A Reporter's View From The War Zone

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Three years into the Iraq war, Richard Engel was holding down the fort as NBC's Baghdad bureau chief when a top producer in New York, M.L. Flynn, told him there was "tremendous pressure" in the newsroom to lighten up his coverage.

"It was all about getting good-news stories out there," Engel says. "There was a collective impression that all the journalists were getting it wrong. It quickly spread to the blogosphere and the world of punditry. It seemed orchestrated."

Despite the feedback, Engel says NBC executives never directly pressed him to change his approach to the violence in Iraq. But in recent weeks he has found himself under assault by the White House over the editing of an interview with President Bush -- the same president who had once invited him to the Oval Office to seek his advice about the interminable conflict.

The violence in Iraq may be subsiding, for now, but the debate over how we got there and what to do next, fueled by the presidential campaign, is as polarizing as ever. And journalists, some of whom are starting to speak more candidly about the duress they have faced, are front and center in that argument.

In his new book, "War Journal," Engel recounts the toll of his five years in Iraq. NBC's bureau was bombed by terrorists, moved to a new location and bombed again. And he hasn't left the conflict behind: Two weeks ago, he found himself in the midst of an extended gun battle in Sadr City.

Beyond the physical risks, he also had to defend himself in the media echo chamber. Engel says he and other correspondents once again came under attack in 2006 and 2007 from bloggers and radio hosts who wanted a more positive portrait of the war.

This round of criticism, he says, "seemed even more disconnected from reality because, as we were seeing in Baghdad, the situation had deteriorated so much that many people were calling it a civil war, including NBC. It was more and more ludicrous." There was even a widespread "myth," he says, that most journalists lived in the heavily fortified Green Zone, which was untrue.

Even with armed bodyguards, correspondents are constantly concerned about security. After Engel told his editors in an e-mail that he had nearly been kidnapped by gun-wielding carjackers, a network executive scolded him, saying that security issues should be brought up only with a small group of the top brass. Engel was furious.

Nervous supervisors, he says, would sometimes send a mixed message: "Don't do anything that would put you in danger. So, what have you got for me today? What's your next story?"

Last year the White House summoned Engel, now based in Beirut, for what turned out to be a 90-minute chat with Bush. The president asked whether Engel is Jewish, which he is. (Engel was taken aback but realized that might be a relevant factor for a Middle East correspondent.) During the conversation, Engel wasn't shy about offering solutions to the conflict, such as dividing Iraq into three states with a weak central government. At one point -- based on notes he took afterward -- Engel said, referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Mr. President, you need to get involved. It's your vision. You're the president. Condi doesn't have the juice."

Should a reporter really be offering geopolitical advice in the Oval Office?

"I didn't say anything I wouldn't have said on the air," Engel responds. "He was asking, and I was telling him. I couldn't wait to get it off my chest."

When Engel did an on-camera interview with Bush late last month, he asked whether the president had been referring to Barack Obama in saying that those who would negotiate with Iran were guilty of appeasement. As aired on "NBC Nightly News," the interview showed Bush saying that his policies regarding the nation's adversaries hadn't changed, but deleted part of the answer in which Bush told Engel, "You didn't get it exactly right, either" in covering his speech. Also dropped was Bush's explanation that he was talking about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas as well as Iran. The truncation prompted White House counselor Ed Gillespie, in a letter to NBC, to accuse the network of "deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline."

Engel is puzzled by the charge, noting that the full exchange had aired the previous day on the "Today" show. "If we were trying to hide this from the public, why would we have put it online before anyone asked us to? Frankly, I didn't get it."

In his book, though, Engel may have handed his critics ammunition by essentially declaring the war a mistake. "The problem was that the U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11," he writes. "I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it."

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has repeatedly attacked Engel as an antiwar advocate who has understated U.S. military progress in Iraq. Engel has described himself as a "pacifist" but says that it hasn't affected his reporting and that he has credited Bush's surge with greatly reducing violence in the country.

"War does horrible things to human beings, to societies," he says. "It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature."

These days, the debate over whether to withdraw from Iraq is getting more attention than the war itself. Coverage of the conflict has dropped dramatically in the past year, especially on television. Engel says the story has stagnated and that TV executives prefer domestic politics at the moment, but he concedes there is a broader reason as well.

"The public is tired of it," he says. "When I came home a year or two ago, I couldn't have a conversation that wasn't about Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, what is the troop strategy. People don't ask me anymore."

A Question of Credit

Jeffrey Toobin spent weeks on his 7,000-word New Yorker profile of Republican consultant Roger Stone, even visiting a Florida swingers' club with him (and putting it on his expense account).

The piece covered some of the same ground as a Matt Labash profile in the Weekly Standard last fall, such as reciting "Stone's Rules" ("Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack") and a photo of a shirtless Stone revealing the Nixon tattoo on his back.

After columnist Kathleen Parker wrote on National Review Online that Toobin owed Labash a nod of recognition, Toobin sent him a note of apology.

Says Labash: "I don't think Jeff should take it on the chin for plagiarism, because it wasn't -- he pinched some of my rhetorical devices and had a lot of the same info." Since his Standard piece was "utterly exhaustive," if another journalist follows a similar path and ends up borrowing material, "that usually warrants a hat tip."

Toobin, a CNN commentator, readily admits he read the Labash article, "and it would have been nice if I'd mentioned I read it. There is no allegation that I copied anything." He apologized, he says, because "it's important to be a mensch rather than just legally within your rights."

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."