Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists who Covered It (Paperback)

~ Mike Hoyt (Editor), John Palattella (Editor), Columbia Journalism Review (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With pens down and cameras shuttered, 44 reporters casually and directly discuss all angles of the War in Iraq, including their own shock, fear and incomprehension, in this compilation of interviews conducted by The Columbia Journalism Review. In thematic, loosely chronological chapters ("In the Beginning," "Turning Points," "The Embeds," "The Good News"), the Iraq situation escalates from uncertainty to lawlessness to siege mentality and open insurgency alongside sunny reports from officials: "Iyad Allawi was saying that almost the entire country was safe," while freelancer Andrew Lee Butters was learning doctors in Mosul's main hospitals "were getting three headless bodies delivered to the morgue everyday." A dramatic portrait of Iraq's day-to-day emerges: freelancer Nir Rosen sympathizes with Iraqis' fear of American soldiers; CBS News' Elizabeth Palmer, meanwhile, sees the "ill-prepared" soldiers in essentially the same predicament as the Iraqis: "hostages of a terrible situation." Back home, reporters deal with misinformation, media bias and post-traumatic stress, as well as disillusionment, shame and rage over the stories that will likely never reach a mass audience. The New Yorker's John Lee Anderson says "there's no proper way" to cover war that isn't "rife with contradictions and problems"; this vital, breathtaking collection may be the closest contemporary reporting gets to cutting through the fog of war. 22 color photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Anthony Swofford

Reporting Iraq grew out of a magazine project to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Columbia Journalism Review. Reporters Vivienne Walt, Judith Matloff and Christopher Allbritton were hired to interview about 50 journalists who had reported extensively on the Iraq war.

The resulting oral history -- composed entirely of the journalists' thoughts and recollections, presented verbatim and without commentary -- is a searing document, one of the most revealing chronicles of the war yet published. It is as though correspondents are talking late into the night, trying to explain what it was like, what sights and smells haunt them, what they're proud of and what they regret, what they saw coming and what they didn't. Here's Guardian/Getty Images photographer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad recalling an explosion in which he was wounded by shrapnel:

"Up until this moment I was separated from the scenes of car bombs by my lens: It was something else, it was not reality because I see it through this viewfinder, and all you care about is the light, where it's coming in, the composition, the light. So you are separated. But the smell, the smell is always there."

This is the kind of book that the hawks who pushed the Iraq war on America could never have imagined. After reading these story-behind-the-story accounts, the easy war fantasy built on fictionalized intelligence and willful blindness seems more than ever like an impeachable offense. But this is neither an anti-war nor a pro-war book. In these pages, men and women who have spent more time in Iraq than most U.S. soldiers deliver intimate, street-level views of all sides of the conflict: of an Iraqi mother grabbing a reporter by the vest and demanding, "Why have you killed my son?"; of opposition fighters debating whether to kill a photographer because he's not a Muslim; of U.S. troops coming to blows over the shooting of a dog.

These vignettes are presented chronologically, creating a lucid narrative from the start of hostilities, through the reign of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to the hope and promise of national elections and finally to the bloody spring and summer of 2006, when most of the interviews took place.

Close readers of the national print press are already aware of the danger and difficulty of reporting from Iraq. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 124 journalists and 49 media support workers -- drivers, interpreters, fixers, guards -- have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. But the psychological toll of war reporting is often forgotten or denied, even by journalists themselves. In Reporting Iraq, Anne Garrels of NPR confesses, "I still have nightmares, truth be told; posttraumatic, whatever you want to call it. . . . Anger -- all of us -- I know I've had anger issues; they're hard to describe."

By nearly all accounts, during the first six or seven months of the occupation, journalists were able to move easily around Iraq. "You could go out all day in a place like Ramadi -- where I think now your life expectancy would be about 20 minutes," says Dexter Filkins of the New York Times. He first noted the changed environment in the fall of 2003, when he went with two photographers to the scene of a suicide bombing in a Shiite neighborhood. "About 500 people turned on us instantly and surged. I remember there was an old man saying 'Kill them, kill them, kill them!' " The reporters were beaten by the crowd, their car was pelted with bricks, a photographer had his head split open, and at day's end Filkins counted 17 bricks in the battered car. This was the new Iraq.

The danger wasn't just physical. There was a concerted effort by some members of the Bush administration and the military to undermine the authority of the press, most notably by accusing reporters of covering only bad news.

