Defending Ellen (and the rest of us…)

BEIRUT – I was about to write a scathing retort to Airedale’s slag on Ellen Knick­meyer when I some­thing more impor­tant hap­pened: Today, CBS cam­era­man Paul Dou­glas and sound­man James Brolan were killed, and the cor­re­spon­dent, Kim­berly Dozier, was crit­i­cally injured when the con­voy they were embed­ded with was hit by an IED. This brings the total jour­nal­ists killed in Iraq to 71 with an addi­tional 26 media work­ers (trans­la­tors, dri­vers, etc.) also dead. My sym­pa­thies go out to all of their fam­i­lies. Airedale’s com­ment, reprinted below, should be see in this light. My response is below his comment.

Chris, on a side note, this reporter Ellen Knick­meyer
has filed a story from Bagh­dad ( green zone ) about an inves­ti­ga­tion into a pos­si­ble inci­dent of exces­sive force atroc­ity of marines and Iraqi sol­diers ( Shia ? ) in a con­voy through sunni dom­i­nated Haditha.
What I read was that a video tape ‘hap­pened’ to catch the explo­sion of an IED and the fol­low­ing mi lai ……
Do you know this “Ellen Knick­meyer” who files reports about Haditha eye wit­ness accounts from a Bagh­dad office?

The story that Airedale is refer­ring to is here. First of all, let’s clear some­thing up. ALMOST NO REPORTERS LIVE IN THE GREEN ZONE. I really don’t know why this has to be repeated so often. The U.S. mil­i­tary does not allow us to live there. The Wash­ing­ton Post house, where Ellen lives, is right next to the TIME Mag­a­zine house, where I lived. We most cer­tainly do NOT live in the Green Zone, and we go through the ups and downs — well, mostly downs — of liv­ing in Bagh­dad like other Iraqis. We have almost con­stant con­tact with Iraqis through out staff and their fam­i­lies.
And most of us don’t want to live in the Green Zone. It’s bor­ing. It’s almost impos­si­ble for our Iraqi staff to get in and out. And when they do, they open them­selves up to retal­i­a­tion from insur­gents and ter­ror­ists who see any­one using a GZ entrance as a col­lab­o­ra­tor. It’s hella dan­ger­ous.
And, yes, I know Ellen well. We worked together briefly back in 1997 when I was new to the Asso­ci­ated Press and she was an old hand on the Inter­na­tional desk.
But that’s not impor­tant. What’s impor­tant is the way reporters work in Bagh­dad these days. More on that later. But also impor­tant is Airedale’s bla­tant mis­read­ing of the story. The video didn’t “hap­pen” to catch an IED and the mas­sacre that fol­lowed. The story makes no men­tion of that, either, so Airedale didn’t read any such thing. Sec­ondly, TIME Mag­a­zine broke this story back in Feb­ru­ary. I know the guys who brought in the video and I’ve seen it. It’s grim. It’s a record­ing of bod­ies, blood­stains, bul­let holes and shell cas­ings. It’s obvi­ous from the video that this was a mas­sacre and not a fire­fight.
I’m not going to go into too much, for secu­rity and com­pet­i­tive rea­sons, but TIME Mag­a­zine reporters — not Iraqi stringers — inter­viewed sur­vivors of the mas­sacre in a safe place in Bagh­dad after bring­ing them down from Haditha. I’m not sure how Ellen did it, but my read is that she did some­thing sim­i­lar, or used one of her Iraqi staffers to inter­view sur­vivors in Haditha.
Oh, wait! That’s exactly how she did it: “The 24 Iraqi civil­ians killed on Nov. 19 included chil­dren and the women who were try­ing to shield them, wit­nesses told a Wash­ing­ton Post spe­cial cor­re­spon­dent in Haditha this week and U.S. inves­ti­ga­tors said in Wash­ing­ton.”
In another para­graph, she writes: “Towns­peo­ple led a Wash­ing­ton Post reporter this week to the girl they iden­ti­fied as Safa. Wear­ing a pony­tail and track­suit, the girl said her mother died try­ing to gather the girls. The girl burst into tears after a few words. The older cou­ple car­ing for her apol­o­gized and asked the reporter to leave.”
Hm. Sure sounds like a Wash­ing­ton Post reporter, pos­si­bly Ellen, did some shoe-leather work there.
