BACKGROUND ON:
FEET TO
THE FIRE: The Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak Out (Prometheus
Books).
The book is a collection of
interviews with 21 of America's most distinguished journalists and news executives
involved in areas of reporting most germane to pre-Iraq war and war
reporting. FEET TO THE FIRE provides an
unprecedented and disturbing insider's look at how the nation's arena of
political power has been interacting with the press since 9/11. The book is divided into five sections:
In EXECUTIVE
IMPRESSIONS, star network correspondent Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings' executive producer Tom Yellin explain how
Americans, as news consumers, are in large part to blame for vapid news and
being so ignorant about what's going on in the rest of the world. Koppel and Yellin also talk about the vise
they live in, pressuring them to get ratings on one side and to present deadly
serious news in an entertaining fashion on the other. The independent publisher of the highly respected Harpers
magazine, John MacArthur, provides a scathing account of corruption in the U.S.
press and the willingness of its members to go along with the U.S.
government's pretexts for war. Tom Curley, who is president and CEO of
the Associated Press, which reaches more than two billion eyeballs a day, talks
about the responsibilities and challenges his global press operation faces on a
daily basis, including choosing stories that will sell over stories that are
more important but less marketable.
THE
ARENA OF POWER
provides enlightening looks at the people and events at the highest
echelons of the U.S. government. Helen
Thomas, the grande dame of the White House press corps, talks about how asking
politically incorrect questions earned her persona non grata status.
In his
chapter, "Inside the House of Power: A Gatherer of Unmanaged
Glimpses," journalist Ron Suskind provides stunning psychoanalytical
profiles of Bush, Rove and Cheney and explains their respective roles as
members of a tiny team that often eschews the advice of experts when deciding
policy and that, at times, de facto constitute this nation's entire
policymaking machine. New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman explains his view of how virtually the entire American
population refuses to recognize that the Bush administration is a revolutionary
government that is currently dismantling the system that it used to assume
power to create a new government that is more theocratic and similar to certain
Latin American governments.
NATIONAL
SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE- The Washington Post's Walter Pincus examines how the relationship
between the executive branch and the press changed long ago to one where the
White House expects coverage, particularly of highly sensitive issues (in this
administration's, case, the "war on terrorism" and the reasons for
going to war in Iraq), to amount to records of packaged messages and
statements. He also discusses how the
press' ignorance about how government works has led to generally hostile and
inaccurate perceptions and coverage of government institutions and
activities. Barton Gellman discusses
why investigative reporting on sensitive issues and events (like the pre-war
era and the reasons given for going to war) that would include accountability
rarely occur in a timely fashion. CBS's
Pentagon correspondent, David Martin talks about the almost untenable
challenges he faces, including living among the people he covers and knowing
when to keep their secrets and when to expose them. Awardwinning national security and intelligence reporter, James
Bamford, talks about how pretexts for war were engineered and what roles
Cheney, Bush, George Tenet and Colin Powell played. Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and John
Walcott talk about their conversations with mid-level CIA intelligence analysts
who were actually reviewing raw field data and writing the intelligence reports
that were sent to the upper levels of the White House, where they were either
ignored or distorted. These analysts
told them, among other things, that Cheney knowingly lied to the American
people about Saddam's WMDs.
THE
MIDDLE EAST: HISTORY AND CONTEXT Blogger, historian
and Middle East expert, Juan Cole and star Washington Post correspondent,
Anthony Shadid, explain the history and current impact of the U.S. presence in
the Middle East. They explore in depth the cultural and political
misunderstandings the American people and government have about the region and
Iraq in particular.
In THE
WAR CORRESPONDENTS section, world famous television correspondent Peter
Arnett, independent war correspondent Jon Alpert and former New York Times war
correspondent Christopher Hedges all have very long experience covering wars
and are brutally no-holds-barred about the various dimensions of
ugliness and duplicity involved when America goes to war. The last two war
correspondents, Hannah Allam and Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder,
are young gen-Xers. Their accounts have a stark, unjaded
immediacy to them, like people seeing a gruesome spectacle for the first
time. Arnett, who lives in Baghdad and
Allam, who until very recently was Baghdad bureau chief for Knight Ridder, both
say Iraq is engaged in a civil war.