… Hannah Allam, that is, the talented and incredibly courageous 27-year-old journo who’s been running Knight Ridder’s Baghdad bureau since late 2003.
That nice profile of her there, from Editor & Publisher notes that,
- Allam has gained a reputation for being outspoken on matters of reporter safety.
Just last week, she responded sharply to a column by St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Mark Yost, which claimed reporters were not giving a full picture of life in Iraq, especially positive news.
The Baghdad bureau, which has been housed in seven rooms on the top floor of a hotel, has seen its share of tragedy in recent weeks. On June 24, stringer Yasser Salihee was killed on his day off, while the assassination on Tuesday of Miijbil Issa, a member of the Iraq Constitutional Convention, affected the bureau because he was a favored source.
“He is my third source in a month to be killed,” Allam said. “Will it ever stop? Every day they are dying.”
As I recall, that idiot piece by Mark Yost appeared after he’d made a whirlwind visit to the Baghdad Green Zone under heavy US military protection…
Allam is an exceptionally capable reporter and administrator– in her two years in Baghdad she has, as the E&P piece notes, built KR’s bureau there into a 16-person operation that “has received praise from journalists both in and out of the newspaper chain.”
But in addition, Knight Ridder itself– which is a chain that owns 31 daily newspapers across the US, as well as 34 web sites– has shown a strong and continuing commitment to excellent coverage of Iraq war issues. Their Washington bureau contains Warren Strobel and Jonthan Landay, veteran journos who throughout the whole buildup to the war were two of the few MSM reporters to aggressively question and investigate the Bushies’ often bizarre and frequently fallacious claims about the Saddam regime.
(Here’s the latest piece of excellent Strobel/Landay reporting… A typically well-done piece telling us about a recent meeting in Europe between two powerful but wacko Republican lawmakers and a representative of Iranian arms merchant Manoucher Ghorbanifar… He of the “Iran-Contra” affair of the 1980s… )
So it’s good to see that this apparently well-run news operation, Knight Ridder, is supporting a very capable correspondent like Allam as she takes a next important step in her career. Now, she’s heading to Cairo to establish a new KR bureau there that will have broad responsibilities for covering the whole Middle East.
The E&P profile of her also notes:
- Allam, an Oklahoma native whose father is from Egypt, said she has strong ties to Iraq through her Middle Eastern heritage and has enjoyed her time there. But she said the increased danger has made the assignment more frightening, as well as harder to complete.
“I still love this place, but I don’t love the conditions I have to work in,” Allam said. “I think I have tried to do all I could. I don’t really have a life outside of work here.”
Allam stressed the increased dangers that have changed the reporting situation in the past two years. “When I first started, there was a real collegial press corp,” she explained. “We knew Iraq was dangerous, but not for us. In the old days, we could travel, the coverage could be comprehensive and complete and you could have a life. Go out to karaoke at night or to parties.”
But, in the past few months, Allam said the atmosphere had dramatically changed for journalists. “It suddenly came that you couldn’t travel,” she said. “You begin to wonder if you can give your readers a full picture. It is extremely difficult and not as much fun.”
Allam cited a story she wrote on Monday that appeared in many papers on Tuesday about life in Al-Musaiyb, the site of a deadly suicide bomb explosion last Saturday that killed nearly 100 people. The story, a scoop of sorts, came about after Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi called and invited her to travel with him to the area.
“I am so desperate to get out of Baghdad and this was a great story, but [the destination] was also one of the top five targets in the country,” she said of Al-Musaiyb. “I went for it but it was scary. It reminded me of how much we miss by not being able to go out there. I don’t see it getting easier.”
But Allam admitted that she is also drawn to Cairo, where her father still lives and where she can take up the challenge of building a new bureau and tackling broader news subjects. “I still have extended family there and I have never lived there, although I have gone back and forth,” she said of Cairo. “Baghdad is similar to Cairo in a lot of ways, it is an old, historic capital. I will be able to travel more and report, but not under the threat of constant gunfire. It is obviously a lot more stable.”
Still, the bureau chief admits that she is so connected to Baghdad’s people and issues, thoughts of leaving remain bittersweet. “The other day, I was trying to imagine what it was going to be like going to sleep in my last night in Baghdad,” she said, adding that it will be nice to live in an apartment instead of a hotel. “Going from a big, bustling staff and constant adrenaline rush to a bureau where I will be all alone.”
Thanks for everything you do, Hannah. Stay safe.
“that idiot piece by Mark Yost”; “wacko Republican lawmakers” — how are comments such as these courteous, let alone helpful?
