War News Radio
A U.S. soldier returns home from Iraq pregnant. Her husband is outraged."But you should be happy," she tells him. "I came back with an Iraqi prisoner."
This nugget of humor is brought to you by War News Radio, an innovative and sometimes irreverent form of journalism practiced by students at Swarthmore College.
The joke, related in English by an Iraqi businessman, aired in a segment titled "Comedy at War" on a half-hour weekly radio program run by students and devoted exclusively to Iraq.
War News Radio was created a year ago as an antidote and supplement to mainstream media coverage of Iraq.
Convinced that commercial news outlets focused too heavily on violence and incremental developments, the students tried to home in on more personal topics — from 6,000 miles away.
The program's reporters have never been to Iraq. Instead, they troll the Internet for e-mail addresses of ordinary Iraqis, then use a free Web-based phone system to interview them. They also track down U.S. troops, Iraqi movers and shakers, and experts on everything Iraq.
The reporters have produced incisive and startling reports on daily life in Iraq. They have interviewed an Iraqi doctor whose daughter was killed at a U.S. checkpoint, a U.S. soldier whose convoy was hit by a roadside bomb, and the top executives of the Iraqi airline and stock exchange.
The stories tend to be intimate and intensely personal. And unlike most radio or TV stories from Iraq, they run from four to seven minutes and sometimes longer — a lifetime in commercial broadcasting.
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"We acknowledge that we're not getting the full picture, but at least we get close," Elhai said. "We acknowledge our biases and try to work past them."
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