Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Prizes, quite rightly, highlight real strengths

Thursday, April 23, 2009

I WAS PREMATURE in my judgment. On leaving college I turned against a career in newspapers, on the grounds they were a dying medium. I chose broadcast television instead. (I was also wrong, long-term, to have backed TV as the winning medium – but then there was no internet in those innocent days.)

Newspapers are still not dead, though to read many commentators – many in cold hard print themselves – it can’t be long before the last rites are said. So it’s both heartening and poignant in the same moment to see the special successes of newspapers being celebrated at this time of year with the Pulitzer Prize announcements. It’s great, too, to have five out of the 14 journalism prizes go to a single great newspaper – my home-town daily, the New York Times.

 

(For the record, I believe – even while dogged by a typical New Yorker’s love-hate relationship with the Times – that it happens to be the world’s finest newspaper. I’ve even, for what it’s worth to anyone, argued this point against the philanthropist and currency trader George Soros, who for an unfathomable set of reasons wants to tout London’s Financial Times instead.)

 

Some telling points gather around the 2009 awards. Executive Editor Bill Keller is right to say that this recognition of his paper’s lengthy investigations into scandals and its big team-coverage of events, plus its often dangerous and expensive overseas reporting (especially about war) does function as “a reminder of the things that newspapers can do that would be very hard to replace if we all went out of business."

 

We can hardly imagine bloggers, for instance, paying for posses of lawyers to flush out government documents under the Freedom of Information Act, while at the same time paying for travel and security in Afghanistan or Iraq.

 

THIS ARGUMENT WAS well made by a story outside of the awards, on the very day of their announcement. The Times’ front page was dominated by a massive photograph from Tyler Hicks (part of the team that won the International Reporting prize for Pakistan-Afghanistan coverage) capturing a tense moment during a firefight in the Korangal Valley.

 

(The next day’s front page carried an Associated Press picture - only possible now under changed, Obama-enacted rules - showing the homecoming coffin that contained the remains of Private Richard Dewater, who was killed in that firefight.)

 

The classically gripping story, of how a unit of the First Battalion, 26th US infantry (above left) desperately held off a band of Taliban fighters after an ambush, was told - at unusual but well-justified length - by Hicks’ frequent partner in coverage, reporter C.J. Chivers, who used to be a US Marine captain and served in the first Gulf War before attending Columbia Journalism School.

 

This story – filed a half-year after the Times’ winning portfolio was submitted to the Pulitzer judges – was entirely typical of the citation that praised the paper’s “masterful, groundbreaking coverage … frequently done under perilous conditions”.

  

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.  

    

 

THE ONE INDIVIDUALLY LAUDED PHOTOGRAPHER among the Times’ awards was Damon Winter, a recent hire (from the Los Angeles Times) who was covering his first US Presidential campaign.

 

The Feature Photography prize came Winter's way deservedly, for some stunning images caught on the stump - including the now-iconic portraits he made of Barack Obama addressing voters in a Pennsylvania rainstorm (above center).

 

It’s the kind of work that a cameraperson rarely gets to achieve – and it will inevitably live on, and on, in more than the ephemeral, flimsy newsprint for which it was first captured.

 

LIKE THE "JOURNAL OF RECORD" that the Times is meant to be, it has gratifyingly kept up a steady (and often page-one) drumbeat on the question of torture and Administration responsibility for torture. It anticipated with thorough-going purposefulness yesterday’s publication of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s scathing report.

 

In the multifarious media efforts to establish a chain of responsibility for this morallly and strategically insupportable outrage committed by George W Bush’s Cabinet, his Defense Department and much of his security apparatus -  one simple and damning link in the chain seems not to be getting the emphasis it deserves.

 

In the insistent and meticulous research for his book, “The Torture Team” the British lawyer Philippe Sands (and incidentally a one-time top adviser to ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair) established incontrovertibly that, back in 2002, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (above right) had his legal counsel William J. "Jim" Haynes explore and report back on the harsh (later called “enhanced”) interrogation techniques to be used on Al Qaeda suspects.

 

That’s how the infamous memo arose approving 15 new techniques, which Rumsfeld signed off on – and added his almost equally infamous personal note in the margin: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

 

In this one simple, documented issuance of a top-down order, there is very little scope for doubt about where responsibility lies.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -