Oral History: CJR Interviews War Correspondents
The Columbia Journalism Review marks its 45th Anniversary with a remarkable piece of journalism centered on the Iraq war. The magazine interviews about 50 reporters who reported on the war. It’s an insiders’ view of the war, and for someone who has read hundreds of stories about the war, this piece is among the most compelling, perhaps the most compelling. Why? Because the journalists are telling the inside story, the one that often because of prohibitions, rules and conventions they cannot report in their own publications. Odd, isn’t it?
As a public journalist I was struck by another odd convention. Citizens were telling the reporters that American soldiers were beating them, torturing them. They would show the bruises but without proof the reporters refused to write the stories. Here is Patrick Graham, a freelance writer:
I didn’t realize the extent of - I had doubts about it. How do you prove it until you find someone who’s been tortured? How do you do it until you see the body? And how do you know that body came from there? All you could do was write an interview with an Iraqi that said this happened, but is that enough? I don’t think that’s enough to get published in an American paper.
Fair enough. However, throughout the piece the reporters talk about how they knew the folks at our government’s Coalition Provisional Authority, were not exactly being truthful, but I dare say we got plenty of that reporting. Here is Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the The Washington Post:
Their press office was packed with Republican Party loyalists, people who were hired for their political views, not because they possessed a great degree of expertise in public relations or expertise in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. They were the ones who had put people on blacklists - they were just incredibly sensitive about anything that might not project the CPA in the most favorable light possible. Reporters were seen as either sympathetic and on their side or those who didn’t get it. And if you didn’t get it, either you were perhaps granted some interviews so that you would get it or you would be written off as a lost cause.
This compelling CJR package of interviews is just very elementary oral history reporting. Reporting that could have been done with the people of Iraq too, but alas we know almost nothing of their side of the war. Nor, until now, did we get to hear the reporters’ personalized stories. And why not? It’s obviously truth telling at its finest.
When I hear all the individual voices, it reminds me of crowdsourcing; something that could be done with or without the help of the mainstream media or best in cooperation with them.