”Mark Yost, which claimed reporters were not giving a full picture”
Yes he is right! because he is a blind and Deaf
“because he is a blind and Deaf”
Again: courteous & helpful? (I don’t suppose there are any rules hereabouts re: mangling the English language?)
Dear “m. freiheit,”
By what rubric do you determine whether something is helpful? This is a blog that posts op-ed pieces by a veteran journalist. Where does “helpful” even fit in? Helena isn’t offering advice to the National Security Council, so who do you want her to help? By your logic, can’t we say that any critical op-ed is unhelpful?
Now, as for “courteous”… Do you think it’s courteous to make fun of someone’s English, (when they’re writing with a foreign name, which may indicate that this is not their first language)? Have you ever learned a foreign language? I hope that if you try and make your voice heard in a foreign blog/newspaper/journal, readers will extend you the same courtesy.
Thanks much, Jake, for aksing … “By what rubric do you determine whether something is helpful?” The “rubric” I use is the one supplied by Helena herself: “comments that are courteous, fresh, helpful, and to the point.” Not too much to ask, I don’t think, that her own guidelines be observed.
M. Freiheit,
I’m trying my best in order to see where your problem is, but I can’t :
1) Helena didn’t insult Mark Yost; she didn’t say he was an idiot. He said the piece he wrote was idiot and demonstrated clearly why. If someone writes idiot unfounded piece, it’s not Helena’s fault.
2) As far as I know, wack or wacky from where wacko was made isn’t an insult. If we don’t appreciate someone there should be a way to state it.
Thanks, for that incisive distinction, Christiane: so, it’s not insulting to say that what someone says is moronic, so long as you don’t say the person is a moron. If, then, I were to write that much of what Helena posts is insipid (and that her transparent anti-Zionism quite often pathologically obsessive and racist), that would not be regarded as discourteous and ad hominem? OK. Sounds good to me.
M. Freiheit,
If you think that Helena’s posts are insipid that’s your judgement. The many readers consulting her blog apparently don’t think like you. Anyway if you think so, then why are you here reading them ? If you think that they are racist, which is a serious accusation, then you should prove your case. General and vague statements like that don’t convince anyone, they just show your own prejudices. If you want a real talk, common, develop your arguments with concrete examples.
Frieheit, my dear, if you don’t understand that for a fly-by Green Zone visitor to disparage the work of solid reporters on the ground who run very real risks to get the story is idiotic (not to mention extremely unprofessional, ideological, and mean-spirited), then I’m sorry for you.
If you don’t see any danger in powerful Republican congressmen having meetings with dangerous Iranian provocateurs who seek, Chalabi-ike, to draw my nation into another quite unnecessary and yet again extremely lethal military adventure, I’m sorry for you.
And if you don’t understand how blogs work– namely that the main thing I write is a post and I can write what I darn well please, and what appears here under the heading “Comments” are comments (how hard is this to understand?)– then what indeed are you doing here?
You are always free to go stake out your own portion of the blogosphere and express yourself there.
Not one of your comments has addressed the subject of the main post.
I’ve become curious about the Yost article. Anybody want to give me a web reference to it?
About the two wacko Republican Congressmen. In the US House of Representatives there are people representing the broad middle consensus of the US and also just about every single extremist cause that can be found in the US. I have never heard of these two guys nor that particular Iranian exile, and have no specific comment on them.
Somebody in the US Congress says or does something extremely stupid at least once a week. This is not news and is probably not worthy of comment. The House is a Zoo.
There are plenty of ‘Wacko’ left-wingers in there, too, and the Right wing can make any point it chooses to by pointing to the misbehavior of the Left. And, of course, vica versa.
(WW then decided to launch into a series of very snide and one-sided comments that had nothing to do with the subject of the main post. Snip. ~HC)
I have seen no signs that Helena’s posts or writing is racist in any form.
I have been accused of that myself in another blog comments section.
I sure hope I am not racist, since I come from a beautiful multi-racial family.
“has received praise from journalists both in and out of the newspaper chain.”
Gee, journalists patting each other on the back. What a surprise. Would you like to know what the troops think of Knight-Ridder’s Baghdad Bureau? We don’t. We never see them. Seems that reporters don’t come out of the Green Zone that often. Too far from the hotel bar, you see. Turns out that it’s much easier to repeat SIGACT reports and hang out in the air-conditioning than to go looking for stories that might run counter to the preconceived negative image that the media is trying to portray. So, we work our asses off and all we see are body counts and Abu Ghraib photos.
I don’t know how “courteous, fresh, helpful and to the point” this is, but it’s the truth. Mark Yost was right about the reporting on Iraq and a media that can take anything but criticism is closing ranks to attack him rather than dare risk the most remote bit of introspection.