War Story

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 2003 by Simon Dumenco

Byline: SIMON DUMENCO

"To be subtle might be confusing," Col Allan, the editor of the New York Post, told The New York Times in discussing his paper's passionately pro-war coverage.

A JOURNALIST GOES WHERE THE STORY IS. Before the war began, war reporters arranged to get embedded among soldiers in Iraq. At New York, we arranged to have our media columnist, Michael Wolff, embedded among the media - the hundreds of print and electronic journalists who were converging at Central Command (CENTCOM) in Doha, Qatar.

I'm Michael's editor, and the idea of sending him to the Persian Gulf at the start of an unpredictable war gave me pause, of course. But, honestly, it didn't take much asking around to ascertain that Michael would not face grave risk being in Qatar. CENTCOM Doha, a hastily constructed fortress in the desert, is far (relatively speaking) from the battlefield. And other media, we found out, were sending some of their marquee talent. This was hardly the front lines.

Still, when I called Michael to tell him that his trip had been greenlighted, there was a pause on the other end of the line.

"Okay, well, I'm going to have a talk with my family," he said.

Suddenly it was real.

I STOPPED WORRYING ABOUT MICHAEL when I reached him at his hotel and someone knocked on his door while we were on the phone.

"That must be the minibar guy," he said.

Somehow, given that Michael had dropped in on a camel auction the day before and had described the barren terrain around the CENTCOM facility as "pure moonscape," I didn't picture his hotel having in-room minibars with uniformed attendants coming around to keep them fully stocked. It's amazing how comforting the thought of overpriced candy bars and bags of chips can be.

RISK CAN SEEM MODERATE AND REASONable - until, suddenly, it's not. Michael Kelly, who was reporting for The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Post when he was killed on the battlefield in Iraq last month, had told Ted Koppel that "there is some element of danger, but you're surrounded by an army, literally, that is going to try very hard to keep you out of danger." I imagine the other reporters who have since perished on the batlefield felt the same way.

Michael was in a hotel far from the battlefield, but so were many of the reporters in Kuwait, where, in March, an Iraqi missile landed near a resort hotel that's 20 miles from the U.S. military's press center there. And the Palestine Hotel - the Baghdad highrise that the U.S. military fired on last month, killing two journalists - was a deceptively Western-seeming oasis in the war zone, complete with a gym, pool, and sauna, and an on-site masseuse and hairdresser.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE LEAVING FOR DOHA, Michael had called me from a cab after having lunched at famed Midtown Manhattan media boite Michael's (no relation) to gossip about the fact that John Huey, Time Inc.'s editorial director, had gotten a better table than Barbara Walters. Now, in Doha, he was calling me to gossip about who scored the front rows at the CENTCOM briefings - and how he figured out that if he showed up early enough to get a center aisle seat, directly in the line of sight of the general on stage, he'd get called on.

Which he did, every day, for several days in a row, until he asked the question no one else had dared to ask. To wit (as seen on a live international broadcast of the briefing): "I mean no disrespect by this question, but I want to ask about the value proposition of these briefings. To the extent that we get information, it is largely information already released by the Pentagon ... So I guess my question is: Why should we stay? What's the value to us for what we learn at this million-dollar press center?"

He got applause from the other reporters.

As Michael noted in his first dispatch from Doha, the more time he spent at CENTCOM, the less real information he received, leaving him with an ever-diminishing sense of reality. Spend enough time at the facility, he wrote, and "Eventually you'll know nothing."

When you send a journalist to a place that's already overrun with journalists, you always wonder how the hell your guy is going to pin down a story that nobody else will get. But in Doha, the story - which, helpfully, none of the other storytellers seemed willing to tell - was about the nonstory: that Doha was a bit of theater. A highly stylized, ritualistic spoonfeeding, by the U.S. military, of journalists hungry for a Persian Gulf dateline opportunity.

As it turned out, I needn't ever have worried about our man in the Middle East. Michael was more of a menace to Doha than Doha was to Michael. After a CENTCOM staffer told him that he would never be called on again, he packed it in and headed back to New York, having filed a couple of thoughtful dispatches about how information is disseminated - and not disseminated - in the war.

When Michael got home safely, I gave him a 1-ounce bottle of Maker's Mark. A minibar-size bottle. For a toast to subtlety.

"The Glossies" columnist Simon Dumenco can be reached at sd17@aol.com.