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What happened to the war? from ABC The flood of coverage from Iraq is now a mere trickle. Yet it's now that the real story of the shaping of the new Iraq is being written. The Media Report talks to journalists still on the ground in Baghdad and reflects on how well the war was reported with prominent Australian journalists who brought you the war. The Media Report: 15 May 2003 - What happened to the War? [This is the print version of story  ]
Gerald Tooth: Welcome to The Media Report. This week we ask the question, What happened to the war? It seems that the moment the bombs stopped dropping, it was dropped as a story. Yet some argue that the real story is what's going on now, as the new Iraq begins to emerge. And we look at how the war was reported. Were the reporters that were there overwhelmed by a flood of propaganda? We talk to the journalists who had to sort out the lies. & Montage of news reports: Paul McGeough: They're certainly right to start with the sense Of Was this deliberate? because the Americans don't like them, and what the American military and the Pentagon have been showing in this war is that if it doesn't like you, you're at risk. It doesn't like the foreign press being in Baghdad. They talk about us quite contemptuously, as 'the independents' as though we're not their much-loved 'embedded' reporters. It's quite outrageous. There is a role for the media in war, and there is a duty for the media of the world to be present for war. As they say, this is for a slice of history and it should be recorded and it should be reported, and it's dealt with in things like the Geneva Convention, but Washington doesn't show a lot of respect for things like the Geneva Convention these days. Geoff Thompson: Basically they're trying to keep civilian vehicles away. They did warn the vehicle: they said, 'Back, back, back' but you must remember it is dark, that this vehicle's got headlights coming up the back of the vehicle. They went, 'Back, back, back', fired a warning shot, the vehicle sort of veered, seemingly in surprise, and they opened up on that vehicle. In terms of what they saw, and what they believe, I think they were very excited by the experience, the green and white tracer fire, I didn't see it, they think they saw it, they're sure they saw fire coming in the other direction, I don't think they're covering it up, in fact I think they believe that's what happened. I don't believe that's what happened and neither does the Commander of their unit. Jonathan Harley: It was another disciplined public performance by General Tommy Franks in the face of growing scepticism about Operation Iraqi Freedom and a mounting propaganda war with Iraq. But he promised to speak the truth from his Hollywood-designed platform at Central Command. Tommy Franks: This platform is not a platform for propaganda, this is a platform for truth, and so what I'll do, is I'll try to provide you the best balance I can, and that's what I've asked that our people here do. Jonathan Harley: The war in Iraq is being fought on many fronts, and by both sides. This is Jonathan Harley in Qatar, for 'AM'. Gerald Tooth: The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeough, who reported the war from Baghdad talking about US troops killing journalists. The ABC's Geoff Thompson, who when he was embedded with the US Army, witnessed American soldiers firing on and killing Iraqi civilians. And Jonathan Harley in the middle of what was The Greatest Show on Earth at American Central Command in Qatar. Those three are all joining us this morning, as well as News Limited's Defence writer, Ian McPhedran, who was expelled from Iraq, and on a satellite phone from Baghdad, Catherine Taylor, from The Australian newspaper. Paul, we'll go to you first. He joins us from his home in New York, where he's just been very busy finishing off his book about the war. Paul, we've had some big domestic stories here that have swept away the coverage of the war's aftermath, but what's happened in America? Paul McGeough: It's still a very big story here, given any day of the week The New York Times are still running three and four pages a day on it. It's very intensely covered, it's still a big television story, it's been shoved down the bulletins in last 48 hours by events in Riyadh, but still a significant story. Gerald Tooth: Is it on the front pages of the paper? Paul McGeough: Yes, virtually every day it's on the front of The New York Times. Two and three stories. Gerald Tooth: And what you getting about what's going on there, and the mess that remains? Paul McGeough: It's a sort of very detailed coverage of different aspects of American policy, but also what's happening on the ground, like this morning Page 1 of The New York Times, they had three stories on the front: one was on the new policy to shoot looters on sight, another was on the uncovering of mass graves, and another was on a general policy issue. So it's quite a broad coverage still. I'd say The New York Times for example probably has six or eight people still on the ground in Baghdad and Iraq. Gerald Tooth: Geoff Thompson, do you think Australian news organisations pulled out of Iraq too quickly? Lost interest in the story too quickly? Geoff Thompson: I think that I agree that the real story is now, and I think that there certainly was a sense that it was no longer a ratings winner, it was no longer exciting, it's now the difficult grind of reconstructing basically a shattered country. And it's not as interesting. I think that, as Paul says, there's certainly newspapers of record, and people who have the resources and commitment are there, and there is a presence there. But I think certainly from Australia, it's certainly dropped off the front pages here. Every now and then something jumps to the