Mission Impossible?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 28, 2006 8:02 AM

It's official: Being a foreign correspondent is one of the world's most thankless jobs.

Those who ply the journalistic trade around the globe are increasingly subjected to bombings, shootings, kidnappings or simply being jailed on spying charges. Yesterday's release in Gaza of two Fox News journalists who had been abducted was a welcome relief, but also a powerful reminder that reporting in war zones is a treacherous business in which Western correspondents are now deemed high-value targets.

For all the abuse heaped on journalists these days, it's worth remembering that there is a hardy band of reporters, producers, cameramen and photographers who risk their lives and put their families through great stress simply to tell the rest of us what is transpiring in faraway lands.

When Fox correspondent Steve Centanni, 60, and freelance cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, were freed after 13 days with the help of Palestinian officials, their comments were striking. Although they had faced death, and were forced at gunpoint to make a video proclaiming that they had converted to Islam, they spoke not about themselves but the country they were trying to cover.

"My biggest concern, really, is that as a result of what happened to us, foreign journalists will be discouraged from coming here to tell the story," Wiig said. "And that would be a great tragedy for the people of Palestine, and especially for the people of Gaza. Your story does not get well told."

John Moody, Fox News's senior vice president, said in an interview that Centanni is "a quiet, self-effacing but really competent reporter. His fingernails have been dirtied. I never thought to worry about his ability to handle himself in an ugly situation." Centanni, who has also reported from Iraq and Afghanistan, volunteered to go to Gaza because other Fox correspondents had been redeployed to cover the war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas.

As for Wiig, another Fox staffer told Moody that his quick thinking may have saved their lives when they were caught in a crossfire in Iraq in 2004.

Since Gaza was widely believed to be safer than Iraq or Lebanon during the conflict with Israel, the emergence of a group called the Holy Jihad Brigades that seized the Fox journalists adds to the unsettling feeling that the press is fair game in just about any war zone.

"The entire international community is beginning to realize that journalists should never be hostages or pawns in world events," Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes said in a statement. But there are plenty of rogue factions unwilling to play by those rules.

"Most reporters have a built-in caution about having armed protection with them," Moody said. "But as the world gets more dangerous, we may have to come to new conclusions about what is acceptable."

As if to underscore the constant threat, two cameraman, one working for Reuters and another for Dubai TV, were injured yesterday when shrapnel from Israeli rockets struck their vehicle as they were headed to cover an Israeli army incursion into Gaza City.

The list of journalists killed or wounded in action this year is a growing one. On Memorial Day, CBS cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq that also badly wounded correspondent Kimberly Dozier. In January, ABC anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were seriously injured by a roadside explosion while traveling with Iraqi troops.

Jill Carroll, a Christian Science Monitor reporter, was released in April after Iraqi abductors had held her for 82 days following an ambush that killed her driver.

And that list doesn't even include a harrowing series of close calls in Iraq over the past two years. New York Times correspondent John Burns and several colleagues were abducted and blindfolded but released after eight hours. CNN correspondent Michael Holmes barely escaped death in an attack on his press caravan that killed two of the network's Iraqi employees. Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner managed to fend off an attempted abduction by men who tried to push her into a van.

The spate of kidnappings also creates a dilemma for other news outlets, since heavy coverage could undermine what are invariably delicate negotiations. After Centanni and Wiig were seized, Ailes called top news executives at the other networks and urged them to exercise restraint.

"At the very beginning, we asked for and received the cooperation of our competitors -- who ceased to be competitors and just became colleagues -- in not overplaying the story," Moody said.

As the ordeal dragged on, and Centanni's brother and Wiig's wife made televised appeals for their freedom, Fox made no further attempt to minimize the coverage.

Still, the kidnapping received no mention on the CBS, ABC or NBC nightly news until the first hostage video was released Wednesday. The relative paucity of coverage, compared with the intensive chronicling of Carroll's captivity, may have reflected the fact that there are many more journalists in Iraq, and that the war in that country is a focus of far greater debate in the United States than the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Wartime or not, television also tends to play up kidnappings involving young women, which often become cable melodramas.

