Bullets and Bylines: Kalb Hosts War Reporters

News, slideshow — By Kristin Drouin on March 9, 2010 at 1:00 am

The act of documenting warfare – describing the lives saved and lost, the occupied places and implemented policies – is never easy.  For the panel of veteran reporters on the most recent Kalb Report with Marvin Kalb, the difficulties of frontline reporting do not lessen over time, regardless of how many tours of duty the reporter has done.

CBS News correspondent Cami McCormick, who is still recuperating from an injury incurred in Afghanistan in August 2009, bears different types of scars.

“The more I’ve seen, the harder it gets,” she said at Monday’s taping of “War Reporting: The New Rules of Engagement” at the National Press Club. “It never gets any easier to see someone killed…but as a reporter, you have to learn to separate that for your own good.”

McCormick was joined by ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran and the L.A. Times’ Laura King in the latest installment in the sixteenth season of the televised discussion series moderated by Kalb and produced by the GW Global Media Institute.

With experience on the ground in some of the most dangerous locales of the past decade, the group has accumulated professional knowledge in a variety of situations. They focused their discussion on the changing nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ways in which coverage of the two conflicts differs.

Chandrasekaran recently returned from Marja, a danger zone where the experience of trudging across land under heavy gunfire reminded him of the battlefront experience circa World War II. He said that reporters in Afghanistan are severely impeded by the dangers of the work, in a country where vast, volatile areas are closed off to any journalist who values their life.

Though he values the resources available to him to cover the war, Chandrasekaran longs to find the stories just beyond his grasp in his embedded position with the American military.

“I do wish we had more eyes on the Afghan side of the story…[to see] the real dynamics when the U.S. forces aren’t there,” he said. “I think the American public is deprived to a degree.”

Indeed, the purpose of war reporting, the panel agreed, is to “illuminate the issues,” according to King, and to encourage the public not to be afraid to be skeptical and to ask the right questions. Writing about policy impact from the perspective on the ground provides a credible dimension, Chandrasekaran explained, to understanding international involvements and interactions that continue to be of vital domestic importance, even after they lose prominence in Washington.

Chandrasekaran described safety limitations as impediments to finding that full story, the “principle challenge” of current war coverage and one that seems distinct to the Afghanistan reporting experience. He said that in the early years of Operation Iraqi Freedom, avenues were created to work around such obstacles. Secure cities like Baghdad provided an environment within which to observe the attitudes shared by much of the population throughout the country. Connections established with Iraqi “stringer” journalists were built into a network through which American reporters could gain information about unstable areas.

In Afghanistan, larger cities like Kabul remain relatively insulated from outside dynamics, and no journalistic web exists to bring light to the stories in zones outside American military influence.

“It’s a different kind of conflict,” said Raddatz, ABC’s senior foreign affairs correspondent. “You can’t go out there [on your own] and say, ‘I’ll meet you at 5 o’clock,’ because you might be dead by 6.”

With access to stories limited by the nature of the conflict, reporters try to find other ways to provide context for their pieces and to obtain more than one side of the war narrative.

For King, who is currently based in Kabul, the juxtaposition of military and civilian experiences is crucial to providing an extra level of understanding. She described the eye-opening experience of riding within a military convoy and, subsequently, a civilian car down the same stretch of road in Kandahar. There was fear in the eyes of the drivers going in both directions.

“One can’t help but feel moved and disturbed,” said King. “You just have to try to take into account all of the factors at play, all of the moving parts, and at the end of the day, just sit down and try to make sense of it.”

The panelists seemed to share the view that the opportunity to glimpse such deep emotions, to look at an unfiltered kaleidoscope of human feeling, is what makes covering the war irresistible to them.

When asked why, even after her injury, she wants to go back to Afghanistan, McCormick was silent before explaining, “You often see the very best of humanity, in the midst of hell on earth…as a journalist, that’s what draws you to a story like that.”

Raddatz agreed that having tasted war reporting, she can never turn back.

“You see everything a human being has inside of them,” she said, adding, “It’s hard to cover a hearing on Capitol Hill after that.”

Tags: Global Media Institute, journalism, The Kalb Report