From Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post:
Posted by Mike at April 9, 2003 12:45 PM | TrackBack
The journalistic body count is rising, and some news organizations are starting to withdraw selected reporters from Iraq.Three more journalists were killed yesterday, following the deaths of NBC's David Bloom and Atlantic Monthly editor and Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. With the media death toll at 12, the networks are reassessing their situations, based both on safety concerns and on a sense that the once-dramatic story is running out of steam with viewers.
"I'm very nervous," said Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president of CBS News. Worrying about the correspondents "makes you a wreck. There's no point in keeping them there any longer than necessary. The risk is not worth the result." CBS may pull Jim Axelrod from the Baghdad airport.
"There's the danger, there's the personal exhaustion, and there's the question of are we getting enough out of it," said Paul Slavin, executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight." "Every day we go over the level of safety."
Some embedded correspondents are no longer producing much news because their military units have stopped moving forward, Slavin said. ABC has withdrawn Ron Claiborne from the USS Abraham Lincoln and Tamala Edwards from an Air Force base in Kuwait. Reporter Bob Woodruff left a Marine unit because he was close friends with Bloom.