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Reporting Iraq: What went Right, What went Wrong from Reporting the World  $file/july15transcript.pdf
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Reporting Iraq: What went right? What went wrong? By Jake Lynch, Co-Director, Reporting the World (This account will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book on the media during the Iraq War, Mediawar due for release Easter 2004) This paper is based on the discussion held among senior London-based journalists by Reporting the World, the journalism think-tank, on July 15, 2003. Introduction The case for invading Iraq remained a matter of public concern in the aggressor countries - the US, UK, Spain and Australia - to an extent unmatched before, during or, particularly, after any other war in recent times. Echoing this was an audible level of disquiet among journalists. Many who had reported from Iraq, or spent the period leading up to and spanning the war in charge of papers or newsdesks, joined in a discussion about the coverage - both in print and in person - which, again, was unprecedented in both scope and tone. One gathering of editors and senior correspondents convened in London under the auspices of the Media Guardian. Then Michael Wolff, media critic of New York Magazine, chaired a similar meeting, in New York. In a report of proceedings, he observed how recriminations, over the conduct and coverage of the war, were now feeding off each other: "Clearly, the war will be more of a story. It gets bigger every day. Not least of all because the media is now having to rewrite itself. The questions we failed to ask, the stories we declined to pursue, have surely helped to get us into the present mess." Reporting the World Finally, in London, on July 15, probably the most senior of these gatherings took place under the banner of Reporting the World (RtW) in conjunction with the security think-tanks, Saferworld, BASIC (British-American Security Information Council) and ISIS (International Security Information Service). Conceived as a series of discussions, publications and a website ( ) mainly for UK journalists, on the ethics of covering conflicts, the Observer newspaper described Reporting the World as "the nearest thing we have to a journalism think-tank."
On this occasion, the discussion, chaired by Annabel McGoldrick, was titled Reporting Iraq - what went right? What went wrong? Participants included the Editor of the Guardian; Heads of News from both the BBC and CNN International; Foreign Editors of the Times and Guardian, Group Political Editor of the Mirror and several distinguished correspondents who followed events either in Baghdad or in embedded positions with forward units. What follows is an edited transcript of the proceedings, organised under the main headings of relevance to the media's performance before, and during the war respectively. Before that, a summary of the main Reporting the World observations about the coverage, and recommendations for changes in covering future conflicts: Observations In many respects, coverage of the Iraq story was of a noticeably higher standard, in UK media, than that seen in previous wars. Some journalists did expose misinformation and misrepresentations in the case for war after both Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Allied Force, the Nato bombing of Kosovo, in 1999. But, on those occasions, pursuing such angles remained a minority media pursuit. In this case, they were kept firmly on the agenda as a matter of vital public interest. UK readers and audiences were much more likely, in this war, to be alerted to the possibility that claims from the proponents of war might be propaganda, or at least that information might be being presented in the service of a clearly identified agenda, and should be judged as such. There was a much greater 'meta-discussion' than in previous wars. There were other significant changes, too. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger drew attention to new difficulties, for governments intent on war and their propagandists, with the "dehumanisation and demonisation" of the 'Other', which has remained an essential aspect of war propaganda. That became much harder to do, he said, because of distinguished reporting on the people of Baghdad, their hopes and fears, by correspondents such as the Guardian's own Suzanne Goldenberg and three participants in this discussion - Lindsey Hilsum of Channel Four News, Anton Antonowicz of the Mirror and David Chater of Sky News. THE IRAQI THREAT - were readers and audiences misled? How? The main concern of many participants was the glaring discrepancy between the impression given, of the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in coverage before the war; and the evidence available afterwards. