Not a Good Time for Journalists

And I'm not talking about the reportorial debacles of the Sago miners and Katrina (*). No sooner had Editor & Publisher reported that the Iraq war has been the most dangerous for journos in the 24-year history of the Committee to Protect Journalists, than we hear of attacks on two more. Both the latter have created firestorms, but let's take a moment for the honored dead. E&P says the CPJ

...names 47 journalists who were killed in 2005 along with 11 whose causes of death are still being investigated [and those who still missing]. According to the CPJ's investigations, 37 of the 47 confirmed deaths were murders. Five journalists died in crossfire and five as a result of dangerous assignments. Although this total number is down from last year's 57 deaths, it is higher than the last 10 years' annual average of 34. Iraq by far claimed the most journalists' lives, 22, more than 70% of which were classified as murders. Fatal abductions are an increasing problem there, where at least eight journalists were kidnapped and killed in 2005. And with foreign journalists staying out of harm's way, Iraqi journalists accounted for 21 of Iraq's 22 deaths; American freelancer Steven Vincent was the only foreign journalist casualty in Iraq last year.

Note that the vast majority of journalists killed are not Americans, but the latest journo kidnapping victim is. Jill Carroll, a freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor, was grabbed and her translator killed in an ambush. "All together, it didn't take 10 seconds," the Washington Post quotes her driver (who obviously escaped). Although the 28-year-old Michigan native was seized on Saturday, US media sat on the story at the Monitor's request, says E&P. The blackout has raised ethical questions from Sig Christenson, president of Military Reporters and Editors. "You've got to ask yourself who else we would have singled out for this special treatment?" he tells E&P. "If this happened to anyone else, they would rush it out on the wires and they should. Do we really want to put reporters in a special class when we do a story? Is it ethical to do that and is it wise?" The larger tempest comes from Sunni Arabs protesting a raid on their mosque by US troops looking for Carroll, reports the Monitor.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, which is based at the mosque, confirmed that one of its members, Yunis Aikali, and five mosque guards were arrested in the raid. In a statement, the Association also accused US soldiers of desecrating the mosque and carrying away files containing the names of members. Reuters reporters saw shotgun shells and explosive charges used to blow out door locks lying on the ground following the predawn raid on the Umm al-Qora mosque complex on Sunday. Many office doors showed signs of forced entry, papers were strewn on the floor, and windows were smashed.

Coincidentally, on the day the Carroll story broke, US forces in Baghdad broke into the home of an award-winning journalist for the London-based Guardian and a British TV network. He had been investigating claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated. A few days after Guardian Films "approached the US authorities and .... asked them then to grant [Ali Fadhil] an interview about our findings," soldiers "fired into the bedroom where we were sleeping," Fadhil is quoted in the Guardian, referring to his wife, their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, and seven-month-old son, Adam. Fadhil was arrested, his footage seized and not yet returned, though he was soon released. In his account for the Guardian, the winner of the Foreign Press Association's young journalist of the year award writes:

I found myself in a small room, two metres square, with wooden walls, a refrigerator and an oval table in the middle. Soon two men came in, civilians, wearing vests. "Do you know why you are here, Mr Fadhil?" they asked me.

I replied: "To be interrogated?"

With a broad smile, one of them said: "No. There was a mistake in the address and we apologise for the damage."

So that's it. They blew three doors apart with explosives, smashed the house windows, trashed all our furniture, damaged the car, risked our lives by shooting inside rooms aimlessly, hooded me and took me from my family who didn't know if they would ever see me again -- and then, with a smile, they dismissed it as a small mistake.

* OK, my two cents: Though I agree totally with Harry Shearer on bureau staff cutbacks exacerbating the cluelessness of reporters on the scene, I'd like to add that such monumentally mistaken "news" coverage is not a new phenomenon attributable to the Internet. Remember the Columbine shootings? So many of the details reported were wrong, but have hardened into urban legend, in some cases into mini-industries (e.g. books etc. about two different girls honored as "martyrs" for the same quote, attributed to a third girl). That journalistic debacle can't be blamed solely on the 24/7 cable news cycle -- the appetite for "scoops" has always increased the risk of big bloopers. William B. Ketter writes of the incident of the misreported "death" of a civil rights activist in 1966. And there's always Dewey Defeats Truman.