Covering All Bases
Patriotism, objectivity, and the pursuit of journalism in wartime
Comedian Dennis Miller was in his element. It was last Tuesday night on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the bearded rant artist was taking aim at the press corps. "You always say that during this war it's the public's need to know about our ground forces," he said. "We don't want to know, OK?" Miller got the audience to join in: "We don't want to know!" they chanted. "It's not for us," said Miller. "It's for you and your cocktail chatter at parties in D.C. Leave our boys alone over there."
In what most working journalists call the biggest story of their lifetimes, the stakes have never seemed higher nor the dilemmas facing the press more serious. How much information should they report? Does the public's right to know outweigh secrecy and security? And perhaps most significantly, these days: Where does the press draw the line between patriotism and the pursuit of journalism? "Everyone in the media is struggling internally with reconciling this new kind of just war with the old rules of journalism," says Larry Sabato, author of Feeding Frenzy: Attack Journalism and American Politics. "The old rules say you have no opinion, you simply report the news and let others decide."
That's never been as simple as it might sound. Balanced reporting, after all, doesn't really mean that every story has two sides: If you interview a serial killer, you don't have to portray his justifications for the murders as an equally valid viewpoint. But it can mean bending over backward to understand other, seemingly alien, points of view. And in times of international conflict--particularly this one, which is arguably as much a war of words as a contest of military cunning--that gets mighty tough. In the wake of September 11, it's hard to show Osama bin Laden and his supporters as anything but, in President Bush's word, "evildoers." But dismissing them as madmen or anomalies, doesn't help the cause of patriotism or journalism. "Fairness in this case is trying to determine motives and trying to determine what is actually happening on the other side," says Sabato.
Look at the case of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Even if a war is just, the argument goes, we have a right to know if innocent people are dying as a result of U.S. military actions. But at this point, we don't even know the basic facts of the deaths. The Taliban have taken two groups of correspondents in to count bodies. Trying to get in front of the Taliban's reports, the White House recently set up a 24-hour international press operation to knock down the organization's claims. Who's telling the truth? "It's like shadowboxing," says Jane Kirtley, a professor of media law at the University of Minnesota. "You don't know what you don't know."
Modi operandi. So journalists try to read behind the lines--or not. Concerned that repeated accounts of alleged civilian casualties might seem unbalanced, CNN chief Walter Isaacson wrote in a staff memo: "We must redouble our efforts to make sure we do not seem to be reporting from [the Taliban's] vantage or perspective," he wrote. "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how [they] have harbored terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people." But Reuters takes the position that unless the terrorist connections are proved, the events of September 11 can be called only "attacks" or "suicide attacks," not terrorism.
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