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, this issue continued to be picked over at great length in coverage of the UK Government's intelligence dossiers - presented as evidence from which the rationale for invading Iraq could be deduced but perhaps deployed as post-hoc justification for a decision already made. The issues for journalists can be illustrated by examining just two of the claims made, before the war, about the supposed threat from Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction', and the way it was handled in the news. One was the allegation that a 'deadly drone' aircraft could be loaded with anthrax spores to menace global security; the other, the demand that Iraq account for 10,000 litres of anthrax from 1991 to prove it was cooperating with UN weapons inspectors. The fatal flaw in most coverage of such lines was that they tended to be repeated far more often than they were assessed or examined. (The figure, 'Anthrax - 10,000 litres' found its way into lots of television graphics, for instance, as was perhaps part of the intention). This was one of the less credible claims because if, as 'litres' implies, the allegation was that Iraq had kept anthrax in liquid form, then, as any biochemist could have said, it would have had a shelf life of a couple of years at the most, ie it could not still be a threat 12 years later. The drone should have rung alarm bells because of the steady dripfeed of 'germ weapon threat' stories over the years, almost always attributed to nameless intelligence sources, which centred on drone aircraft. Any of these stories could have been knocked down with one simple fact - the range of the aircraft in question. In the mid-1990s, it was a slightly more sophisticated version, an M-18 Dromeda, capable of flying some 300 miles or so. It meant that if, for instance, stories about threats to New York or Sydney were to stand up, it would have to be refuelled around 20 times en route from Iraq. In the discussion, Lindsey Hilsum, stationed in Baghdad for Channel Four News, recalled that this, above all other claims about the supposed Iraqi threat, revealed to her "the extent to which we were being sold a pup". RECOMMENDATION - 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. It might have been as well, in this case, to remind readers and audiences from time to time of specifics about the history of dubious claims of an imminent threat from Iraqi chemical or biological weapons; and to make provision to hear from experts on the question of whether Iraq could have projected them, in this way, beyond its own borders. ENABLING DEBATE - Did we do a good job of equipping readers and audiences to form their own views on the merits - or otherwise - of attacking Iraq? This is where the coverage could have benefited from a much more innovative and creative approach, particularly during the period - bracketed, roughly, by the big demonstrations of February 15, and the invasion itself - when the debate was arguably at its most relevant. The BBC's War Guidelines, issued in January 2003, describe concisely a task many journalists - both from the corporation and elsewhere - would recognise as a core function. Journalists should "enable the national and international debate", they say, by "allow[ing] the arguments to be heard and tested". They continue: "all views should be reflected to mirror the depth and spread of opinion." Key arguments in favour of war on Iraq boiled down to five essential propositions: The crisis - later, the war - is really 'about' WMD These pose an authentic threat to regional and world security The only way to rid the world of this threat is regime change Regime change is the only way to alleviate the grim humanitarian situation in Iraq The only way to bring about regime change is war Of these, the second took centre stage after the war, and, by the time of this discussion, had raised the question uppermost, by then, in participants' minds - why was it not interrogated more effectively beforehand? Before the war, the only one of these propositions really put to the test was the third. Crucially, the Franco-German call for the inspectors to be given more time offered an alternative, allowing readers and audiences to juxtapose what they were hearing from the US and UK governments with a countervailing proposition, and weigh them in the balance. In all the other areas, countervailing propositions attracted little or no coverage. In the first, a large cross-section of the UK public believed all along that the crisis was not, or not primarily, 'about' WMD at all, but about a US agenda to install and maintain compliant governments in the world's main oil-producing region. In a survey for Channel Four, which presented respondents with a menu of possible explanations, the 'security threat' topped the poll, with 22%; but only by a narrow margin from the most popular alternative view. Fully 21% told pollsters they thought it was really all about oil. A second poll, for the Pew Research Center, setting up the question in a different way, found the oil theory was shared by fully 44% of the British, and large majorities in many other countries. Far from being "reflected to mirror the depth and spread of opinion", however, this was almost entirely absent as an analytical factor in coverage of the build-up to war. Likewise, with propositions four and five, there were plenty of ideas circulating, for bringing about regime change without war (learning from the process which eventually brought down the iron curtain) and for improving the human rights situation of Iraqi people - but these, too were largely excluded. Why were these perspectives, on three out of the five key arguments for war, so conspicuously missing from most coverage? At least partly because countervailing propositions, in these areas, were being put forward by what one participant, BBC World Service Europe region editor Bill Hayton, called "non-traditional sources." RECOMMENDATION - 