All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is CBS News producer Max McClellan. Oops. Make that Emmy-Winning producer Max McClellan.

Matthew Felling: You won your first Emmy. I feel like I should ask you if you’re going to Disney World. How's it feel?

Max McClellan: It's feels terrific - and lucky. In my case, I was lucky to be working with Lara Logan and Jeff Newton, who shot some extraordinary material in Ramadi and then let me join them to help put it together.

Matthew Felling: As a producer for Lara Logan, what does your job entail?

Max McClellan: I work with Lara to develop stories around the world for the CBS Evening News. She spends a lot of her time in Baghdad, of course, but when she's not there, she still keeps extremely busy. Aside from Iraq, we've done stories in India, Darfur, South Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Syria in the last year. People often ask me if she's indefatigable. Yep.

Matthew Felling: Tell me about the story that won the award.

Max McClellan: This was a two-part series that aired on the Evening News in May 2006. Lara and her Associate Producer from 60 Minutes, Jeff Newton, spent several weeks living and working alongside US Marines in Ramadi, Iraq. At the time, Ramadi was the operational center of Al Qaeda in Iraq and one of the bloodiest frontlines in the war on terror. These Marines were involved in heavy, daily, street by street battles with the insurgents. Lara and Jeff were with them every step of the way and captured an up-close view of the war that had rarely been seen. For me, the material they shot and the interviews they did were extraordinary, not only because it gave our audience a glimpse of the intense fighting going on, but also because it showed the bravery and humanity with which these soldiers conducted themselves every day.

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Yesterday in this space we discussed a new article that raised the economic problems of covering Iraq … and how it’s a difficult business proposition.

But enough from the bean counters, what about the journalism? In the piece, TV news analyst Andrew Tyndall was quoted:

"We’re in a period of prolonged news doldrums," says Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes newscasts in the online "Tyndall Report." "Iraq is no longer a headline news story. There are no new things happening there; it’s just more of the same. That would be a true thing to say even if the security conditions were better. It’s stuck, militarily and diplomatically."

Later on in the piece, CBS Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan took issue with his characterization, saying:

"You don’t abandon the American soldiers who are on the streets of this country because people are tired of hearing about it," says Logan. "You don’t abandon the Iraqi people. You don’t abandon people like that because back home people are tired of hearing about the war. Our job is to find a way through that."

I was interested to hear what Logan meant by “find a way,” so I contacted her in Iraq yesterday and asked her to expand on that idea.

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On Wednesday, Public Eye spotlighted CBS Evening News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan’s report about US soldiers rescuing two dozen starving special-needs orphans in Baghdad. Logan reported that a US military patrol happened upon a “horrific” scene of 24 children being starved in a Baghdad orphanage, some tied to beds like dogs on a leash.

The treatment of the kids may have been indefensible, but their rescue made for a rare good news story out of Iraq. Not much more to say, then, right?

Wait. Nothing is easy when reporting from Iraq.

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Which one of these is not like the other?

Sunni-Shiite tensions hit a new level of violence due to the bombing of the Golden Dome Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Mental illness – mostly in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder – is on the rise in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

US soldiers save 24 starving special needs orphans in Baghdad.

As you can tell from the final example, there is reporting of positive developments from Iraq – though some might say that the media doesn’t bother with them.

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Did Lara Logan's piece on the "Battle for Haifa Street," posted to CBSNews.com, include video obtained from Al-Qaeda? That's the question on the mind of a number of bloggers, including Michelle Malkin. Writes Nibras Kazimi:

What I'm interested in is the footage of dead Iraqi soldiers that Lara Logan claims was “obtained by CBS.” But this footage was first released by Al-Qaeda!

Al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq released 8 minutes of cell phone footage through its media arm, the Al-Furqan Institute for Media Productions, under the title ‘Some of the Casualties of the Heretics in Haifa Street After Sunday’s Fighting, January 7, 2007, in Baghdad.’ The grainy images were of six or seven bodies wearing Iraqi military fatigues with ‘carry-out’ lunch boxes strewn about them. The images were probably taken by a cell phone, judging by quality. In one scene, a close up is shown of a soldier shot through the head, probably executed.

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The footage “obtained by CBS” is identical to that put out by Al-Qaeda. But Logan makes no mention of Al-Qaeda’s video and does not address the implication that the footage she used was off an Al-Qaeda video. And if it’s not off the Al-Qaeda video, then how did she get footage identical to the one used by Al-Qaeda? This needs to be explained.

I asked CBS News Vice President Paul Friedman about the video.

"I can assure you this was not from Al-Qaeda," said Friedman, who declined to identify the source. "Whenever we can identify the source of information or video, we want to do that," he added. "There are some rare cases when we have to protect the source. In this case, we needed to do so, because it’s literally a matter of life and death."

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Just about everyone seems to have an opinion about the media’s coverage of the war in Iraq and they run the full gamut. We’ve heard all those absolute judgments over the past three years – the press was complicit in the thirst for war and acted as willing agents in deceiving the world about weapons of mass destruction; the mainstream media is against the war and reports only bad news from Iraq; they’re corporate stooges bowing down at the alter of a capitalist war machine or anti-Americans more than eager to exploit any opportunity to embarrass the nation.

The reality of war reporting is far different, but, like the first draft of any period in history, it’s going to take some serious distance in time before the matter can be solved in anything approaching a definitive way. With all that in mind, I sat down for a long chat this week with CBS News’ chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan to talk about some of the challenges of covering this war (click the picture below for one of her more recent reports from the field).

For all the sweeping generalizations we so often hear about reporters who are anti-war, administration apologists, enemy sympathizers and the like, Logan says “I’m not any of those things.” She presented her views of the war as largely complicated and wholly “irrelevant” when it comes to being a part of her work. For instance, Logan told me her pre-war reporting uncovered skepticism about the ability of an invasion to achieve many stated goals, mostly because she was told over and over again by people in that region that Iraqis did not want foreign soldiers in their country. At the same time, she voiced a great deal of respect for the coalition soldiers she covers because in most every particular instance she finds “they are trying to do the right thing.”

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You'll notice that we've put a box linking to a Reuters panel on the right hand side of the site. The panel, which will take place Wednesday night, concerns whether the media is "telling the real story" in Iraq. I will be attending, and one of the participants will be CBS News' Lara Logan*. If you'd like more information about the event and the panelists, go here, where you can find out more and watch the event live.

As for why we've posted the box, it's a little bit of cross promotion. Reuters has posted a link to Public Eye on their site, and we thought we would link to them as well, since the panel covers ground we think our readers are interested in. Reuters did not pay for the placement, and we did not pay for placement on their site.

*UPDATE: I've just learned that Lara Logan, who is presently in Iraq, will be unable to attend the panel.

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Debate over media coverage of the war in Iraq is all the rage these days, and increasingly reporters are firing back at critics. A fighting attitude was on display on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program yesterday which featured CBS correspondent Lara Logan from Iraq. Here’s part of what she had to say to critics who claim reporters don’t venture out of their hotels to see firsthand what’s happening in Iraq:

I don't know any journalist that wants to just sit in a hotel room in Iraq. Does anybody understand that for us, we used to be able to drive to Ramadi, we used to drive to Falluja, we used to drive to Najaf. We could travel all over this country without having to fly in military helicopters.

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