Tuesday, April 01, 2003

Balanced Coverage or Balancing Act? From a global vantage point, this morning's most telling (and troubling) war story involved the killing of ten Iraqi men, women and children that were in a van that failed to stop when troops from the Second Brigade of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division waved them down and fired warning shots. It's the sort of story, Shibley Tehami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for the Peace and Development at the University of Maryland told Katherine Lanpher on MPR's Midmorning, that fuels ant-American sentiment in the region and, as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek said last week, will create "100 new bid Ladens." Both metro dailies in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, featured the story prominently (the Strib starting William Branigin's Washington Post report on Page One, the PiPress teasing the tragedy on their cover, then running the same piece inside). Both papers also chose to print and give even more prominent play to a piece written by the Associated Press's Chris Tomlinson, chronicling how an U.S. infantry division rescued a civilian woman who had run out onto the bridge they were in the process of taking on their way through Hindiyah, Iraq--a Euphrates River town. The Strib ran the AP story on top of (and in tandem with) Branigin's report, then jumped both pieces to the same inside page. The PiPress led their special war section with the AP story. What was most telling, though, was that both papers chose to run a full-color AP photo of the rescue on Page One, just below their flags, above the fold. The implicit message, whether it was consciously delivered or simply a consequence of both newspaper's attempt to be "balanced," was that the tragedy involving the van near Kabala (now under investigation) can somehow be measured against the heroic efforts of U.S. Troops in Hindiyah. It's no surprise that most media outlets around the world did not make the same connection.      3:14:57 PM

The Rules of Engagement (or how to be em-bed-ded) While news organizations stumble over one another in an embarrassing rush to promote their war coverage,  little ink and even less air time has been expended to let consumers know the rules of engagement for the major media's so-called "embedded" reporters. Those rules are outlined on the DOD's website. Pieces discussing the dangers inherent in these "regulations" have been digested in a trade-related publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher, and Jim Romenesko's site at Poynteronline. Most of the best work was written before the war started, but it's easily accessed and  worth re-visiting. In the New York Times on Sunday, Anthony Swofford--who served in the last Gulf War and wrote the book "Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles"--writes that "Our Sergeant has suggested that we let the reporters into our circle, that we let them join us as though they were our fellows. He also said, 'Don't tell them a thing.' And we didn't because the reporters laid down for us. The mystique of the military and the military man overpowered their natural cynicism and skepticism. The reporter doesn't put pressure on the soldier because he doesn't want to be the bad guy. The young kid might die tomorrow, so why make him buckle today with intrusive questions? The kid is young and rugged, the reporter thinks; the reporter sees his braver and sexier and more romantic self in him. The real-time reporter broadcasts the combatant's bare and muscular chest because that is the vision that jibes with what the viewer wants. The reporter falls in love; he rests his head on the young,  muscular chest." Former Minneapolis journalist, now New York Times reporter David Carr made similar observations to Swofford during the March 28 broadcast of National Public Radio's "On the Media."    12:22:59 PM

© Copyright 2003 David Schimke. Last update: 4/3/03; 3:53:04 PM.