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Glimpses of Hamdan trial news coverage

By Mark Obbie

Two recent stories from the trial of Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan combine to provide a snapshot of the logistics involved in providing coverage of the trial. Yesterday, Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg noted that the majority of reporters who flew in for the start of the trial flew right back out after only two days. In the fifth item of her reporter's notebook, Rosenberg notes that the trial-opening contingent of about three dozen news organizations had dwindled within a couple of days to 11 people: four newspapers, three wire services, one radio reporter and "an audio-video team from This American Life, which came to Guantánamo for gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Hamdan trial."She doesn't ID the four newspapers, but I'd guess they're The New York Times, Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Then, in today's Times, longtime GuantĂ¡namo-justice reporter William Glaberson explains in his "Guantánamo Memo" that "freedom of the press has its limits at Guantánamo": military-run press conferences and escorts to corral reporters; limited and often-delayed release of court documents; and tight control over the closed-circuit video feed to an overflow room, editing out certain faces and details. Glaberson, whose article mainly contrasts the Hamdan trial procedures with an ordinary American criminal trial, ruins one military flack's breakfast with this graf:

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 29, 2008 (boomark / email).