Three months ago, at the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, there was some sense that the rebuilding of the country had begun and, despite some violent resistance, so had a movement toward establishing a new government.
Newspapers, including this one, filed dozens of stories about how the rebuilding was progressing. Reporters spoke to Iraqi citizens who had endured the war but were hopeful that a new life, free of a brutal dictatorship, was a not-too-distant dream.
That was in March. In April, the violence took a dramatic turn for the worse, aimed increasingly at American civilians at work in the country. Then came news of the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib, the beheading of another civilian contractor, more attacks on U.S. troops and persistent car bombings around Baghdad, like the one last week that killed at least 30 Iraqis.
Now, just a few days before coalition forces are set to hand over control of Iraq to a provisional government, most Americans have no real sense of how the movement toward self-rule is going.
Why is that? Is it because — as I so often hear — the news media isn’t interested in telling the positive news out of Iraq; that we’d rather focus on the negative; the violence in the streets, the abuse of prisoners and the criticism of President Bush by his political opponents at home?
Or is the answer that we simply don’t know?
The extreme violence that has marred the country over the last three months has rendered it virtually impossible for reporters to independently verify the progress of the rebuilding efforts. In a conflict that has already taken the lives of about 20 journalists — twice as many if you count the non-journalists (drivers, security guards, etc.) who work with them — reporting in Iraq these days seems largely confined to the protective confines of secured military and civilian sites in Baghdad.
No doubt for many readers, the lack of security for journalists in Iraq is not a good enough excuse for failure to provide a comprehensive report about what is happening there. But it doesn’t change the fact that meaningful, independent reporting about the rebuilding effort simply doesn’t exist right now.
Jackie Spinner, the Washington Post reporter based in Baghdad, was asked in an online forum last week whether journalists ever see anything positive in Iraq or do they just feed off each other’s negativity. Spinner’s answer was instructive.
“That’s a fair question. I think our coverage reflects the sentiments of the Iraqis themselves. It is hard to feel positive about the future when you are scared that if you leave your house you might get killed. People — and not just the media — are consumed by the violence. When security was better, we were reporting the gains made in reconstruction. That has become more difficult as the security situation has worsened. People involved in reconstruction will tell you that it’s hard for them to focus on their jobs because of it.”
Such a harsh, eyewitness reporting experience leads news organizations to overly rely on information supplied exclusively from military officials or gleaned from TV reports broadcast by Al-Jazeera, which can hardly be considered an independent source of accurate information.
Last month, for instance, when U.S. jets attacked a village in western Iraq, killing 40 people, witnesses told Al-Jazeera that the military attacked a wedding party. But military authorities at central command headquarters said the attack was on a hardened outpost known to harbor violent insurgents.
To the best of my research, no American journalist has been able to independently verify which story is true — mostly because getting to the village is too risky right now.
Such a vacuum is more than unfortunate. As Spinner’s editor, Philip Bennett, the Post’s assistant managing editor for foreign news, wrote recently:
“Reporting Iraqis’ views and aspirations seems more critical today than in any point since the invasion. The people of Iraq have gone from being spectators and objects of Americans to being agents of change. They are leading their country, and ours, down an uncertain path. This is a story waiting to be told.”
