Editors Ponder How to Present a Broad Picture of Iraq

NYT reported Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year. "Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?" the anonymous polemic asks, in part. "Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?" "Of course we didn't know!" the message concludes. "Our media doesn't tell us!"

Ms. Goudreau's newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these assertions and to put them into context. Like many other journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.

And when he got it, did he figure out a way to check out those assertions and put them in context, and then did he post that story in the AP?

Ms. Goudreau's query prompted an unusual discussion last month in New York at a regular meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press. Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the daily death tolls.

Something bloggers have been complaining about for a long time.

"The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we're making progress in Iraq," Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question. "It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is such a dangerous place," she said. "But there's a perception that we're not telling the whole story."

More than a preception.

Mr. Silverman said in an interview that he was aware of that perception. "Other editors said they get calls from readers who are hearing stories from returning troops of the good things they have accomplished while there, and readers find that at odds with the generally gloomy portrayal in the papers of what's going on in Iraq," he said. Mr. Silverman said the editors were asking for help in making sense of the situation. "I was glad to have that discussion with the editors because they have to deal with the perception that the media is emphasizing the negative," he said.

Are you going to help them deal with the situation by providing some good news stories, or just by telling them how to distort the situation.

"We're there to report the good and the bad and we try to give due weight to everything going on," he said. "It is unfortunate that the explosions and shootings and fatalities and injuries on some days seem to dominate the news."

Maybe that is because those are the only stories AP provides.

Suki Dardarian, deputy managing editor of The Seattle Times and vice president of the board of the Associated Press Managing Editors, said that the discussion was "a pretty healthy one." "One of the things the editors felt was that as much context as you can bring, the better," Ms. Dardarian said. "They wanted them to get beyond the breaking news to 'What does this mean?' " She also said that as Mr. Silverman and Kathleen Carroll, The A.P.'s executive editor, responded to the concerns, the editors realized that some questions were impossible to answer. For example, she said, the editors understood that it was much easier to add up the number of dead than to determine how many hospitals received power on a particular day or how many schools were built.

Why is that? You can call the hospitals or schools to verify what happened, or the government officials in each city. You can't telephone dead soldiers.

Mr. Silverman said the wire service was covering Iraq "as accurately as we can" while "also trying to keep our people out of harm's way." "The main obstacle we face," he said, "is the severe limitation on our movement and our ability to get out and report. It's very confining for our staff to go into Baghdad and have to spend most of their time on the fifth floor of the Palestine Hotel," which is home to most of the press corps. The hotel was struck by a tank shell in 2003, killing two journalists.

How can you count the number of dead soldiers, while cowering in your hotel room, and not be able to make a few phone calls to government officials.

Iraq remains the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 13 media workers have been killed in Iraq so far this year, bringing the total to 50 since the war began in 2003. Postwar Iraq is fraught with risks for reporters: Banditry, gunfire and bombings are common," the committee's Web site says. "Insurgents have added a new threat by systematically targeting foreigners, including journalists, and Iraqis who work for them."

If it is too scary for your reporters, tell them to come home and let others with a backbone take their place.

Mr. Silverman said The A.P. had already decided before the meeting that it would have Robert H. Reid, an A.P. correspondent at large who has reported frequently from Iraq, write an overview every 10 days.

Unfortunately he has a new job, and hence probably will not be able to continue his series, but Arthur Chrenkoff has been doing good news stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal for a long time.

Mr. Silverman also said the wire service would make more effort to flag articles that look beyond the breaking news. As it turned out, he said, most of the information in the anonymous e-mail message had been reported by The A.P., but the details had been buried in articles or the articles had been overlooked.

Then run the articles again.

Before the meeting, The A.P. collected three articles by reporters for other news organizations who were embedded with American troops and sent them out over the wire to provide "more voice." Mr. Silverman said he wanted to do more of that but the opportunities were limited because there are only three dozen embedded journalists now, compared with 700 when the war began more than two years ago. Ms. Goudreau, for one, found the discussion useful. By the end, she said, editors were acknowledging that even in their own hometowns, "we're more likely to focus on people who are killed than on the positive news out of a school."

Rob @Wizbang blogged I'm glad that they're having this discussion, but the "its to dangerous to leave the bunker [read: hotel - ed.]" excuse is bunk. Covering good news like the rebuilding of schools and infrastructure and the re-establishment of embassies (I hadn't even heard that one) isn't any more dangerous than covering IED attacks and convoy ambushes.

The fact that the media isn't covering the good news is a combination of a "if it bleeds it leads" approach to reporting and a pervasive anti-war bias. Because they could be covering the good news, if they really wanted to.

Jeff Jarvis blogged Well, it’s good they’re asking … a bit late in the party of public perception, but at least they’re asking. I also would have been curious to hear the same questions asked of papers, including The Times, that have their reporters in Iraq. One thing they can do is turn soldiers and bloggers there into contributors. No, they’re not journalists. Yes, they have a viewpoint (what human doesn’t). But they have eyes and ears where the American news organizations do not.

Scott @PowerLine blogged St. Paul Pioneer Press associate editorial page editor Mark Yost chastised his Fourth Estate colleagues in a column last month for presenting a skewed picture of events in Iraq: "Why they hate us." The reaction to Yost's column exposed the epidemic of thin skin among those who love to dish it out; he was more or less invited to leave the trade.

Yesterday Mary Katharine Ham told the story at Townhall in a terrific column: "Knight-Ridder: Closer to the fight than the Marines." Reader Mark Pittard also directs us to yesterday's New York Times story by Katharine Q. Seelye: "Editors ponder how to present a broad picture of Iraq." Add these two items to the internal Pioneer Press memo that we posted here and you might begin to think that Mark Yost is owed an apology.