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BY BEN OLDFIELD

In print | January 27, 2005

35 years ago, Board of Managers member David Gelber ’63 reported for Pacifica Radio, a program that aired a nightly broadcast called the Vietnam War Summary.

Every day, its producer and presenter Paul Fischer, who now writes for the CBS Evening News, collected wire copy from Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and other sources, and conducted phone interviews with journalists in Vietnam and Washington.

A forum for news that was reported nowhere else in the major media, Fischer’s program became what The New Yorker called the single best daily source of news on Vietnam.

Today, Gelber is in the process of starting a Nightly Iraq War Summary, based at Swarthmore, to serve the same purpose that Pacifica did during the Vietnam era.

The program, whose pilot broadcast was produced last weekend, will be aired through the Swarthmore Web site. With access to AP and Reuters wire copy, students will rewrite stories from newspapers worldwide, turn wire copy into radio copy and conduct interviews with journalists in Iraq and academic experts across the globe.

Now a CBS writer himself, Gelber said his motivation for creating the program was his own frustration with the way the American press deals with the war. “It’s frustrating for all of us who work for the networks how hard a time we have covering the conflict in Iraq,” he said. “It’s the biggest foreign policy issue since Vietnam, and it never gets more than a couple minutes on the nightly news.”

Further, according to Gelber, network journalists reporting from Iraq are severely limited by the threats to their own safety. “They’ve got targets on their backs,” Gelber said, “and can’t get the full story.”

Because the show will be broadcast on the radio rather than television, news can be obtained from anywhere a telephone is available, Gelber said. “We’re hoping Swarthmore can do with the telephone what networks can’t do with the camera. For example, at the minimal expense of a phone call, we could speak with a pharmacy worker in Fallujah.”

Last weekend, Gelber and Fischer came to Swarthmore to meet with students and faculty who had volunteered to help create and run the Nightly Iraq War Summary.

After the set was cleared for the Evening News with Dan Rather at CBS Studios on Friday, the two writers left New York and worked almost 48 hours straight with students and faculty at the college to produce a sample version of the program.

Clips of the pilot program will be aired at an informational meeting tonight, where Eva Barboni ’06, who has taken on a main leadership role in the group, will formally unveil the program and its mission to the college population.

“Our goal is to enhance the debate over the war,” Barboni said. “We want to provide a greater context than mainstream media can and ask more difficult, important questions.”

The program also aims to provide a more profound perspective from the Iraqi people.

According to Barboni, the pilot broadcast included an interview with a hotel clerk in Baghdad who spoke of the changes his life took when his hotel began housing foreign journalists.

According to history professor Tim Burke, who was involved in the program’s creation, this personal element is absent from mainstream media. “There is a real lack of information that gets at interesting, human, complex stories. So much gets quickly compressed into being either against or for the war effort, or reduced to a mere story of mayhem and disorder,” he said in an e-mail.

For him, the job of the radio program is to provide news that is convincing as well as nonbiased and raw.

After the informational meeting, Barboni hoped many more members of the community will get involved with the program. “The pilot broadcast was not an end to the creation process,” she said. “It serves as a model to present to the administration and to get others involved.”

In addition to student volunteer workers, a full-time professional journalist will be hired by the college to help oversee the program.

According to Gelber, the administration has agreed to fund the journalist’s salary, and students and faculty involved in the program have already begun interviewing young journalists for the job.

Burke and fellow history professor Marge Murphy, who also helped in the program’s creation, would both like to see student volunteers receive academic credit for reporting for the program.

“It will be a big time commitment,” Murphy said. “We were here all weekend for a half-hour show.”

For those who are interested in the program but are unable to commit to large amounts of time, Murphy hoped the college will offer an option to do “audit” work for the broadcast.

Murphy and Burke believe offering credit for students’ reporting and editing work will further legitimize the program. “I’d like to see a more professional journalism option available to students,” Murphy said.

“As a history professor, I see a lot of students who are interested in careers in journalism. After all, journalism is the first draft of history,” she said.

Once the program is running normally, it will air five days a week on the Swarthmore Web site.

This will happen as soon as the students and faculty involved work out the last logistical issues, according to Barboni.

These include the recruiting of more students, hiring a professional journalist to serve as an advisor to the group, which should occur before the end of the weekend, purchasing sound equipment that the administration has agreed to fund, and training student volunteers to use this equipment.

Other than the expense of a professional journalist and a small amount of new equipment, funds needed for the program will be minimal, according to Gelber.

“Radio and telephone just aren’t very expensive,” he said. “And we should have no problem finding young journalists in Iraq who are looking for an outlet for their work.”

Gelber hopes that the broadcast will eventually be linked to a public radio station, but until then he believes the program will bring thousands more people to the Swarthmore Web site, and thus a greater media attention to the college.

“No one else is doing this, and for the college to provide this public service it would further show the nation how unique Swarthmore is,” Gelber said.

Tonight’s meeting for the Iraq radio group will be held in Kohlberg 115 at 7 p.m.

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