Stories that test our seriousness

Over the past three days, one of the American news media’s greatest strengths and one of its most serious shortcomings have been on crystalline display.

Taken as a whole, the coverage of Saddam Hussein’s detection and capture was a kind of tutorial in what the contemporary U.S. press can do when it places itself in the urgent service of serious events.

As the story broke early Sunday morning, the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, provided viewers -- at least on the East Coast -- with hours of compelling coverage. (West Coast viewers who were not among the predawn risers got Sunday sports as usual until the nightly newscasts.)

The cable news operations -- Fox, CNN and MSNBC -- stuck with the story through the day and into the night, providing not only compelling pictures from Iraq but also admirable amounts of useful context and commentary. To watch the coverage was to see the promise of cable at least momentarily fulfilled.

All of the major newspapers arrived Monday with astonishingly comprehensive, detailed and clearly focused reports. The sheer volume of genuinely valuable reportage was a communal triumph. The amalgam of gripping newswriting and the up-to-date graphic design that, day by day, becomes an ever more important part of newspaper storytelling seldom has had a better or more timely display.

The seriousness and quality of the journalism the American news media have provided readers and viewers over these 72 dramatic hours make it all the more important that the same values apply as this story enters its next, and in some ways more critical, phase: the indictment and trial of Hussein for crimes against humanity and the laws of war.

There’s more than enough evidence to support apprehension on this point.

Monday, for example, retired U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, former supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, testified before the international tribunal at The Hague currently trying former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on 66 charges growing out of his involvement in Serbian atrocities committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Milosevic, who has been on trial for more than two years, is the first head of state in history to stand trial for such crimes. Yet Clark’s appearance before the tribunal provided only inside stories for the major newspapers and passing items for the broadcast and cable networks. In every instance, a substantial part of the stories’ focus was on Clark’s current standing as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, rather than on the evidence he might have to offer against the onetime Balkan strongman.

It was merely coverage as usual for a trial that is critical to the emergence of international legality in the 21st century.

In the three years since Milosevic’s own people overthrew him and extradited him to the Netherlands to stand trial, the level of interest among the United States’ leading newspapers has been less than overwhelming: Since Jan. 1, 2000, the New York Times has run 120 stories on the trial, two of which have appeared on the paper’s front page. The American capital’s hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, has printed just 41 reports from The Hague, none of them on Page 1. The Los Angeles Times has carried 58 stories on the Milosevic trial, five of them on its front page.

If that seems like an underwhelming level of attention, think back to how many reports you have seen on the United Nations tribunals currently prosecuting charges of genocide and other crimes against Rwandans and participants in Sierra Leone’s terrible civil strife.

Lots of luck on that one.

It’s not that the U.S. press doesn’t have an appetite for trials, after all.

Over the past 12 months, the New York Times has run 113 stories on the Kobe Bryant case and 58 on Michael Jackson. The Washington Post has run 107 reports on the Lakers’ star and 58 on the singer. The Los Angeles Times has carried 450 stories on Bryant and 87 on Jackson, who isn’t even expected to be charged until later this week.

It would be easy to dismiss these disparities as just more evidence that, in all but the most extraordinarily dramatic circumstances, sensation now trumps substance, even in that part of the press that tries to comport itself in a serious manner.

But Tom Rosenstiel, who directs the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, sees even more fundamental shortcomings at work. Considering the numerical disparities between stories on The Hague and those on the so-called celebrity trials, he sees three factors at work:

“One is that the U.S. press is good at covering news that breaks, but not news that bends,” Rosenstiel said. Stories about Saddam being caught or Milosevic killing hundreds of thousands are examples of the breaking news we do pretty well. But the process story about what we do with a head of state who has committed atrocities is a slow-moving story, one that involves many complex institutions trying to sort out difficult issues over time. That’s news that bends. There are few pictures, very little drama, and covering requires a commitment of time and expertise nobody is willing to make.”

According to Rosenstiel, “War crimes stories involve looking back, and the press is no good at that. We don’t even look very far ahead, and we’re terrible at ... reflecting on history. What’s done is done. In that, we’re pretty much like the American public.”

Rosenstiel finds it particularly disturbing that those comparative statistics “were drawn from the three American papers with the largest commitment to covering and printing foreign news.” The smaller an American newspaper is, his organization’s studies have found, the less foreign news of any sort it prints.

Today there are 1,450 daily U.S. newspapers, and more than 1,300 of them have circulations of less than 100,000. “If they mentioned Milosevic’s trial at all,” he said, “it’s probably been in a wire brief.”

When it comes to crimes against humanity, the press no less than governments or international organizations bears a profound responsibility. No matter how long, ambiguous or convoluted the case against Saddam Hussein becomes, what ought to be kept in mind is the sentiment expressed by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg: “What we propose is to punish acts that have been regarded as criminal since the time of Cain and have been so written in every civilized code.”