The Weaknesses of Reporting

There’s a piece at the Columbia Journalism Review consisting of eight brief reflections by journalists who have spent much of the last 20 years in Afghanistan, covering the war there. I found it interesting not just for the insight it provided on the plight of reporters and the situation in Afghanistan but for its potential importance for what we’re experiencing now. I’ll except some brief snippets but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

The first snippet is from Kathy Gannon who has spent most of the last 35 years reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Associated Press:

The coverage was making everybody but the Taliban a good guy, when the reality was there were a lot of bad guys. People were being made heroes who had done horrible things. And I thought, “How much of history as we know it is like this?”

That is very much to the point I have been trying to make here. “First draft of history” my Aunt Fanny.

Here’s a brief quote from Sebastian Junger, author and documentary film maker, who has reported for ABC, National Geographic, and Vanity Fair, based on his experience “embedding” with an American platoon for a whole year:

What I took away from that experience: before that, I hadn’t known how powerful group affiliation can be. You would think something like the Army results in a diminishment of free will and autonomy. What’s weird is, instead, many soldiers experience a kind of expanding of themselves. Like, “This is the real me. This is me on the grandest scale.” The question is always, “Why do soldiers come back so messed up?” Well, I think part of it is that what they experience over there—a group of people, facing adversity and relying on each other—that’s all of human history. But a lot of modern America doesn’t require that anymore, and soldiers miss it. It was even true for me, and I didn’t carry a gun, I wasn’t defending shit. I had a camera. I was in my mid-forties, preconditioned by a liberal upbringing not to be part of any of this mess. But that social contract—that “I’ll help you, you help me, and we’ll get through this together”—I truly felt that. When it was over, I was heartbroken.

War is hell but in an unexpected way it is also a sort of heaven. A fact that bears reflection.

This is from Atia Abbadi, NBC News’s lead Afghanistan correspondent:

At the end of a long day, when we could finally get on air, they had me on with a reporter in Kabul and another journalist in D.C. The battle is raging, and the control room tells me, “We’re not going with you first, we’re going with the guy in Kabul.” So, I’m listening to the coverage, and I hear this reporter saying that the Marines have “complete control” on the ground in Marja—as bombs are literally going off all around me. And it wasn’t this reporter’s fault, he was great. The problem was he was talking to coalition leadership in Kabul. So, I’m listening and I’m getting frustrated. And then they’re like, “For more, let’s go to Washington.” And again I hear, “Complete control, complete control.” I start yelling at the control room, and when they do finally come to me, the poor anchor is like, “Well, Atia, things seem great.” And I go, “Absolutely not!”

I eventually saw the broadcast. You can hear the fighting going on behind me, and the anchor’s eyes are bulging, because he’s realizing that for ten minutes they’ve basically been giving the news as propaganda. Later that night, some Marines who’d overheard my report came up to me and said, “Are they really trying to say that everything’s okay and we’re safe? That’s bullshit.”

From Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, international correspondent for NPR:

So much of the coalition’s efforts were Kabul-centric or focused on other city centers. But that doesn’t make sense in such a rural country. In the north, I found farmers yearning for the Communist days, when they’d had a communal tractor to use—because for all the aid programs money just wasn’t showing up there like it was in other parts of the country. You’d have a province like Bamiyan which was mostly quiet and peaceful, so nobody was interested and it got very little aid. I did a story in 2008 about how they had only one mile of paved road in the entire province. Then you had Kandahar, where hundreds of millions, at least, were pouring in to build an entire network of roads—but those were being blown up every five minutes.

in case you’re wondering how we could have been there for 20 years and accomplished so little.

Laura King, national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times:

If you wanted to write stories about civilian casualties in an errant airstrike, for example, you could maybe do that a couple times, but there was a sensitivity on the part of editors back home to things taking on a certain sameness. This was a time when innocent people were starting to become hurt or killed so often. It was a huge emerging theme, but it wasn’t something we could write about over and over—and that’s not a criticism of my news organization, I think we all experienced this as journalists.

Instead, we got into a pattern where, if you wrote critical stories, you were thought to have this bitter, defeatist attitude. You’d get emails from readers saying, “Why do you hate America?” I remember thinking, “Why would somebody think that?” I was always comfortable with the way I’d characterized things, but I think these ideas about journalists—these assumptions of bad faith—were already taking hold in society. I regarded it an aberration then, but now of course I see how pervasive it was.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s ten times worse now. “Sameness” is only a handicap for stories that don’t promote the narrative your organization wishes to have promoted.

Azmat Khan, investigative journalist for New York Times Magazine:

I started by getting the coordinates for every school built by USAID or the military, focusing especially on battlefield provinces where America had invested so much money to “win hearts and minds.” Then I just started showing up, unannounced. At one school, in Kandahar, records showed the school had opened and there’d been a ribbon cutting ceremony. But it was boarded up, and inside all this construction equipment was laying around. Across the street, in this mosque, I found boys and girls rocking back and forth, reading Koran. There’s a guy holding this skinny stick, which I asked about, and one kid said, “If there’s no beating, there’s no learning.” Eventually, a man who owned the land told me he was supposed to have gotten money to build the school I was looking for—from the district governor’s brother—but he’d never been paid and so he refused to let the school open. So I went to the governor’s brother’s creepy mansion—he’s got this framed dagger on the wall—and the guy was like, “Oh, no, I never had that contract, that was another company.” Okay, so then I pulled up the website for that company—and, no, it turns out it’s a partner of the brother’s own company.

This kind of corruption happened all the time, and the US was totally aware. It was so common to hear things like, “Yeah, he’s a warlord, but he’s our warlord.”

The only way to win is not to play.

Tom Bowman, NPR’s Pentagon correspondent:

Looking back, I wish we’d pressed the Pentagon and military commanders much, much harder. You know, “You’ve been here now six years, nine years, twelve years. How long will this go on? What are your metrics for success? This is how much money’s being spent, and these are the things that aren’t changing.” That said, I could go on the radio and say things like that, and it seemed like they just went into the ether. It was like people didn’t care. And so, we continued to hear, “Oh, six months from now, things will get better. A year from now, things will get better. The Afghan troops, they’re getting better every day.” In more recent years, leaders were just hiding information. They were hiding Afghan casualty numbers. By 2019, they weren’t even giving information on which districts were in government control. What does that tell you? It didn’t tell me that things were getting better.

And you wonder why I keep talking about propaganda. Don’t think that what we’re getting is the news. It’s like the news through a keyhole.

Magazine writer Matthieu Aikins:

We were wrong, for example, about how much the Afghan elite actually represented the people of the country. One of the key trends in two decades was the development of this whole cadre of well-educated Afghans who all worked, in one way or another, for Western-supported companies and institutions, as well as for the government and media organizations. Many of these people were from cities and often they couldn’t really travel the country, because of safety concerns—some understandably had less risk tolerance than a foreign journalist coming in to make their career. I think we tend to better understand the stories and the voices of people who are similar to us. And so, the people in Afghanistan who felt similar, who spoke our language, and who represented our values were the voices that were listened to most by the media. But really these were people firmly on one side of a civil war—which was our side, too.