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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 10/5/2004 11:36:32 AM
Title: What did WSJ's Fassihi do wrong?
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From MATT MENDELSOHN: This Farnaz Fassihi brouhaha has a little of everything, no? It touches on reporters as bloggers (accidental or not); it touches on a collective lack of journalistic backbone in a post-Fox News world; it speaks to pre and post embedded life in Iraq; it conjures Jack Kelley, Tim Chavez and Carl Cameron; and, perhaps most importantly, it once again sends us back to Vietnam, the war that just keeps giving. Neil Sheehan is probably dizzy with deja vu right now.

Exactly what mistake did Farnaz Fassihi make? Other than the issue of Blogging As Capital Offense, a topic for Human Resources to discuss at a later date, Fassihi simply told the truth. In the best traditions of Sheehan, Halberstam et al. she reported on what she was witnessing. First hand. In Baghdad. Isn't that what reporters used to be known for? Greg Mitchell, in his E & P column, notes that "others feel she compromised her news reporting by revealing her private opinions." Her private opinions? She's the Baghdad correspondent, for goodness sake. The Wall Street Journal didn't send a laptop or an android to Iraq, they sent a human being. A human being whose particular job happens to be making skilled observations of ongoing news events. Fassihi's mistake, if you could call it that, was not doing a better job of getting those observations, intended only for for friends and family, onto the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal's managing editor Paul Steiger initially said "Ms. Fassihi's private opinions have in no way distorted her coverage, which has been a model of intelligent and courageous reporting, and scrupulous accuracy and fairness." Okay. So why the forced vacation to an undisclosed bunker? Nobody wants to tell the emperor that he has no clothes.

Everyone ought to go to Amazon right this second and buy themselves a copy of William Prochnau's wonderful book about the early days of Vietnam reporting, "Once Upon a Distant War." Is there really that much different between Fassihi's brutally honest e-mail and what Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, Halberstam and Sheehan were doing back in 1963? The war is going terribly, the president is giving rosy assessments and there is little hope for a quick exit, Fassihi wrote in her e-mail. Hmmm. Where have we read those sentiments before?

But, alas, the journalism world is all topsy-turvy. Fair is foul and foul is fair. We've got one Kelley filing "foreign" dispatches from the safety of Arlington, Virginia while another Kelly, in search of the truth, is dying in an overturned Humvee in Baghdad. We've got the comedy staff of the "Daily Show" connecting more dots than much of the mainstream media. We had a ditsy TV reporter a few months back patting herself on the back for turning in to police a man who wrote mean things about Ronald Reagan in a tribute book. And now we've got a Fox News reporter making up -- making up!! -- damning quotes about the candidate he is covering and receiving a slap on the wrist, while back in Baghdad a reporter who risks her life each and every day is given a forced sabbatical for just being honest. [She denies she was put on sabbatical.]

When I Googled Prochnau (to make sure I spelled his name right) I found an interview he gave to Brian Lamb in 1996, back when his book came out. He related this story about David Halberstam: "At one point, in one very famous episode, he slammed his fist down on a table in a little cafe in Saigon and said that the commanding general, the American General, Paul Harkins, should be court-martialed and shot. And everybody in the room turned around and looked at this 28-year old making this kind of announcement. He was clearly the driving force."

So hang in there Farnaz. You're in good company.

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