Colleagues of mine have spent time working in and reporting from Baghdad. The descriptions of that work provided by Orville Schell in his recently published essay “Baghdad: The Besieged Press” seem to dovetail with many of the accounts I have heard from reporters and ENG technicians who have worked there.
Foreign news bureaus are either in or near the few operating hotels such as the Al Hamra, the Rashid, or the Palestine. Like battleships that have been badly damaged but are still at sea, these hotels have survived repeated bomb attacks and yet have managed to stay open. A few hotels like the Rashid, where once there was a mosaic depicting George Bush Sr. on the floor of the lobby, are sheltered within the Green Zone. A few other bureaus have their own houses, usually somewhat shabby villas that have the advantage of being included inside some collective defense perimeter that makes the resulting neighborhood feel like a walled medieval town.
Wherever in the city the news bureaus are, they have become fortified installations with their own mini-armies of private guards on duty twenty-four hours a day at the gates, in watch towers, and around perimeters. To reach these bureaus, one has to run through a maze of checkpoints, armed guards, blast-wall fortifications, and concertina-wired no man's lands where all visitors and their cars are repeatedly searched . . .
The price of staying in Baghdad is to have Iraqi surrogates perform more and more tasks, from driving and shopping to getting exit visas and plane tickets —and reporting. This situation deeply frustrates Western journalists, who pride themselves on their independence; but they know, as the Committee to Protect Journalists reports, that some sixty-one reporters (many of them Iraqis) have been killed here, and many others wounded, since the 2003 invasion …