Well, the blog Cincinnati Beacon has picked up the Grandma in Iraq story where we left off. Last we heard, the upbeat “Grandma in Iraq” blog — written by an Army Public Affairs Officer, but hosted by the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper’s online division — had new biodata identifying its author, Suzanne M. Fournier, as an Army flack.
A man identifying himself as Gil Fournier, Suzanne’s husband, has written in to the Beacon with the backstory of how his wife started writing for the Enquirer:
I was interviewed by the Cincinnati Enquire [sic] about how I felt about my wife going to Iraq, etc. During the course of this interview, I mentioned to the reporter that she was thinking of writing a blog. The reporter asked me if she would consider writing it through the Enquire’s blog section. I told him to ask her. He called her, and he asked her if she would allow her blog to be carried by the Enquire.
She told him she would check with her higher ups and get back to him, and that he should do the same.
Supposedly, he got all the permission he needed, and told my wife, and me, that he did. At that time, he knew without the slightest doubt, that she was a public affairs officer with the Corps of Engineers in Cincinnati. If you had read your own paper, or wish to do now, before responding, you would know without a doubt who she was and who she worked for.
He was responding to an email from Tom Callinan, editor of the Enquirer, to the Beacon. In it, Callinan questions the efficacy of “pointing fingers at the well-intentioned souls” who set up the blog. “It sounded like a great idea,” he wrote, “but we should have poked further into her p.r. background with the military and put a disclaimer with her blog.”
Ms. Fournier’s oldest son also responded to Callinan’s note. “[T]o say ‘we’ll need to be mindful of the sensibilities and ethics…’ is a complete and utter cop-out,” he wrote. “Mrs. Fournier is among the most ethical people one would ever meet. Her stories are honest, fair, and non-political. . . . Don’t stop this rare glimpse of reality in reporting because of a few malcontents.”
I don’t consider myself a malcontent, at least not most days. And I am willing to believe that Ms. Fournier is a good person. And I even think a blog like Fournier’s is a good idea — the Iraq reconstruction is an important topic and worthy of more coverage than it gets.
But if the Enquirer wants a blog on Iraq reconstruction, why not send a real reporter over there to write it? If Fournier wants her own blog, she’s entitled to it — and there are plenty of free online tools she can use to set it up. But no one has yet convinced me why it should be part of the Enquirer. Newspapers have a mission — to bring objective news to their readers. They hire reporters to fulfill that mission. Nowhere in that scheme does an army flack get to write directly to a paper’s pages. Or am I missing something?