fore, but most of the time now it's buried in wool at the moment, as far as I can see. Gerald Tooth: Catherine, you've joined us from Baghdad; most of the world's media have now left Iraq. Is there a sense there that the story's over? Catherine Taylor: Well I think many of the people here feel that the story in fact is just starting. For them, the story was not so much a military story, but of what happens after the military has left, and people are questioning what sort of society Iraq will become, how Iraq will achieve some sort of reconciliation with their past, and the questions of whether ethnic and religious groups can get on peacefully is really on people's minds; they're concerned about questions of Islamic States, what that will mean. And each of the ethnic groups is trying very hard to & Gerald Tooth: We seem to have lost Catherine there. OK, Ian McPhedran in Canberra, what do you think? Would the public have been able to take any more war coverage, here in Australia? Ian McPhedran: I think that's the point really. It's all very well saying the story, the most important part of the story is now, but the realities of newspaper and media production and the public's ability to be able to focus on something, are not quite alongside that. I think once the war, the bang-bang war, if you like, is over, then of course the story's going to drop off the front page. These stories about the reconstruction and the politics of Iraq are very, very worthy and important, but they hardly measure up to the actual campaign of a war in terms of editors and readers, and I think that's just a reality, particularly in Australia, which is a long way from there, and we have only a very small commitment of people there now. The Americans of course are much more committed, and have a far greater responsibility to stay there and fix the place up. Gerald Tooth: But it was so important that we went there, why isn't it important that we actually take a look at the reconstruction? Ian McPhedran: I think we are taking a look, I think it's wrong to say that the story's dropped altogether. The story's still there every day, there's still a page or so in most of the papers every day, focusing on the issues. Most of the electronics are covering the story every night, the story of the mass graves for example has been a big story in the last day or so. I think people still have correspondents there and they're still interested in the story. The story will be judged on its merits on a day-by-day basis in comparison to the news that's going on here. And there's a lot of news about, as you know. Gerald Tooth: Let's look at how the war was reported when we were getting that deluge of information. Jonathan Harley, we heard you earlier describing Central Command in Qatar, as a 'Hollywood-designed set'; is that the sense that you got reporting from there, that you were in a dream factory hearing how the Americans wanted the war to go, rather than how it was going? Jonathan Harley: Well it was a Hollywood-designed set. The US Forces spent a spectacular half-a-million dollars on what was supposed to be this grand presentation room and briefing room, with flat plasma screens and the whole kit and caboodle. But I must say I wondered where the money went, because it was fairly unimpressive, and even less impressive was the supply of information, and even the appearance of key figures. We heard at the top of the program there from General Tommy Franks, the Coalition Commander, who on his first press conference, I might add, not till the third day after combat operations began, promised that his podium would be one of truth and not propaganda. But unfortunately, we never heard from him, because he only made three appearances. Through the whole course of the month of main combat operations, the Commander of the Coalition only bothered to come to talk to the media on three separate occasions, and that was only in the first couple of weeks. We hardly heard from him in the latter half of the war. Gerald Tooth: You were in the position where you had to report on that and make something of it; how do you go about that? Jonathan Harley: Well unfortunately his most predominant spokesperson was Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks, who while a very impressive young General and very able commander, it would seem just didn't have the authority, because he was a one-star General, as opposed to a four-star, in the case of Tommy Franks, to really talk with confidence and to instil confidence really in the media, and in viewers and listeners and readers. So that was an extremely frustrating situation. He only made an appearance once a day, and then there were these rather ridiculous so-called 'gaggles' that you'd have. I mean the halls where they maybe sort of brief you with little tid-bits. And one other thing to note is that at Coalition Central Command at the Media Centre, you couldn't actually go and see spokesmen, they were huddled away in a back room in this warehouse. If you walked in to that room, you were breaching security, they'd tell you then to call you, so you'd have to walk out and try and call the same person from 5 metres away on a very patchy mobile phone line. So that gives you a sense really of the awkwardness and the suspicion, which really enveloped Coalition Central Command as far as the media is concerned in its relationship with the military. Gerald Tooth: How could you check your facts? Jonathan Harley: Well, often you couldn't. So, look, it should be added that these guys were playing for keeps, and they made it very clear that their dislike for the media, or their disaffection for the media was in no way a concern to them, and they were trying to keep as tight a lid on it as possible, and they did that from their perspective very successfully. So you also had lots of other sources of