All Blog Posts from Public Eye

David Bloom. Michael Kelly. Kimberly Dozier. Bob Woodruff.

Anwar Abbas Lafta.

The first four are well-documented and oft-discussed American media casualties of our military engagement in Iraq, regularly cited as examples of the dangers of reporting from the front.

But the last was an Iraqi who served as a translator for CBS News in Baghdad before he was kidnapped and killed. His name and commitment and spirit were discussed for just a few days after his death. But it is Lafta’s fate that is far more common, while also being far less known.

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"I think for the first time I'm going to tell my wife I'm not going to go back to Iraq, at least for now."

-- Former ABC "World News" anchor Bob Woodruff, speaking to a group of journalists yesterday. Woodruff was seriously injured in an attack near Taji, Iraq last January.

As the consistently excellent Editor & Publisher reminded us yesterday, it's now been a month since the abduction of Christian Science Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll, and her fate continues to be unknown. A large poster of Carroll has been hung outside Rome's city hall, and a Paris demonstration urged support for her release. "We continue to explore every avenue that we can think of," David Cook, the Monitor's Washington bureau chief, told E&P.

In China, meanwhile, an editor died after a beating inflicted by police. Wu Xianghu's newspaper had accused the police of charging illegal bicycle fees. He was attacked by 50 policemen in October, and succumbed Thursday to liver and kidney problems reportedly exacerbated by the beating. His death "is a cruel reminder of the new dangers faced by Chinese journalists," Ann Cooper, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, told the BBC.

As protests continue over the Mohammed cartoons, the debate within the journalism community over whether they should be reprinted rages on. Four editors from the New York Press resigned when told to pull the cartoons from an issue devoted to them. "We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running," wrote now former editor in chief Harry Siegel. As he noted, editors in Jordan and France have been forced out for running the cartoons. He added: "We have no illusions about the power of the Press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them."

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Kimberly Dozier has a column up at CBSNews.com where she discusses the challenges faced by journalists in Iraq. Towards the end, she offers up some perspective:

…if we, the journalists, are sitting in hot water, the troops we cover are hopping around on Hell's coals. Even when we spend extended time with them, we face a tiny fraction of their risk.



It's even worse for their Iraqi army and police counterparts, who are getting attacked at even higher rates, with deadlier consequences.



And then you've got the Iraqi people, who never signed up for combat, but are sure seeing a lot of it. And they're not restricted to tours of duty, nor do they have a ticket out.



So yes, absolutely, journalists face awful, dangerous risks in Iraq, more so than almost anyplace else on earth right now.



But it's nothing compared to the people we cover.

That's true, for the most part. Depending on who you ask, between 79 and 101 journalists have been killed in Iraq. While it's extremely difficult to compare the percentage of journalists killed versus the percentage of military or civilians killed, it seems safer to be an American journalist in Iraq than it is to be a soldier, policeman or man on the street. There have been more than 2,200 U.S. military casualties in Iraq alone, and civilian casualties, though difficult to estimate, are thought to be in the tens of thousands.



So why do people like Bob Woodruff and Jill Carroll get so much coverage? For one thing, their stories hit close to home. As Howard Kurtz wrote today, "Every death or injury in Iraq is important, whether it's a journalist or soldier or civilian. But when you know someone, or have talked to someone, just before things take a turn for the worst, it hits home in a very personal way." Police officers are hit particularly hard when one of their own is injured, put at risk, or killed, and journalists are no different. They're more interested in the story and more diligent in their reporting.



Part of the flurry of coverage of journalists in peril also has to do with expectations. A journalist is not a soldier. War correspondents and the people who work with them know the risks they face, but they are not designated combatants. They put themselves at risk in order to perform an essential function – helping people understand the truth on the ground. When journalists are hurt or killed, it has a symbolic meaning as well as a literal consequence. Doug Vogt and Woodruff's injuries suggest that not even the truth, or our best approximation of it, remains safe.

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As the world of journalism waits for updates on the condition of ABC co-anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, it’s worth pondering what, if any, impact this event will have on the press – and the coverage of the Iraq war. Here’s how Alessandra Stanley opened her story today in The New York Times:

Bob Woodruff was in Baghdad for ABC reporting the good news that the Bush administration complains is ignored by the news media, and he ended up as a glaring illustration of the bad news.

More from Stanley:

What happened to Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt was one of those chilling television moments that mark a milestone. This conflict has shown all too clearly that soldiers, civilians, aid workers and journalists are all targets.



Soldiers, American and Iraqi, are wounded and killed by roadside bombs and ambushes every day in tragedies so common they float to the back pages. But until now, at least, network anchors always seemed to sail through hot spots with an inalienable aura of invulnerability, like senators or movie stars.



Mr. Woodruff's plight underscored at a whole new level that Americans there feel like sitting ducks, picked off by a faceless enemy.

Stanley allows this is no “Cronkite moment” that will alter the course of the war in Iraq. But it got us wondering whether it will in any way change the way the press reports the war, and by extension, how Americans view the war. What do you think?

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Like most everyone in journalism, we're particularly saddened by the serious injuries suffered by ABC News cameraman Doug Vogt and co-anchor Bob Woodruff, who are now being treated in Germany after their convoy was attacked in Iraq yesterday. We 'll have more later, but in the meantime we wanted to point you to a few places where you can get continuing coverage.



Jim Romenesko's Poynter institute website has an excellent roundup of links to stories here. In one of the stories he links, former foreign correspondent Donatella Lorch discusses how the "danger that journalists face in Iraq is really unparalleled." Mediabistro's Morning Newsfeed also has a good roundup.



Howard Kurtz, who wrote a piece on Woodruff and co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas that appeared in yesterday's Washington Post, has a column that talks about the questions he asks journalists over and over: "Why go to places like Iraq? Why risk your life? How do you blot it out and work when danger is always lurking just around the corner?" He also mentions Bob Schieffer's praise for Woodruff's bravery on Face The Nation. "Wars are not fought on the training ground, nor can they be covered from a TV studio," said Schieffer. "They are not reality shows, they are reality. Young men and women have to fight them and correspondents have to cover them if we are to understand what they are about."

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Two down, one to go: ABC has named Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff co-anchors of an "expanded version" of "World News Tonight." ABC News has the press release. In a first for an evening newscast, there will be a live version of the show broadcast to the west coast, as well as "a live daily Webcast anchored by Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff" every weekday afternoon. (There's less to the Webcast than meets the eye, though: It looks like it's just an update of top stories and a preview of that night's "World News Tonight" broadcast.)



In addition, "'World News Tonight' will … significantly increase its presence on ABCNEWS.com with distinct content programmed specifically for the Internet audience," according to the press release.



It all goes down January 2nd. Today's news, of course, leaves CBS as the only of the three networks with nightly newscasts yet to name a new, long-term anchor.



This seems as good a place as any to mention what most of you already know: The press has engaged in rampant speculation of late about who, exactly, the new CBS anchor or anchors will be, with a particular focus on "Today Show" host Katie Couric. And we've pretty much ignored it. Why? Well, frankly, because there's not much for us to say – until something goes down, it's pretty much all noise. But when it does, make sure you check in early and often. We'll be all over it.

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