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October 19, 2009
Goodbye Baghdad, Hello Kabul
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/business/media/19coverage.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER
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.
“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 west, 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.
Echoing the remarks of other correspondents, Mr. Engel said that the war in Afghanistan was “ignored because of Iraq,” but noted that for several years the conflict there “was really in a holding pattern.”
Few journalists were present to document the holding pattern. But they are there now. Mr. Engel, who was hired by NBC to cover the war in Iraq in 2003 and is now its chief foreign correspondent, said he plans to spend more than half of his days in Afghanistan in the coming year.
CNN, the Fox News Channel and NBC each have a full-time correspondent in Kabul. CBS stations what it calls a digital journalist there. ABC bases a producer there and rotates correspondents in and out.
In explaining their decisions to expand staffing in Afghanistan, news executives said they had taken their cues in part from the United States presidential election last year.
Mr. Maddox noted that Afghanistan was a frequent subject during the campaign, and said the network decided 12 to 18 months ago that “Afghanistan was heating up.”
News organizations say they are applying lessons from Baghdad as they invest in Kabul. Critically, they are not replicating their fortresslike Baghdad compounds, which were costing millions each month to maintain. Much of those costs were because of painstaking security.
“Very quickly in Baghdad, everybody got into a situation where there was a major installation there that cost a huge amount of money to service. We don’t want to get ourselves locked into that situation again,” Mr. Maddox said.
Amid a troop drawdown in Iraq, some — but not all — media organizations have significantly downsized their Baghdad bureaus in the last two years.
CNN’s bureau in Kabul, Mr. Maddox said, is more “light-footed. “
Bruce Wallace, the foreign editor for The Los Angeles Times, used a similar term, “lighter footprint,” to describe that newspaper’s bureau. “There’s still an ability to operate in a more low-profile way in Afghanistan, ” Mr. Wallace said. “So far, it hasn’t been essential to build a security structure the way we built them up in Iraq.”
Mr. Maddox noted that much of the news in Afghanistan has happened in the outer provinces.
“You could tell the Iraq story pretty well from Baghdad,” he said. But the Afghanistan story involves tribal regions, hostile territory and Pakistan.
Security remains a foremost concern. While it has become physically easier to travel around the country — Ms. Montagne recalled that commercial flights were not available to Kabul on her first visit in 2002 — it has also become more risky to do so. Several journalists have been injured by roadside bombs this year.
Ms. Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS, said the dangers in Afghanistan are increasingly difficult to assess. “Journalists are still trying to establish where the limits are,” she said.
They also face the risk of kidnapping. David Rohde of The New York Times was kidnapped by the Taliban last November and held for seven months. Stephen Farrell, also of The Times, was held by the Taliban for four days in September. Mr. Farrell’s translator, Sultan Munadi, was killed in the raid that freed him.
News executives said it is hard to learn the level of interest in Afghanistan among viewers and readers. The week of Oct. 5, CBS scheduled three days of the “CBS Evening News” with a focus on Afghanistan. It devoted nearly all of the broadcasts to the conflict, and each day, the newscast’s ratings dropped, from a 4.3 household rating on the first day to a 3.4 rating on the third day. When the newscast returned to its usual format on the fourth day, its household rating ticked back up to a 3.9.
The ratings drops were dispiriting to some staff. But Rick Kaplan, the executive producer of the “CBS Evening News,” said: “It was never about ratings. It was always about responsibility. “
He called the Afghanistan situation “a vitally important story that will shape our history for years to come.”
@ROB wrote:
I was beginning to wonder about the increasing coverage of afghanistan – like why now?
Guess its cos the trust fund babies needed a new gig to give them depth of character. :wink:
Spot on.
The media circus is always looking for a new place to put up their fun tent. I see them every night abusing local waiters in ways only self-important hackwanks can :wink:
Cheers
The more I am around them, the more I feel my hand playing with the safety catch of my shooter
Latest “celebrity” journo acting like an utter cunt in Kabul?
David Loyn, he of the august BBC, sitting at a table across from me at the Gandamack last month shouting at a local waiter “Don’t stand there and fucking insult me! First you get my order completely wrong and now you have the cheek to fucking insult ME? Go away and sort it fucking out!”
That’s verbatim. The pock-mark faced skinny cunt, if i wasn’t at work looking after my boss I’d have challenged the nasty prick and made him apologise.
That’s not uncommon anywhere in the third world though – some prick thinks he’s fucking Kipling and tries to lord it over the locals.
Frankly I love seeing this:
http://www.break.com/index/english-man-brutally-knocked-out-in-bangkok-bar.html
Stitch that you bastard!! It was a sly side-on dig though!
“Third party awareness” – I tell my ninja secret agents when I train them – you’re focused on your would-be assailant in front, while his oppo is working his way around the side/back of you to put a Judas jab/boot/knife/axe into you unawares.
Plus, if you’re gonna fight, don’t say “come on!” and start jumping about like Bruce Lee – just make the decision to strike, say nothing and ke-bap the bastard, just like the little Thai guy did (sneakily though) in this vid.
Great stuff!
@ROB wrote:
I was beginning to wonder about the increasing coverage of afghanistan – like why now?
Guess its cos the trust fund babies needed a new gig to give them depth of character. :wink:
Iraq is pretty much “over” as far as the media is concerned – yesterdays news.
With the scaling back of military forces in Iraq vs the increase of troops in Kaboomistan, the media circus has moved on. Don’t think today’s huge explosion in Iraq will make any difference to that.Obama will commit the 40,000 + sooner or later, not including the contractors of course . The show must go on until we all get thoroughly bored it…and by that point, the will be yet another war being manufactured elsewhere to ply our attention. its just business after all.
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