Check out this fascinating, must-read dispatch from Iraq in the April 6 New York Review of Books, on life in Baghdad as the news crews there have come to know it:
I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner, there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.
The result is that reporters find themselves living in a strangely retro mode where their days end before sunset, and they are pulled back to their bureaus for dinner like an American family of the 1950s. Not a few have sought solace in cooking.
One evening while I was in Baghdad, a British security guard mentioned that Fox News was giving a "party" in the nearby Palestine Hotel, once the almost elegant, five-star Le Meridien Palestine on the banks of the Tigris River. I was curious both to see what had happened to this legendary hotel and also what now passed for a social gathering among foreign reporters here. So at dusk, accompanied by two armed guards, I walked over to the Palestine through the maze of blast walls.
The first thing I noticed was that the hotel, which had become something of a household name when US tanks opened fire on it in April 2003, killing three journalists, was now largely dark. Of the major bureaus, only Fox News and APTN are still here. The Palestine and the equally fabled Ishtar Sheraton, known as "the Missile Magnet," are the two tallest buildings in Baghdad. They are situated adjacent to the roundabout in Firdos Square, made famous when a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by a US tank in 2003. Although the Ishtar has long since been excommunicated by the Sheraton chain, the hotel continues to call itself a Sheraton, like some aging divorcée who cannot quite bear the thought of giving up her former husband's last name.
In October of 2005, both hotels were the target of attacks by three vehicles with explosives driven by suicide bombers. The last of them, a cement mixer loaded with explosives that drove through a hole just blasted in the wall by another suicide bomber, might have brought both hotels down if its axle had not got snarled in a razor-wire barricade. Snipers on the roof of the Palestine Hotel then opened fire on the truck, setting off an explosion that, among other things, blew out windows at Reuters, the New York Times, and the BBC several hundred yards away. The Sheraton Ishtar was so badly damaged that it never really reopened, while the Palestine, which had much of its lobby blown out, somehow manages to keep going in a state of suspended animation.
Inside its darkened lobby, a lone Iraqi sits dozing at a battered wooden desk under a caved-in ceiling that is hemorrhaging wires, electrical fixtures, and plumbing. A faded placard still marks the closed Orient Express Restaurant, once the meeting place of all the correspondents who used to live here.
In our search for the alleged Fox News party, we ask the attendant in the lobby for directions. He tells me and my guards to go to the fifth floor, but adds that in order to get upstairs, we must first go downstairs, evidently a strategy to prevent suicide bombers from going directly to their targets. In the basement, amid a stack of discarded cardboard boxes and heaps of broken plate-glass windows, an Iraqi man is kneeling on a rug in front of a cement block wall, presumably facing toward Mecca, in prayer. When we finally arrive on the fifth floor, we have to leave our guards at a checkpoint fortified with a steel door. Inside, we are greeted by the stink of disinfectant and stale air filled with the smell of curry and cigarette smoke. Down a hallway with a greasy carpet I find a small sitting room with shabby furniture and a soccer game playing on a TV. The Fox News staffers who are smoking and drinking seem glad to see almost anyone. The scene makes me think of a group of elderly retired people clinging to a residential hotel slated for demolition.
"Where are all the other guests?" I ask, as one of them thrusts a bottle of beer into my hand. Zoran Kusovac, Fox's bulky, unshaven bureau chief, takes a long drag on his cigarette and explains in his Croatian accent, "Everybody's gone home." He laughs. "It's Saturday. We wanted to have some fun. We used to be able to have parties until late at night. But now our security people told us that if we wanted to have a party, it would have to end no later than 6:00 PM, so that everyone could get home before dark. We started at 3:00!"
"It's a little like being in third grade, where everybody has to be home before dark," someone else says. Everyone laughs.
"TV means you have to get close to the action," Kusovac complains when I ask how Fox's coverage has been going. "After all, we have to get pictures. It's absolutely essential. If you're a print reporter and out in a Humvee, you can look through the window. But as a TV reporter, you have to stand up and get tape." Everyone nods, thinking, no doubt, about ABC TV's Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, who had just been wounded while out on patrol. "All of us," Kusovac said, "depend on our Iraqis whom we have learned to trust.... Our ‘bona fiders.' But still, they're filters."
