When I called Associated Press photographer Steve Helber on Tuesday, I discovered it was his first day back in the office since mid-February.
Where had he been? As the Village People sang with gusto, “In the Navy!”
Like Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Rex Bowman, Helber was an embedded journalist. Bowman, who returned home to Roanoke on April 15, was attached to the 1st Marine Division as it moved across Iraq into Baghdad. Helber spent most of his time in the Persian Gulf aboard the carrier USS Kitty Hawk.
Helber, 50, has been with the Virginia AP bureau here for nearly 23 years. He was in Bahrain in March when he was named winner of the Virginia AP staffer of the year award for 2002.
He earned national recognition in 1986 when he received a “top performance” award from the Associated Press Managing Editors Association for his stunning pictures of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. His photo coverage of the disaster dominated front pages around the world.
During Gulf War II, Helber kept an almost daily Web site journal of his experiences. He wrote that “one of my biggest assignments is to take photos of launches and landings on the flight deck . . . and it is a cumbersome mess. Flight deck safety officers are all over us to move here, watch that, duck because of jet wash, don’t walk in the prop arc . . . ”
He filled 10 compact discs with pictures from his digital cameras. Dividing up the megabytes, that comes out to perhaps 5,000 images.
So, what was it like? “Life aboard a carrier,” he wrote, “is one day of routine added to another day of routine then another and yet more.”
A carrier can be a dangerous place to work. “It’s like a bad ballet on a greasy deck,” he wrote, likening the slick surface to a skating rink. “I’ve ruined five pairs of pants kneeling on the deck to get a good angle. It’s hard to walk due to the grease . . . and I guess the fuel that spills on the deck.”
After two jets launched from the Kitty Hawk were reported missing, Helber wrote about the change in mood aboard the carrier. “The pilots are not the self-assured, brash young men we have been bantering with all along. They have gotten a little more serious and have withdrawn a bit more.”
On his own way home, Helber was joined by wife Sarah and 5-year-old daughter Lauren for five days in Paris. “I thought I was in Kings Dominion for a minute,” he said. (Wink, wink – Paris has an Eiffel Tower, too.)
Then it was back to work for the Virginia bureau. His photo coverage assignment last week: the NASCAR races at Richmond International Raceway.
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The Department of Defense policy of embedding – attaching reporters to military units – likely will be the subject of many postwar debates by media leaders.
Among the critics is Bob Edwards, host of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Edwards, a native of Louisville, Ky., was inducted last month into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. He expressed a negative opinion of embedding in his acceptance talk on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington.
According to a newspaper report, Edwards charged that journalists embedded with troops have mainly provided propaganda for the military. “Without question,” he said, “this embedding program has been a public-relations bonanza for the military. . . . There used to be lines that no newsman crossed. Those lines are very blurry nowadays.”
On the other side, a panel of veteran Washington journalists and retired generals, discussing the issue during an American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in New Orleans, had positive reactions, as reported in Editor & Publisher.
Carla Robbins, a news editor in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal, said she “was very skeptical about the embedding process, but it worked remarkably well.”
Charles Horner, a retired Air Force general, said embedding eased tensions between the press and the military. “We have historically been afraid of the press,” he said. “We are no longer afraid of them,” E&P reported.
Editor & Publisher said about 775 journalists embedded with the military before the war began to wind down after the fall of Baghdad. Fewer than 190 remained, the press journal reported, in the last few weeks of April.
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The SARS outbreak in Toronto – 21 deaths were reported by last midweek – has been called a public-relations debacle for the city. An article last week in The Toronto Star said some business leaders “complained that the news media hyped the actual threat posed by SARS, fueling public fears.” Health experts countered that journalists simply were reporting information provided by public officials.
Don Sellar, astute and long-time ombudsman for the Star, told me his office has not been swamped with blame-the-media calls.
“I took a dozen or so complaints over the [last] weekend when the Star published a terrific picture from the Blue Jays’ ball game. . . . It showed an outfielder and a kid in the stands missing a fly ball.
“The kid wore a protective mask. This was seen as a damaging image of Toronto to present to the world.”
At his newspaper, he said, nine employees (of a total 1,700) have been subjected to quarantine. One reporter just back from Hong Kong was asked to work from home.
Three Star newsroom managers felt the SARS stigma. They had traveled to Washington to look over computer operations at the Post, Sellar said, but “were barred from the Post newsroom.”
