Media Culture
Patriot Games
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting - 06/08 09:03 AM
Alan Feuer’s new book Over There: From the Bronx to Baghdad, contains several interesting anecdotes about various media personalities that Feuer encountered during his brief stint as a war correspondent for the New York Times. For instance, I came across the following passage, in which T.R. (Feuer’s nom de guerre) has a “quarrel” with CNN’s Bob Franken:
His quarrel with Franken had begun the very moment Franken had expressed his horror that Fox News anchors wore American flag lapel pins on the air.
“How can you be a patriot and a journalist?” Franken had asked. “They’re mutually exclusive occupations.” T.R., who considered himself both, had asked why Franken could not love his country, to which had come the answer, “America is not my country. I’m a citizen of the world.”
“Like Danny Pearl?” T.R. had asked. “You are American, Bob… it is a nonnegotiable fact.”
“My goodness,” Franken had said. “I think your employers at the New York Times would be horrified, horrified! to hear you say a thing like that.”
Such weird statements piqued my curiosity enough for me to call Bob Franken and ask him if Feuer had remembered the conversation correctly. He was not yet aware that Feuer had written about him.
Franken said, “What I said and what I meant is you can be a patriot and a journalist. My point was and is that we exhibit our patriotism by being journalists — that is, skeptics… What I said was, ‘When I’m reporting, I am a citizen of the world.’”
In Franken’s view, “Wearing an American flag while on the air leaves the impression that we are believing the U.S. government and not believing those who challenge the U.S. government, and that is a lesson we should have learned a long time ago from Vietnam — that we have to be skeptical about claims no matter who makes them.”
Franken’s clarifications mitigate the oddness of Feuer’s account somewhat. Franken seems like a good journalist of the old school — a tradition that lives according to certain dogmatic principles, which PressThink’s Jay Rosen explored over the weekend in a piece about Watergate and journalism education. Rosen explained that such principles (such as constantly placing oneself in opposition to the government, seeing ones role as journalist as “carrying the mantle of the downtrodden,” etc.) are held to be “non-political” beliefs.
In fact, these beliefs are laden with political implications. As frequent NRO contributor Tim Graham put it when I asked him about this story, “Readers expect a certain amount of American-ness in their reporters. They expect that since the source of these reporters’ liberties is the U.S. Constitution, then perhaps they owe the U.S. a tiny bit of loyalty.”
But because “the believers” don’t understand this, Rosen wrote that, “the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents” such as Graham and others at the Media Research Center and elsewhere.
Moreover, this pretense of objectivity would not be recognized if Franken found himself kidnapped by forces that violently hate all Americans, as has sadly happened to other journalists in the Middle East (undoubtedly what Feuer meant when he wrote, “Like Danny Pearl?”). One can imagine Franken’s reaction to this occurrence (“But I’m a citizen of the world!”).
Should reporters investigate the military? Absolutely. Be skeptical sometimes when the military makes suspicious claims? Sure. But it’s important to remember that most of what we know about the military’s conduct in this war (the endless coverage of Abu Ghraib, detainee abuses, etc.) has come from the military’s own investigations.
Sometimes, reporters are so eager to prove their skepticism toward the United States, they lose all sense of whose values are worth fighting for. And sometimes, that eagerness translates into real harm for our side (e.g. Newsweek’s Koran story). I think that reporters like Franken would benefit from realizing that keeping an American perspective doesn’t always have to be “horrifying” — it can actually result in more careful journalism.
P.S. Fair Press.org had this to say about one of Franken’s reports during the War in Afghanistan. Who’s lying about poisoning American humanitarian food aid, the Pentagon or the Taliban? Tough call…"
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