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War correspondents lament ‘incomplete view’By CHRIS JONES Monitor Staff New York Times reporter Lynette Clemetson covered the war in Iraq from aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. It was a vantage point that was ultimately frustrating because of its limited view of the action, she said. Clemetson was speaking as a participant in an NABJ panel, “Tales From the Front Lines,” a discussion of news coverage of the war in Iraq. Clemetson said each day she watched warplanes take off from the deck of the carrier on which she was assigned in the Defense Department’s program for embedding journalists with U.S. forces. “They go off with bombs and come back with no bombs,” Clemetson said of the attack aircraft. “You didn’t get to talk to anyone on the ground about the bombs.” Contending with an incomplete view of the war was a complaint echoed by other journalists in the panel discussion Wednesday in the Landmark Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Dallas. The other panelists included Ron Allen, a correspondent for NBC News; Stephen Buckley, assistant managing editor at the St. Petersburg Times; and George Curry, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. Allen, NABJ’s 2003 Journalist of the Year award recipient, said news coverage by U.S. media tended to focus on the American military’s role at the expense of reporting on the experiences of the Iraqi people. Most of the panelists said that embedding journalists during the war sometimes led to one-sided coverage. The speakers also said that - if they had to do it over again - they would accept the restrictions of being embedded with troops to gain access to the people carrying out the war and at least a partial view of the action. Some people attending the session disagreed. “Basically, to embed reporters is not good,” said Jamie McGriff, 22, of WBAP, a news/talk radio station in Arlington, Texas. “There are some that glamorize the truth, and we cannot always trust or celebrate the decision of the United States government. We have to look at the story from all angles possible.” Chris Jones can be reached at chrisnabj@hotmail.com. Kara Edgerson contributed to this report. |
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