Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
Iraq: the battle for the media by Anne Alexander 
Middle East International Iraq: the battle for the media From Anne Alexander in London February 6th, 2004 -- Nine months after George Bush announced the end of "combat operations" in Iraq, the war continues. The battle for Iraqi hearts and minds also shows no signs of abating. US forces have had to face a fight over the press and the airwaves as well as the struggle to crush the Iraqi resistance. The US government is losing the propaganda war to Arab satellite TV channels and alienating many Iraqis in the process. The Coalition Provisional Authority's news channel is seen by many as a clone of the state-run media which dominated the airwaves under Saddam Hussein. A sorry tale The sorry tale of the Pentagon's involvement with the Iraqi media entered a new phase in January with the award of a $96m contract to run the ailing Iraqi Media Network. A Florida-based firm, Harris Corp, takes over from SAIC, one of the defence industry's biggest and most secretive contractors. SAIC's failure to create a functioning, let alone credible, media network in Iraq appears to have tarnished the corporation's image in the eyes of Defence Department officials. The origins of the IMN lie in a Pentagon contract awarded to SAIC in February 2003. Before the war had even started, SAIC had been contracted to "quickly establish a free and independent indigenous media network, consisting of radio, television and print media components". According to the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, which published details of the deal on its website in October, the contract was worth around $38m. On the surface, SAIC seemed to have every advantage over its possible competitors. The corporation has unrivalled contacts with Pentagon officials - a key aide of Deputy Secretary of Defence Douglas Feith is a former SAIC vice-president - and an almost indecent intimacy with the new Iraqi administration (SAIC employees have been placed as powerful advisers in several ministries). And Saddam Hussein's morose TV announcers were not exactly a hard act to follow. But it all went spectacularly wrong. The IMN's first broadcasts were delayed after a row over editorial control of the newsroom - US officials apparently appointed Hero Khan, wife of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, to oversee the station's launch. In August, one of the TV station's few well known journalists, Ahmad al-Rikabi, left and was soon complaining publicly that IMN was underfunded. Don North, senior TV adviser to IMN, also left, "for health reasons". He told New York Public Radio in October that IMN lost credibility after the first few months because of "an overburdening of news conferences, interviews, statements, admonitions from the CPA that did not go through the filter of Iraqi journalists". According to North, IMN's programming was so bad that the 101st Airborne in Mosul helped the local radio station break off from the CPA network to become independent of Baghdad (although possibly not independent of Maj.-Gen. David Petraeus, who seized "editorial control" of Mosul's TV station in June). What Iraqis watch By the autumn, Iraqis' dislike of IMN was filtering through to the international press. AP reported in November that many preferred the pan-Arab news channels such as Al Jazeera and al-Arabiya to IMN's "stodgy" style. Rough viewing figures from a State Department poll the previous month provided some hard evidence: 63% of Iraqi viewers with access to a satellite dish tuned into Al Jazeera or al-Arabiya, 12% watched IMN's programmes, now rebranded al-Iraqiya. Iraqi journalists, in particular, have been critical of IMN's reliance on returning exiles. Shamim Rassam, the latest in a long line of al-Iraqiya chief executives, is one such figure. She was a newsreader on Iraqi TV in the 1960s and fled to the US in the 1990s, only to return as a SAIC contractor after the war. "The people of Iraq are not as simple-minded as they believe," Ahmad Abd al-Majid, editor of al-Zaman, told the Washington Post in January. "They don't give us an accurate picture. It's not complete, and they're still too cautious." In some ways IMN's difficulties are a rerun of the previous media projects overseen by the Iraqi National Congress. Millions of dollars were channelled into the INC under the leadership of Ahmad Chalabi, who has close links to SAIC board members. In 2002 State Department officials temporarily cut off the organization's funding, pulling the plug on the INC's newspaper and TV station, to allow auditors to investigate possible financial irregularities. Although funding was resumed, Chalabi's critics argue that the State Department ended up with little to show for its investment. However, as late as April 2003, the State Department confirmed that $3.1m was being redirected to the INC to "support activities of the leadership of the Iraqi opposition in Iraq", including radio and TV broadcasting. Burgeoning press The INC seems to have had little direct impact on the Iraqi media since the war. Although continuing to bring out its flagship paper, al-Mu'tamar, as well as a new weekly, al-Jamahir, and a local paper in Mosul, it has shown less interest in broadcast media, despite (or perhaps because of) past experience. Other former exile groups have continued to publish and broadcast, however. The Iraqi National Accord, led by Iyad Allawi, now publishes its newspaper Baghdad in Iraq's capital city, rather than in London. Kurdish newspapers are now freely available in central Iraq and the two main Kurdish parties distribute their Arabic-language papers in Baghdad. It was the opposition parties and the Kurdish groups which were able to move first into the vacuum created by the collapse of the state media in April. The Communist Party's paper, Tariq al-Sha'b, was among the first old titles to be republished. Other newspapers and magazines quickly joined them on the streets. Between May and July, 85 publications appeared and by October the number had risen to 210. Many of the new titles are published by political parties or interest groups, including human rights organizations and local business forums. Some have a distinct sectarian identity, such as al-Hawza, which strongly supports the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) publishes a newspaper, Nahrayn, and continues radio broadcasting on Voice of the Mujahedin. Clamping down The explosive growth of the media coincided with a rising curve of attacks on coalition forces through the summer months. US officials reacted by clamping down on "incitement" by local and international media. An independent newspaper was closed down and its owner jailed, while Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz took Al Jazeera and al-Arabiya to task. Media rights groups protested, but US officials returned to the attack in November, when Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Al Jazeera's reporters were cooperating with resistance fighters to obtain footage of attacks on US forces. Another worrying development has been the imprisonment of journalists by US forces. Two Iranian documentary film-makers spent several months in custody over the summer. Al Jazeera says its journalists are routinely held by US forces and their film confiscated. Iraqi journalists are often worst off: Yunis Kuthayr, a fixer for the UK's Insider Films, was arrested in September. It was weeks before his family and colleagues found that he was being detained at Abu Ghurayb, Saddam Hussein's notorious jail near Baghdad. It remains to be seen whether the Pentagon's new contractors will be able to win back the trust of Iraqi viewers. Harris Corp. may have an advantage over SAIC in its choice of partners: the Lebanese satellite broadcaster LBC and the Kuwaiti media company al-Fawares. LBC's programming has traditionally been strong in entertainment but over the past two years the network has established a unified news service with the respected newspaper al-Hayat. Meanwhile, the future of the IMN is unclear, despite the injection of funds. It is not yet known what will happen to the network after the projected hand-over of power to a sovereign Iraqi government in July. Samir al-Sumaydi, chair of the Governing Council's media committee, told al-Sharq al-Awsat in January that the Council was thinking of creating a media organization modelled on the BBC: publicly funded, yet editorially independent. He did not say whether IMN could evolve into such a network. |