input obviously, you know, journalists like Geoff embedded, so you really had to pull that big picture together, and that had its own challenges. But at the end of the day I certainly found that I had to weave through my stories that underlying theme of the restriction of information, and that was really part of the story throughout the war, I think. Gerald Tooth: Ian McPhedran, you were at the other propaganda feed point in Baghdad, facing virtually the same problem; how did you deal with Iraqi information that you didn't believe? Ian McPhedran: Well there was a fairly obvious filtering process to go through. You can easily identify what's clearly plain lies. But I mean it's a matter of just reporting - Gerald Tooth: And you got quite a few of those, didn't you? Ian McPhedran: Of course we did. It was fairly obvious from what you've heard about Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf and his cronies, the Information Minister, you know these guys were just a joke. But we knew they were a joke, and you've still got to report what they say, to a certain extent, just to give some sort of perspective on the kind of outrageous behaviour that's going on, and then you have to get out on the streets and have a look for yourself. And that's what we did. And that's how we coped with it. To get all het up about it and say 'Well these guys are lying to us, how are we going to stop this?' is just ridiculous. They're not going to stop, and they didn't stop. We just had to balance that with what we were seeing with our own eyes. Gerald Tooth: Baghdad Bob as he was called, was quite a comic performer; how did journalists react to that? Did you sit around talking about his performances afterwards? Ian McPhedran: Well it's hard not to like the guy in a lot of ways, I mean he stayed on song right till the end when the tanks were coming across the bridge, he was really there till the end, unlike a lot of his comrades. But it was just ridiculous, he was just saying what he felt like saying at the time, and telling barefaced lies, as were all the other Ministers and officials that we spoke to about the military operation. It was clear that the Americans were dominating, and this nonsense about the Iraqis shooting down fighters and all the rest of it, was just plain silly lies. But we're all grown-ups, we can all recognise that, and yes, it was a matter of discussion, but it wasn't really a matter for chest-beating. Gerald Tooth: Paul McGeough, you were watching the war from the same narrow vantage point in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad; how did you sift through all this, and what have you put in your book that you've just written? Paul McGeough: One of the most interesting things about Saharf performance the whole way through was that it was incredible revelation on the whole conduct of the Saddam regime. It was all a lie. Everything was based on telling lies and the Iraqi people over the years had to accept that they would believe the lies, otherwise they ran the risk of death, torture or imprisonment. And what we saw in the full glare of television lights and a press conference briefing arrangement every day, was this man doing what the regime had done and not fully appreciating that he was being exposed on a daily basis, and not curbing his conduct in any way. And he went right to the line, telling the lie the whole way, presumably believing that the people would believe it. It was quite a fascinating Last Hurrah for the regime. Gerald Tooth: How did you report that though? Ian McPhedran: Well you would report it in the context of, well you'd juxtapose what he was saying against the fact as best you could understand what was happening on the battlefield, things like him saying the Americans aren't in Baghdad, when you could hear tank fire just the other side of the river. And also, several times in my report I used the word 'delusional' to try and give readers an indication of this man's performance of fiction against the background of fact. Gerald Tooth: As I said, Geoff Thompson, you were embedded with the US army. As we heard at the top of the program, even when you saw events right before your eyes, sometimes you couldn't make sense of those; how did you try and go about making sense of what you saw though? Geoff Thompson: Well what I tried to do is only really report what I saw first-hand. I had come context coming to me, listening to BBC World and what-have-you on the radio, but I really tried to just focus my reporting on what I saw and could confirm myself. And in a sense that was liberating because I wasn't in the spin machine as such, and I wasn't being spun stuff on the ground, because what people often don't realise is that a lot of these - I was with the Marines, and it's true of all, I think, US Forces, is that even at the relatively senior command level in the field, they don't know anything. They're not told anything. All they're told is that they have to go and attack this position, or blow this thing up, they actually don't know what the big picture is. So I just reported the advance that I was a part of, and that way, avoided a lot of the need to balance what they were telling me, because I knew it was fact because I was seeing it. So that's the way I dealt with it. Gerald Tooth: But doing that though, and being where you were, you say they knew nothing, does that mean that you really knew nothing as well, just being there? Geoff Thompson: I think they knew nothing about what the overall plan was, what was really going on in the overall campaign, but obviously they knew that they had taken objective A, or they had moved from this point on a map to another point on the map, they knew what they saw, as I knew what I saw, and so I basically took information from them responding to what they saw and I saw, and put those bits together