Panel discusses the challenges and pressures facing reporters and editors after Sept. 11.
By: Jeff Milgram
With an impenetrable enemy, no front lines and little cooperation from the Bush administration, the war on terrorism is a particularly difficult conflict to cover, according to Steve Coll, managing editor at The Washington Post.
"Al-Qaeda remains an elusive subject," Mr. Coll said Tuesday during a panel discussion of media coverage of the war on terrorism at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
The Islamic jihadist movement is "a transnational subject. It’s a very difficult subject to root out. It requires language skills. It requires deep forms of specialization," Mr. Coll said. "To organize foreign correspondents to try to describe and chronicle phenomena of that kind both before and after Sept. 11 was really just beyond our ability."
Mr. Coll was among a panel of editors who discussed the challenges and pressures facing reporters and editors after Sept. 11. The panel also included Richard Starr, managing editor of The Weekly Standard, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center for the People and the Press, was the moderator.
The panelists maintained that issues of free speech, censorship, patriotism, civil rights and media preparedness have been at the forefront for journalists and editors over the past several months.
Mr. Coll said the Bush administration is overly secretive and reporters in Afghanistan have no liaison with American forces. The war in Afghanistan is, Mr. Coll said, "an unusually dangerous and frustrating theater for us to cover." Opinion-oriented publications face distinct dilemmas, added Ms. vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, a liberal magazine, and commentator for CNN and MSNBC.
"The Nation is about a mile away from the World Trade Center, and like everyone else on Sept. 11, we got to work, and people watched TV," she said. "We were horrified, we were saddened, we were angry. People wept."
And then they put out the Sept. 12 issue, which "set a tone and a purpose that I think the magazine has striven to maintain in the weeks since," Ms. vanden Heuvel said. "It paid respect to the reactions of anger, hurt and grief, and our editorials in those first few weeks made the case for an ‘effective and just response’ to those horrific terrorist acts. We argued that such a response might include discriminate use of military force. This is a magazine that had not supported the use of military force since World War II," she said.
"Criticizing government policy during wartime is certainly not a path to popularity," said Ms. vanden Heuvel, a 1981 Princeton graduate. "But in my mind, the most patriotic act is holding one’s country to its highest ideals."
At The Nation, "From the very beginning we took issue with the idea that skepticism or criticism of government policy was unpatriotic or un-American," she said. "We argued that we need a multiplicity of voices, a true national debate about what sane national security means in the 21st century."
She said opinion magazines serve as the independent critics of government. "The fight against terrorism will be long. Reporters should pose tough questions," she said.
And the mainstream media have joined in, she added.
"More and more of the elite media outlets have begun to question our Middle East policy," she said.
And, she said, it is wrong to believe the American left are monolithic America-bashers.
Mr. Starr of the conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard said that one effect of the war on terror is that readers have become more knowledgeable and opinionated about world events. The result, Mr. Starr said, is that the media are less influential than they have ever been.
Mr. Kohut also gave high marks to the American public.
"The public wanted to know what was going on," he said. "The public does not want a lapdog, it wants a watchdog. The public wants to know what the other side thinks. … Public interest in what is going on in the Middle East is now four times as high as the time of the Oslo Accords."
The event was co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School and Students for Informed Dialogue, a university graduate student group formed to foster dialogue about the causes of the events of Sept. 11.