politics

The Press Briefing Room, Iraq and Citizen Journalism

Newsweek previews the rehab of the White House press briefing room, Time offers two takes on the Middle East crisis, and the New Yorker concludes that citizen journalism has brought us … not much.

August 1, 2006

Looking for another reason to be glad you’re not covering the Bush White House? Newsweek‘s Periscope provides one this week in a punchy item on the imminent, “long-overdue rehab of the press briefing room and workspace” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Immortalized on TV and in movies as the glamorous place to be, the briefing room is, in reality, a dump with broken chairs, torn carpeting, dangling wires and a musty smell that’s especially pungent in the summertime,” writes Holly Bailey. “One of the area’s two bathrooms died long ago, and the air conditioner barely works,” while engineers have deemed the area a “firetrap.”

And so Tony Snow’s press briefings are moving across the street to Jackson Place until the nine-month rehab of the “dump” is complete. “[L]ike many dealings between the administration and the press,” Bailey writes, the move to Jackson Place “has been eyed with suspicion by reporters, who worry the renovation is a ruse to get them out of the White House for good.”

Moving on to more worldly matters, Newsweek provides an absorbing on-the-ground account of an insurgent ambush of Marines in Ramadi, Iraq, where several thousand U.S. forces “are pitted against a city full of adversaries, who run the gamut from Qaeda veterans and unreconstructed Baathists to street-corner mercenaries.”

“Lance Cpl. Dustin Gross lay on a Ramadi street beside his wrecked Humvee, conscious but too badly injured to get up,” reports Scott Johnson. “The crew’s gunner, momentarily knocked cold, slumped in the turret above him. Huge pieces of shrapnel and broken bits of pavement rained through a haze of dust and debris. A massive blast from an improvised explosive device had just ripped into the Humvee’s engine block, tossing the five-ton vehicle into the air and flinging the driver-side door, torn from its hinges, across the street.” While the Marines eventually escape, the strategic situation the U.S. faces in Ramadi — where al Qaeda has taken control of the city’s gas stations — is daunting. “One of the things I want to do is get to the point where I’m not killing so many people a day,” says the U.S. commander there. “I want to give them jobs.”

Meantime, the magazine provides some good context on the war between Israel and Hezbollah, from the public relations battle to Bush officials “‘freaked out’ by Hezbollah’s resilience.”

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Newsweek‘s cover package features Oliver Stone’s new 9/11 film, World Trade Center. (We recommend the Newsweek interview with the police officers who inspired the movie, two of just 20 survivors pulled from the Ground Zero rubble.)

Time‘s Lisa Beyer provides context of a different sort, making a reported argument titled “Why the Middle East Crisis Isn’t Really About Terrorism.” “[B]y casting the battle against Hezbollah as part of the war on terrorism,” she writes, “the Administration is obscuring the real questions in this crisis and depriving the American public of a debate over them: How much should we do for Israel, and what should we do to Iran, Hezbollah’s main source of funding, training and weaponry?” Pretending that “Hezbollah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will top 9/11,” Beyer argues, “costs the U.S. credibility, risks driving terrorist groups that aren’t allied into alliance and obscures the real issues at hand in the Middle East.” (Immediately following Beyer’s piece Charles Krauthammer presents a radically different interpretation of current events, writing that “the Arab-Israeli wars are now merging into the global conflict between radical Islam and the West.”)

Bringing things full circle, we turn to another article about journalism: Columbia J-School dean Nicholas Lemann’s new New Yorker piece on the Internet and would-be citizen journalists, who now number in the millions. After sampling some of their work, Lemann asks “what has citizen journalism actually brought us?” and concludes that the answer is … not much. “[A]fter having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not to think, This is what all the fuss is about?”

To move the medium toward consistently “good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling,” Lemann concludes, “requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material — which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not ‘citizens’ with day jobs.”

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.