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. NEWS MANAGEMENT - A fascinating input from Mary Dejevsky, diplomatic correspondent and foreign leader-writer on the Independent, highlighted the use of the Parliamentary Lobby in news management. Key security stories, including the September dossier on Iraq's weapons, were handed out to Political Correspondents - bypassing specialist reporters who might have polluted them by raising, at the outset, some difficult questions. Dejevsky drew rueful chuckles of recognition from participants when she described herself as "the proud possessor of a denunciation email from John Williams at the Foreign Office who accused me of 'consistent negative coverage' and how I need to call up more frequently to 'check the line' with the Foreign Office, as a lot of my colleagues do." This well-known technique of news management rests on a symbiotic relationship within the Westminster village. Compliant reporters get a steady dripfeed of exclusive stories from official sources; spin-doctors get a reliable conduit for their message to enter the public realm on favourable terms. But it proved, in this story, a major obstacle in the task of conveying a proper understanding to readers and audiences. The effect is exacerbated by television news - particularly 24-hour news - in which a set-piece speech, statement or press conference by a senior politician is automatically treated as 'news' - regardless of whether what is being said addresses, or evades, the important questions. RECOMMENDATION - 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'. The discussion: BEFORE THE WAR Why were the holes and discrepancies in the Government's case on Weapons of Mass Destruction not exposed before the war? ED PILKINGTON - Home News Editor, the Guardian (Foreign Editor during the war) The weird thing about this war, and uniquely in my experience, is that the war itself is becoming increasingly a sideshow. The talk about embedding and talk about Basra, talk about Umm Qasr and all that - it is becoming increasingly marginal to the main question of how 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 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. MARK BRAYNE - BBC Trauma Unit and Director, DART Centre Europe I am fascinated by the psychology of what is happening with self-delusion. To explain it extremely briefly... we each of us have what psychologists call a 'schema' inside ourselves, which is a kind of roadmap of how the world works. When something challenges us that doesn't fit that schema, we can do one of two things. We can change our internal schema and adapt and say, "oh well I was wrong," and we move forward to the next level of understanding and awareness or we can say "I am right," how are we going to adjust the external schema and continue to search for evidence that I was right in the first place. I think we can draw conclusions from that what is going on at levels of manipulation of information. KIM SENGUPTA - 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, they were set up by the US and Britain and France, they were nothing to do with the UN in that sense. But not one single reporter in that Pentagon press conference raised that question. Now, with huge apologies to our American friends here, someone said ah, well, that's the American press for you. 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 under international law had the right to fire back . I think to a certain extent what is happening now is because we were intrinsically less than critical enough at the time. LINDSEY HILSUM - Diplomatic correspondent, Channel Four News [In Baghdad] we only really understood the extent to which we were being sold a pup a few days before the war when the Americans suddenly got very excited about a drone, which they said the weapons inspectors had hidden in their report but this drone was a terrible threat to the future of the world. Now, the drone was like something out of Aeromodellers Monthly, it was made out of the fuselage of an aircraft, it was done up with duct tape and it had an engine which, as one American reporter put it, "was smaller than a weed-whacker", which I gather is even smaller than a lawn mower, and we were told the Iraqis had hidden this programme. We actually had pictures from the November trade fair where they were trying to sell these drones to other Arab countries and they were painted fluorescent pink, so that people would notice them. Now the Americans were telling us that this drone was a threat to the security of the world and it was only when we got to that point that we felt bold enough to say, "hang on - I don't think so." RICHARD SAMBROOK - BBC Head of News Well I think that hindsight is a fantastic thing, and clearly we've been through the developments of the last few weeks wishing perhaps we had raised some of these questions last autumn or in the early part of this year and tried to sort them out then, but we didn't. On the threat, we probably didn't 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. ALAN RUSBRIDGER - Editor, the Guardian We had the same difficulty as the BBC over sources. We were hearing a lot of the same stuff as Richard was but it was coming out through necessarily anonymous sources and that makes the whole business of securing stuff precisely very difficult. So I think that process will go on and on and on and take many months, if not years to peel back. ANDY