The News & Observer has come in for a good bit of criticism lately for its international news coverage. The paper is too focused on local news, this argument goes, and doesn’t give enough prominence or space to world affairs.
That may be, and it’s worth a discussion — in another column. But recently the paper did something out of the ordinary in the foreign news department, and I thought it was worth a closer look.
Reporter Jay Price and photographer Chuck Liddy returned last week from a month-plus assignment to Afghanistan, accompanying recently deployed troops from Fort Bragg. What value did readers receive from having the local newspaper in Afghanistan? And did their deployment under the wing of their military host color their coverage?
One unusual element was that the team went to Afghanistan instead of Iraq, where most of the world’s media focus is. In Afghanistan, Price and Liddy found only a handful of reporters covering this continuing conflict dating from the U.S. ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Just since March, more than 400 people have been killed in fighting there, including 29 U.S. troops. Yet, little media attention.
Price said he pitched Afghanistan to N&O editors because he thought the Asian nation held a fresher story for readers. “If we were going to go to the effort to do a story about North Carolina troops, we wanted a different story from Iraq,” he said. Coverage in Iraq is confined to the tight security zones around the troops, and Price wanted a broader picture of the country. “We wanted to be able to get out away from the troops and just talk to the local folks. I knew we could do that in Afghanistan, and that we could do the broader story.”
The series included reports on soldiers’ interactions with Afghan people, on redevelopment of villages, on campaigns for upcoming parliamentary elections and on a grandmother from Durham, now living in Pakistan, who is legendary among Afghans for her human relief efforts.
Much of the story was told in Liddy’s pictures, which displayed the expressive faces of a people coping in a land torn by war. One memorable shot: lines of Afghan workers in sandals standing in 140-degree asphalt building a road. That spoke volumes about the condition of the people and their country.
“What was shocking to me in Afghanistan was that, unlike Iraq, there was no infrastructure to rebuild. That’s what I tried to show in the photographs,” Liddy said. “I really thought it was important to show the people and how they reacted to us. The Afghan people had the most unique faces — from the youngest children to the oldest — they just had incredible faces.”
A legitimate question is whether the team could effectively cover a mission that they, as “embedded journalists,” were part of. One of the main criticisms of Iraq invasion coverage is that the media became cheerleaders for the operation because they were too close to the troops.
The N&O incurred significant expense in sending Price and Liddy to Afghanistan, but they did receive free military transportation, lodging and meals. They lived, ate and worked with the troops they covered.
There were stories, true enough, that were sympathetic to the mission — of troops playing with kids, of village reconstruction work, of tearful soldiers marking Memorial Day, of the reunion of two grievously wounded vets returning to the battlefield.
But there also were stories with a harder edge that surely did not please the military. Price and Liddy were scolded for shooting pictures of dead and wounded soldiers during a helicopter medical evacuation (and The N&O ran the pictures). They showed broken-down Humvees with a sergeant saying, “We need Humvees that work. Tell people that.”
Their story about a manpower drain among non-commissioned officers — with quotes from departing sergeants and corporals — displeased brass at their base.
One of the best stories examined the U.S. policy of using “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” (PRTs) of soldiers and U.S. agency workers in redevelopment efforts. Those teams are resented by non-governmental organizations such as CARE and Doctors Without Borders, as Price’s story said, because they blur the line between aid workers and soldiers. The story was full of soldiers and international aid workers dissing each others’ work.
Price says he was sensitive to the embedding issue and went out of his way to avoid being compromised. “This thing about being too close to your sources, that’s not a new phenomenon with embedding,” Price said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an embedded reporter with the military or if you’re covering City Hall. If you’re too close, you’re unprofessional.”
Price and Liddy reported back to you in 12 stories and 27 photographs, plus 12 blogs on the N&O Web site. (The stories are located at newsobserver.com keyword: afghanistan and the blog is located at keyword: forgottenblog.)
What was the value of their work? They heard from lots of grateful family and friends of troops in the 82nd Airborne, hungry for any scraps of information about living conditions of their loved ones.
The readers benefited from a local-angle look at Afghanistan, a war-torn nation that isn’t getting adequate attention now from any media. And, says Liddy, the journalists themselves benefited. He’s already asked to go back for the Afghan elections in September.
“To be honest with you, it really isn’t so much about doing this for any gain for the newspaper. I thought we were doing a service, which is what newspapers are supposed to do, because we educated our readers about a different culture they didn’t know anything about. And we brought a level of understanding for ourselves, not just our readers, but us as journalists.”
