| [an error occurred while processing this directive] |  |  |
 |  | |
| ||
| |||||||
| |||||||
|
| ||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
 Recent commentary from National Journal: Wealth of Nations: Economics Is Against the War. But Economics Isn't Everything (March 11, 2003) The economic threat if Saddam were left in power is smaller now than it was when he occupied Kuwait. By Clive Crook. Legal Affairs: Is It Ever All Right to Torture Suspected Terrorists? (March 11, 2003) Suppose that Mohammed is taunting his interrogators by predicting an imminent, deadly attack. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: A Leadership Vacuum (March 11, 2003) That void poses more of a threat to post-Saddam Iraq than do Kurdish separatism and Islamic revolt. By William Schneider. Media: What's That Racket? (March 3, 2003) American radio is a wasteland of ideology-driven talk. What it lacks is heart, and the desire to listen and learn. By William Powers. Social Studies: As War Looms, Can a Young Democrat Save His Party From Itself? (March 3, 2003) Democrats' fixation on multilateralism and their discomfort with force could consign the party to oblivion. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: How Free-Riding French and Germans Risk Nuclear Anarchy (March 3, 2003) Some of our allies act like spoiled teenagers who badmouth their parents while they're living off of them. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The French Have Their Own Program (March 3, 2003) Chirac's message is: If you want to be part of new Europe, then echo France's anti-Americanism. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Pyle OnDon't look for war with Iraq to produce the next Ernie Pyle, no matter how much embedding goes on by William Powers ..... By Ernie Pyle DESERT CAMP, Kuwait—It's odd being here. War always catches you off guard, but this one is especially strange for me. After all, I died 58 years ago. The Defense Department decided to give journalists what it calls "long-term, minimally restrictive access" to the war story, by "embedding" them with the troops here. This reminds some people of my situation back in World War II, though I'm not sure why. In that war, there were a million ways to find good material, but asking a GI if I could embed myself with him definitely wasn't one of them. Anyway, I got called up again. They needed a role model, and the next thing I know I'm over here and everyone wants a piece of me. They say that by the time the fighting begins—if it begins—more than 500 journalists will be embedded. It already feels like 5,000, and they're all chanting my name. Ernie Pyle, Ernie Pyle. Everyone wants me. "We're going back to the GI Joe, Ernie Pyle style of war coverage, bringing the scene home from the perspective of the fighting men and women in uniform," a TV producer told Newsweek magazine. An embedded New York Times-man wrote that many of his colleagues speak of "the vaunted writings of Ernie Pyle, the World War II correspondent whose dispatches from Normandy, Sicily, Okinawa, and Tunisia have become legendary." The San Jose Mercury News found a reporter from Texas who made no bones about it: "Sig Christenson wants to be the next Ernie Pyle, the legendary reporter who chronicled World War II by focusing on the experiences of typical soldiers that he lived with and accompanied into battle." It's all flattering, and it's nice to know my work has held up. But to be honest, I'm not sure I'd recommend being me, not now, not in this war. The first problem you face is competition. My work took off in such a big way—it appeared in hundreds of newspapers, landed me on the cover of Time, turned me into a real folk hero—because it was different. There weren't 499 other Ernie Pyles running around doing the same thing I was doing. I've been watching the would-be Ernie Pyle stories start to emerge these last few weeks, and I've got to tell you, they're all starting to run together. How many clever, self-deprecating memoirs of life at journalist boot camp can the market bear? And the shooting hasn't even started. Once it does, it would be nice if the embeds, as they're called, were to have the same kind of freedom I had, to move around and find their own stories, and let the stories find them. If you look back at my work, you'll see it relies heavily on journalistic autonomy, serendipity, informality. I had censors to contend with, but only when I was done writing. Otherwise, I had enormous freedom. To be embedded somewhere—stuck in one unit where you can be monitored and controlled—was my worst nightmare. If I'd been operating under the nine pages of single-spaced "guidance, policies, and procedures on embedding" issued by the secretary of Defense, I'm not sure I would have been able to produce a lot of my best stuff. The nine paragraphs of rules on covering battlefield casualties are so detailed and insert so many layers of bureaucracy into the reporting, it's going to be awfully tough to produce pieces like the one I filed on January 10, 1944, about the death of Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas: "Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain's hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone." Maybe we'll be lucky and there won't be any scenes like that in this war. But even if we're unlucky, I'm not sure you'll see scenes like that in the coverage, even from non-embedded journalists. War is different today, and so are the media. The troops are not conscripts, but savvy professional warriors. They understand the news and how to play the media game. They're media people themselves, in a way, monitoring the news from the middle of the desert, sending back e-mails so sophisticated some could be published in the newspaper, and occasionally are. My franchise was speaking for Everyman, but Everyman now speaks for himself. Turn on a cable-news camera in the vicinity of a bunch of young American soldiers and watch what happens. It's like they've all been to anchorperson school. As the troops have become more and more like media people, the media people have become less and less like troops. I always made liberal use of the first-person plural. The troops were "our men" fighting "our war," a war I hoped "we" would win. You won't see many American reporters writing that way about a new Iraq war. They may be embedded in body, but in spirit they are beings apart, skeptical, suspicious, and relatively cool to patriotism. My name is everywhere right now, but if you're looking for another Ernie Pyle, I'm afraid you've got the wrong war.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
|
Home |
Current Issue |
Back Issues |
Forum |
Site Guide |
Feedback |
Subscribe |
Search
| ||||