But, look: This is how it’s done these days; we rely on stringers and Iraqi staffers who can go where West­ern­ers can’t. It’s not per­fect, but it works bet­ter than you think. Our Iraqi staffers are get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter: more pro­fes­sional, more dis­cern­ing, more skep­ti­cal. I have utter faith in the Iraqi TIME staffer who brought this story to us, and I’m sure Ellen has the same con­fi­dence. Since I know Ellen and I know her to be a good jour­nal­ist, I’m going to say I’m pretty sure she knows what she’s doing.
This accu­sa­tion that reporters don’t go out has been dog­ging the press corps in Bagh­dad since things got bad, and it’s almost wholly unde­served. Why the hate, brother? Other than the obvi­ous and clumsy White House attack on the media to dis­credit all news com­ing out of Iraq as “biased,” I also think it’s because the Wash­ing­ton press corps was so phe­nom­e­nally bad in the lead-up to the war that peo­ple think we’re all the same peo­ple. We’re not. I don’t know any Bagh­dad reporters who were also in the Wash­ing­ton corps before the war. Except for maybe some TV and mag­a­zine para­chute jour­nal­ists.
But the fault, dear brutes, lies not just in our­selves, but in the stars of the blo­gos­phere, sites like Daily Kos and Instapun­dit. Blog cul­ture has cre­ated such a dis­trust of all so-called Main­stream Media that it’s almost hereti­cal to defend “the press” in a blog these days. Well, fire up the coals and burn me at the stake then: I think the jour­nal­ism com­ing out of Bagh­dad has been some of the best the inter­na­tional press corps has pro­duced. Under tremen­dous dif­fi­cul­ties, we have pro­duced some great jour­nal­ism — like TIME’s Haditha scoop, for instance. No other enemy has been so cov­ered as the Iraqi insur­gency; hell, the press in Bagh­dad under­stood there was an insur­gency before the U.S. mil­i­tary did!
Our mil­i­tary cov­er­age has been, in a word, great. Tom Lasseter’s cov­er­age from embeds has been some of the most hard-hitting of the war. He has been ahead of the curve on the sec­tar­i­an­ism fury within and between the var­i­ous secu­rity forces — and he did all that report­ing while embed­ded.
We had one major mis­step: Abu Ghraib. I’ll cop to that (not per­son­ally, of course.) Reporters had been hear­ing that stuff for weeks and months before­hand, but we just couldn’t believe that Amer­i­cans were pil­ing naked guys into piles and putting glow­sticks up their asses. It just seemed too out­ra­geous. And every reporter in Bagh­dad has had the expe­ri­ence of hear­ing an Iraqi blame the “Israeli mis­sile” for what was obvi­ously a sui­cide bomb. Iraqis do have a ten­dency to exag­ger­ate.
But we learned after our les­son; we stopped dis­miss­ing seem­ingly wild Iraqi claims out of hand, earn­ing us unend­ing scorn from the right which thinks the press corps is pop­u­lated by rag­ing left­ies who think the U.S. mil­i­tary is a bunch of baby-killers. It’s not. I think most of us thought, ini­tially, that an all-volunteer mil­i­tary with Viet­nam behind it would have learned some lessons from My Lai, etc. about the abuse of power. We were all shocked by Abu Ghraib. We’re not shocked now.
Which brings us back to Haditha. I’m incred­i­bly proud to be asso­ci­ated with an out­let that broke this story and which got an inves­ti­ga­tion going into this. The evi­dence I saw on that video­tape was over­whelm­ing against the Marines involved. Men are going to go to jail for a long time over this, inshal­lah.
And we did it using the exact same frus­trat­ing, imper­fect and flawed report­ing meth­ods Ellen used. And we were right, dammit. And so is Ellen. To crit­i­cize her for her using Iraqi staffers to go where she can’t is to crit­i­cize and doubt all of the report­ing that comes out of Iraq these days. Lord knows the Bushies would like you to lose all faith in the media so they can claim all the bad (but true) news is a giant con­spir­acy by east coast lib­eral elites out to under­mine the troops. You’re per­fectly free to believe that. But you won’t be get­ting the story of America’s mis­ad­ven­ture in Mesopotamia.
Two more men are dead and a woman crit­i­cally injured for that story. You may not like the sto­ries com­ing out of the the­atre of bat­tle. Well, I don’t like what the Marines did in Haditha. If you want me to “sup­port the troops,” what­ever that means these days, how about a lit­tle sup­port for the press corps?

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