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'Beyond the Killing Fields' Discussion, Part 2: Where Have All the Reporters Gone?

1 year ago

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David Wood

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Five Politics Daily staffers -- Carl Cannon, Melinda Henneberger, Walter Shapiro, David Wood and James Grady -- are joining in an online discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg about politics and the press as seen through the prism of his new book, "Beyond The Killing Fields."

In today's essay, David Wood laments the shrinking of foreign news bureaus, and asks Schanberg how the great tradition can be kept alive. Schanberg will reply in the next installment. At the end of Wood's essay, earlier exchanges appear in order of their publication on Politics Daily.

Sydney, I'm reading your book, "Beyond the Killing Fields," with outbursts of giddy recognition, and some deepening melancholy. Your vivid portrayal of Cambodia's 1975 disintegration, in its corruption and its human tragedy, eerily echoes some of what I have seen in Afghanistan over the past eight years -- although I do not believe the Taliban yet approach the incomprehensible depravity and brutality of the Khmer Rouge.

And your descriptions of being a reporter in the confusion and chaos of war -- bent exhausted and sweating over a keyboard at dawn, trying to capture the immensity of the human struggle while a power generator jackhammers nearby -- neatly capture both the desperation and the irrational hope of war correspondents. In my own career I have many times felt that if I could only get people to pay attention and listen, they could stop the killing. Still hoping for that.

The melancholia: Sadly, battlefield reporters are disappearing. Great newspapers that once maintained foreign bureaus and sent forth aggressive journalists like you are going or gone. Where are the Sydney Schanbergs of the future?

At the outset of your book, an anthology of your war reporting and commentary, you wrote this credo:

In the end -- whether in Cambodia or any other killing field -- there is nothing new either about the barbarity of people destroying people or, unfortunately, about its seeming inevitability in every age. . . . Is it hopeless, then, to try to strengthen both the international law and its enforcement? No, never hopeless, not if you believe in the possibility of improvement, no matter how slight.

Journalists are by blood and tradition committed to the belief, or at least to the tenet, of trying to keep bad things from getting any worse than they already are.

Thirty-five years after your experiences in Cambodia, Air Force bombers (B-1s, not B-52s of Southeast Asia carpet-bombing fame) are dropping ordnance on primitive villages in Afghanistan and civilian casualties still happen -- although this time it's the enemy that kills most civilians, and the U.S. military has done all it can to try to narrow the gap between those it intends to kill and those it actually does.

There are no child soldiers at war in Afghanistan, at least none that I've seen, as you did in Cambodia.

But corruption? How little has changed. You might have been writing about modern-day Afghanistan when you wrote this in March 1975 from Phnom Penh:

While cabinet ministers ride to and from their air-conditioned villas in chauffeured Mercedes, hungry begrimed refugees, crushed by food prices that have risen more than 1,000 percent since the war began, hunker beside their sidewalk lean-to's stirring the garbage in the gutter in search of a scrap of something salvageable.

And I was struck by the reaction of Ms. Nha, an Air France employee you wrote about. In the chaos of the fall of the Cambodian capital she had lost her parents, and the Khmer Rouge soon would force her on a grueling mass march into the countryside with her young son, a march on which many would die.

"I was an optimist,'' she told you as tears coursed down her cheeks. "Not only me. All Cambodians here thought that when the Khmer Rouge came it would be all welcomes and cheering and bravo and the war would be over and we would become normal again. Now we are stunned, stunned.''

Even now, 35 years later, we too are stunned at the events in Cambodia you chronicled at great personal risk. And we are immeasurably enriched by the human stories you reported and the heart-breaking experiences you preserved.

Following in your footsteps, in a way, 700 journalists were embedded with U.S. military units for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and at least as many were writing about the war's deepening misery as what we've come to call "independent'' reporters and photographers -- those out on the battlefield but not confined to the view from inside an infantry battalion.

In the seven intervening years, that glorious, noisome, sharp-eyed and sometimes obstreperous horde has largely disappeared. Great news organizations, including my former employer, The Baltimore Sun, used to station correspondents in foreign bureaus, where they'd accumulate the kind of experience and penetrating insights you developed in Cambodia. And these newspapers and magazines and broadcasters would regularly dispatch correspondents to distant trouble spots to poke into usually unwanted corners and hold to account those engaged there.

On my last two trips to Afghanistan, in the course of eight or 10 weeks each, I came across a total of a half-dozen photographers and five journalists ("pencils,'' in trade lingo, meaning writers). I think the problem is not that young reporters don't want to go. The problem is no one wants to pay them to be there.

I'm interested in your thoughts on how to keep the great tradition of foreign reporting alive. Somewhere out there are talented young journalists who could, given the chance, write the "Beyond the Killing Fields'' of 2045.

How can we make sure they do?

By James Grady
June 19, 2010
Few Americans are more deserving of a movie about them starring an actor with the cinematic moral authority of Sam Waterston than the so deserving Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, who Waterston portrayed in "The Killing Fields." That was the riveting, Academy Award-winning movie about Schanberg and his translator/assistant Dith Pran, who survived Cambodia's descent into genocide at the hands of the cultish Marxist Khmer Rouge. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia was a homicidal horror show in which at least 20 percent of that nation's populace was killed -- roughly 2 million people.

Schanberg lives in New York city now, and he's just published a book called "Beyond The Killing Fields" -- part memoir, part polemic, and part collection of his previously published articles on an American-influenced tragedy we'd rather forget.

