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Planning for inevitable stories – and surprises

Thursday, March 27, 2008

MARCH IS NOT the only month to have Ides that might be fateful - but thanks to old Will Shakespeare we tend to think it is. And we know, because the media know and have chorused it to us repeatedly, that March of this year would indeed present us with a terrible watershed.

Besides being the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion (with the simple predictability of the calendar) it has also marked, of course, the mounting of America’s body-count past 4,000.

 

That too was predictable, but not with the obviousness and precision that the media find most convenient to plan for. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition carried a somewhat queasy item pegged to the 4,000 death toll, which memorialized an unquestionably deserving individual soldier’s story - a US Army major, Alan Greg Rogers from Hampton, Florida - who had been killed in January, and buried in early March. It was one of those all too-evidently pre-planned and studiedly held-back stories that every newsroom spends time in building, and can never really hide the scaffolding.

 

But on television, meanwhile, PBS's timing was curiously off, with WGBH's two Frontline specials. They totalled over four hours, surveying the war’s history in detail under the nail-it-down title “Bush’s War”, and they were aired over two nights - but in the week after the anniversary. (Here you can see WGBH's trailer, which in 30 seconds doesn't just advertise, but pretty well sums up, in its crisp audio-track, the entire enterprise.)

 

                             

 

The New York Times had its own self-created problem with timing. Ever since 2003, it's been counting US military casualties, and periodically - and very creditably - publishing the names and details of the dead. But its tally has been tied throughout to the Pentagon’s own figures, and so at the 4,000 mark that just about everyone else recognized (the Associated Press count, in fact, which has never waited for official promulgations) the Times was still recording just 3,985.

 

But the very next day – sadly enough – the paper had all the necessary rounded-up numbering it required, and this triggered its impressive full-court presentation -- four whole broadsheet pages covered with tightly-packed individual photographs of the last thousand fallen warriors. The grimmest part to report, perhaps, is that this was an update to its last mournful memorial ... to the third thousand, published on Jan 1st, 2007. (Pictured above left, a microcosmic section of the Times’ roster from five years of fatalities.)

 

 

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WHAT FEW NEWS OUTLETS PREFIGURED, though well-informed observers have been predicting it would inevitably happen sometime very soon, was the internecine (in essence Shiite-on-Shiite) killing that burst out openly in both the southern Basra region and in Baghdad – one dimension of the very civil strife from whose brink the country was supposed to have thankfully stepped back last year.

 

There was also supposed to be a ceasefire on the part of the renegade Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army forces - and that, too, looks like a poorly maintained fiction now. The violence has prompted Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to demand (hmm ... "demand") that the militiamen lay down their weapons within 72 hours. How many of us, Iraqis or outsiders, expect that to happen?

 

Add to the new turmoil (which today brought a militia attack effectively staunching the vital southern Zubair-1 oil pipeline) the recent flurry of roadside bomb explosions that helped to hasten the 4,000 US deaths total, plus the returning missile and mortar onslaughts against the far-from-invulnerable Green Zone.

 

Given all this, the week’s widespread media navel-gazing now cries out for a rewrite. Various commentators were agreed that we have had Iraq’s relative "decrease" in violence (always a relative term) as well as the ever-tightening constraints on Western journalists’ freedom of movement, and the competitive demands of a vigorous and compelling electoral campaign back on the US home front, to blame for our all-too-obviously diminished media coverage of the war.

 

Instead I now foresee increased reportage once again – which will inexorably feed into the tracking of that already compelling domestic American election, and will serve also to change its nature.

 

Expect a surge, if you’ll forgive that word, in the Democratic primary campaign (and inevitably later in the General Election) for the specific issue of troop levels, and the speed of any withdrawal.

 

All it has taken is headline coverage of the current Iraqi bloodletting … plus of course President George W Bush’s video-briefing this week with General David Petraeus being drip-fed to the Washington press corps - a clear sign that US force levels will not fall below 140,000 for the rest of this present benighted presidency.

 

 

IT’S CATCH-UP TIME ON OTHER PEOPLE’S ELECTIONS. I recently wondered if we’d get, in mainstream US coverage, the kind of reportage I hoped for when Iran, Taiwan and Zimbabwe went to the polls.

 

Well, no television news outlet has particularly distinguished itself, but the ever-alert and now better-resourced NPR (thanks still to the infusion of MacDonalds heiress Joan Kroc’s $200 million bequest) served us well, and so did the print leaders, the NY Times and the Washington Post, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad found his allies and supporters substantially rebuked by the public in its parliamentary voting, even though “reform” candidates (again a relative term, in the context) were largely disbarred from running ... and when the Taiwanese electorate went so far as to switch its leaders in an evident endorsement of closer and better relations with mainland China.

 

But Zimbabwe remains a hard place to report on, with its Presidential vote only two days hence – and threatened as ever by the megalomaniac President Robert Mugabe’s usual methods of terrorizing anyone who might dare to vote against him. The foreign press, for a long time now, is effectively banned from operating openly, and the local media are largely under government control.

 

There are different elements to watch for this time, though. Mugabe is in the unwonted position, after 28 years in power, of being opposed by not one, but two credible contenders - the longstanding and much-persecuted Movement for Democratic Change’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai (pictured above right), and also the former cabinet minister Simba Makoni, whose candidacy signifies an internal split in Mugabe’s own Zanu-PF party.

 

It’s hope against hope, perhaps, but maybe the stories out of Zimbabwe this weekend might be stories about something new.