Into harm's way

The first Gulf War was a fiasco. Journalists who covered it will tell you: Some of the dispatches they sent home in the winter and spring of 1991 are embarrassing to read today. Holed up in a hotel, herded into pens for military briefings, few of the roughly 1,400 who reported from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on Operation Desert Storm had the military expertise to judge whether the press releases they were fed - about the successes of Patriot missiles, the accuracy of smart bombs - could possibly be true.

"We were being shown pictures of bombs going down chimneys," says Peter Ford, who covered the war from Dhahran for The Monitor. "Of course, we weren't shown pictures of the bombs that didn't go down chimneys. And we now know many more didn't than did."

Now, as war again looms in Iraq, all those who plan to be involved in its coverage - from the Pentagon to the press corps - are clear about one thing: No one wants a reprise of the last war.

Facing unprecedented dangers, correspondents (and their editors) are now weighing how best to cover the conflict. Some will go in with US troops; others are now making their way to Baghdad or Northern Iraq independently.

But all roads to Iraq are not equal.

This week, in newsrooms across the United States, editors, producers, and executives are debating where and how to send their reporters to cover what may be the end of Saddam Hussein's nearly quarter-century stranglehold on Iraq. Everybody wants this story.

And, of course, everybody wants their reporters to survive its telling.

"In this business, there's always the sense that you're telling them to be careful, but with a wink and a nod, because you want the story," says Bill Spindle, who edits Middle East news for The Wall Street Journal - including, until last February, stories by the late Daniel Pearl. "I spend a lot of time telling reporters, "We're not winking. We're not nodding. We really don't want you in [the] fighting.'"

If this war comes, those covering it will be in more danger than any wartime press corps in history. They'll face not only shooting, shelling, and gassing, but a host of relatively new perilous possibilities: kidnapping, use as human shields, and Hussein's much-debated nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenal.

"Frankly, I've been surprised by how many people signed up [to cover the conflict]," says Chuck Lustig, director of foreign news for ABC. Yes, it's a big story, he says, "but there's also more of a threat."

But these are only the most obvious dangers. Perhaps an even greater obstacle to balanced war coverage is a deep skepticism in the Arab world about the impartiality of Western, particularly American, journalists. "They have no experience of a free press to begin with," says Scott Anderson, who has spent the past year reporting from the Middle East for the New York Times Magazine. The idea that a journalist could be independent, he says, "is pretty alien to them."

What's more, argues Robert Wiener, who produced CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War from Baghdad, news organizations aren't helping to make the case that their reporting is unbiased when TV anchors - even on his own former network - wear accessories as blatantly patriotic as American-flag lapel pins. To do so, he says, "places CNN people in Baghdad and other spots which are potentially hostile to journalists in danger unnecessarily."

But this week, amid the visa forms, the gas-mask fittings, and the hundred logistical hurdles that precede covering such a story, many reporters are finding themselves most anxious about the quality of their coverage.

"I'm sure when the time comes I'll be as scared as anyone," says reporter Steve Inskeep, who plans to report the conflict for National Public Radio. "But right now I'm most worried about: Is this going to be a war that we're going to be able to cover in a meaningful way?"

Page: 1 | 2