Ironically, Cambodia and its 20^th-century travails haunt the edges of today's news, too, with reports that its now far-more-benign official "constitutional monarchy" and multi-party democracy again threatens government-sponsored "forced migration" of segments of its population -- not in the service of yesterday's monstrous Khmer Rouge "killing fields" ideology, but to make way for today's gold mining in that impoverished country.

Schanberg is one of journalism's stars, and five Politics Daily staffers are joining in an online discussion with him about politics and the press as seen through the prism of his new book and reporting career.

Sydney, in this election year of 2010, what strikes me as being of most political significance beyond remembering the lessons of history in your new book is how you reveal language as a political weapon. The closest-to-home example that your book touches on is the use by America's Vietnam era politicians and journalists of the German word realpolitik.

How absurd is it that our Vietnam-era political savants embraced a word that allegedly means "politics based on practical considerations" from a culture whose 20^th century "practicality" included spawning and then losing World War I and World War II, plus creating a genocidal empire that made the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" look primitive.

The only "practical" thing in that realpolitik is that it "practically" destroyed Germany and savaged the rest of the world.

But the most striking example of language being used as a political tool comes in your reporting about the Khmer Rouge, and I'm hoping that you can expand on the concept of language as a political weapon -- both back in the Killing Fields era and in our 2010 election year frenzy -- and also talk a bit about some of the truly Orwellian examples of Khmer Rouge "politically correct" speech.

By Sydney Schanberg Responds to James Grady
June 22, 2010
As you point out, language is almost always a casualty when nation-states set out to sell their people on a war. I am not a pacifist. I believe some wars are unavoidable, such as when a power-hungry tyrant decides he wants to swallow you and erase your civilization. But many wars are clearly unnecessary and are perpetrated by regimes solely to amass power and restyle the world in their image, thereby intimidating competitor nations and winning re-election at home. Americans have been living in such madness and its after-shocks for the past decade.

Language is not the only device used in the marketing of wars, but it's a significant one. "Go Shopping" was President George W. Bush's mantra as he took us into the Iraq War. Usually presidents call for austerity and national sacrifice. Not Bush. He told Americans to take the modest tax rebate he had given them and spend it to keep the economy robust. Here we stand, almost a decade later, in our robust economy.

During the Vietnam War, military briefers called napalm "soft ordnance." After the war, the Pentagon announced that, because of the bad reputation of napalm, it had decided to end the use of the incendiary weapon. But then they started using it again in the first Gulf War in 1991 and again in Iraq. Oh, no, they told the press, those "fire bombs" aren't napalm. Translation: One chemical in the napalm mixture had been altered. Thus, they said, it can't be called napalm anymore. By the way, the effect of that chemical alteration now causes the weapon to burn its human targets more fiercely.

This is probably a good moment to raise the question of whether the United States is more bestial in war than other nations. From my years of covering wars close-up, the answer is no. Ours is one of the world's more disciplined military forces. It's war that by definition is bestial and insane. That's why presidents and politicians always say they consider war only as a last resort -- even when there is no evidence that they had considered any other options first.

Henry Kissinger's embrace of the word "realpolitik" was an effort to paint himself as a patriotic pragmatist and not as a man who cared little about the lives of the weak and powerless. I witnessed his handiwork in Cambodia, a small country trying to stay out of the Vietnam War. The Kissinger-Nixon military "incursion" into the country in 1970 -- an attempt to clean out North Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines -- dragged Cambodia full bore into the conflict. The weak Khmer Rouge communists then used the heavy American bombing as a recruiting tool in the countryside, a pattern that we have seen in Iraq and now in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In less than five years, the insurgents grew from scattered bands of an estimated 4,000 harassing trouble-makers into the guerrilla army of 70,000 that seized the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975 and began their horrific purge of the population to make it "borisot" -- pure -- a word never before used to apply to human beings. The bourgeoisie, which the Khmer Rough called the "soft people," were to be erased. The verb they used was "komtec," meaning smash or kill. The targets were the educated, the citified people, anyone who had worked with foreigners. This "purification" took nearly two million lives – a quarter of Cambodia's population.

Kissinger, as Secretary of State, had adamantly refused to seek a peace treaty with the Khmer Rouge, an effort that other diplomats, including the American Ambassador to Cambodia, John Gunther Dean, thought might have muted this outcome.

The White House press corps seemed mostly fond of Kissinger. He was accessible. They could always get a quote or two from him for their page one stories. For a long time, many Washington reporters described him in print as "Dr. Kissinger," which he preferred. The honorific was for his graduate degrees. He had no connection to the medical profession, whose oath commands: "Do no harm."

Yes, corrupted language plays a significant part in the selling of wars, but an accommodating press that ignores its crucial adversarial role can be an even more defining contribution. A committed, energized press can expose the perverted language and perfumed falsehoods.

(The examples above of the Khmer Rouge use of Orwellian "Newspeak" come from the formidable first-hand research of Ben Kiernan in his ground-breaking book, "The Pol Pot Regime.")

Filed Under: Media, Military

Tagged: Afghanistan war, AfghanistanWar, cambodia, killing fields, KillingFields, Sydney Schanberg, SydneySchanberg, vietnam, war correspondents, WarCorrespondents

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JohnR

One reason the reporters are gone from the front lines is because we now have, back at home, commentators on the right and left, who sit with nothing to do but belittle real reporting and defend their side.

Instead of using their 24-hour format to do in-depth analyses of the news, they waste that time on self-righteous defense of their chosen party or leader.

sigh

June 26 2010 at 9:09 AM Report abuse Permalink +8 rate up rate down Reply