Knickmeyer: 'Some of Us Here Actually Get Out Quite a Lot'

By: E&P Staff Ellen Knickmeyer, Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post and a veteran of war coverage in Iraq, has written to E&P, responding to our Sept. 16 article, "NYT War Reporter: Anarchy Curtails Reporting in Iraq."

That story, by E&P's David S. Hirschman, covered remarks by another longtime Iraq war reporter, Dexter Filkins, at a forum in New York City. Among other things, Filkins said that 98% of Iraq, and even most of Baghdad, has now become "off-limits" for Western journalists.

Knickmeyer writes in her letter to E&P:

"It is critical in judging the quality of reporting in Iraq to know how much of it the reporter has actually seen for himself or herself; and therefore it critical for us to be explicit how much we as reporters are seeing or not seeing for ourselves.

"I'm writing for that reason, to say that the range of reporting people do for themselves in Iraq varies enormously from person to person and organization to organization, and that some of us here actually get out quite a lot. Unfortunately, the people and organizations who go out the least here in Iraq often seem to speak the loudest, perhaps to justify publicly their decision not to go out.

"This is a war, and like any war our movements are curtailed, but like any war we still get about: the Western reporters with several organizations here, including ourselves, still do man in the street interviews here, still go to businesses, political offices, hospitals, morgues, bombings, neighborhoods where fighting is present, etc. We ourselves still travel out of Baghdad independently of embeds, to both the Shiite south and to a much smaller degree to the Sunni west and center. That's not to say that it is fail-safe. We weigh the risks every time.

"It ought to be a little clear in the bylines, datelines and credit lines: when American reporters do the reporting by themselves, our credit lines and bylines reflect that, and when we have help, they reflect that.

"That's not to understate the great contribution of our Iraqi translators and reporters and other staff in Iraq. Their brave work is essential to our operations here, and for the Sunni west of the country in particular often is the only way we can gather news on site outside of embeds. But not all organizations and not all reporters here work solely through Iraqi reporters.

"It's in fact become something of a political question central to the interpretation of the war whether what you're seeing reported in the newspapers is first hand or second-hand. For a lot of us newspapers still, what you're reading is still what we as the Western reporters are seeing and hearing for ouselves here in Iraq."