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DARTS AND LAURELS
Our wartime press
This column is compiled and written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should be addressed.
* DART for yellow (ribbon) journalism, to: the Fort Wayne, Indiana, News-Sentinel. In news accounts, editorials, and columns, the News-Sentinel relentlessly reminded the community of the contrast between the News-Sentinel's patriotic policies and those of the rival Journal-Gazette, whose editor, Craig Klugman, had decided to enforce his policy against displays of political sentiments by newsroom employees -- including the wearing of yellow ribbons while inside the Journal-Gazette newsroom; * The Bakersfield Californian. With similar zeal, the Californian had a page-one field day for three days running when an office clerk for a local hotel was ordered by her supervisor to remove a flag she had hung on the wall beside her desk. (The supervisor happened to be a native of Jordan; the flag happened to be a full-page reproduction from The Bakersfield Californian.) The ensuing brouhaha produced a full-page ad in the Californian from the beleaguered hotel, assuring the "citizens of Bakersfield" that hotel personnel support the troops "in many ways, including tying yellow ribbons throughout our hotels. . . ." The ad also announced that the offending supervisor had been "reassigned" -- a euphemism for having been "run out of town," as Californian columnist Herb Benham later put it in a piece decrying the "lynch-mob mentality" whipped up by the media (though he didn't mention his own paper by name); * WDSU-TV, New Orleans, which opened its ten o'clock newscast on January 28 with what it seemed to regard as the sensational revelation that actor Woody Harrelson, who plays the bartender on Cheers and who had been selected to be grand marshal of the Krewe of Endymion's Mardi Gras parade, had several days earlier attended a peace rally at UCLA, going so far as to be photographed standing next to antiwar activist Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July; the segment strongly implied, as Times-Picayune media critic Mark Lorando wrote in his February 4 column, that Harrelson's antiwar sentiments made him unfit to lead the parade. Endymion leaders agreed and quickly replaced Harrelson with a new grand marshal, one presumably untainted by such an un-American activity as peaceful dissent. LAUREL to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and writers David Albright and Mark Hibbs, for a state-of-the-art report (March) on Saddam Hussein's nuclear capability -- and on how, aided and abetted by the U.S. news media, that capability was exaggerated by the White House to generate support for its actions in the gulf. In "Iraq and the Bomb: Were They Even Close?" Albright and Hibbs itemize in massive detail the scores of complex components required to produce a nuclear bomb, measuring Iraq's known, unknown, or probable status on each; they concluded that at the time of its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was five to ten years away from a useable device. In "Hyping the Iraqi Bomb," the authors show how, two days after a November 20 poll concluded that Americans would not go to war in the gulf to protect access to oil but would support a military effort to keep Iraq from getting the bomb, President Bush was publicly asserting that Iraq was only months away from possessing the ultimate weapon. * DART for war-profiteering, to the Willoughby, Ohio, News-Herald, and The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, Virginia. On January 25, the News-Herald announced a new weekly section of special three-inch photo messages "for loved ones in the armed forces" -- at seventeen bucks a throw. On March 7, The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star announced an upcoming "keepsake homecoming edition recounting important Gulf War events" and advised readers, "This is your place to let the military know how much you appreciate and support them." The price of a "message of support": three lines for $ 6.00; with small flag illustration, $ 9.75; with large flag, $ 14.50. *DART to Michael Hedges of The Washington Times, for getting too close to the story. Hedges opened his March 22 dispatch from Dhahran with the following revelation: "During the initial artillery bombardment of Iraq, I spontaneously took up a soldier's offer and flipped a switch that sent a dozen bomblet-filled rockets at Iraqi soldiers." *DART for expanding the definition of "friendly fire," to the Kutztown, Pennsylvania, Patriot; to the Paso Robles, California, Daily Press; and to the San Francisco Examiner. Among the journalistic casualties of the war in the gulf: * Patriot editor Joseph Reedy, fired after running an antiwar editorial (January 24) headed HOW ABOUT A LITTLE PEACE?; * Daily Press reporter Paul Payne, fired after a friend of the paper's publisher complained about a scheduled piece (subsequently killed) on the profitable boom in locally produced flags, ribbons, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other support-the-war paraphernalia; * Examiner columnist Warren Hinckle, told to take a three-month unpaid furlough after he had submitted a January 17 piece (which never ran) on the "folly of the path to war." * DART to The Sacramento Bee, for a graphic demonstration of how an unretouched photograph can distort the truth. The paper's full-page January 20 roundup on rallies for and against the war in the gulf was illustrated with four large photos, three of which featured solid, respectable-looking middle-class citizens demonstrating their support; the fourth (and, at 5-by-11 inches, the largest) photo, representing those who had participated in antiwar demonstrations -- and who by all accounts were solid, respectable-looking, and middleclass -- featured a lone punker who seemed dangerously close to the lunatic fringe. * DART to KRON-TV, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco, for a self-serving salute to "America's newest heart-throb, NBC News correspondent Arthur Kent, who has been reporting on the war from Saudi Arabia." Distributed by the NBC News Channel to affiliates around the country, the two-minute, nine-second segment (January 24) featured shots of the handsome reporter in Saudi Arabia, Romania, Afghanistan, and Italy, along with interviews with some of the Bay area "women of all ages" who, as one adoring fan put it, "just can't wait to see him on the evening news." The report also noted (in a statement not likely to repel the onslaught of Cupid's arrows -- or diminish the station's ratings) that, according to Kent's agent, the thirty-five-year-old reporter is both "modest" and "single." * LAUREL to The New Republic, for its consistently striking postwar insights. In his TRB column of March 18, senior editor Michael Kinsley tracked the shifting image of the weapon known as the "fuel-air explosive" as it evolved in the U.S. media -- beginning last fall (when it was believed to be in Iraqi hands and not in the allied arsenal) as a horrific terrorist device, and ending in February (when it was being used by allied forces) as an experimental weapon whose function was limited primarily to the clearing of minefields and whose devastating effects on living beings was all but ignored. Then, in the March 25 issue, Washington writer David Segal tracked the career of the ubiquitous Middle East "expert" Judith Kipper (Nightline, World News Tonight, CNN, MacNeil/Lehrer, NPR, C-SPAN, etc.), and concluded that, lacking both credentials and expertise in her so-called field, Kipper's real skills are in networking, parlaying her M.A. in psychology, her p.r. background, and her contracts with the likes of Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings into high-profile punditry. Finally, in his April 1 dispatch, "Highway to Hell," special correspondent Michael Kelly tracked a fifty-mile stretch of forgotten two-lane blacktop between secondary cities in Kuwait and Iraq ten days after the official cessation of hostilities, seeing for himself the "language of war" -- the "techno-idolatrous jargon, the nonsensical euphemisms" of his military briefers -- "made concrete." His searing account of the awful tableau, of "roasted vehicles" and "wizened, mummified charcoal-men" untouched except by wild dogs and birds of prey, stands (even in this age of instant and unedited video images) as haunting testimony to the unmatched power of the written word.
