Civil war mad-libs

Yesterday, I grumbled that American newspapers like the Washington Post cover the Iraq war from a purely American perspective. In other words, the subjects of these articles are American soldiers, American politicians and political appointees, or American problems. Unfortunately, winning any counterinsurgency war requires a deep understanding of the country where the civil war is taking place.

After I wrote that post, I realized that I left out an important qualification. American journalists often do write about the citizens of countries wracked by internal war. The content of these articles, while sympathetic to the subject, are largely useless.

It’s hard to speak of these articles in the plural, since they amount to re-wordings of the same story. Here is that Ur-article, presented in the “fill-in-the-blank” format that I can neither confirm nor deny reporters actually use:

___________ has lived in the village of ___________ for all [his/her] life. That was, until war came to the village. Today, ___________ lives in [a refugee camp/fear].

“I don’t know where I’ll go, or what I’ll do,” ______________ said, clutching his ___________, a treasured keepsake. “Nowhere is safe.”

___________ story is all too familiar, in this war that has claimed over ___________ lives. With the failure of negotiations between ___________ and ___________, there is no end to the violence in sight.

Still, ___________ clings to hope. “Every day I pray for peace,” [he/she] said. "It’s all I can do."

What’s wrong with that? At the very least, this kind of reporting draws attention to the conflicts themselves. Unfortunately, that’s usually where the information stops.

After arousing sympathy and horror, the next step should be a description of how these tragic circumstances came to be. Who’s fighting, and why? What is the current state of the war? How is the conflict likely to unfold? Is there anything the reader, or the reader’s elected officials, can do to nudge these events towards an end to the suffering of people like [fill in the blank]?

That’s why I spoke highly of Digital Diplomat’s post about the rivalry among Shi’ite factions in

Iraq, including SCIRI, the Army of the Mahdi, and the Shi’ite dominated government. It’s also why many foreign news sources do a better job of covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than the mainstream American news outlets. It’s also why it’s worth reading blogs by the citizens of these countries (here's a sample list from Iraq), soldiers deployed to these war zones, or even the occasional Middle East specialist, such as the widely-cited Juan Cole.

No one deserves a Pulitzer for going to Iraq and pointing a camera at the victims of a car bomb attack. Real reporting means talking to the Iraqis, understanding the political forces propelling the war, and writing clear, accurate, and useful stories. Otherwise, journalists are behaving like besotted doctors who think their job is to describe the symptoms their patients are suffering, without explaining the possible sources of their ailments. (“Wow! Look at the lesions on that guy!”)

Comments

[A.E.]

I think there's also a tendency to see the Arab people as abstractions--think the phrase "The Arab Street," as if they are merely features of the landscape.

[Ryan Holiday]

I just added you to my reader a few days ago, and I'm not sure how I went so long without your site. Good piece.

R

[D.C. Walker]

This is a really interesting point about the role journalists-as opposed to those who write op-eds-and how they percieve their role. Most reporters are trained to do just that: report. They train themselves not to think beyond the story in hand, "just the facts, ma'am", and for God's sake don't editorialise. On the other hand, most intelligent consumers of the news look to foreign correspondents to provide a reasonable summary of the conflicting interests that would go some way to helping the formation of an informed opinion. A small example: in the course of my professional life I had the opportunity of asking an experienced China correspondent, who had lived and worked there for almost a decade, her opinion on what impact the internet, in particular the proliferation of blogging, would have on the development of democratic governance in China. Now I know the journalist in question was aware of this issue because she had done a number of stories on the internet and blogging. The reply: "I don't know, I've never really thought about it" floored me. Why not!? Was it a fear of having credentials withdrawn? Of being stonewalled into ineffectiveness? Then a light globe went on. For foreign correspondents and their masters what matters is being there. Analysis is done by people in suits back home, the modern correspondents job (apart from a few honourable exceptions) is providing a kind of breathless wide-eyed commentary that confirms what a nasty place the rest of the world is.

That said I should declare my interest. Yes I am an ex-journo and am now in academia trying to burn off karma.