Hotel journalism

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of what some have dubbed "hotel journalism," press critics' term for what they see as lazy reporting in Iraq and other places. Instead of going out and getting the story, the accusation goes, reporters sit in their improvised newsrooms letting Iraqi stringers do the real work while the Westerners take the credit. Most recently, one of my hazardous duty training instructors grilled me in our hotel bar about why American journalists are in Iraq at all. "They're not doing the first-hand reporting anyway," he said. "Wouldn't it be easier for all involved if they just compiled their Iraqi staff's feeds sitting in D.C. instead of in a walled compound in Baghdad?"

Perhaps not surprisingly, the criticism generally comes from overtly partisan people. Do you think the left-wing media is being too tough on Bush and his administration? It's probably because reporters aren't actually experiencing all the positive work going on. If you think major media outlets are the lapdogs of the neocons, blame it on the fact that they don't see all the real danger in Iraq. Experienced reporters hear it constantly from both sides. And as someone with more first-hand experience than any of those partisan bloggers, I know for a fact that they're wrong. There isn't a lazy American reporter in Iraq, nor one who has a political agenda. Contrary to popular belief, American reporters don't live in the Green Zone or receive protection from the military.

Yet the idea of hotel journalism still gnaws at me constantly. The reality of the situation in Iraq is that reporters often can't do their own reporting from the streets. It's not laziness, it's common sense; an American wandering through Sadr City, for example, would surely be killed. When reporters do go out, it's with bodyguards, translators and an armored vehicle. We all take risks to go to Iraq, but we must make sure they're calculated ones. Sometimes even a great story isn't worth it, and that's a difficult thing for a hard-nosed journalist to accept. This can be troubling: does the need to avoid so many areas mean the American press isn't getting the whole story?

Former UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Dean Orville Schell is emphatic in his argument that reporters are doing an admirable job under the circumstances. "But while Western journalists are relying on surrogates, what I observed at the bureaus I visited in Baghdad was far from a dereliction of duty," he wrote last year in the New York Review of Books. "If anything, it showed how the old overseas bureau model of independent reporters has been forced to evolve under very extreme pressure to survive."(Full article is pasted here; scroll down a bit to see the top)

I am constantly inspired by journalists who manage to capture stories of life in Iraq under the pressure Schell describes (one of my recent favorites is here). I know hating on the mainstream press is trendy on both sides of the aisle, but I think reasonable people must concede these guys are doing the best they can.