MCLEAN - Saferworld One interesting question for me is why did Niger not make a bigger story earlier on? Because, before the war, the IAEA said these are forged documents and so on, and it got some coverage but didn't really get picked up. I remember wondering, why were more people not running with this? MARY DEJEVKSY - Diplomatic Correspondent, the Independent It wasn't picked up because chemical and biological weapons trumped it and because the IAEA said we don't believe they have nuclear weapons - so nuclear weapons were basically off the agenda - what was on the agenda was chemical and biological. Now the chemical and biological weapons have gone, at least for the moment - that is why the nuclear thing has come back. Was the anti-war case given fair coverage? BILL HAYTON - Europe Region editor, BBC World Service We obviously covered the big demonstration [on February 15] in a fair and proper way but we should have reached out more to dig out these voices of dissent. The stuff that was going on in [RAF] Fairford [the air base from which US B52 bombers took off to bomb Iraq] was staggering. The bombs were on one side of the road and they had to be taken across a public highway into the airfield and they were being driven along at five miles an hour and people would chain themselves on and bomb vehicles kept moving with people chained to them, this is a fantastic story but we didn't cover it. There was a protest where people went out in buses from London, they were held at a road block several miles from Fairford, for a couple of hours, then turned around and bundled off, they would have been arrested if they didn't, there was a police escort on all four sides of the coaches. 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 on because we weren't reaching out to these protestors and these non-traditional voices to get them in. JAKE LYNCH - Co-Director, Reporting the World The BBC's War Guidelines say "all views should be reflected to mirror the depth and spread of opinion", which is a very useful phrase and honoured perhaps in some cases more in the breach than the observance. They also call for the arguments to be "heard and tested". Just briefly to review the main arguments in favour of the war: firstly the crisis, later the war is really about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and threat they pose to global security; secondly, the only way to remove or neutralise that threat is by regime change; the third was the only way to achieve regime change is war and fourth which was kind of made up along the way was that war would therefore do most to improve the humanitarian situation for the Iraqi people. Now, I would suggest that of those four the only one that was really tested was the second, because it could be juxtaposed with an alternative proposition, the French, German and later Russian position that no, the only way to neutralise that threat is not by regime change but also by letting the inspectors continue their work. So personally, I think the lesson from the reporting of this conflict might be that we need to look harder and cast our net wider for alternative propositions to set alongside the propositions being given to us in the grid, the Downing Street grid, the White House grid or the Pentagon grid of daily developments, because otherwise they will be lost beneath the daily deluge of troop deployments, dossiers, press briefings, diplomatic shuttles, etc, etc, which can obscure questions that we started with. RICHARD SAMBROOK - BBC Head of News I think the period before the war was very peculiar. In a sense you have two discussions, one about the pre-conflict period and then about the conflict itself, and for the BBC the pre-conflict period was very difficult for us because it 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? DAVID SEYMOUR - Group Political Editor, the Mirror What in fact happened, was that it was partly a feeling in the office, and partly getting some sort of feedback, it wasn't that we were particularly pro or anti - although obviously we were anti - but that the paper was unremittingly negative and the sort of stories like the rescue of (Private) Lynch were the odd - untrue as it may be - were the odd positive thing to come through. If you remember, I think by the second week, all the papers, even the pro-war papers, we were all consistent in saying the thing is going completely wrong. Rumsfeld has only sent a half or a quarter of the number of troops he should have sent in there and it is all going wrong. We looked at the paper, and you would have had one of Anton [Antonowicz]'s great reports [from Baghdad] in there but it would be, from a British perspective, negative - we were killing civilians, Americans were killing civilians and then you see somebody else killed, and then you see something going wrong somewhere else and that was at 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? ALAN RUSBRIDGER - Editor, the Guardian In every war you try and depersonalise the enemy and dehumanise them but I think having someone like Suzanne Goldenberg's quality inside Baghdad talking to ordinary Iraqis and making them terribly human I think is a new element in war, and you can see why politicians don't like it but it also makes it extremely difficult to go to war on a nation when you are getting that kind of image and I think the humanity of her reporting and Lindsey's (Hilsum, Channel Four News) was just of a different calibre and texture from the reporting we'd seen before and I think that will in some way made fundamental changes in how war is seen. How was the news managed on the 'Home Front'? MARY DEJEVSKY - Diplomatic Correspondent, the Independent The two dossiers which have now become so much the topic of debate were not presented to us, the diplomatic correspondents who might have been expected to be given the dossiers for perusal first. The first one was released to the lobby, which became a practice, and the second one was released I gather at 7am in the morning to correspondents for the Sunday newspapers covering a trip to the US. So we were basically cut out of the loop. And there was that feeling the whole time that anybody who had sort of specialist expertise or experience in London in the Whitehall operation was deliberately given sort of second class treatment. The second problem with covering the Foreign Office was that you were continually trumped by the Lobby, that the briefings that the Foreign Office conducted basically duplicated what the Lobby had been given and you had to compare notes to pick up what was going on. I now think, with the benefit of hindsight that a lot of people at the Foreign Office were very unhappy at the sort of stuff that they were feeding us. I was certainly extremely unhappy with the stuff the Foreign Office was feeding us, including the two dossiers, and the spin that the Foreign Office was putting on it, to the point where I am the proud possessor of a denunciation email from John Williams at the Foreign Office who accused me of 'consistent negative coverage' and how I need to call up more frequently to 'check the line' with the Foreign Office as a lot of my colleagues do... I would just like to make two points about the dossiers. I think we probably all do a lot of breastbeating in retrospect as to why didn't we challenge them, well from somebody who did challenge them to the Foreign Office, the context was very different because then there was always the risk that, the very next day, they were going to find piles of the stuff all over Iraq in the very places where they said would do, so you were at a great disadvantage expressing the scepticism that I was doing. It was a high-risk thing to do and it was also very difficult for editors, because they were very reluctant to pursue that line as a reporting line. They were happy to pursue it in editorials, columns - fine. The discussion: DURING THE WAR Did we manage to sift propaganda from fact? TONY MADDOX - Senior vice president of CNN International 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 and you were in the process of having to say, 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. So there was quite a bit of that balancing act going on and no-one got away clean on that, we were all caught up in this. [On] the point about Basra and Umm Qasr and the different reports which were based on reasonable sourcing at the time but as the conflict went on we became, all of us, more savvy about what we were broadcasting and I think it is certainly true to say that if I had my time over again there are certain stories we would have sat on and certain stories we would have gone to air with more quickly. RICHARD SAMBROOK - BBC Head of News You get a better flavour but you are now further up the information chain in the field, so that is why you get the 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 happening and you are live on air telling the world about it before they really know what is going on. That's compounded by the nature of 24 hour broadcasting, where the audience are alongside you trying to work out what is happening, and even if we think we can understand the issues it raises I am quite sure the audience doesn't, which is why you got people saying, "the BBC says this and it turns out to be wrong". Well, what we said was what we thought we'd been told at the time, and if it then turned out to be wrong we had to go back and correct it. JOHN KAMPFNER, Political Editor, New Statesman and reporter on the BBC Correspondent film, War Spin: We focussed mostly on the Jessica Lynch story [for the film] and... we were wilfully misinterpreted by the Pentagon. They suggested that we were saying that the Americans should not have gone in heavily armed, with reinforcements, into Nasiriyah, into the hospital to seize her. After, all the idea that the Fedayeen had gone, they'd been told it, they were right not necessarily to trust it. No, the issue - as the Iraqi doctors told us in our film - was the way it was spun by the Americans afterwards, turning what was a pretty professional and heavy operation into a heroic operation. What they needed to have said afterwards was, yes, we went into there all guns blazing, we were right to do that, however, we could have simply opened the door of the hospital and walked in, and the doctors were there, there was no military there, ready to hand her over, in fact they wanted to hand her over a couple of days earlier in an ambulance, but the Americans started firing at the ambulance, so they had to go back. So it's interesting to see the Americans [now] basically resiling from all their criticism. BILL HAYTON - Europe Region editor, BBC World Service The story that the Iraqis had fired Scuds, if they had fired Scuds that is a prima facie case that they were in breach of UN resolutions. Now it may have been a military spokesman that said it but I'm afraid we repeated it unchallenged, we didn't say missiles, we said Scuds, it went round too long in my view. Was it possible to report properly from Baghdad? LINDSEY HILSUM - Diplomatic correspondent, Channel Four News There were complicated decisions every day on how far to push it. You are not supposed to go out by yourself, you're supposed to only go out on the Saga tours holiday bus which takes you on a rubble tour. Now at what point do you not do that and say 'bugger it' I need to go out and talk to people and we all made different decisions, crept out and talked to people with or without camera and so on. Looking back I wish I had done more than that but in the end we survived and we got out as accurate a picture as we could. I think one of the important things that we did which we could do was to reflect to some extent what Iraqi people thought and felt. We could not obviously report a lot of what Iraqi people said to us. Some Iraqis talked to me about what they felt about Saddam Hussein, about the regime. I remember one student who came up to me and said, "we want this war, we want change." Nothing in the world would have made me report that because that young man could be dead now if I had done. We have all been criticised for censoring ourselves, but I am glad I don't have the death of this young man on my conscience, what can you do? But I think other Iraqis were able to be honest to us about what it felt like to be under bombing and missile attacks and the insecurity they felt and I think that as the war progressed and it was clear that Iraqi Government was losing, we were able to report more and more what people really said to us. KIM SENGUPTA - the Independent There was self-censorship for pretty laudable reasons. I've also got to say before the war there was also self-censorship for purely selfish reasons. We wanted that all-important golden visa, we wanted to not upset people too much, and to that extent self-censorship went on and I am pretty much as guilty as anyone else on that. ANTON ANTONOWICZ - Chief Feature Writer, the Mirror Just briefly back to Baghdad and embeds I can't help but think that all of us in Baghdad were in fact embedded, in fact we were being held in a kind of custody by fairly horrible people who wanted to show us very horrible things for their own even more ghastly motives but actually it was quite easy in Baghdad, because you would just follow the script. The opportunities for being analytical on the ground were very very few. What one could do in the end was come out with little more, I suspect than the Christmas cracker platitude that war is a horrible thing and innocent people get killed. Was it possible to report properly from embedded positions with US and UK forward units? AIR MARSHAL SIR TIM GARDEN - Centre for Defence Studies, King's College, London and former assistant chief of defence staff The embedded bit seemed to me to be done pretty well by those who were there, but you have to remember that that actually determines what the news agenda is and actually there were lot of important things that were not covered by embedded journalists - special forces operations, what was going on in the western desert and what is probably when you look at the endgame of all of this, the thing that determined the way the war was shaped - that was the full air task order activity which isn't sort of the embedded bit, and the failure from my point of view, was not the journalists' failure but was an extraordinary failure in the Centcom Headquarters which was appalling. RICHARD SAMBROOK - BBC Head of News After Kosovo Jamie Shea did a speech in Bosnia where he basically said their frustration had been 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 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 and was embedding simply a means of capturing the narrative of the day in a controlled way. PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY - Journalist & Author of The First Casualty The embedded idea rose partly out the fact that in the war against the former Yugoslavia NATO succeeded in winning that war without the loss of a single Nato military person for the first time in the history of war. And the military looked around and said wait a minute, if there was no military heroes talk about explains why all the journalists focussed on the human interest stories and the victims, bad for the military! We don't want them writing stories about people being bombed and shot and murdered, so this time we are going get over that by embedding the correspondents with the military so that all they can write about is the activities of the troops that they are embedded with. What are we going to do with the next war? Are we going to go along with the embedded idea? The main danger I can see with that is not so much that you'll be limited to the group that you are with but the psychological identification that grows between the embedded correspondent and the soldiers he is with, the use of the "we", "we're doing this, and we're doing that." And frankly admitted by one 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 - Reporter, the Guardian (embedded with the Household Cavalry) We have to acknowledge that being embedded has its limitations because you do not have very much freedom of movement, ability to go off and interview who you like. We have no translators with us, basically no control, we're seeing what they want us to see, although in my experience it wasn't that they could control what I saw because I was there with them, a frontline fighting unit, so they couldn't say you can't come here or there because I was actually with them. 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. Other issues were simply stylistic, things like "running for cover" was changed to "dashing for cover" because running for cover implies cowardice. Certain elements of what was perceived to be anti-Americanism was removed and Ed (Pilkington) who was the Foreign Editor of the Guardian at the time, had asked me to do this piece about the situation we were talking about, about boredom. We were in the desert for a couple of days, not knowing what the hell was going on and what we were going to do. I went out and spoke to all the guys and they were like, "well this is just rubbish". And basically I had to cut back lots of it, because they said, "we'll all get sent home if you run that. We can't say that the whole unit is really fucked off." ANDREW NORTH - BBC Radio Reporter I was with the US Marines, which was very different because there was no censorship for me at all. I was live on air, sometimes up to forty times a day, and no-one was checking what I was doing once we crossed over. I had to get permission before we crossed over the line, to go live, but after that I just reported whatever was happening. What the Americans saw they would get out of it was that by having so many journalists out there they knew that everyone would be desperate to get on air to get their particular bit of action, it did generate a lot of drama and then as a result of that you did forget about the big picture, there was so much of this stuff coming through. Yet at the same time we did get information. Given what was going on at Centcom - Centcom were not giving anything. The embeds, and I've heard this from so many different editors, saying that the stuff we were providing on the ground was the only information they were getting. Were western media too squeamish in not showing the gory effects of war? LINDSEY HILSUM, Diplomatic Correspondent, Channel Four News: When I was young we used to bang on about this thing called, 'the New World Information Order' which was going to be imposed by UNESCO, it has in fact been created by technology. There were two Indian TV stations there [in Baghdad], there was a Bangladeshi reporter for a newspaper, Philippines television was there, everybody was in Baghdad. The rest of the world was not depending on European and American broadcasters and newspapers anymore, so that is a real change, something new and very important. PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY - Journalist & Author of The First Casualty The ending of the western monopoly of television reporting, the arrival on the scene of Al Jazeera and Arab TV are going to change the nature of what the western reporters have to do. And there'll be more gratuitous violence I am afraid because the whole point of Arab TV is going to be to show victims, they'll be victim correspondents, victim correspondents seen on the scene, gratuitous violence, the real face of battle is going to force western TV networks to consider whether they too can continue to ignore what war all about. RICHARD SAMBROOK, BBC Head of News: The pictures issue is a narrow one, it is easy to say we need to show the horror of war for people to understand it, I think that is too easy and cheap an argument, we have responsibility as broadcaster for what we are putting into peoples living rooms with families watching. Having said that I think we got it wrong this time. You have to decide where you draw the line, we were probably too conservative this time. We need to look very hard at that, but it's wrong to think you can just pump out pictures of carnage. Were US media concerned with telling, or selling? DANNY SCHECHTER - Executive Editor, MediaChannel.org We've had a divided country at least since November 2000 probably before, the red states and the blue states, the Gore versus Bush people, the large unprecedented anti-war movement which materialised in the US and grew alongside movements in other parts of the world, led to the feeling on the part of a lot of people who were active, that they were electronically disenfranchised, that their voice was not showing up on American television, that their voices were not being included for the most part in the American media and there are studies analysing the guests on television shows, how many took what positions, and you see a process of marginalisation of voices who are critical of the Administration. We also have the Fox effect, which is a very significant effect of a news channel that was taking a political stance and packaging it as fair and balanced journalism, real journalism even, and aggressively going after journalists it didn't like, who were critical in any way or perceived to be critical. Peter Arnett for example was targeted by Fox news which was one of the reasons that MSNBC responded. MSNBC set out to transform its programme schedule to out-Fox Fox as they put it, and the head of the channel said they were up against the 'patriotism police' - people who were actually monitoring MSNBC coverage and so they moved to the position of putting promos on the air that said, 'God