in a report, and never really tried to say any more than what I could confirm first-hand. Gerald Tooth: Jonathan, from where you were, did you view embedding as a valuable process? Jonathan Harley: Look I think it was a piece of the puzzle. Certainly the Americans were very happy with it. They regarded it generally, Coalition Commanders regarded it as very constructive from their point of view, especially in the early days, these extraordinarily dramatic images of tanks rolling through the desert live. From my point of view, the information that we were getting out of embedded reporters was a piece of the puzzle as it was with so-called independents in Baghdad. My job in Qatar was really to pull together as many strands as you could, and that was just one of them. Gerald Tooth: Paul McGeough, we heard you at the top of the program expressing the view that there was a difference in the way that independents in Baghdad were treated compared to the journalists that were embedded. Why were you saying that? Paul McGeough: I was speaking then in the context of the hours after the American attack on the Palestine Hotel, and more than the attack itself, which you could have accepted if it was an accident, didn't seem like an accident, but much more important was the whole tone and tenor of the Americans' public response to that, which initially, before the spin doctors got to it, was pretty well, 'Bugger you. You guys are there, we told you it was dangerous, you shouldn't be there.' It was a contemptuous response and it was a response that showed no regard for the safety of civilians who as I said in that piece, are recognised as legitimate observers of war in the context of the Geneva Convention. We have a right to be there too. Gerald Tooth: Did one position have more integrity than the other, being embedded or being an independent journalist? Paul McGeough: No, the Americans ran, if you like, a more sophisticated spin machine, as Geoff used the expression. The Iraqis ran a pretty backblocks operation. There was no sophistication to it. In fact it was a system that was run on intimidation and threat. I mean the constant threats to our visas, the amount of effort and energy that went in to just maintaining our visas which they would renew on a 10-day basis, which meant you would come out of one renewal process and go straight into the next, and all the time implicit in that was that 'Your visa is at risk and we have a say over whether you stay here or not.' On another level, the use of satellite phones, they would only let us use satellite phones from the government's press centre, which the Pentagon had identified as a target to be bombed. Now quite clearly, we did not want to use that press centre. But they were running sweeps at the hotels that we were staying in, searching for satellite phones. We had to resort to coded messages, coded doorknocks to get into people's rooms, people hiding satellite phones in air-conditioning ducts at night-time, or getting drivers to smuggle them out of the hotel. It was absurd, but all the time there was this constant threat which was quite unpleasant and a very tense arrangement to have to work under. Gerald Tooth: Geoff, being embedded, it sounds as though it wasn't quite as precarious as being in Baghdad. Geoff Thompson: I think that's right. I think arguably, as long as the young grunts don't shoot you, arguably being surrounded by the American military is the safest place in the world at the moment. And that's the thing, I mean there's always risks in these things, but you're at as much risk as they are, and if you look at the casualties that US forces suffered, they're pretty well minimal in that conflict. So what's interesting I think with travelling with the US forces, is really how careful and even paranoid they are about their own safety. They take far less risks than we do as so-called independent journalists in the field normally. And the number of levels at which they seek to protect their personnel, is quite extreme and to the point where it just seems over-cautious with all the gas and chemical equipment, endless drills which we completely disrupt work, digging in against the very rare chance of a mortar attack every night. Going through all sorts of processes to protect themselves. So as journalists working in typical conflict zones as journalists were working outside of the US military in Iraq, it's far more dangerous. And I've got to say that with the resources that were available to us and being surrounded by armed people, which we normally never are, yes, I generally felt pretty safe. Gerald Tooth: Ian McPhedran, you say you'd never involve yourself with the military to report a war; why do you say that? Ian McPhedran: Well just from experience. I tried to get involved with the military and tried to get the military to understand where we're coming from without much success from an Australian point of view. The American military's different, they have a different understanding of what the press is about. But just going to Geoff's point about how safe you felt with the Americans, I think they were pretty courageous, those guys who were working with the Americans, given the amount of friendly fire casualties that the Americans inflicted on their own and the British side. Having said that, the issue of independence I think is an important one. The only truly independent reporting that was going on was small teams of people operating in the south who had got themselves across the border from Kuwait and were going into Basra and back to their digs at Umm Qasar on a daily basis with no military help, no military control. They were the only true independents, and a team of those people, Peter Wilson and John Feder from our organisation, were actually being independent when they were arrested by the Iraqis and transported