“It is a head trip leaving,” she said. “In any case, wherever you go, being able to walk along a footpath by yourself without an escort is great. Having electricity 24 hours. Being able to pick what you want to eat.”
But Ms. Susman, the L.A. Times reporter, does not feel she comes home a hero for her reporting.
“The level of ignorance is distressing,” she said. “It shows people aren’t paying any attention to the stories. They’re asking me about details like, ‘Do you go out, do you go to the Green Zone?’ And I tell them, ‘Just read the stories!’ If you just read the stories, they wouldn’t have to ask. They say they’re paying attention, but they don’t. If they ask you what the situation is like, they’re not reading. The New York Times, Reuters, the AP, the Los Angeles Times, they produce a lot of copy! It’s so easy to criticize the mainstream media for not covering the story, but there’s a lot of coverage.”
And if you do try to retell the story, it’s not always so warmly received.
“It’s a conversation stopper,” said Phillip Robertson, a freelance reporter who covered Iraq for Salon. “It’s not dinner-table conversation. Digging up bodies in mass graves. Even the people who didn’t see a lot saw way too much. That has a real effect.”
“Because the press put out all that stuff in the early days in 2003, the press is now blamed,” said Courtney Kealy of Fox News. “People say to me, what’s the real story in Iraq? I say, read the books that have come out and won Pulitzers. Look at my friends’ articles. Look at the stories I’ve done. They’re not looking, and they’re not reading; they don’t want to. And now the press corps gets a whole heck of a lot of, ‘Well, you’re just hotel journalists.’ I come home, people say to me, ‘What’s it like, have you been brainwashed?’ People who like Fox have said, ‘Well, I like your stuff, but I won’t read that paper.’ I say to them, anybody who has covered Iraq for a serious time frame, they’re a solid reporter. You can pretty much trust and read their stuff and forget about thinking there’s some great media conspiracy that we’ve all been co-opted by some right-wing or left-wing agenda. But no one can get their heads around that anymore.”
“There is a chance for this place to remain quiet. There is a chance for the Iraqi army to get better. There is a chance for a timetable for withdrawal that could work. The only issue I have is when I talk to people in the States … they really just ask me, what should we do, have we won or lost, how long are we staying? I think that winning and losing should be struck from the lexicon right now.
“I just try and stay away from, ‘What’s a good news story, or what’s a bad news story, or why did we come here?’ It’s like people who are 35 and can’t stop talking about their childhood. No matter how bad your childhood was, at some point you have to take responsibility for it and deal. Whether we were supposed to come here or not, we’ve been here for five years. History books have already been written.”
But the networks and, in many cases, the print media are keenly aware of the questions their readers and viewers want answers to. They are not always that complicated, and they don’t always require live reporting from Iraq.
“I have to say that’s an appalling indictment of the media,” said CNN’s Mr. Ware. “This is the Vietnam War of our generation. This conflict is going to have repercussions that far exceed that of an Indo-Chinese, essentially, civil war. Yet for a litany of reasons, which may or may not be legitimate, from cost to security to audience fatigue, the media has dropped the ball on this conflict. It is a tragic indictment on the Fourth Estate.
“Obviously, the media is a business at the end of the day,” said Mr. Ware. “There are advertisers to attract. We’re also about much more than that. We don’t always have to follow the market. Sometimes we have to lead it. And illuminate it. That’s where the media is failing the longer this drags on. How many people cut their teeth in conflicts in Vietnam? This is the war of this generation. Where is the graduating class of this conflict? That is something that has long saddened me. Not enough of our breed has picked up the cudgel of this war.”
“The press has not gotten the credit it deserves from the broad public,” said Mr. Packer of The New Yorker. “The idea that there was a group of people in Vietnam who were really changing the nature of journalism and its relation to the government. … I guess the mythologizing of those guys was more successful than this group. And I think it’s partly the sense that the press no longer has the clout and credibility it did. You don’t look to three or four people for the truth the way you once have done. There just is too many ‘truths’ out there.
“And second, I think it’s because the press is just part of the war, whether it wants to be or not.
“The press did discredit itself in the lead-up to the war. But I think the press redeemed in Baghdad what it missed in Washington. I’m not sure the public even knows that.”
“I think this is the story for my generation, the way that Vietnam was the story of the generation before us,” said Mr. Burns of The New York Times. “It’s the defining moment. I think, if I ask myself, what was the most challenging? At which story did I need to draw upon all the lessons I learned along the way? Iraq was it. I was not just a reporter, but I also had the good fortune of being a bureau chief. I don’t want to sound too pious here, but to see young people come into that bureau with little experience and no experience at all with the world at war and see how they prospered—and I think I helped them—was really extremely rewarding. It was the toughest and hardest assignment.
“It’s always hard to come into war when the trajectory has changed—and it isn’t so dramatic. For a reporter now, it is tougher. It was a lot easier. But this war is a long way away from over. We may be taking the temperature of this a little too soon. The numbers will come down and the surge will end and the Iraqis themselves will become less assured of an American presence, and there will once again be a great risk of the politics of ethnic schism in Iraq. We may not have seen the worst of it yet.”
fgillette@observer.com, mhaber@observer.com, jkoblin@observer.com
