Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Was it “ethical” for Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Lee Pitts to coax a soldier in Iraq to ask Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why soldiers “had to dig through landfills to find scrap metal” to armor their vehicles before heading into harm’s way?
That’s the question that has arisen in a faux debate in journalistic circles over the question of whether Pitts “followed the rules.” (No one asks, “Whose rules ?”)
Pitts came up with his ploy once reporters were banned from asking questions at the town hall session that Rumsfeld had with the troops — and after having spent weeks embedded with the very soldiers concerned about that issue. And as soon as the question he suggested to a soldier was asked, cheers broke out among the assembled troops, and equally blunt follow-up questions ensued.
Where we come from, that’s called enterprise journalism — a reporter on the ground figuring out how to push to front and center an issue that is central to the beleaguered troops.
Predictably, Pitts has taken some heat from knee-jerk defenders of anything that the Bush administration does or doesn’t do (Rush Limbaugh, Jon Podhoretz). But, interestingly, both Rumsfeld and the president himself have been quick to acknowledge the legitimacy of the question, and it seems likely they’ll pay more attention now to finding an answer. “The concerns expressed are being addressed, and that is, we expect our troops to have the best possible equipment,” the president said Thursday. “And if I were a soldier overseas, wanting to defend my country, I’d want to ask the secretary of defense the same question.” On the same day, Bloomberg News reported that the manufacturer of armor for military vehicles is willing and able to step up production, and had informed the military of that fact. And with that, rumbles in Congress began.
In our book, the only thing Lee Pitts is guilty of is a bit of brilliance — coming up with an inventive way to get a newsworthy question asked. It’s preposterous to suggest that, simply by using a proxy, Pitts “inserted himself into the story” any more than any reporter maneuvering to get the attention of any government official at a press conference.
We do agree with Pitts’ executive editor, Tom Griscom, who wrote in today’s edition of the Times Free Press that the sin wasn’t in the asking of the question, but rather in the newspaper’s failure to disclose the reporter’s role in getting the question asked.
But that’s a small transgression indeed, especially if the outcome of all this is fewer lives and limbs lost in Iraq because one intrepid reporter figured out a way to break through the shield that separates official power from life and death on the ground.
That’s in a tradition that goes back 60 years, to reporter Ernie Pyle and cartoonist Bill Mauldin, both of whom were revered by a grateful public during World War II for voicing the fears and hopes of the infantry grunts who fought their war inch-by-inch and mile-by-mile until they prevailed.
You’re in good company, Mr. Pitts.
–Bryan Keefer
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
