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Media
Death of a journalist
Reporter Sander Thoenes was touring a neighborhood in Dili, the capital of East Timor. Then soldiers opened fire.
By Eve Pell
[09/30/99]

Brand X
Why is Madison Avenue gripped by insanity?
After pondering the "cultural meat values" of Peparami, the only question remaining is: What are these guys smoking?
By Ruth Shalit
[09/29/99]

Media
Who will buy the Village Voice?
The Voice, L.A. Weekly and five other weeklies are put up for sale. Who will buy? A daily? A Web company?
By David Carr
[09/29/99]

Brand X
Hypnotizing slackers for Starbucks, and other visionary acts of marketing research
Through hypnosis, deconstructive theory and other advanced techniques, marketing experts have definitively established that champagne is associated with romance.
By Ruth Shalit
[09/28/99]

Brand X
The return of the hidden persuaders
Driven by a booming economy, a corporate obsession with brand-building and a feelgood philosophy, a motley crew of ex-grad students, starry-eyed admen and hypnosis gurus are probing the consumer unconscious to sell soap.
By Ruth Shalit
[09/27/99]

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Nearly as striking was the story's byline: "By the Associated Press." Not the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, all venerable dailies known for their investigative work, but the stolid AP.

Sure, the AP has broken its share of big stories in the past. In recent years it has done stories on child labor and the slaughter of horses in the U.S., both of which prompted Congressional hearings. And in its 150-year history -- it's the world's largest and oldest news organization -- the group has won 45 Pulitzer Prizes, 18 of them for reporting, and two of those for dispatches filed from Korea during the conflict in the '50s. But since the 1960s, almost all of the AP's Pulitzers have been awarded for their photos -- most notably Nick Ut's oft-reproduced picture of an open-armed Vietnamese girl, naked and napalmed, running right into your life; and Sal Veder's 1974 photo of an Air Force officer (and former POW) returning home to his wife and daughters (their arms stretched wide for other reasons).

The story of the bridge near No Gun Ri, where hundreds of civilians were killed over a three-day period in July 1950, has elements of both those photos: Innocent women and children victimized by war and soldiers returning home. And while the story is being told partly in images -- AP's online Wire contains videos of both veterans and survivors telling their tales, as well as a three-dimensional IPIX photo of the bridge itself -- it is at root the result of old-fashioned reporting. Digging for evidence. Reconstructing events. Finding eye-witnesses. And listening. The story was the fruit of a year's work by an AP special-assignment team: Martha Mendoza, Sang Hun Choe, Charles Hanley and investigative researcher Randy Herschaft. Choe, a Korean AP reporter, broke a story in April 1998 about a group of Koreans who'd survived the massacre and had attempted to make claims against both the U.S. military and the government of South Korea. Their claims were ultimately rebuffed, with the Korean courts saying the statute of limitations had expired and the U.S. Army saying it never had happened: We weren't even there. "So the special assignment team was asked, find out if we were there," Mendoza recalls. "Go to the National Archives and find out if we were there. That should be a relatively simple check. So we went to the National Archives and found not only were we there but there were these orders to fire on civilians, [and to] use discretion with women and children." They figured they had a story. Finding the rest of the records was not so easy, though. The Korean conflict is often called "The Forgotten War." From the way the military has kept its accounts of it, they would like to forget it as well. Digging through a jumble of source material, the team kept finding references to the massacre -- but no clear account of what had happened and why. (The survivors claimed the U.S. soldiers were simply convinced that all the Koreans were insurgents and killing them all was their only recourse.) It was the early days of the conflict, the troops on the scene were either very green or burned-out survivors World War II. That and a lack of knowledge of the Koreans -- the people themselves, the very meaning of the conflict -- made the atmosphere ripe for disaster.

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