COM 209: Reporting in Bagdhad

Here's a link to an important story in The New York Review of Books titled "Baghdad: The Besieged Press." I'm assigning it for class discussion.

Link to: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18844 ... read it by Tuesday, March 28, and we'll discuss it in class.

The story is by Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently visited Bagdhad. I'll add to this post later, but here's a sound bite. Well, OK, OK, it's a print bite:

In recent history, there have been few wars more difficult to report on than the wa in Iraq today. When I was covering the war in Indochina, journalists went out into th field, even into combat, knowing that we would ultimately be able to return to Saigon Phnom Penh, or Vientiane where we could meet with local friends or go out to restaurant for dinner with colleagues. Although occasionally a Viet Cong might thro a hand grenade into a bar, the war essentially was happening outside the city

I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner, there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.

The result is that reporters find themselves living in a strangely retro mode where their days end before sunset, and they are pulled back to their bureaus for dinner like an American family of the 1950s.

And here's his description of a party at the Fox news bureau:

In our search for the alleged Fox News party, we ask the attendant in the lobby fo directions. He tells me and my guards to go to the fifth floor, but adds that in order t get upstairs, we must first go downstairs, evidently a strategy to prevent suicid bombers from going directly to their targets. In the basement, amid a stack o discarded cardboard boxes and heaps of broken plate-glass windows, an Iraqi man is kneeling on a rug in front of a cement block wall, presumably facing toward Mecca in prayer

When we finally arrive on the fifth floor, we have to leave our guards at a checkpoint fortified with a steel door. Inside, we are greeted by the stink of disinfectant and stale air filled with the smell of curry and cigarette smoke. Down a hallway with a greasy carpet I find a small sitting room with shabby furniture and a soccer game playing on a TV. The Fox News staffers who are smoking and drinking seem glad to see almost anyone. The scene makes me think of a group of elderly retired people clinging to a residential hotel slated for demolition.

"Where are all the other guests?" I ask, as one of them thrusts a bottle of beer into my hand. Zoran Kusovac, Fox's bulky, unshaven bureau chief, takes a long drag on his cigarette and explains in his Croatian accent, "Everybody's gone home." He laughs. "It's Saturday. We wanted to have some fun. We used to be able to have parties until late at night. But now our security people told us that if we wanted to have a party, it would have to end no later than 6:00 PM, so that everyone could get home before dark. We started at 3:00!"

"It's a little like being in third grade, where everybody has to be home before dark," someone else says. Everyone laughs.

Party hearty, huh? The whole story is like that. It gives you a sense of what it must be like to be there.