OLEAN -- War, as we know, changes everything, including my beloved profession, journalism.
It seemed to me a fairly simple formula when I became an ink-stained scribe four decades ago -- find the truth, put it down in readable English, tell the reader what happened.
Now, reporting more resembles quantum physics. In these days of political correctness, every last phrase seems to be examined by boards of self-appointed "ethics" experts for "balance" and "objectivity" and "fairness" -- as if these were substances one could store in a jar and scoop out when needed. A couple of recent examples serve to illustrate.
A Boston Herald reporter, Jules Crittenden -- one of the "embedded" newsmen with the Army's vanguard Third Infantry Division in the current war with Iraq -- routinely sent back gripping, gory and extremely well-written dispatches from the front. Now he's the focal point of controversy among breast-beating media types.
Weekend before last, Crittenden rattled off an astounding story which he wrote took him "over to the dark side." Rumbling through Baghdad with the Third in a lightly armored vehicle, Crittenden writes that he "spotted the silhouettes of several Iraqi soldiers looking at us from the shadows 20 feet to our left."
They were aiming RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) at Crittenden's own vehicle. He shouted, "There's three of the (expletives) right there."
The American gunner up top opened up on them.
"I saw one man's body splatter as the large caliber bullets ripped it up," wrote the newsman. Two more Iraqis were killed in the short firefight.
"Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three fellow human beings in the war I was sent to cover," continued Crittenden, "I'm sure there are some people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc. I'll keep the argument short. Screw them, they weren't there."
He pointedly adds, "They are welcome to join me next time if they care to test their professionalism."
To be fair, most media observers and critics who weigh in on such stuff for a living defended Crittenden, noting he was in a life-and-death situation, and that the enemy doesn't make all these tea party distinctions. When you are "embedded" with a military unit -- traveling, eating and sleeping with the men of that unit 24/7 and writing about it -- you are sometimes "going to have to act in the unit's interests first," noted Tom Kunkel, the University of Maryland journalism dean, in the "American Journalism Review."
But some called Crittenden "overly cocky" and "reinforcing the stereotype that journalists are less than human."
Kelly McBride, who writes an interesting "Ethics Journal" for the renowned Poynter Institute in Florida -- a respected organization for which the prolific Crittenden was also free-lancing a war diary -- told the Boston Phoenix she was bothered by the "tone" of his confessional piece. According to the Phoenix Web site, she characterized the article as "revealing his bias" toward the American soldiers he was with.
Uhhh, time out.
At the risk of getting overly cocky myself, or of offending someone at Poynter, I'd like to make a few personal comments right about here.
I've never been in combat, as many of my friends have, but I'm pretty damn sure if I found myself reporting in a war zone, and I saw some Iraqis about to kill some Americans, I'd show a little bias too.
I wouldn't be polite or soft-spoken about screaming a warning in terms that would include obscenities.
In other words, having to choose sides, I'd go with the Americans.
Don't most Americans expect that of their reporters? Don't most Americans -- whether they question the motives for this war or not -- expect American reporters who spring from American culture and American birth and American background and American influences and American education and everyday American life to act like Americans?
Do American media consumers actually expect their reporters to show bias in favor of a declared enemy of this country -- which a mute Crittenden would have been doing -- all in the name of pure "balance" and "objectivity" and "fairness"?
Does exhibiting these qualities in reporting the truth -- and they are compatible -- extend to aiding and abetting the ambush of one's countrymen? Do the navel-gazing priests of the journalism temples really expect American reporters to act like Martians, newly inserted into a war of unknown hostiles?
Somewhere along the line, journalism academics (and I now am one) and social reformers and political philosophers and media critics -- and a fair number of editorial nincompoops -- got to thinking our profession was so above all others in importance and purity and rectitude and unassailable morality that it must not be corrupted, ever, by corrosive elements like patriotism, or sense of community, or sense of self.
We were to be pristine -- a class by ourselves, purer than the driven snows, virginal of influenced thought and unknowing of molded spirit. We were to give all sides of every story, even if there was only one. Balance was to be the ultimate shibboleth. In sum, we were to be "politically correct."
How arrogant. How gossamer. How unreachable. We were to be -- somehow -- rigidly adjustable in thought, if that's possible, and self-identified as journalists first, last and always.
Not only do I think that impossible, I don't even think it's advisable. Never have American consumers of information been more confused. They are supplied not only two sides to every story -- they are inundated with dozens.
And believe me when I tell you there are plenty of things I consider myself before I define myself as a journalist, as do many successful friends.
Yes, I am an American and I'm proud of it, before I am a journalist. If you demand I give up either my citizenship or my status as a journalist, expect a curt answer as to where you can put your journalism. Yes, I'm a parent before a journalist. I'm a believer in a just God, a friend, a husband and lover, a brother, an uncle, before I'm a journalist. Hell, I even think of myself as a fisherman, baseball fan, single-malt Scotch drinker and above-average gardener before I think of myself as a journalist.
Journalism -- and now teaching it -- is merely my craft, my job, and true, a damn important one. I have enjoyed great success in this field.
Sure, I still enjoy it and throw myself into it, driven among other things by fulfillment in seeing promising young people develop, or by typing my byline above a well-written piece, or by putting things into perspective, or by uncovering some fact previously not disseminated, or by sticking up for Joe Sixpack when he and his family get screwed by the government or big business.
But get real. It isn't THE most important job on earth. It may be right up there, and it may be terribly important, but its practitioners are humans and the pursuit of truth an art instead of a science. A little more humility would do us all -- and our critics -- well.
Now, if you really want to get critical about media behavior, consider my second illustration: CNN.
At about the same time Jules Crittenden was unloading, CNN's chief news executive -- Eason Jordan -- was confessing in The New York Times that for almost a dozen years he had smothered his own knowledge of Saddam Hussein's inhumanities. He did not report atrocities against CNN staffers or the two-week, electroshock torture of one of his own cameramen. He did not report the intended (and eventual) assassination of Saddam's two defector sons-in-law in 1995, even when Saddam's eldest megalomaniac son, Uday, told Jordan of the plan directly and ahead of time.
Verifiable reports of unjust executions, teeth and fingernails ripped out with pliers for minor infractions that offended Saddam, other unspeakable butchery, the delivery of the bagged body parts and severed limbs of a murdered CNN informant to her family's doorstep on the eve of Gulf War I -- none of these atrocities were shown the light of truth by Jordan.
He says he did it to protect other CNN staffers and innocent Iraqis. His critics say he did it for access, to keep CNN crews in Iraq, approved and mobile as long as he looked the other way. Bob Steele, the ethics director at Poynter Institute -- which I sideswiped in the Crittenden portion of this column -- has stated he thinks CNN and Jordan set aside their ability to report the truth in order to keep "a continued presence in Baghdad."
Said Steele to Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times, "In essence, he was caught over a long period of time dealing with the devil."
This time, I'm with Poynter.
Jordan should tell his story to Saddam's two sons-in-law. Or to all those innocent Iraqis who died in horrible suffering over the years while the United States or United Nations might have interceded when armed with knowledge of the dire information Jordan held secret. Or as refutation to all those free world molly-coddlers who portrayed poor old colorful Saddam as merely the victim of CIA bad-mouthing.
If we truly want to be politically correct, we should never barter silence for access.
There's a template for all this. It was set down about 65 or 70 years ago. Only the catered-to bad guy's name wasn't Saddam.
It was Adolf Hitler.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 22 2003 |