers covered the city�s post-9/11 budget crisis, commissioned by the nonprofit Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, found that the coverage failed "to clarify the stakes of policy decisions on various socioeconomic classes." The coverage, the study concluded, suggested that "everyone�s interests are identical." Not surprisingly, the sources used to delineate and explain those interests were mostly politicians and government officials.

For David Shipler, the former New York Times correspondent whose latest book is about the working poor, it took a newsroom strike to free him of the confines of daily journalism. "I was in Moscow with the Times when we went on strike in 1978," he says. "For three months I didn�t have to write for the paper, and I stopped thinking in terms of the seven-hundred-word story. I began to notice things that I hadn�t stopped to consider, to see patterns and connections. That�s why I was able to write a book. I got a different lens. When your antennae are highly tuned for the �good story,� these things go by you. Unless a paper is willing to give reporters the freedom to not write every day, then it will be hard for them to find a new lens."

Dale Maharidge, who won a Pulitzer for his 1989 book And Their Children After Them, about rural poverty, never found it difficult to see the world from the bottom up. Since taking his first journalism job at The Gazette of Medina in Cleveland, his hometown, in 1977, Maharidge has been referred to by editors, somewhat derisively, he says, as the "bum writer." He was the son of a steelworker who had a side business at home, grinding cutting tools for industrial use. "I literally grew up breathing steel dust," says Maharidge. His new book, Homeland, due out July 4, is about an undercurrent of working-class -- really working-poor -- anger that Maharidge says predates 9/11. The book highlights the kinds of stories the press misses because of this "lens" problem Shipler talks about.

Among the people Maharidge introduces us to are a mother and son who live together in Bridgeview, a blue-collar neighborhood in Chicago, where, following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a white mob marched on a local mosque, threatening to burn it down. In 2002, on the first anniversary of the attacks, there was another march in Bridgeview, and Maharidge was there for it. He saw the mother and son, carrying an American flag, being chased off by the police, and he followed them and got their names and address. A few days later he went to their house. Two hours later he had a deeper understanding of the anger on display in that march, and it wasn�t as much about anti-Muslim bigotry as press accounts surmised. The son, who was in his mid-thirties, couldn�t work because of a heart condition. He showed Maharidge a grocery bag full of medical bills -- $200,000 worth, the son said -- that he had no way to pay. The mother, who needed knee-replacement surgery that she couldn�t afford, lifted her shirt to show him a pain patch on her back. She worked for seven dollars an hour at J.C. Penney, but had no insurance. "Would they have still been racists if they had jobs and insurance?" Maharidge says. "Sure. But would they have been out there marching? Maybe not."

Outrage

There are things that we could do to address this class divide and get a news report that is, as the Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans put it, "multiperspectival." The most obvious is to broaden our diversity recruitment programs to include a specific focus on class. Efforts to bring racial and ethnic diversity to the newsroom have struggled, and this one wouldn�t be any easier. But Tim Rutten, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, cautions against fatalism on the question of building socioeconomic diversity. "I worked with the first black in the L.A. Times newsroom, the first Latino, the first woman editor, and the first woman on the masthead," he says. "All those things are commonplace now in journalism, but there was a time when each seemed an impossible social barrier."

Editors might do more to encourage reporters like Newsday�s Wil Cruz as he struggles to figure out how to use his background -- he dropped out of high school before eventually getting a degree from New York�s City College -- to inform his reporting on his new beat, education. "I don�t know if it gives me power," he says of his atypical path to journalism. "If it does, I haven�t been able to channel that advantage into my stories. But I need to, because I see it as a responsibility to do it right."

Newspapers need to play to their strengths, and stop trying to compete with the electronic media on every breaking story. The ability of even the sharpest journalism to effect real change is incremental at best, but the stories that have a shot -- the scoops that matter -- are those that go deep and tell us important things about the world, that challenge the way we think about something. David Barstow and Lowell Bergman�s Pulitzer-winning articles last year in The New York Times said something important about worker safety in this country, but they took seventeen months to complete and involved a dozen reporters, researchers, producers, and editors. As important as those stories were, though, they are indicative of how the press approaches the poor and the working class. As Mary Schmich says, we embrace the big project, then ignore them until time for the next big project. Day to day, their perspectives and concerns are missing from the media.

A bit of outrage would help, too. Russell Baker says that outrage has been "bred" out of us, that we come from a class for whom the system has largely worked, and he�s right. The working class has all but disappeared from our pages and no one seems to notice. We report on the poor, but do little to empower the poor. That�s what makes the recent crusade by the New York Daily News to raise the state�s minimum wage so noteworthy. Not only did the paper have a reporter dogging the issue from the field, but its editorial page hammered away at it for months.

Anthony DePalma says that the outrage is still with us, but that it takes a crisis -- a pair of kids starving to death in Newark, an innocent man being shot forty-one times by the police in the Bronx -- to draw it to the surface. Well, how about this for a crisis: We are the richest country in the history of the world, and we tolerate thirty-five million of our fellow Americans living in poverty; we tolerate forty-four million without health insurance. Meanwhile, Gannett pays Larry Miller, its outgoing CFO, $600,000 a year for an open-ended "consulting" contract, in addition to a car and golf club membership.

Brent Cunningham is the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.