The first good TV candidate was Kennedy. Speaking of the Media.
Photo Illustrates Rift Between Army, Army Times
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 5, 2003; Page C01
For all the talk about how well the media and the military got along in Iraq, Army officials were so outraged over a photo they found offensive that they tried to boot one news organization from the battlefield.
They have trained their rhetorical fire on Army Times, which despite its name is a privately owned newspaper, over a photo of a wounded soldier who died soon after the picture was taken.
Robert Hodierne, the paper's senior managing editor, says Army officials "essentially threatened us" that "if you run that picture, there will be consequences." But senior Pentagon officials refused to go along with the plan to expel two Army Times correspondents from Iraq.
Lt. Col. Ryan Yantis, an Army spokesman, says it was wrong for the paper to show "a mortally wounded soldier, with full facial recognition. I'd hope nobody would ever do that to me and put my wife or mother through it."
In a letter to the paper, Army Secretary Thomas White and four other top officials declared: "The Times editors' callous disregard for basic standards of decency and the emotions of the family and loved ones of this brave soldier in their time of grief is -- by any reputable standard -- a poor editorial decision."
The picture in question is of Spec. Larry Brown, his eyes glazed after being shot, as his Army buddies carried him off. Brown died the next day.
Running the photo was a "painful" decision, the paper said in an editorial, but it "bespeaks a fundamental truth: At this writing, 126 young American men and women have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Brown was one of them, a man who selflessly gave his life for the freedom of an oppressed people and the cause of his nation. . . . He was a real man, with a real face, who died on the battlefield. . . . This picture helps ensure no one forgets that."
But Yantis says officials told Army Times that Brown's parents were opposed to publication and that the paper failed to "think of the impact of a family that's already suffering." Days later, after an editor reached the parents, Army Times declined to provide the photo to Time magazine.
"It was a difficult phone call and we didn't want to make matters worse," says Army Times Editor Tobias Naegele.
"The Army was upset because they kind of see Army Times as their internal newspaper, as part of the family," a Pentagon official says. "They don't believe there should be any pictures of any dead service member. But there wasn't any violation of the ground rules."
As it turned out, the Army Times correspondents were rotating into other military units anyway. But Hodierne is still steamed at Army officials. "What I don't like is them violating the very rules the military set up to kick us out -- censor us, even -- for running a photograph they didn't like," he says.
Rivera Bites Back
Geraldo Rivera withdrew from Iraq amid Pentagon complaints that he revealed sensitive information by drawing a map of troop movements in the desert sand. Pentagon officials allowed Rivera to rejoin a military unit there after he acknowledged his mistake and underwent training. Now he's settling scores.
"I'm filled with smoldering anger at the grotesque exaggeration fostered by my cable competitors," the Fox News correspondent writes on his Web site. Accusing MSNBC of having "maliciously conducted a 'get-Geraldo' campaign," he opens fire on talk show hosts Joe Scarborough and Keith Olbermann:
"Using a neo-Nazi ex-congressman and a psycho ex-sportscaster as their hatchet men, they lobbed accusations and innuendo aimed at using my sand drawing to destroy a 33-year career far more distinguished than anything to which either of that hapless pair can aspire."
MSNBC declined to comment, but Olbermann poked fun on the air: "When Geraldos Attack! The Sand-man is back, and he knows who's responsible for ending his career. . . . Former journalist Geraldo Rivera is back in the news. He is blaming his expulsion from Iraq not on his having given away U.S. troop positions during a war, but rather on MSNBC."
Taking On the Big Boys
Those rumors about Time columnist Margaret Carlson not getting along with company honchos John Huey and Norman Pearlstine are true.
She says so herself.
At a lunch last fall, Carlson writes in her new book, "Anyone Can Grow Up," Huey, Time Inc.'s editorial director, asked: "Aren't you embarrassed that I don't like your column?" He also told her that "I'm not in the business of fixing people's work." When Huey urged Carlson, a regular on CNN's "Capital Gang," to do more TV, she concluded: "Telling that to a writer is like telling someone they have a face for radio."
She even calls Huey a "bully" and says he doesn't like "uppity women" as columnists.
Carlson also made the mistake of panning a book on sexual fantasies by Nancy Friday, Pearlstine's wife. ("Psychobabble . . . Forget finding anything erotic here.") Of course, that was before Pearlstine became Time Inc.'s editor in chief, and he told her he'd try to get over it. Huey and Pearlstine declined to comment.
Carlson still has her Time column, though now she's a contributor to GQ as well. "Everyone at Time over-compensated by saying how much they loved me," she says. |
