As the Obama administration debates whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, a squadron of journalists has already arrived. Many of them are transplants from America’s other overseas war, in Iraq.
Lara Logan, a CBS correspondent, is among the journalists reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Richard Engel of NBC, is also reporting in Kabul as TV networks and newspapers expand their coverage.
“It’s like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009,” Richard Engel of NBC said by telephone Saturday from Kabul, the Afghanistan capital.
No longer overshadowed by Iraq, the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan, as news outlets had once called it, is suddenly very visible. Television networks have opened small bureaus, and major newspapers have assigned more staff members to the country, and its neighbor to the east, Pakistan. But with the media business under great strain, this war is being covered on a budget.
“Afghanistan has always been the poor man’s war,” Lara Logan of CBS said in an interview; the news media, too, are spending less.
For the first time in years, Afghanistan has “emerged as the top story” for news organizations in the United States, the Project for Excellence in Journalism reported this month.
“I think there’s been an explosion of coverage,” said Renee Montagne, the host of “Morning Edition” on National Public Radio, who spent a month in Afghanistan over the summer.
Much of the current attention is centered on President Obama’s formation of a new American strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But events inside the country are earning more coverage now, as well.
A recent cover article in Time magazine was headlined “The War Up Close.” The issue featured a photo essay about infantrymen fighting the Afghan insurgency. In a nod to the invisible qualities of the war, Time wrote of the photographs, “If it’s true that sometimes we’ve let ourselves lose sight of Afghanistan, then as a start, let’s look here.”
Like Iraq, Afghanistan poses several vexing problems for journalists. Chief among them is safety: amid deteriorating security in the country and the ever-present threat of kidnapping, news organizations have increased precautions for their staff members in the field.
The security concerns are compounded by the country’s complex political landscape and the famously tough terrain.
“It’s an extremely difficult place to operate out of,” said Tony Maddox, an executive vice president and managing director of CNN International.
One of the other problems is financial. Battered by the recession, some news organizations have made deep cuts to their already small foreign staffs, making it difficult to finance continuing coverage of wars in two theaters. While no one says news organizations are skimping on security measures, it is evident that they are trying to maintain flexible presences in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was being neglected long before the most recent round of media cutbacks, some journalists say. The main TV networks in the United States almost completely withdrew from Afghanistan as attention shifted to Iraq in 2003. Networks depended on producers in Afghanistan or Pakistan and rarely covered the simmering conflict.
The cable network with the largest international staff, CNN, relied mostly on stringers (a term for local freelance journalists) and visits from foreign correspondents, although Mr. Maddox said “we were in there more than we were out of there.”
The New York Times has based a correspondent in Afghanistan since November 2001. The Times and other newspapers have also maintained local workers in the country. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post say they now have correspondents assigned to Kabul and Islamabad, Pakistan.
Compared with the bloody situation in Iraq, Afghanistan was a subject that “rarely made news,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which produces a weekly news coverage index.
Using its sample of 55 print, online, television and radio outlets, the project found that in 2007, its first year of media monitoring, Afghanistan represented under 1 percent of all news coverage. In 2008, the 1 percent figure stayed true, “despite the fact that it was the deadliest year ever for the U.S. in Afghanistan,” Mr. Jurkowitz said.
He said that coverage of Afghanistan grew modestly for the first half of 2009, as Mr. Obama deployed more troops and talked about a shift in strategy. A more significant increase happened over the summer as the Afghan presidential election neared and the troop discussions ensued. Now the situation in the country is “consistently among the top stories of the week,” he added.
No comments:
Post a Comment