Running with the pack
By Michael Lev Posted Apr 1 2002
Corrrespondents covering the war against terrorism aren’t always under fire in the streets of Afghanistan or making contact with dark characters in dark alleyways in Pakistan. Sometimes the pursuit of the truth isn’t lonely and dangerous. Sometimes it’s crowded and routine.
Can you imagine how deflating it was for me, as a reporter, to arrive in Jalalabad early in the story to find the main hotel already filled by the media?
What happened next was predictable pack journalism: hundreds of nearly identical reports, like the story we all did on the joyous return of music after the Taliban’s fall.
Working in China, as I usually do, puts me away from the pack. I’ve just returned from a two-day trip to the Chinese countryside where I didn’t see another reporter, or any Western face, the entire time. The story was mine. If I did it well, I’ll get the glory. If I failed, no one will notice.
My colleagues covering Donald Rumsfeld, or the Enron scandal, or before that Gary Condit, or before that Elian Gonzalez can only dream of a day away from the competitive frenzy of the pack.
The pack mentality can give journalistic integrity a black eye. The constant repetition of incremental developments, the endless analysis and the omnivorous television-camera stakeouts can distort the significance of a story. The phenomenon of the media circus can overly magnify the stakes in beating the competition and lead to embarrassing errors.
Sheer volume can destroy credibility. One sensitive story on the JonBenet Ramsey case might tell a gripping family drama. Several weighty stories might prompt a more thorough police investigation. But what do 2,000 stories represent, besides a serious misallocation of resources?
Yet the truth is that while the media wolf pack might symbolize all that can be bad about journalism, it is a weapon on par with — if not greater than — the skills of one intrepid investigative reporter.
It can take talent and bravery to pull off a major scoop, but it takes an economy of scale of the entire media’s focus to raise a story above the din of daily events and make it important enough to demand the nation’s attention. Only then might the government react to a scandal or a corporation acknowledge its wrongdoing.
According to some recent comments by Walter Cronkite, President Nixon might have survived Watergate by intimidating The Washington Post away from the story, but then CBS News jumped in with its own report.
In the Enron affair, Fortune magazine caught the whiff of scandal early on, but when no one immediately followed up, the company escaped further scrutiny for months.
In contrast to group success, editors and reporters dream of those moments when their story will take off and suddenly tell the entire country about the trouble with Firestone tires.
Being part of the pack becomes most unpleasant when the story hits a lull. Even on days when there are no new developments, reporters still have to write space-consuming articles about Elian Gonzalez and hope no one else gets a scoop.
I faced this pressure in Afghanistan as one of 50 reporters sequestered at the Spinghar hotel in Jalalabad. For more than a week, we waited for the fighting to unfold at Tora Bora while unhealthily worrying about what each peer might uncover.
Would someone discover the evidence of an Al Qaeda sarin gas attack? Would their contacts get the Osama bin Laden interview first?
It was nightmarish at breakfast. Each morning, one group of eight or 10 talented reporters from big news organizations came together to sip coffee and lay plans for the day’s reporting.
For those not in the alpha clique, it was nerve-wracking. It took every ounce of bravery to go your own way and not fret about what they were up to.
In the evening, after the competitive pressure had built to a boiling point, an alpha and one of the outsiders might meet casually in the lobby.
“What’d you get today?” the outcast might ask.
“Oh, just a feature,” would come the vague response.
In the end, we all got the story that mattered, and we all helped each other through treacherous days of reporting on the invasion of Tora Bora by Afghan militias and American warplanes.
We shared quotations from commanders and shared our feelings about whether it would be too dangerous to inch toward the front.
Many of us were together the day we got to see one of bin Laden’s caves, and that was a great day to be in the pack.