Dateline: Iraq

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Despite such challenges, the four journalists here have found ways to plumb the Iraqi experience and tell stories that feel closer to the contradictory truth.

Vivienne Walt, freelancer

It was an aid worker who told Vivienne Walt about the children. In a Baghdad neighborhood, Walt, a former USA Today reporter who is now on assignment for Time and The Boston Globe, found 9- and 10-year-olds grabbing fistfuls of ammunition from a pile and separating the copper casings from the lead bullets. A little boy told Walt, "My mother says this is a good job. I give her all my earnings."

"Of course, it was a great story," Walt says, and she couldn't have found it without help. But reporters don't get much help in Iraq.

"It's fairly unique to work in a country where you don't have international organizations, observers of any kind" to help journalists understand a situation, says Walt, who has worked in more than 25 countries. Because she doesn't speak Arabic and cannot easily blend in, Walt must rely even more heavily on fixers and translators than she usually does because of the dearth of other sources. Translators can also phrase a question in a way that's culturally palatable.

She depends on translators, but they're as much products of Saddam's culture of silence as everyone else, and Walt has found they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to generate leads. Under Saddam, a news story was simply a government proclamation. Though Walt had her translators reading 25 newspapers a day in search of stories, they would tell her there was nothing in them: "They would just see nonsense," she says.

But as foreign correspondents have been training their Iraqi fixers to think like journalists, the situation has slowly improved, perhaps just in time. With tensions on the rise, both the obstacles to uncovering the Iraqi story and the need to expose it will only grow.

Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post

Last August, Anthony Shadid spent a day on Mutanabi Street, a narrow alleyway of bookstores and shops in old Baghdad. Because he speaks Arabic (his grandparents were born in Lebanon), Iraqis tend to be relatively comfortable in his presence, says Shadid, who won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his work in Iraq. "Gaining trust or gaining personal access and confidence is much harder" than in other places he has reported from, he says. His appearance and his ability to get along without a translator allow him to get in close.

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