For newspaper editors, the distance between hearing about something you think needs to be in the paper and hitting the button on the keyboard to get it into type is often a matter of hours.
Not so for the around-the-clock news channels on TV. While we have the luxury of watching stories develop and change for hours before deadline, the TV folks have to make much tougher and faster decisions about when to broadcast what they have heard and believe to be true.
I’m struck by that distinction the more I watch the TV coverage of the war and read some of the same accounts of the previous day’s events in the newspaper the following day. Sometimes it comes up in a reader’s call to this office, asking why we didn’t report some major development that he or she heard on CNN, Fox or the other cable networks the previous day.
Often, the answer is that the story literally evaporated during the day.
For example, initial reports from the field and from wire services coming to the networks on Monday seemed to indicate a chemical weapons storage site had been discovered in southern Iraq. But by late afternoon the story had changed, and the networks were reporting troops had taken a facility that may once have been used to store chemical weapons. Late that night, military officials said there was no indication that the plant was a weapons storage facility.
Viewers clicking in and out of TV coverage during the day may have missed the later reports and assumed the next day’s newspaper would have a major account of the discovery of the chemical weapons plant. When it wasn’t there, they got suspicious about why we “refused” to print this major development.
In fact, it went from a major story early in the day to a nonstory by the end of the night. That’s not to say that the networks were wrong to report it. They went with the best information they had at the time. The information simply changed. Keep that in mind when comparing TV coverage with what you see in the newspaper.
Behind the bylines: It took only five days into this conflict for a story to surface about how some field commanders and retired combat leaders were bickering with the Secretary of Defense and other presidential advisers over what it would take to win the war.
The generals said they would need more troops and supplies, but the politicians were convinced Saddam Hussein’s troops would not put up much of a fight, a front-page story said Tuesday.
The story, based entirely on conversations with unnamed military sources, retired and active, was written by Joseph Galloway, a free-lance military writer working with Knight Ridder News Service.
Galloway has an extensive network of sources inside the military going back to his early days as a wire service reporter covering the first major helicopter-borne cavalry assaults against the Vietcong in the 1960s. You may remember his name as the co-author (with former Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore) of the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”
The book, later made into a movie starring Mel Gibson, documented similar misgivings between field commanders and Washington over what the staggering costs of the war — in lives and casualties on both sides — would be.
The prisoner photo: Last Saturday we ran a front-page photo of American soldiers providing water to an Iraqi prisoner. Many readers loved it, including one who said she printed it out with a copy of Matthew 25:40 (“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”).
But the way the photo was cropped made it appear that one of the soldiers was holding a weapon to the prisoner’s head — as two letter writers reference on this page today.
In fact, a wider view of the photo shows the gun is at the side of a third, unseen American soldier standing next to the two who are kneeling and attending to the prisoner.
While the rifle is pointed in the prisoner’s direction, it is not aimed at his head. Explaining that in the caption would have been helpful so readers wouldn’t jump to false conclusions.