Violence isn't the only hazard facing foreign correspondents these days. Chicago Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was charged with espionage in Sudan on Saturday, three weeks after being detained in the war-ravaged province of Darfur. Salopek was on a freelance assignment for National Geographic.

Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinksi told her paper that Salopek is "one of the most accomplished and admired journalists of our time. He is not a spy." Chris Johns, the Geographic's editor in chief, said in a statement that Salopek was preparing an article on sub-Saharan Africa and "had no agenda other than to fairly and accurately report on the region."

Salopek entered Sudan without a visa and now realizes that was a mistake, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), who visited him last week, told the Tribune.

On Friday, a Chinese court sentenced Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher in Beijing, to three years in prison on a fraud charge. That was good news, in a sense, because Zhao was acquitted on more serious charges of leaking state secrets. He was detained in 2004 after a Times article accurately predicted that former president Jiang Zemin would give up his last Communist Party post.

It is not difficult to see that such cases are another form of warfare against foreign correspondents, carried out by repressive governments that are determined to chill aggressive reporting by outsiders.

In the past two weeks, television networks have embarrassed themselves with wild, speculative and unrelenting coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey case, based on little more than a shaky confession from a creepy character whose own relatives say he was not in Colorado when the 6-year-old girl was killed a decade ago. The kidnapping of Centanni and Wiig, and the charges in China and the Sudan, are a reminder that there is another side to journalism, one that relies on courage and dedication rather than hype and sensationalism.

Now on to some other things.

Well, this ought to liven up the Rhode Island primary:

"U.S. Senate candidate Stephen Laffey acknowledged that he wrote humor columns denigrating gays when he was a college student but said he regrets it," reports the Boston Globe .

"The Providence Journal reported on Saturday it received the articles anonymously in the mail earlier in the week. The paper later confirmed with the Republican candidate that he wrote them in 1983 and 1984 while studying at Bowdoin College in Maine. The articles appeared in the Bowdoin Patriot, a paper published by campus Republicans.

"Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, is running a closely watched race against moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

"In one column, Laffey said he has never seen a happy homosexual. 'This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet,' he wrote. 'All the homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life.' "

Sickly and decrepit?

"In another column he wrote that pop music was turning the children of America into sissies, and criticized the singer Boy George, referring to him as 'it.' 'It wears girl's clothes and puts on makeup,' he wrote. 'When I hear it sing, 'Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me cry,' I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and break your ribs.'

"Laffey called the writings 'sophomoric political satire' and said they do not represent his views. 'Not now, nor then, or ever,' he said. 'Do I regret some of these things? Sure. But at the time, we were just having fun. We thought it was funny.'"

Yeah, a real stitch.

Since I've been off, you've missed my fulminating over the JonBenet coverage (though I suspect I'll have more opportunities). Here's a noteworthy LAT column by Meghan Daum :

"We may or may not have found JonBenet Ramsey's killer in John Mark Karr, the former schoolteacher who publicly stated last week that he'd been with the child when she died in the basement of her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996. Some suspect that he's simply a wannabe, and it's not your average American pedophile who answers media questions as Karr did when he was arrested Aug. 16 in Thailand. But no matter what the new investigation turns up, many Americans will never reverse the conviction of the suspect they nabbed long ago, Patsy Ramsey . . .

"In the collective public imagination, any mother who would dress up her daughter like a tiny drag queen and have her perform sultry moves before a panel of judges was already, in some sense, a murderer."

