Editor’s Corner
December 21, 2007
How to tell a story when the story is still war
By
Constance Hale and Andrea Pitzer
With Iraq and Afghanistan dominating headlines year after year, we are especially interested to see how different writers and publications use narrative to avoid staleness in depicting the gains, losses, and violence inherent in war.
The idealized war correspondent—a courageous, roving journalist writing from the trenches—has been, like many things, upended by the conflict in Iraq. Journalists embedded with troops at the outset of the war seemed to lose the freedom and wider perspective of their predecessors, while keeping the danger. More recent circumstances make us wonder how correspondents can “report from the trenches” in a conflict without front lines.
What kinds of stories best inform a war-weary public: Long newspaper articles? Video narratives? Photo galleries? Blogs? Charticles? Footage of beheadings? If the first casualty of war is truth, is another casualty narrative itself? It is easier to pose such questions than to answer them, but we would like to enter the conversation about the storytelling methods that reporters are using to represent the war at home and abroad.
The narratives we feature on the Web site are selected from stories that have been submitted to us by readers, so we don’t claim to offer a representative sampling. One article that caught our attention, though, was “Anguish in the Ruins of Mutanabi Street,” by Sudarsan Raghavan, published in The Washington Post. The Post also has a dynamic Web site, which includes the extraordinary work of videographer Travis Fox. For his series “A Nation Divided,” Fox traveled to New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina to document people’s feelings about the war at the beginning of the presidential primary season.
Closer to our home here in Cambridge, The Boston Globe has been covering another aspect of the war—veterans—in a variety of narratives. Globe reporter Charles Sennott started 2007 with coverage of veteran Jonathan Schulze’s suicide in Minnesota, and has returned to this topic throughout the year, most recently with “Back, but not at home: battered returning vets struggle with transition,” which ran in November, complemented by online video and survey statistics.
Blogs on the war run the gamut. George Packer writes “Interesting Times” for The New Yorker, analyzing domestic politics as well as challenges in Iraq.
Colleagues at Salon pointed us to “Baghdad Burning”. In her blog, a young Iraqi woman of hidden identity describes events in Iraq and the politics that influence them as her family prepares to leave for Syria. Without the affiliation of a news organization, such “citizen journalism” offers readers the subjective voice of experience but also limited accountability.
The dangers of limited accountability came to the forefront earlier this year with the publication of three pieces in The New Republic from Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who serves with the US Army in Iraq. Beauchamp’s diary excerpts detailed a tank targeting dogs and troops ridiculing an injured woman. His work ignited a controversy that resulted in the magazine’s statement earlier this month that it would no longer stand behind Beauchamp’s pieces.
The Beauchamp affair is a cautionary tale as journalism searches for ways to use new media and narratives without losing the advantages of traditional formats. We look forward to seeing—and featuring—narratives you have written, or impressive stories you find and send to us...
Here’s to peace in 2008.