through the battlefield to Baghdad. Now their reporting and the others who were reporting from that area prior to that capture were really the only truly independent eyes on the war, and I think it's all part of the picture that the other guys were talking about, you know, the embedding thing's fine, the being in the target area's fine, and having some independent eyes in between is the ideal situation. Gerald Tooth: Here's a question for all of you: Is there a best vantage point for a war? Jonathan? Jonathan Harley: Well the best vantage point is being right in front of it, but when you've got a war being inevitably fought on many fronts, that's impossible, you can't be everywhere. You know, from Doha, from Central Command, it was a convenient dateline to wrap the big picture but without all the different elements, it would have been absolutely hopeless. Geoff Thompson: I think every position is compromised at some level, and I think the only way of remedying that is putting as many people in as many places as possible, and getting a broad perspective and a broad range of coverage. Gerald Tooth: Paul McGeough, do we then need people far removed from the actual conflict to be writing the stories, to be pulling all the pieces together rather than getting these unadulterated first-hand accounts from correspondents at the front line? Paul McGeough: No, I think you need both, and that's what most of the media were doing. You had people, the term that we used, anchoring the story in various places, be it Amman, Doher, Kuwait or wherever. But you also must have people as close to the front line as you can and if there are limitations on the extent to which they can report aspects of what they're seeing, that should be a part of the story. But I think you have to have as many people in the field as you can because the more removed you become from the field and the more points of intervention by way of military spokesman filters, the less clear the story is. More people in the field at all times. Ian McPhedran: I agree with that, and I just think that the target area is probably the best place to be in a war where you know the result. Gerald Tooth: What, where the bombs are dropping? Ian McPhedran: Where the result is inevitable, I think that's probably the best place to be. But there were times when this result was not necessarily a foregone conclusion, and I think it was only really in the end, the humanity of the individual Iraqis that kept the reporters who were there safe, and the accuracy of the American military machine. Gerald Tooth: Wasn't this a foregone result from the moment the war started? Ian McPhedran: Well it was a foregone result, but it wasn't necessarily a foregone outcome for those who were on the ground in Baghdad. There were lots of times when people were very uncertain about the situation there. I can remember Paul and I discussing this a couple of days before the war started, about whether we should go or not, and the threats that were coming through, the information that was coming out of the CIA and out of Australian intelligence about what they were going to do to journalists. And in the end, it was just part of the propaganda machine. Gerald Tooth: Jonathan Harley, you had the view that the nature of the 24 hour broadcast news cycle actually allowed for the military to avoid scrutiny; why do you think that? Jonathan Harley: Well I think the military is always liking to avoid scrutiny. Gerald Tooth: Certainly you'd think more coverage that they'd be more scrutinised. Jonathan Harley: Well I think what we've seen over the last decade or so is with the mushrooming of 24-hour, round-the-clock satellite news services, and not just in the States and the Western world but also it should be added, in the Middle East and the Arab world for example, there's been this proliferation of outlets. But what that's meant is that the news cycle is so much shorter than it once was, and that media's attention span is so much shorter, because everyone's looking for the next story for the next hour or so. And the effect that that had was that when there was a contentious issue, when mistakes were made, as they inevitably are in war, the Coalition spokesman didn't need to buy very much time when there was say civilians killed, for example at road blocks, they could say that investigations are ongoing and we're looking into that in a direct and deliberate way. And within a couple of hours let alone by tomorrow, something else has happened and we've all moved on. So there was no follow-through, there was very little sustained inquiry, and the machine rolls on and nothing really gets answered. Gerald Tooth: Well unfortunately, we've run out of time. We have to leave it there. Thank you to all our guests, to The Australian's Catherine Taylor, who very briefly joined us from Baghdad; to The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeough in New York. And Paul has just finished writing his latest book looking at his war experiences. It's called 'In Baghdad' and is due for release next month. Thanks also to News Limited's Ian McPhedran in Canberra and to the ABC's Jonathan Harley and Gerald Tooth in Sydney. & Gerald Tooth: And that's the program this week. Thanks very much to the production team of Caroline Fisher and Jim Ussher. And more from Baghdad on Sunday morning, when Julie Copeland has the latest on the looting of the treasures from Iraq's National Museum. Sunday morning after 10, on Radio National. Guests on this program: Catherine Taylor Correspondent for The Australian, in Baghdad Paul McGeough Correspondent, Sydney Morning Herald Geoff Thompson ABC correspondent Jonathan Harley ABC correspondent Ian McPhedran Defence writer for The Australian Presenter: Gerald Tooth Producer: Caroline Fisher © 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation |