The Media and the War. posted by Richard Seymour

Although it goes without saying that the right-wing press will malevolently spin and weave to make every piece of information emerging about the Iraq war look like a cruel indictment of its opponents, there has been an increasing attempt to gauge the quality of reporting and analysis emerging from the antiwar media. In that regard, a few snippets from the latest issue of the media journal Mediactive might prove useful. First of all because it features a transcript of a “Reporting the World” panel discussion with London based journalists affiliated either to ‘neutral’ television news programmes or to antiwar newspapers. I want to first draw your attention to Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, confessing to his paper’s inadequate pre-war coverage:

“[H]ow did we allow Tony Blair to get away with telling us that he had his own special intelligence and we must trust him? And he knew the truth? And we now know that in fact he didn’t have his own special intelligence and in fact virtually the entire lot of it was at least four years old and pre-1998, and we let him get away with that.”

Quite how this sits with that paper’s reluctance to describe Blair as a liar or a fantasist, I leave to your judgment. Here is Kim Sengupta of the Independent:

“I think there was a view that anything the Iraqis said or did was not to be believed and that the US and Britain basically told the truth. I remember being in Baghdad and watching a Pentagon press conference on television, when Donald Rumsfeld talked about how the Iraqis were flouting the UN by firing at American and British aircraft in the no-fly zone.
Now, we all know the no-fly zones were not set up by the UN…
Then, when I got back to London in November, I remember Jack Straw said the same thing, and again, no one actually said no, it’s nothing to do with the UN, it is an illegal no fly zone set up by America, so the Iraqis had the right under international law to fire back.”

Richard Sambrook:

“Well I think that hindsight is a fantastic thing … On the threat, we probably didn’t go into that for the reason that we were not able to pursue it at that stage, and I’m glad that we haven’t let it go and that we’re still pursuing it.”

And later on the question of whether fair coverage was given to the antiwar voice:

“[I]t was the first time, certainly in my professional life, that Britain has gone to war with the country so deeply divided, so how do you achieve some impartiality and some fairness?”

Bill Hayton of BBC World Service adds:

“The stuff that was going on in [RAF] Fairford was staggering. The bombs were on one side of the road and they had to be taken across a public highway and into the airfield and they were being driven along at five miles an hour and people would chain themselves on … this is a fantastic story but we didn’t cover it … People on the buses rang the BBC newsroom and were told they were lying this couldn’t possibly be happening. These stories were not getting out because we weren’t reaching out to these protesters and non-traditional voices to get them in.”

David Seymour, Group Political Editor of the Mirror, explains the late turn to lighter reporting taken by his paper:

“[T]he paper was unremittingly negative … we were all consistent in saying the thing is going completely wrong. Rumsfeld has only sent a quarter of the number of troops he should have sent in there and it is all going wrong … and that was the stage where you were trying to say well do you really want to do that? Is what you are doing to your readers so depressing them?”

Tony Maddox, Senior Vice President of CNN International, explains how the news media tried to sift propaganda from fact:

“I think what was difficult, for 24 hour news specifically, was that this was one of those stories where there were lots of sources of information that were very difficult to check … well, do we sit on this until we check it out, in which case others are going to run with it and we’ll get the blame if it proves to be true, or alternatively we pump it out there and we reserve the right to pull it back afterwards.”

Tenner to anyone who finds more than one instance where CNN retracted a story initially published but later proven to be false. Seriously, I’ll send you a cheque (well, give me a break, I’m a student).

Sambrook also blames 24 hour broadcasting, but has this to say about using senior military sources:

“You get a better flavour but you are now further up the information chain in the field, so that is why you get news like Umm Qasr has fallen and there’s an uprising in Basra, because you are hearing from the military before they have worked out what is really happening…”

The possibility that the military could be lying to the media for some obscure reasons of their own seems to have eluded Mr Sambrook, and I don’t know how to point it out to him without making him feel foolish.

Mr Sambrook later explains how “embedding” emerged:

“After Kosovo Jamie Shea did a speech in Bosnia where he basically said that their frustration had been that it didn’t matter whatever happened, if there were pictures of a civilian tractor being hit that became the narrative of the day. And I think the embedded policy came out of that because he said they would have to grab the pictures of the day to day to grab the narrative. I wonder whether we reflected on that when actually we had no pictures of the Republican Guard, we had no pictures of the western desert – was embedding simply a means of capturing the narrative of the day in a controlled way.”

Phillip Knightley endorses this historical view, but points out a significant problem:

“The main danger I can see with that is … the psychological identification that grows between the embedded correspondent and the soldiers he is with, the use of ‘we’, ‘we’re doing this and we’re doing that’. And it was frankly admitted by on BBC correspondent that he got involved in the action because the soldiers around him said, ‘what are you doing here? Help us!’ so he helped them.”

Audrey Gillan, of The Guardian, talks about censorship during her embedment:

“Censorship was an issue, for some of these discussions I have been involved in; it has not been so much of an issue for other people but certainly I know a lot of journalists who were censored; I was censored, sometimes quite rightly where I was in breach of security and could have brought us into great danger … Certain elements of what was perceived to be anti-Americanism was removed…”

On reporting “unilaterally” (ie: independently), Richard Sambrook avers that it “was more difficult than in any conflict in the last few years, certainly on safety grounds. We were inhibited from being able to work independently to the extent that we would have liked”. Tony Maddox agrees that “The death toll amongst the journalistic community was, and continues to be, disgraceful. It’s appalling the amount of casualties”. Phillip Knightley adds that:

“It is an undisputed fact that fifteen journalists died in this war, more than in any other war with such duration in history. To put it in perspective, in the second World War BBC reporters covered the war in Europe from the time of the Normandy invasion until the surrender of Germany, and lost only two journalists. Fifteen lost in less than a month is a disgraceful state of affairs.
“And we have to remind ourselves that the largest single group of those were killed by American fire … I think the American government is now adopting the attitude towards unilaterals which is simply this: ‘we think it intolerable that any red-blooded American or any coalition journalist should want t report the war with the enemy side and if they do and they get in our way we will fire at them.’ I can’t prove that but I think that is a very, very likely scenario.”

Now, to review some of the reasons offered for the media’s poor performance before, during and after the war: competition with rivals; ideological acceptance of military and political leaders and their statements; ignorance; an obscure inability to “pursue it at that time”; censorship; danger of being killed by US fire; 24 hour news; the use of military sources; the desire to accentuate the positive and thereby avoid depressing readers; and psychological identification with the troops.

The conference produced a number of recommendations which are well worth looking at.

1) “Do not report a ‘line’ from an official source without obtaining and citing independent evidence as to its likely reliability. If, once evidence has been obtained, the reliability seems questionable, STOP repeating the line, or, if you do repeat it, always remind readers or audiences that independent evidence casts doubt on it.”

2) “Acknowledge that the important job of testing arguments is best done if they are juxtaposed with, and weighed against, alternative, countervailing arguments. If these do not issue from traditional sources, be on the lookout for opportunities to explore them by going to non-traditional sources.”

3) “All newsrooms genuinely interested in offering a service to the public must think long and hard about ‘conduit’ journalism and, in particular, whether their Political Correspondents are being used in this way. In covering speeches, statements or news conferences by politicians, precautions should be taken in advance to have reporters and commentators standing by, ready to point out omissions from what is being said, or elisions of key questions. They should not just be put on television automatically as an update.”

4) Fire Andrew Marr.

Okay, I made the last one up, but it would be interesting to see a news organisation seriously attempt to adhere to those very modest recommendations. I couldn’t see it lasting a day. On these ‘conduit’ journalists, one recommendation they might have added would be for them to stop saying things like “Well, what the Prime Minister would say is”, or “Downing Street is eager to”, or “Ariel Sharon is very determined to” etc. If they report like they’re reading the mind of the Prime Minister or President or Foreign Secretary, that is probably because that is precisely where what they are reading emerged from.