"Shooting through a straw" US journo reports on Iraq voting

[donsu]

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/02/10_danner.shtml


On Sunday, January 30, the day of the Iraq elections, Mark Danner — a veteran journalist and a professor at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism — awoke unrested on the concrete floor of an American (formerly Iraqi) air base just outside Baghdad's Green Zone. His sleep had been interrupted over and over by artillery fire, mortar rounds and other explosions. He hadn't planned to crash there, but his ride — provided by The New York Times’s Baghdad bureau, for which he was doing some consulting — had been unable to get through the previous night because of the heavy fire and accompanying security barriers.

The Iraqi driver had tried hard to pick him up. He found out later that the man, who carried New York Times identification papers and spoke English, had been forced to get out of his car at a U.S. checkpoint and walk on his knees, hands on his head, for 200 yards over rough cement. A soldier then held a rifle against his temple while his car was searched. Even with journalists, such procedures are routine in the embattled Iraqi city, said Danner.

"The first lesson of this story is that Baghdad was locked down," he emphasized to a standing-room-only crowd at the J-School last night (Feb. 10), the kick-off to this semester's Goldman Forum on the Press & Foreign Affairs series. Danner had just returned from two weeks in Iraq reporting on the election for The New York Review of Books. He is the author of the 2004 book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, and has visited Iraq several times in the past few years.

Danner gave a gritty, behind-the-scenes view of how reporting works — or doesn't — in Iraq. The media are "shooting through a straw," unable to see or know what is happening except in a handful of "secure" locations. While the media and the world to which they report have no inkling what lies outside that tunnel vision, the U.S. military, the insurgents, and the Iraqi election commissioners are very much aware. The real battle in Iraq right now, according to Danner, is the battle for public perception
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he talked about "any report in a storm" kind of reporting (reporters go to Green Zone once a day for reports and that's that)

he talked about "A war fought with images" and "A little Haiti, a pinch of El Salvador…"

he ended by saying the killing will go on.