bless America'; 'let freedom reign' and the rest of it. So we had a wave of patriotic correctness. ... I've tried to argue that essentially that there were three media wars going on. The war that you saw in Europe, the war that people saw in the Middle East and the war that we saw in America and the different wars with different focus and a different emphasis... I challenge this notion that was very common in the media heads of power, that we can't get ahead of our audience, the audience was gung-ho for the war, therefore we have to give the audience what it wants and I think in doing so there was an abdication of journalistic responsibility. TONY MADDOX - Senior vice president of CNN International The point you make Danny is a very fair one, many people who have seen CNN-USA saw it criticise the robustness of the challenges that were being made to the US government. The fact is CNN-USA went a lot further than most of the other US networks in what it did and still finds itself now being derided as unpatriotic, leftwing, too Democratic, because there is a spirit of intolerance which I perceive as a Brit when I visit the US and talk to my American colleagues, a spirit of intolerance which seems to have got inculcated across beyond Fox. People talk about Fox a lot, Fox are a cable channel like we are, on a day to day basis they only have a limited amount of appeal but its effect seems to me to have run much wider and certainly don't discount the effect of talk radio which is enormously well listened to and has quite a right-wing agenda so this idea that anyone who is not for us is against us, and they created this zero-sum game is actually quite widespread. Now if you watch NBC, CBS, ABC or CNN. I suspect I probably saw more of that than most people in this room. The fact is, there was some very good reporting took place by some very talented journalists who were asking quite probing questions. LINDSEY HILSUM - Diplomatic correspondent, Channel Four News I'm going to stick up for some of the American print media because in Baghdad there was a real contrast because when the America broadcasters and TV all pulled out ostensibly on safety grounds I suspect also on grounds that they had been pressured and partly the Pentagon told them they would be killed because it wasn't safe and the MoD told British broadcasters the same, but British broadcasters stood firm and the America newspapers were all there. The New York Times was there, the Washington Post had two correspondents - even a paper as small as the Atlanta Constitution had two correspondents there, the Sacramento Bee was there so I do think that American newspapers did extremely well in staying in Baghdad and reporting daily. Did the US military deliberately set out to make life impossible for journalists to report from any but embedded positions? DAVID CHATER - Senior Correspondent, Sky News based in Baghdad I think [embedding] is a serious abdication of journalistic responsibility, I am not used to it as a war reporter, I am used to being unilateral and making my own decisions. I am not trying to take away from those who are embedded but theirs was a very restricted view, but it was a very vivid view and the TV technology was there to put it across to people and that is one of main dangers I think - that there were 1,200 unilateral journalists operating outside that system, they had a very, very hard time. The Americans especially gave them a very hard time. It was very dangerous for them, they took a lot of casualties, but on top of that we were using technology now which we are going to use increasingly in warfare to bring the very frontline straight into people's living rooms live and that is a very dangerous development for the journalist. RICHARD SAMBROOK, BBC Head of News: [Operating unilaterally] 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, and that definitely had an impact on the journalism on the overview we were able to present. TONY MADDOX - Senior vice president of CNN International The death toll amongst the journalistic community was, and continues to be, quite disgraceful. It's appalling, the amount of casualties, I mean the group that went out there, we probably, as a battalion of journalists suffered as many losses as anybody. And I think as editors that is still something that we are coming to terms with. PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY - Journalist & Author of The First Casualty It is an undisputed fact that 15 journalists died in this war, more than 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 they surrender of Germany, and lost only two reporters. 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. Accident? Design? I don't know but 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 to 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. Jake Lynch is an experienced international reporter in television and print media, and co-Director of the journalism think-tank, Reporting the World jake@reportingtheworld.org.uk Other contributors to Mediawar include: Pat Holland - BBC (writing on Women and war) Maire Messenger Davies - Cardiff University Cindy Carter - Cardiff University Des Freedman and Daya Thussu (Goldsmith's College and authors of a book on the Gulf War) Ros Brunt - Sheffield University Darren O'Byrne - Surrey University Paul Rixon - Surrey University R. Harindrath - Open University |
EXHIBITS july15transcript.pdf  |