Presence to the story. Jay Rosen has a fine piece up at PressThink, "'The View From Iraq is Getting Narrower Just as Things Are Getting Worse...'" It's as long and thoughtful as Jay's posts usually are, so I can't possibly get to the heart of it in an excerpt. Here's where it begins, though:

"The view from Iraq is getting narrower just as things are getting worse." That's what Howard Kurtz reported Monday. "Growing violence is forcing Western correspondents to change their approach to reporting, restrict their travel and pass up stories that are now deemed too risky." ... The reality Kurtz describes—journalists pushed back and pinned down, dependent for protection upon the government they are trying to hold accountable—not only tells us something about dangers in Iraq. It forces us to understand the American military effort, and the American press effort as one thing. "More journalists have resumed traveling with military units through the Pentagon's embedding program, which proved so popular during the war against Saddam Hussein," Kurtz reported.

Rosen notes that the Times' John Burns was held by al-Mahdi militia last month for eight hours, and that his associate Jeffrey Gettleman was abducted the next day. And that prompts his central question: "What are these people--journalists on assignment in Iraq--actually there to do, and why do they do it at such high personal risk?"

I offered a comment to Jay's piece—with some trepidation, when people like Max Frankel had commented before me on the same thread—and since it relates to a recent post of my own I thought I'd cross-post it here:

Placing a reporter on the ground—in difficult or perilous circumstances—is not I think primarily about fact-gathering. A reporter's physical presence to the story in a place like Iraq both states and promotes an ethical commitment: one that stems, ultimately, from the knowledge that we never observe merely, without being implicated in what we observe. (We don't just observe, in other words, we witness.) I've never been a journalist, but as a reader it seems to me that the phenomenon of "presence to the story" has deep consequences for the formation of a correspondent's self-awareness. In the best cases (I'm thinking at the moment of James Bennet's beautiful piece in the Times yesterday), the product—the writerly product—offers layered testimony to the correspondent's own interests, to the journalistic agenda more broadly, and to the inevitable dissonance between those agendas and the lived reality of which the correspondent has made himself or herself a part. The result strikes me as honest, about the uses and the limits of journalistic observation, in a way that rarely ever emerges from, say, the journalism of access the makes for standard practice in a paper like the Times. The value of correspondents to me, again as a reader, isn't just that they put eyes and ears and judgement in a place where I can't—it's that their writing offers me a chance to witness with them.

A commenter up-thread had taken strenuous issue with Burns saying that war against Iraq "could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone." I addressed that at the end of my comment:

If what Burns is quoted saying about the justification for war were advocacy, I'd agree with the criticism. But I think what we're talking about in this case is a statement of just the kind of ethical commitment that animates, and has to animate, a journalism of presence. Slipping over into advocacy is one of the risks that sort of journalism runs: but I'll take Burns' version of it, if that's what this is, in a heartbeat over the bad-faith advocacy of some access-peddler like, say, Judith Miller.

posted by michael  5:08:47 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

A map of the abuse. I get the dead-tree edition of the Times delivered daily, as I have for at least a decade now, and it's my primary resource for writing this blog. I was reminded why yesterday, when the paper didn't show up on my doorstep—and had the reminder reinforced with this morning's paper, which was there in its usual place. The physical edition of a newspaper maps an information space: it offers a powerful, subliminal metaphor for the paper's ability to locate individual pieces of information within a global context. (I'm sure I'm half-remembering this point from something of Marshall McLuhan's, but I don't have the energy right now to figure out where I'm half-remembering from.) That's also, incidentally, a powerful, subliminal assertion of hegemony. More to the point now: an extensive, mapped information space, one whose rules and countours you know by habit, has a powerful influence on how you direct your attention. On the Web, a news story is total-immersion: one simply replaces another, and all the page navigation and sidebar links in the world can't alter that central fact. In the physical space of the paper, information doesn't replace information, with each piece completely consuming your attention; the cartography of the page allows each piece of information to contextualize the others, to create a texture of cross-checking and cross-comment that's crucial to the structure of the reading experience. (From this angle, the paper establishes, by a physical correlative, an openness to critique that's paradoxically absent from the more openly structured Web.)

Which is all by way of saying: if you want to really get it in your gut what a dominating story the Abu Ghraib scandal is, grab a copy of today's Times and follow the jump from either of the two front-page stories (Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt, "Dogs and Other Harsh Tactics Linked to Military Intelligence"; Kate Zernicke, "Only a Few Spoke Up on Abuse as Many Soldiers Stayed Silent") to A6. (Much of this burst of coverage, in the case of Jehl/Schmitt's article as well as Steven Lee Myer's horrific accumulation of detainee testimony, is a product of documents from the Army criminal investigation having begun to surface.) There's nothing quite so dramatically contextualizing as two full, facing inner pages devoted to covering about half a dozen angles on a single story—especially in this case, where a chunk of the page real estate is devoted to new abuse photographs on one side, and a graphical map of the "hard site" maintained by the Abu Ghraib interrogators on the other (a map within an information map!).

No detailed dissection of the coverage; it's by-and-large vigorous and worthy. (Even Zernicke's apparently ingrained moralism, which led her to such obtuse reporting last week, is well targeted to her subject today.) The Times was unaccountably slow, slower than the already slow rest of the major American media, to recognize just how shattering and monumental the detainee abuse story was—but if this is the paper playing catchup, then they'll get no complaints from me. Well, for today, at least.

posted by michael  4:48:36 PM  
tell me about it []