The life-or-death struggle to cover the war in Iraq

As U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad and the statue of Saddam Hussein came down in April 2003, reporters on the ground quickly realized that they were not witnessing the unbridled joy on the part of Iraqis they had seen at the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Instead, the journalists encountered a mix of cheers and trepidation that turned out to be a harbinger of the future.

An ophthalmologist standing beside Cox Newspapers’ Larry Kaplow complained about the small American flags attached to the tank antennas. “They’re Americans and that’s the American flag. That’s what occupiers do. That’s an occupation and that’s what people don’t want here.”

If Iraqis did not feel immediately liberated, foreign journalists did. After decades of restrictions by Hussein’s regime, months of working under the watchful eyes of government minders, weeks of U.S. bombardment, reporters suddenly were free to move about. They could speak openly with average Iraqis. The freedom was exhilarating, but it would be short-lived.

Security conditions deteriorated rapidly; reporting would go from being merely dangerous to almost impossible. Journalists dodged bullets, then bombs and kidnappings. Eventually, they discovered that they were not just caught up in the violence but were targets of insurgents who saw all foreigners as American occupiers and all Americans as the enemy.

Freelance reporter Andrew Lee Butters likened their situation to that of “the proverbial frog in boiling water. The changes are so gradual you don’t notice it until suddenly things get really bad.”

“Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It” is a fascinating account of trying to report on a war unprecedented in its danger for the media. At least 165 journalists and media workers have died covering the Iraq war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That is far more than in the Central American wars, Vietnam or World War II. The vast majority of these victims have been Iraqis, who bravely stepped into the void when Westerners pulled back after becoming high-value targets for insurgents and criminals.

Editors Mike Hoyt and John Palattella and the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review pieced together interviews with 46 journalists who have covered the war, tracing the arc of their reporting from 2003 to 2006. The book provides a detailed look at the difficulties they faced in gathering news and writing the first drafts of this history, along with some of the most shocking photographs of the war. (The photos likely to be most remembered from Iraq, however, were not taken by journalists but by soldiers of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.)

The reporters and photographers discuss some of the more controversial issues surrounding their work: embedding with military units; coverage of Abu Ghraib; charges that they failed to cover the “good news.” Their accounts are honest and reflective, although those who blame the press for failing to tell the truth in Iraq may be disappointed, because there is no effort to analyze the reporting. Rather, this will serve as a resource for those who make a job of critiquing war coverage. For average readers, it should provide valuable insights into the job.

“In the beginning,” as the first chapter is called, some of the Iraqis standing beside National Public Radio’s Anne Garrels as the tanks rolled into Baghdad were celebrating, but others were in shock. “You understand you will now have to be in complete control,” a university professor warned her, “and we will resent you every step of the way.”

Iraqis began slashing portraits of Hussein and looting government ministries. They went through intelligence files to find what neighbors and associates had reported about them. They searched for loved ones who had been arrested or had disappeared, eager to learn the truth and relate it to journalists. There was crime and chaos, but nothing aimed at Westerners. “In fact, for that first month I felt incredibly safe around Baghdad,” said Thanassis Cambanis of the Boston Globe.

Reporters could wander around places whose names unfortunately would become household words: Abu Ghraib and Fallouja; Saddam City, later renamed Sadr City. They searched for clues to help find the weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. Elizabeth Palmer of CBS recalls the looting of caches of rifles that the regime had left in schools. “But the American forces were just overwhelmed, and at that stage nobody -- at least not the military -- was taking the probability of a really well-equipped and well-organized insurgency properly or seriously.”

The reporters went to people’s homes, to mosques and markets. As the insurgency began, they went to look for the rebels. “It was a fool’s paradise in a way. I felt we could go anywhere, and we did,” Palmer said.

Then the massive suicide bombings began. First the U.N. headquarters was bombed, then the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross. There were several suicide bombings on the same day in October 2003 of the Red Cross attack and, at one of them, the crowd turned on New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins and two photographers.

“I remember there was an old man saying, ‘Kill them, kill them, kill them!’ ” Filkins said. The crowd beat the journalists and threw bricks at them as they made their escape. “[T]hey blamed us for the bombing, you know? Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me . . . But it’s like before the Americans got here we didn’t have these things and you’re American, so we’re angry at you.”

Openness became a liability.

On Dec. 31, 2003, eight Los Angeles Times reporters and translators were caught in a suicide bombing at the popular Nabil’s restaurant. In March 2004, angry relatives of civilians killed by Marines in Fallouja put a gun to Times reporter Alissa Rubin’s head. In April, “things just snapped,” said Richard Engel of NBC News. “ . . . Any Westerners became targets. Convoys became targets, contractors became targets, journalists became targets. . . . “ In March, four U.S. contractors were killed in Fallouja, their mutilated bodies hung from a bridge. In May, abducted U.S. businessman Nicholas Berg was beheaded.

As the unraveling continued, reporters pulled into protective shells of blast walls and barbed wire, armored cars and armed guards. They were not as isolated as government officials in the Green Zone, but they were no longer free. Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi wrote an e-mail to friends in September 2004, remarking that reporters were under virtual house arrest. Her comments shook the journalism world because of her opinion that “the genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleased onto this country as a result of American mistakes.”

This volume also documents one of the under-told stories of reporting in Iraq: International journalists have employed their own small armies of translators, stringers and reporters to help them gather the news and tell the story.

Absent from these on-the-ground accounts, however, are any from reporters working for politically conservative Fox News, although they were there. Hoyt and Palattella never say whether Fox reporters were invited to participate, but it would have been interesting to hear if their experiences varied from the other media’s.

The reporters’ accounts here are notable for their studied neutrality. Blood flows, bodies and limbs pile up. They hear the whistle of bullets and whoosh of mortars. There is a shell-shocked quality to the telling. It comes out most when they are asked the question about why they never tell “the good news stories.”

“Hey, what’s most important in people’s lives when they’re getting killed on the way to the grocery store isn’t that the grocery store has a greater selection of imported cookies than it did before,” the Boston Globe’s Cambanis said.

--

marjorie.miller@latimes.com

Miller is The Times’ foreign editor.