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Time's Aryn Baker loves reporting from Afghanistan...
Commentary: ...but wishes her work had more impact on Washington
By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Nov 4, 2009
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Aryn Baker, Time magazine's correspondent in war-torn Afghanistan for several years, has a lot on her mind.
Baker worries about the prospects for government stability in Afghanistan, of course. She is concerned about the future of a beaten-down country she has grown to love.
As a competitive journalist who is on the ground in the country every day, Baker frets that the policymakers in Washington give short shrift to her stories and nuggets of analysis -- compared with the dispatches of celebrity columnists, television-news anchors and political dignitaries who drop into Afghanistan for quick and carefully guarded trips and then talk as if they know the country inside and out.
"I don't get the feeling that anybody makes policies over what journalists in Afghanistan are saying," she says glumly.
Rick Stengel, the top editor of Time magazine, empathizes: "If I were President Obama, I'd ask Aryn Baker what she thinks. She's dazzling."
Baker looks warily at the attention that is showered on network-news people who come to a remote place like Afghanistan while their public-relations machines crank up in New York. These journalists get limited exposure to what is a massively complex matter. And upon their return home, they're regarded as experts.
"They have the bylines and datelines and they don't get it," she said, her voice filled with quiet intensity. "I don't feel anybody pays attention to whatever I write."
Stark appraisal
I was taken aback by her stark appraisal. To take some of the edge off for a moment, I asked if perhaps she was being a mite modest about the value of her dispatches in Time.
"I really don't," she said. "I feel like I do a lot of serious work and I never feel it gets reflected in any sense of policy -- no offense to columnists. But now colonels, whenever they come to Afghanistan, are defining the (foreign) policy.
"I say, 'Where are you getting these statements?' Still, they have the voice in Washington. It is easy to come up with a very black-and-white perception about life in Afghanistan when you spend your time (behind) barbed wire without the perception of what life is like on the ground. I've traveled around every corner [in] this country."
Baker said that "very rarely" has she encountered anti-American sentiments or accusations that "Americans are causing more trouble than they're solving."
She is most frustrated by the attention given to the representatives of the Washington political scene who get widely quoted on American TV shows after they return from a brief visit to Afghanistan: They are "the people who fly into Afghanistan on junkets and talk to selected (American) generals and Afghans."
Baker doesn't want readers of this column to conclude that she is just another cranky journalist who lives to complain. She is genuinely concerned that the American people are getting an incorrect picture of life in Afghanistan, based on the often insufficiently informed ramblings of celebrities.
Plus, Baker has no choice -- even from Kabul -- but to fear that Time, a division of Time Warner TWX, as well as the entire advertising-impaired magazine industry may disappear someday.
"The situation that's developing -- not just for Time -- is that foreign correspondents' jobs are being lost and their role is being filled by stringers hired locally and not even on contract," points out Matt Rees, a novelist and former Time bureau chief in Israel.
Afghanistan has been front-page news for several years. The continuing conflict there was the second-hottest news subject from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1. And it was the leading story on network news, filling 27% of airtime.
The Afghanistan narrative was almost equally split between President Barack Obama's deliberations over war strategy and the escalating violence in the land, noted Tom Rosenstiel, director for Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center in Washington.
The findings are the result of PEJ's content analysis of media coverage, called the News Coverage Index, studying 55 outlets from five media sectors.
Andrew Heyward, a consultant to media companies and an adviser to the Monitor Group, says the biggest challenge for American companies in Afghanistan is to "protect their people. The biggest worry is safety."
For Baker, the best part of the job is the opportunity to tell richly detailed stories about her travels throughout Afghanistan.
"I get obsessed with the details of Afghan society," Baker told me in a telephone interview last week. Her work, she says, is "fascinating, constantly evolving and very engaging. Once you get here, you get the bug. I'm definitely a victim of that."
Baker, who hails from California and was educated in the U.S., was enticed by the exotic nature of life in Afghanistan: "It's the adventure, pure exoticism, biblical wars, the landscapes, the guys in turbans, the really interesting stories as you're seeing nation-building from the ground up, like early democracy in the United States."
Baker has discovered a few things about herself. "I'm not an adrenaline junkie," she said, countering the high-voltage image of the foreign correspondent that was perpetuated in such movies as Oliver Stone's brilliant and absorbing "Salvador."
"What I seek is out is new adventures, and here we have those in spades," Baker said.
One saving grace is Time's multiple platforms for publishing her stories: She writes for the domestic and international editions of Time as well as Time.com. "Because we have both the Web and the magazine, I'm never fighting to get space," she says. "If anything, I'm struggling to keep up with the demand."
Special delivery
Baker, who is married to an Afghanistan native, is expecting her first child, a daughter, sometime next year.
"Being pregnant is making me feel (aware) about my safety," she says. "I feel like a frog in a slowly heated up pot of water. I won't know when I should jump."
Time's Stengel says: "When Aryn and I talked about it, she said that there are millions of wonderful babies being born in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is courageous but not foolhardy. I trust her to make the right judgments. It'll be fine."
If Baker truly worried about her well being, she could, of course, request a transfer to a quieter place -- Time's home base in New York City, for example, where she could leave the war behind and sit behind a desk.
She laughed and said in mock horror: "Oh no, don't make me do that! I don't know what I'd do in New York! Now I'm REALLY terrified."
MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: Are American media presenting an accurate picture of life in Afghanistan today?
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