Harm’s Way

Maybe it’s just that I am a hopeless cynic, but I found it quite disingenuous to watch President Bush bemoan the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. After all, the prime beneficiary of Pearl’s gruesome death, at the hands of Pakistani "extremists," is the Bush administration.

That is a harsh assessment, I know.

But given how this administration is dismantling the Constitution piece by piece and given how the president is playing the role of global cowboy, consider the harsh reality.

The administration gains from the death of Pearl because of who he was: a distinguished and beloved member of the media.

In the normal order of things, the longer the war on terrorism goes on, the more members of the media will begin to question the hows and whys of Operation Enduring Freedom. As the body bags start to come home, the press, which has been, by and large, a cheering section for the president, will revert to its more natural state of nattering nabobism.

Now another body bag contains one of us. Last year, 37 journalists worldwide were killed, including seven in Afghanistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Pearl’s murder became intensely personal, as the drama unfolded over the course of weeks and the world became familiar with those horrible pictures of Pearl in captivity and with his pregnant wife, who was waiting and hoping, in vain as it turned out, for a happy resolution.

The viciousness of Pearl’s death will stay with those who decide how and why news gets covered. It will stay with people who remember one of their own slaughtered, and it will very likely serve to delay the much-needed shining of the light on the president and the war.

Already, reporters are deciding to stay out of harm’s way. Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews (www.poynter.org/medianews), the most important font of journo-related news on the Web, has interviews with reporters who are opting for safety, which means avoiding the danger Pearl placed himself in to get the other side of the story.

And that, for Bush, is the best news about all this.

His attorney general, John Ashcroft, has branded those who question the war as traitors. Pearl’s death makes those who ignore Ashcroft — a man so morally bankrupt that he lost his Senate seat to a corpse — reconsider the pursuit of the truth, whatever and wherever it may be.

Danny Pearl’s death is not just a loss for his family and friends, or journalists as a group, but for the whole nation.

Speaking of truth and death, Pearl will not be the last media martyr. The world is a dangerous place, and journalists are often easy and highly visible targets. The Bush administration’s aborted plan to spread disinformation through the recently created Office of Strategic Influence makes the world an even more dangerous place for journalists.

It is not news that we are often highly distrusted and thought of as agents of the U.S. government. That the administration was establishing an office dedicated, in part, to pumping out phony stories to the foreign press will only exacerbate the problem. Thanks to criticism, the office may be kaput, but the sentiment that created it lingers.

I know about distrust of US media from firsthand experience. During the first intifada, I was warned by Israelis and Palestinians alike that, as an American and a Jew, I would be suspected of being a shill for the CIA, the Mossad or both, and that I should be wary during my forays into the West Bank.

Being young and foolish, I pretty much ignored the warnings, milled about Jerusalem looking for a private tour guide and, with a C-note as enticement, found a Palestinian man with a car who was willing to drive me around the West Bank, looking for hot spots.

Moussa’s tour would turn into quite an eventful little trip, one in which I had to don a kaffiyeh to get past Israeli checkpoints, only to have the car followed by two Israeli army helicopters as we rumbled over dirt roads and in and out of refugee camps and trouble spots like Ramallah, now home to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

But there was a moment on that journey when I thought my life would be over.

Moussa told me that he wanted to quickly stop by his house, in Arab East Jerusalem. As he pulled up and stopped, the car was surrounded by dozens of Palestinians, and from the crowd I could hear cries of "Yahudi! Yahudi!" — Arabic for Jew.

Then a man from the crowd opened the car door and jumped into the back seat. My heart raced, adrenaline coursed through my veins and, for a split second, I wished I had paid a little more attention to the warnings I ignored.

Then the man in the back seat broke into a smile.

"You are American?" he asked. "We have never met an American. We always wanted to meet one."

Realizing that I was not about to die, I was more than a little relieved. And I was able to continue my journey and see for myself — and report — the deplorable conditions of the refugee camps and the violence on both sides of the conflict. Even those fleeting glimpses offered a perspective on world events that we rarely see back in the States.

But given what happened to Danny Pearl and given the added danger presented by the way the White House wanted to use "news," I am not sure that I would take that ride again. I know I am not alone.

And no one benefits from the stifling of the press but George Bush.