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March 2001
Exclusivity Clauses
For reporter Sebastian Junger's piece on the conflict in Sierra Leone, Vanity Fair published what it said were exclusive pictures of the shocking violence. But the same pictures had already been used in a film, and shown on the Internet and worldwide TV.
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When a story is not quite an exclusive, editors hype first and ask questions later. |
In the glamorous unfolding of his career, from tree cutter to foreign correspondent to author of the best-selling The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger has taken on his share of dangerous assignments and won his share of acclaim. And at first glance, Junger's "Terror Recorded," which appeared in the October 2000 issue of Vanity Fair, seems to be further evidence that his cinematic prose style is not incompatible with serious reporting.
Junger relates a trip he took to Sierra Leone, where, after some careful maneuvering, he managed to obtain from a so-called village "Elder" photographs documenting war crimes during that country's civil conflict. The pictures are shocking. In one, a group of grinning men displays a severed head. In a gruesome triptych, soldiers in combat fatigues are seen dragging and then shooting a half-naked civilian at point-blank range.
Vanity Fair did its best to hype the images. The headline copy says the photos are "published here for the first time," and the piece claims that "only a handful of people know [the photos] exist," which is why they could play an "enormous" role in an upcoming war-crimes court. Junger writes that the Elder risked his life to steal the images from a band of rebels, while he, the resourceful reporter, used his contacts at the State Department to smuggle the pictures out of the country.
But as it turns out, the photos have been kicking around Sierra Leone for at least a year. Miles Roston and Peter Leahey, two New York-based documentary-film makers, bought the same set of pictures on the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone, for $25, and used them in a film, Last Chance for Peace, first shown in 1999 at a conference in Jordan and subsequently aired on the Internet and on television around the world.
The pictures may be irrelevant to the outcome of a war-crimes trial, because the U.N. secretary general's office wants the court to consider only those crimes committed after 1996 -- three years after Junger's account suggests the photos were taken. Not only that, but the BBC regularly publishes Sierra Leone war photos on the Internet, because, as its star correspondent Mark Doyle writes via e-mail, they "are readily available. You fly to Freetown and the victims are there. It's quite easy." And as many people who follow Sierra Leone know, the war's bloodiest episode, the invasion of Freetown, was captured by a Sierra Leonean freelance cameraman, and his footage has been shown on CNN as a documentary called Cry Freetown.
Yet Vanity Fair was sufficiently underwhelmed by angry complaints from the documentarians not to print a clarification saying they didn't have an exclusive. Perhaps that's because in a narrow sense, the magazine was not incorrect to say the pictures were "published here for the first time" -- they had merely been broadcast on the Internet, television, and movie screens.
Toward the end of his piece, Junger quotes State Department official Pierre Prosper, who says the pictures may be valuable, and in a reply to the aggrieved documentarians, Vanity Fair's editorial associate Stephen A. Levey wrote that the State Department "can confirm" the "importance of the photographs."
But when Brill's Content spoke to a high-level State Department official close to the matter, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity, that there was "no independent confirmation of the photos," although he was hopeful that the Elder would be instrumental in bringing Sierra Leone criminals to justice. However, because the rebels and government soldiers are continually switching sides in the decade-old civil war, the true story of the photos may never be known. (Junger hedged this by writing that the Elder's story is "impossible to confirm.") Junger was unavailable for comment for this story.
Vanity Fair's stretch is a variation on something that happens all the time. When a story is almost an exclusive, editors and writers seem increasingly likely to hype first and ask questions later. That's what happened, for example, when Bill Clinton gave a round of exit interviews and everyone from Rolling Stone to Esquire billed their stories as revelatory. Then there was the recent cover story in the now defunct George magazine, featuring an "exclusive" interview with Linda Tripp in which she rehashed her complaints about the Clinton administration. According to George editor in chief Frank Lalli, the biggest news in the piece was that "Linda Tripp reminded this country about how the president diminished his office in his affair with Lewinsky." But if that isn't old news, what is? It takes some creativity to imagine its plot, but maybe George's editors were hoping, à la Junger, for a movie deal. 
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