"In October 2003, I think that was when the first salvo in this good news, bad news debate started going on. And I started questioning myself," says Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid, who admits that the pressure for good news affected one story he filed. "And I regret that story. . . . It came out of that thing of, again, not sticking to what you're hearing, not sticking to what you're seeing," he says.

The pressure wasn't just from the military; sometimes it came from editors. Patrick Graham, a freelance writer, says, "A friend of mine who was working for a British paper kept getting a lot of pressure to write 'good-news' stories. I can remember him saying, "I've written a good-news story in Hillah; I hope they print it before Hillah blows up."

Many of these reporters are remarkably critical of their own work. While Iraq is "certainly very, very dangerous," says Walt, an interviewer for the book who has also covered the war as a freelancer, "I think in some ways its uniqueness is a little bit exaggerated. . . . I was just in Kurdistan; Kurdistan is not totally safe, but it is an important part of Iraq and you can more or less operate there pretty well." A translator for Time and CNN, Yousif Mohammed Basil, responds to the good news, bad news debate this way: "As an Iraqi, living inside Iraq, I cannot hear good news, and even if there is good news, you cannot hear it with the noises of explosions and the noises of the terrorists and the noises of American military operations."

It is said that if you ask 100 soldiers to tell you about the same firefight, you will hear 100 different stories. The same can be said of journalists. Many Western reporters now work from walled compounds in or near the Green Zone, coordinating Iraqi stringers by phone and e-mail. When they leave their compounds, those who report for major news organizations often, though not always, move with armored vehicles and guards; freelancers, on the other hand, have little choice but to dress up as Iraqis and drive through neighborhoods in beat-up, thin-skinned cars. The war the two groups see will inevitably be different. And there is no attempt in Reporting Iraq to gloss over the differences, or to make journalists look good. That may be why they come off so well.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Melville House (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933633344
• ISBN-13: 978-1933633343
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #670,748 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inside the inside story, February 25, 2008

By	Charles A. Krohn (Burke, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This book is remarkable for its previously unreported insights and candor. I suppose the participating journalists have nothing to lose now when they talk about the challenges of reporting the war in Iraq. Still, they illuminate how clumsy the efforts were to control what they reported by limiting access or intimidation. It didn't take long for reporters to recognize the gap between ground truth and what was being pitched from the lecturn. This left a credibility gap that should have been forseen, reducing support for the war, whatever the merits. One story still unwritten is the role of Dan Senor when he headed the strategic communications team from the Green Zone. Did he take orders from others in Washington, or did he create policy on his own? Reporters told me they often didn't trust him, but they had no choice but report his observations. Second sourcing was often impossible. We all know there was little Phase IV planning, but the failure to plan for a credible, effective communications organization ranks high among the unforgivable ommissions. The military spokesmen were more credible than Bremer's folks, but military PAOs were not totally independent. It got to the point where Gen Sanchez and Amb Bremer wouldn't brief the media as a team, or so I was told. High marks to Mike Hoyt and John Palattella for assembling this imporessive undertaking.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable insight into war reporting, December 2, 2008

By	S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This will give anyone who wonders about how the news (particularly the news of a controversial war) is transmitted to them via newspaper, television or radio. The interviewers have spoken to some of the best of the reporters who covered the invasion of Iraq at the side of the troops (Peter Maas wrote one of the most thoughtful and chilling reports on what it's like to be combat for the NY Times magazine that I have ever read, and is included in this) as well as those who were in Baghdad.

Most importantly, this shows how with each week and month that passed, the challenges of reporting what was happening within Iraq grew. The story became more complex and the dangers of trying to obtain accurate first hand information became more acute. At the same time, the frustration within the United States has only grown -- hunting for certainties that are thin on the ground, it has become more common to hear politicians and others lash out against "the media" for failing to show the "real" truth of life in Iraq.

Anyone who takes the time to even skim through this oral history will quickly realize that there may be no single truth, much less one that is easily understood by an American public looking for simple narratives. Moreover, readers will marvel that many of the journalists who have traveled to Baghdad over and over again are willing to repeatedly put their lives in jeopardy to try and explain what is happening there.

For anyone interested in delving more deeply, I'd suggest two quasi-memoirs. Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR's Correspondent Anne Garrels and Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq are both tales of trying to report what is happening in Iraq.