I’ve almost become boring with my constant complaining of the shoddy or non-existent coverage of what’s going on in Afghanistan. Even in the most recent of significant events—the death of Mullah Naqib in Kandahar—I learned from a friend fairly soon after it happened, but had to scour into a Canadian paper to find even a mention several days later. Even if something warrants attention, it’s often shoddy and lazy and lacking context (recall my constant complaints about the phrase, “the coming spring offensive,” which could be found in press account as late as June). Of course, reporting on Afghanistan is no easy task, and Bill Gentile wants you to realize that:
I got my hands on this DVD to see what it’s like. It is generally what one would expect: vignettes of various reporters’ coverage strategies, how they have to navigate an unfamiliar culture (though the relative ease of some, such as the delightfully uncovered head of NYT veteran Carlotta Gall, is admirable), and often a recalcitrant U.S. military to get to the bottom of things. In this, Gentile is successful—Afghanistan is a tough beat.
The movie falls apart, however, on the central unanswered question: while it’s nice to see these brave and selfless reporters (even the rather smarmy Andrew North) pounding away at their keyboards, or arranging photospreads on their Macbook Pros in the walled gardens they rent, or relentless beseeching sources and contacts over the phone for some kind of lead, what of ordinary Afghans? What of Afghanistan outside Kabul?
This is the main conceit of the big agencies covered here, in the posh expat community of Kabul: the BBC, AP, NYT, Washington Post, and Time, they all are centered in Kabul, and with extremely rare exceptions, their coverage is almost entirely America- or Western-centric. This isn’t an inherently negative thing, as we need to know what our own governments are up to in the country; but our governments’ actions take place in the grander context of Afghan society. While it’s nice to hear about a woman running for Parliament, or about the death of some SEALs, the problems of the rest of the country—from Herat to Kandahar to Jalalabad—go largely unmentioned.
This problem isn’t confined to these agencies; they just happen to be featured here (from what I could gather, most of the correspondents are friends of Gentile’s). It also isn’t a problem exhibited by all agencies, either—as one example, the CS Monitor in particular, whose international news section is drastically underrated anyway, routinely datelines stories from Kandahar. But then, it’s not uncommon to read stories about, say, Farah datelined in New Delhi; how can a reporter in India possibly hope to get what’s going on in a village in southwestern Afghanistan?
Alas, such broader questions about the efficacy of reporting are not the purpose of this film. Like most other issues in the country, reporting suffers from a fundamental lack of resources—it is just not sexy enough to warrant the same resources as covering, say, Britney Spears’ custody battle or repeating CENTCOM’s talking points from Camp As Sayliyah. Gentile, a journalism professor at American Unviersity’s School of Communication, clearly meant this movie more as a primer on the difficulties and challenges of foreign correspondence, and I would guess something of an encouragement to the students who would view it.
I am not a journalist, nor have I ever been trained or worked as one. It is entirely possible I simply have unrealistic expectations for these reporters—who am I to complain they almost never leave Kabul without an entire squadron of Rangers in accompaniment? (Some, such as Ms. Gall, have traveled extensively over the past several years, including from the very first days of invasion in 2001, while others, such as Mr. North, were only there for a year or two and then moved on.) But as a researcher routinely frustrated with the obviously poor quality of information coming from the country, it is disappointing to see just how little the western news agencies even try to grasp the larger picture on a regular basis.
Luckily, I have sources such as Afghanwire, which produce English translations of local news sources published in Dari and Pashto. That provides valuable news and insight into what is going on and what locals think. As an educational experience, however, I’d still have to recommend Dateline Afghanistan. It would obviously be of more use to a journalism student getting excited about working abroad, but from the outside it is nevertheless deeply instructive: learning why, perhaps, the news from the country is so splotchy.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust