American reporting vs Brit reporting...a dialogue

Who does journalism right?

Objectivity, the guiding principle of the U.S. media, stands accused of undermining the press's ability to challenge the Bush administration as it rushed to war in Iraq. We were too worried about balance, the argument goes, so concerned with giving all sides a say that we neglected our adversarial role. The British press, meanwhile, which is much more comfortable expressing its political leanings and was decidedly more skeptical about the war, is gloating a bit now that the American casus belli has crumbled. So: Are the Brits right and we Americans wrong about how to practice journalism? CJR asked Michael Getler, the ombudsman at The Washinton Post, and Leonard Doyle, the foreign editor at The Independent in London, to argue this question in an e-mail debate that ran from February through April.

CJR: What's wrong with objectivity as a guiding principle for the press? Shouldn't readers and viewers be given the facts as straight as possible and allowed to make up their own minds?

DOYLE We have heard it all before: Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus; the American press is objective and the European press isn't. If only we partisan Europeans could stick to the verifiable facts and stop telling the readers/viewers what to think, our journalism would be a whole lot better for it and the public better informed.

Let's put that maxim to the test: The place is Tora Bora in December 2001, the mountain range on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border where Osama bin Laden hid out before escaping in the dying days of the Afghan war.

The Independent and other media reported that American B-52s had unloaded dozens of bombs that killed 115 men, women, and children in a village called Kama Ado. Then the Pentagon's spokesman told the world: It just didn't happen. He explained that the U.S. was meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. These Alice-in-Wonderland denials prompted our man on the spot, Richard Lloyd Parry, to write the following: "So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped through yesterday, as I traveled to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings."

But what really raised eyebrows at The Independent was an amazing CNN nonreport of the same tragedy. From atop the mound of bombed rubble, its correspondent described attempts to dislodge Osama bin Laden from his cave hideaway but never mentioned the 115 dead villagers. As we now know, CNN chairman Walter Isaacson had ordered reporters not to focus on Afghan civilian victims in the ongoing war on terror. That's objectivity?