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A Mother Jones article indicates that there's still a reporting shortage in Iraq:

No official tally of reporters on the ground exists, but a head count of American print correspondents, not including wire service scribes or freelancers, caps out at around 20. McClatchy has cut its American reporting staff in half, the Boston Globe has folded its bureau altogether, the Washington Post doesn't have nearly the presence it once did (although the paper wouldn't confirm exactly how many remain), and the number of embeds -more than 200 at a high point in early 2005 - was down to 48 by mid-April of this year. Edward Wong, who has covered the war since 2003 for the New York Times, describes the Western press corps in Iraq as "a skeleton crew."

Why?

Borzou Daragahi, the former Los Angeles Times Baghdad bureau chief, says he can easily count 20 times when he thought he was going to die. And every reporter who's spent time in Iraq has had close calls with ieds or insurgents. For that reason, and for financial ones, too - even a shoestring bureau costs more than $1 million a year- most news organizations have chosen to cut back or eliminate the large operations they fielded at the beginning of the war.

It's important to note that there are varying degrees of risk. Embeds take calculated, manageable risks, whereas foreign journalists who operate independently outside the wire assume unacceptable risks. As one Iraqi stringer describes the latter:

When I ask him what he can report that Western correspondents can't, he turns quiet. "Being a foreign journalist here," he finally says, "It's just like committing suicide."

Which forces the situation recently criticized by the blogosphere: local Iraqi stringers feeding reports to their Western media handlers which they cannot fact-check. I think that editors need to apply a higher level of skepticism to such reports - verifying basic events and casualty figures with military PAOs is a simple step - but it's not really fair to wholly condemn the MSM's use of stringers when moving amongst the local population means certain death. And where private security can help keep such a journalist alive, a high-profile entourage of armed personnel changes the dynamic of the story and/or frightens people away from being seen giving an interview. Plus, the expense is beyond the capability of smaller news outlets, if not the wire services or tv bureaus.

Independent bureaus aside, there's really little excuse for a low presence of military embeds. Aside from armor, equipment and insurance, everything is supplied by the military. Yes, there's the inevitable critique that embed reports show a military-centric perspective compared to reports filed independently, but it's still a remarkable opportunity to get an up-close perspective on what's going on in any given locale. And much of the aforementioned, needed fact-checking of questionable stories filed by local stringers could be accomplished by a reporter embedded with a US military unit close to the event.

A couple of European journalists I met in Baghdad told me how they had begged every newspaper on the continent for accreditation to go to Iraq as embeds, and were turned away by almost all of them because of a professional culture of risk aversion. But danger isn't the only reason - one of these guys just told me that editors also "don't feel like buying Iraq anymore, they are bored." It seems war fatigue is setting in all over.

Also interesting in the article: Western journalists bristle at criticism for being holed up at bureaus ...

The correspondents who do remain, however, blanch at being called "hotel journalists" - a term they think connotes laziness, when it takes tremendous effort just to conduct a simple interview.

... while a local stringer is angered at his work being kept under wraps:

A former Iraqi reporter for a major U.S. newspaper told me that the paper's Baghdad bureau chief emailed his whole staff forbidding them to speak with me. He thinks he knows the reason: "I didn't want to say it first, but I can't hide it anymore," he wrote. "I am sick of them hiding [behind] the bravery of the Iraqi staff who go out and do the reporting while the American journalists ... hide behind their compound's blast walls and then get the credit."

If you'd like to increase the quality and quantity of reporting from Iraq, please donate to Public MultiMedia. Applying the April figure mentioned in the Mother Jones article (48), PMI might soon accredit 13% of the embedded reporters in Iraq.

In September of 2006, the number of embedded reporters dropped as low as nine.

(Hat tip)

UPDATE: See also:

U.S. media reporting of the war in Iraq fell sharply in the second quarter of 2007, largely due to a drop in coverage of the Washington-based policy debate, a study released Monday said.

Taken together, the war's three major story lines -- the U.S. policy debate, events in Iraq and their impact on the U.S. homefront -- slipped roughly a third, to 15 percent of an index of total news coverage, down from 22 percent in the first three months of the year.

Posted by Bill at August 21, 2007 10:39 AM | TrackBack (0)

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Comments

Posted by: baldilocks at August 21, 2007 04:13 PM

Posted by: Bill from INDC at August 21, 2007 04:28 PM

Posted by: baldilocks at August 21, 2007 04:53 PM

Posted by: Jake at August 22, 2007 11:52 PM

Posted by: Brian H at August 24, 2007 01:36 AM