PressEthic

This Sunday’s issue of The New York Times Week in Review section featured on its cover a eulogy of sorts for an Iraqi stringer. It’s a commentary on all of the stringers who go to dangerous, far-flung places to report news. The article makes the reader consider the value of someone who is not only on the ground, but understands the nuance of the place they’re covering.

The article took me back to the discussion of embedded journalists. It seems so long ago that we were watching reporters in helmets and flak jackets, perched atop tanks, riding through Iraq with the American troops. But there are still embedded journalists out there who don’t have a news camera accompanying them.

The September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review features a first person article from Bill Putnam and his take on the role of embedded journalists in Iraq.

He demonstrates that there is value to what he sees from the American soldiers’ point of view, even if he feels that “Army journalism is really public relations.” There are two sides involved on the ground in this conflict and it’s important that the media try to show them both.

There are even tougher questions brought on by these two articles. Putnam decided, in some instances, to get involved with the military action. “I make a decision to put my cameras down and help ‘Doc’ Griego treat the wounded,” he says. Should a journalist participate?

Both the stringer and the embed were in precarious situations, but the stringer in The New York Times article had to create identities to protect himself while making his connections. Is it ever OK to lie about who you are to get a story?

Even Putnam seems to be a little confused about his role. He says at the beginning of the article that he was a “soldier-photojournalist,” but seems to say that, after 2003, he’s going in as “primarily” a photojournalist and, ambiguously, as a “conduit between the civilian media and the military.”

He goes on to write, “But the mission of a journalist is one thing and the mission of the military is another.” Farther down in the article, when there is an accidental attack on Iraqi civilians, he says, “I’m one of the first soldiers at the car.”

With war reporting, life or death situations could mean that the rules have to be bent just for a journalist to make it out alive. Good reporting and as much objectivity as one can muster may be all that these journalists are striving for, and that may be all we can ask.