The RNC is now officially after Kos, and Philly Inquirer blogger Dick Polman has some thoughts:

"I was catching up on my backlogged emails (mostly marketing junk, political propaganda, and random diatribes) when I chanced upon a standard submission from the Republican National Committee. It began this way: 'WHO IS MARKOS MOULITSAS ZUNIGA? A Partisan "Nutroot" Who Turned His Hate-Filled Blog Daily Kos Into A Leadership Post In The Democrat Party.' (By the way, this business about the 'Democrat' party, a label clearly intended as a pejorative, is getting a little old. Wouldn't it sound equally dumb for the Democrats to refer to their opponents as the 'Repub' party?)

"Anyway, the email proceeded, at considerable length, to attack the blog proprietor for various alleged financial, political, and ideological sins. The GOP even attacked him for going on vacation in El Salvador, although I was unaware that El Salvador had been deemed by the governing party to be an unacceptable locale for the expenditure of leisure funds.

"What's most instructive here is not the bill of particulars amassed against a blogger whom most Americans still probably haven't heard of; rather, it's the fact that GOP headquarters opted to launch the attack at all. And the reason is clear: at a time when the party is down in the polls, and in danger of losing at least one chamber on Capitol Hill this November, the GOP is casting around for an enemy, any enemy, who might rile up the conservative base voters and get them out to the polls en masse."

If you missed or didn't have time to read Laura Blumenfeld's piece on Israel wrestling with the ethics of targeted killings of terrorist leaders, set aside some time now. The best reporting I've ever seen on a very difficult subject.

You know the old line about being so sure you're going to get a big job that you're measuring the office curtains? Well, House Dems appear to be doing just that, says the NYT :

"In fund-raising appeals, on the Internet and in stump speeches, Republicans raise the specter of a Judiciary Committee headed by Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, a banking committee steered by Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a tax-writing committee led by Charles B. Rangel of New York, and an energy panel under the leadership of John D. Dingell of Michigan.

"Democrats and others call it a tired scare tactic with more than a whiff of bigotry because Republicans often point to gay and black Democrats who would lead committees. But faced with the attacks and pent-up ambitions of rank-and-file lawmakers, Democratic leaders are hinting they might abandon party tradition and award sought-after slots not solely on the basis of seniority, but instead follow the Republican lead of also weighing such factors as legislative record, diversity and work for the good of the party."

One possible target: Alcee Hastings, who would take over the intelligence committee but has the small problem of once having been impeached as a federal judge.

American Prospect's Greg Sargent says the WP needs a math lesson:

"The Washington Post has a long piece which struggles as hard as possible to portray Dems and the American public as evenly split over Iraq. To accomplish this objective, the piece mischaracterizes poll numbers, speculates about the motives of Dems based on exactly zero evidence, and tries to portray the fact that Dems won't advocate cutting funding for troops as a sign of political weakness.

First, the poll numbers. Here's what the excerpt he cited says (boldface added by Sargent):

" The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan polling organization, found this month that the public is evenly split over pulling out U.S. troops, with 48 percent in favor of keeping troops in Iraq and 46 percent in favor of withdrawal. Yet even among those who favor bringing U.S. troops home, only a third support doing so immediately. Asked another way, 52 percent of those polled said they would favor setting a timetable for getting out, while 41 percent would oppose that. "

And here is Sargent's analysis: "The above in bold is flat-out wrong. The poll is right here . That '46 percent in favor of withdrawal' cited by the Post is actually the number the poll cites as being is in favor of bringing home the troops 'as soon as possible' or 'now.' In other words, in no way does that 46 percent represent all of those who want withdrawal in general, as the paper suggests. The second set of Pew numbers cited by the paper itself -- that respondents favor setting a timetable by a 52-41 margin -- is clearly a better way of measuring public sentiment on the broader withdrawal question, and it belies the suggestion that the poll found that the public is 'evenly split over pulling out.'"

We close with Ray Nagin trying once again to extract all five toes from his mouth:

"With the anniversary of his own city's tragedy coming tomorrow, loudmouthed New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is apologizing for calling Ground Zero a 'hole in the ground.'"

Amazing the way he keeps whipping up sympathy for his city, isn't it?