The Nieman Symposium, sponsored by the College of Communication, brings journalists and media experts from all over the country to Marquette’s campus to discuss a specific topic. This year, they will be discussing aspects of the war in Iraq.

Katherine Skiba, a Washington-based reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a 1978 Marquette graduate, will be one of the panelists for the symposium. She was an embedded reporter with the Army’s 159th Aviation Brigade, a part of the 101st Airborne Divsion, during the war in Iraq.

“Philip Seib, the Nieman chair at Marquette (and organizer of the symposium), asked me to come, and as an alum(na) of Marquette, I was delighted to come back for the experience,” she said. “I also get to visit my colleagues while I’m here.”

Among Skiba’s experiences was being fired upon by an Iraqi missile.

“I was frightened to death,” she said. “We were warned about the dangers, but it was still hard to deal with.”

An organizer of the embedded reporter program, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bryan Whitman is also appearing at the symposium.

“I was involved in training for the media prior to the actual embedding,” Whitman said. “I then identified embedding opportunities that existed after I looked at war plans, and editors chose who was embedded — after all, who knows better who’s capable of the assignment than the editors?”

Skiba does not agree with accusations that the American reporters were not objective due to their dependence on the people they were reporting on.

“We had a keyhole view of the war,” she said. “We’re not there to see the whole picture. The idea that (embedded reporters) were co-opted by the American forces is greatly overstated. What I did see, though, was bravery, sacrifice, and dedication; some were doing three jobs at once, 24/7.”

Skiba said her main focus was Wisconsin residents in the unit with which she was embedded. The unit started in Kuwait and arrived on the outskirts of Baghdad before she returned home.

Whitman agreed with Skiba’s reaction to the accustations.

“The claim, which I heard mostly from journalists who weren’t embedded, doesn’t give journalists enough credit,” Whitman said. “It presumes that they can’t be objective or fair, and so it sells the journalists short.”

Panelist Mohammed el-Nawawy, professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., and co-author of a book on the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, disagreed.

“I cannot imagine how someone who relies on someone else for their lives can be objective,” he said.

Whitman said the topic of media coverage after most embedded reporters went home should be discussed.

“I think what the American people don’t have is an opportunity to see and hear is a cross-section of activities across Iraq,” he said.

However, he said that such events as the bombings against American interests in Iraq were news that should be covered.

Andrew Barrett, a panelist and assistant professor of political science at Marquette, agreed the discussion was needed.

“In the coverage of Iraq, there are the same problems that the American media has at any time — the tendency to sensationalize, dramatize and take out of context,” Barrett said.

The keynote speaker for the symposium is Michael Getler, the ombudsman for The Washington Post.

“An ombudsman is an internal critic of the paper and, if you will, the readers’ editor,” Getler said. “I pass on concerns of readers, write a Sunday column about the readers’ comments to me, and issue a weekly internal critique to the staff here.”

Getler said Seib asked him to speak at the symposium because he was familiar with Getler’s work. Seib’s father, Charles Seib, had once been the ombudsman for The Washington Post.

Getler’s speech will come after two series of discussions.

“I will be talking about how the press has handled this new era after Sept. 11, with a focus on the war in Iraq,” he said.