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Media knocked for Iraq war coverage by Tom Regan 
Christian Science Monitor, February 11, 2004, updated 12:00 p.m. Media knocked for Iraq war coverage Experts say US too soft, foreign media often too hard. By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com While the Bush administration has come under some heavy criticism lately for the way it used prewar intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, another institution is also beginning to feel some heat about the way it conducted itself before and during the war in Iraq: the media. While some experts say the US media was far too sycophantic in their coverage of the Bush administration's positions on Iraq, and issues like WMD, others say foreign media sometimes went too far in the other direction, and created an us versus them relationship in their coverage. In a piece in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review who writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs, notes that many media outlets are currently rushing to expose the Bush administration's prewar failings on Iraq. And he asks "Where were you before the war?" He notes that beginning in the summer of 2002, "the 'intelligence community' was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it." He also says American journalists were too eager to use Iraqi dissidents as unnamed sources, often printing their claims without checking them. This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views - and there were more than a few - were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own. (Judith Miller of The New York Times, one of the reporters criticized by Mr. Massing in his piece, called the article "biased and unfair.") 02/10/04 The 'Al Qaeda' memo, Zarqawi, and civil war in Iraq 02/09/04 US image abroad will 'take years' to repair 02/06/04 Spying under scrutiny Sign up to be notified daily: Find out more. Several media organizations and publications have examined this issue recently. The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and future journalists, conducted a "virtual roundtable on war coverage with liberal and conservative journalists. Seth Ackerman of FAIR! first raised the issue of the way the US media unquestioningly covered the WMD issue last summer. Reporters, Mr. Ackerman noted, dispensed with the formality of applying modifiers like "alleged" or "suspected" to Iraq's supposed unconventional weapon stocks. Ackerman's piece records the frequent "discoveries" of chemical weapons dumps in Iraq last March and April, trumpeted by organizations and individuals like FoxNews, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, and ABC News. All of the discoveries turned out to be false reports. In part, journalists absorbed their aura of certainty from a battery of "independent" weapons experts who repeated the mantra of Iraq concealment over and over. Journalists used these experts as outside sources who could independently evaluate the administration's claims. Yet often these "experts" were simply repeating what they heard from US officials, forming an endless loop of self-reinforcing scare mongering." This lack of critical examination played into the hands of a new US military policy, David Miller wrote recently in the Guardian. Information dominance (or as the military calls it "full spectrum dominance") seeks to control and influence all news about Iraq. The policy has two aspects: first to "build up and protect friendly information," such as the kind provided by embedded journalists; the second aspect is to "target" unfriendly information. This is perhaps best illustrated, Miller writes, by the attack on Al Jazeera's office in Kabul in 2001, which the Pentagon justified by claiming Al Qaeda activity in the Al Jazeera office. As it turned out, this referred to broadcast interviews with Taliban officials. The Arab networks' offices were also attacked in Basra and Baghdad. In the past, propaganda involved managing the media. Information dominance, by contrast, sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism. They are all types of "weaponized information" to be deployed. As strategic expert Colonel Kenneth Allard noted, the 2003 attack on Iraq "will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war". On the other hand, Tom Bentley writes for Open Democracy, the recent problems between the Blair government in Britain and the public broadcaster, the BBC, show the danger of what happens when the media exhibits "an absolute distrust of what government says or does, whatever the circumstances." The Hutton inquiry's findings on the death of WMD scientist David Kelly, strongly criticized the BBC for the tactics it used in reporting comments made by Kelly. The BBC has helped to bring a catastrophe on itself by denying failure and interpreting its independence as a licence for aggression. Tony Blair's government has won an adversarial contest but suffered further losses in its struggle for public confidence. Both are central components of a public culture where to admit failure, even when it is followed by convincing efforts to learn lessons, is savaged as weakness by those in search of a good headline. In the International Herald Tribune Fletcher Crossman, a former British journalist now teaching English in South Carolina, looking at the difference between Fox News and the BBC, and finds that the way each covered the WMD issue shows how they are very much the product of their cultures. This also helps explain, he says, why US news coverage was the way it was (very pro-administration), and why the BBC got into trouble with the Hutton inquiry (even though, as Edward Wasserman points out in the Miami Herald, the BBC's story about how the Blair government was "sexing up" pre-war intelligence was basically correct). The rapid growth in Fox News's audience caught other news channels off guard, Crossman writes, and prompted a panicked shift toward the political right in cable news coverage. The buildup to war gave American networks the chance to "outdo each other in patriotism and hawkish support for the administration." It is disconcerting to think that American opinion is being informed by such unpredictable forces. Yet in a typically American way, the political bias of its news stations is open, brash and strangely addictive. The British bias is subtle, covert and shielded by the myth of objectivity. There is no such thing. When Fox News claims to be fair and balanced, we're all in on the joke. When the BBC makes the same claim, they seem to actually believe it. But these days even some journalists at Fox News are changing their minds about the issue of WMD. Conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly apologized Tuesday on rival ABC for accepting President George Bush's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (Mr. O'Reilly had said last year he would do so if no WMD were found.) "I think all Americans should be concerned about this, for their families and themselves, that our intelligence isn't as good as it should be," he said. Meanwhile, has the pendulum of war coverage now swung too far in the other direction? The New York Observer reports that Dr. Bob Arnot, the physican turned reporter for NBC whose contract was not renewed when it expired in 2003, alleges that one reason for this turn of events is that NBC News boss Neal Shapiro had problem with his reporting from Iraq - "it was just very positive." Mr. Arnot accuses the network of failing to report stories about the progress being made in Iraq, particularly efforts by the Coalition Provisional Authority, something that Mr. Shapiro denies. The Washington Post reported Monday that the Pentagon has ordered its clipping service to exclude articles critical of the military and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "It comes down to the fact that they don't like these magazine articles," said a Pentagon official who declined to be identified and believes the Early Bird should not "censor" what is reported by major news organizations. The argument made against the offending articles, the official said, is that they are dated or inaccurate. Japan is also engaged in a debate about war coverage. The Japan Times interviews media expert Takaaki Hattori, who says government restrictions on Japanese press coverage in Iraq are a cause for massive concern. |