behind the news

It’s Not Just What You Know, It’s How You Know

October 18, 2005

If sometimes it seems like pundits and politicians can see what they want to when looking at Iraq, either fledgling democracy or catastrophic failure, it has to be at least partly due to the murkiness of even the most basic news reports from the region.

This morning offered a perfect example of a critical story whose essential facts were so blurred and confused that it’s hard to figure out what to think.

We know, from the military, that in the town of Ramadi on Sunday afternoon an F-15 dropped a guided bomb on the eastern part of the city where the day before a roadside bomb had killed five American and two Iraqi soldiers. The burnt out Humvee was still on the road when the bomb hit.

The New York Times dutifully reports, in an article by Sabrina Tavernise, the military’s version of what happened next. According to Col. John L. Gronski, commander of the Army’s Second Brigade Combat Team, the bomb took out 20 insurgents gathered around the ruined hulk of the Humvee. Gronski also emphasized that no civilians were hurt.

The Times article is datelined “Ramadi,” so we can presume Tavernise was on the scene. But her account provides absolutely no on-the-ground reporting of the scene after the bomb hit. The only thing that keeps it from reading exactly like an army press release was that Tavernise says the bomb was dropped at “1:30” rather than writing “thirteen hundred hours thirty.” Otherwise the entire piece could have been written from military HQ in Baghdad, or New York, for that matter.

On the other hand, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times articles on the bombing, which are fronted rather than buried like the New York Times piece, are datelined “Baghdad” but provide a much more detailed and complex (and horrific) picture of what happened.

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Based on “hospital officials and family members,” the Post reports that the bomb killed 25 people, including 18 children. And it then goes on to describe the scene at the local hospital where “distraught and grieving families fought over body parts severed by the airstrikes, staking rival claims to what they believed to be pieces of their loved ones.” The article quotes a resident, Ahmed Fuad, who says he saw children playing around the Humvee before it was hit. He says he lost his 4-year-old son, Saad Ahmed Fuad, and his 8-year-old daughter, Haifa Ahmed Fuad.

The Los Angeles Times splits the difference, providing quotes from local officials, like Dr. Ayad Duleimi at the Ramadi hospital who says he saw 35 civilian casualties, 20 dead and 15 injured, from the Humvee airstrike and two other bombs dropped on the city later that day. But the article also includes the voice of Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, who, though admitting that insurgents “will try to hide in and among the civilian populations,” insists that, “at this time, to the best of our knowledge, this was strictly a military target. We have seen in the past propaganda claiming that whenever we go after targets in urban areas we kill civilians, which turns out to be false.”

We have two question: 1) Why was the New York Times report based only on military sources? It’s possible that Tavernise was embedded and therefore couldn’t break free to report on the local response. If true, the Times owes it to readers to let them know that this was the case and account for the limited perspective of the article. 2) Since the Post and Los Angeles Times stories are datelined “Baghdad,” who was collecting for them the information from local officials and residents of Ramadi? Stringers? Phone calls? Again, with such a sensitive issue as civilians — and children, especially — killed in war, the papers need to be absolutely transparent about where and how they are getting their facts.

No one is saying that it is easy to report from a war zone. Conflicting body counts are to be expected. Conflicting versions from the military and the population are to be expected. The only thing the press can do — after trying to collect as much information as possible — is be completely upfront about the conditions under which it gathered that information. We need to know if the Times reporter was embedded and could not get out of an armored vehicle to speak with local residents. We need to know if the severed limbs and dead children were something a reporter saw with his own eyes or something a doctor told him about over the phone.

It changes the way we read the story, and it changes our understanding of what is going on over there.

–Gal Beckerman

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.