Full Disclosure

Question: What activity burns through money "like jet fuel," involves three armored cars, forty-five full-time, Kalashnikov-toting security guards, and two blast-wall-enclosed houses with belt-fed machine-guns mounted on their roofs?

Answer: Reporting from Iraq. This comes from New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins, now home from Baghdad on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.

According to an article by David S. Hirschman of Editor & Publisher Online, he added as well that, essentially, if you're a Western reporter in Iraq, you can never go out. Filkins claimed that "98 percent of Iraq, and even most of Baghdad, has now become ‘off-limits' for Western journalists."

Here's the problem. I've been reading New York Times reportage since the invasion of Iraq began and I don't remember running across a figure like that -- and neither has just about anyone else who happens to have been reading a major paper in the US for the last year. When, way back in September 2004, an e-mail from the Wall Street Journal's fine reporter Farnaz Fassihi slipped into public view, suggesting that "[b]eing a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest," it was treated as a scandal in the media; her "objectivity" was called into question; and (if memory serves) she was sent on vacation until after the presidential election. While there was a vigorous discussion in the British press of what came to be called "hotel journalism," it was hardly a subject here, once you got past The New York Review of Books.

It seems to me that it should be news when Filkins reports that Western journalists can no longer even go to the scene of a car bombing and that there are many situations in Iraq "even too dangerous for Iraqi reporters to report on."

Cigarette packs have their warning labels, as do vitamin supplements. Shouldn't our news have the equivalent? How about little pie-chart icons before each Iraqi story suggesting what percentage of the news pie had been available that day. Or a warning label that might say: "This ordinary piece was put together by American reporters locked in their well-guarded and barricaded buildings from scraps of information delivered by Iraqi reporters who can't even tell their families where they work for fear of assassination."

My own theory, based on a 1 percent pie slice of knowledge about that missing 98 percent of Iraq, is that that must be where the "good news" is -- you know, the stuff that the Bush administration has so long insisted the media doesn't cover. And it's undoubtedly zealously guarded by Shiite and Sunni militants, who aren't about to share all the wonderful things Bush/Cheney reconstruction has done for Iraq with the rest of us.

Comments (8)

1. i just know some brainless conservative is going to say that the media is still "liberal" and that they "never report any good news from iraq".

   another nice report from engelhardt....

   Posted by darladoon at 09/18/2006 @ 5:14pm

2. Posted by DARLADOON 09/18/2006 @ 5:14pm

   Inside the Emerald City, there is nothing but good news. For example, as I write this, no high-ranking members of Iraq's national unity government were abducted or assasinated inside the Green Zone in the past 24 hours! Why isn't anybody reporting that?!?!?

   Posted by nathanhale at 09/18/2006 @ 5:25pm

3. Only a kook thinks cigarette smoking warning labels slow down smoking. As far as the military..when you voulenteer for the service you do so with an open mond and an open eye....one might be called on to do what the military does ...kill people and break things...

   My own theory,..is that may be the reason we don't hear any good news from Iraq is that the press is nowhere to be found reporting it?....

   Posted by john maasch at 09/18/2006 @ 5:29pm

4. "Only a kook thinks cigarette smoking warning labels slow down smoking"

   only a kook would believe that warning labels were MEANT to slow down smoking.

   Posted by darladoon at 09/18/2006 @ 5:32pm

5. All the journalists killed in Iraq were cowards, don't believe me, ask the Admin.

   One: journalists cannot learn of many of the good things because if they get a list, so will the insurgents.

   two: the money has run out with most major projects unfinished.

   Three: If a bomb went off in your city, and a new school opened, which would you pick up the paper to read about?

   Posted by crabwalk at 09/18/2006 @ 6:06pm

6. zero, are you serious? i agree with almost everything you say, but your first sentence.

   were you aware that journalists were only working in 2% of the country?

   Posted by darladoon at 09/18/2006 @ 7:31pm

7. and our Republican candidates TV and radio advertising need a disclaimer, too, like the cigarette packs and those E.D. pharmacuetical ads, little quick-talk trailers saying "our candidate has been arrested for DUI, wife-beating, illegal possession of prescription drugs, and has suffered an election lasting more than four hours..."

   better call the Supreme Court!

   Posted by jepatt at 09/19/2006 @ 4:24pm

8. At least Iraq doesn't cause cancer...or does it?

   Posted by Tarnation at 09/19/2006 @ 5:11pm