US media debunked for its war coverage

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON The US media’s coverage of the Iraq war has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent weeks with accusations that include the charge that it “cravenly submitted to the Pentagon and the White House.”

Russell Smith, a Canadian writer and journalist, calls the coverage “disgusting.” Writing in the May 29 issue of the ‘New York Review of Books,’ he says “the worst culprit” was also “the most embedded,” namely the CNN which he adds was “the voice of Centcom”

According to Smith, “CNN was more irritating that the gleefully patriotic Fox News channel because CNN has a pretense of objectivity. It pretends to be run by journalists. And yet it dutifully uses all the language chosen by people in charge of ‘media relations’ at the Pentagon. It describes the exploding of Iraqi soldiers in their bunkers as ‘softening up’; it describes slaughtered Iraqi units as being ‘degraded’; some announcers have been even repeated the egregious Pentagon neologism ‘attrited’ (to mean ‘we are slowly killing as many of them as we can’). I don’t know if I am more offended by the insidiousness of this euphemism or by the absurdity of its grammar.”

Smith says “to recite from a Pentagon press release that an Iraqi invasion has been ‘degraded by 70 percent’ is an astounding abdication of journalistic responsibility. The graphic reality of ‘degradation’ is a large pile of dismembered bodies. Surely some picture or explanation of what the wiping out of an entire division with high explosives actually looks like is called for.”

He points out that many readers and viewers were baffled by the suddenness with which the Battle of Baghdad came upon them, without any large-scale engagement with the Republican Guard. They wondered what happened to the three or five divisions that were supposedly ringing the city. “The facts of their destruction were grudgingly mentioned almost in passing. They were destroyed from the air. This did not make a glamorous or even central story to anyone’s coverage of the war, because there were no embedded reporters with the Iraqi troops the press simply downsized the story. No pictures, no story.”

He recalls that the same thing happened in the first Persian Gulf War, and since nobody minded the failure of the American media to report the Iraqi casualties, nobody minded now. “We’d rather have a twelve-hour cycle of interviews with one parent of one rescued POW (Jessica Lynch).” He also takes the Canadian media to task for their failure to report the war accurately and fairly. One Canadian reporter working for CBC Radio said Gen. Tommy Franks had run “one of the most brilliant campaigns in military history” which, Smith writes, is “nonsense” since “he had complete air superiority, massive technological advantages, a better-trained, better-equipped, better-paid force and a limitless budget. He was fighting an isolated, impoverished, demoralised conscript army which was already decimated by bombing.”

Another writer, Michael Massing, editor of the Columbia Review of Journalism who was in Qatar during the war on behalf of the Committee to Protect Journalists, writes in the same journal where Smith’s analysis appears that the Coalition Media Centre at a military base in Doha was “designed to be as annoying and inconvenient for reporters” as possible. The daily briefings were even less helpful. Sometimes, the journalists would be given misinformation as when after the bombing of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, they were told that US forces had come under fire, something that none of the eyewitnesses corroborated. American reporters invariably asked questions such as “Why hasn’t Iraqi broadcasting been taken out,” while Arab and European journalists would make more searching inquiries. Reporters who asked “unhelpful” questions were ignored at future briefings and even warned that they were on a “list”.

Massing contrasts the partisan coverage given to the war by US networks with that provided by BBC, which had a team of 200 in the field. “The network offered non-nonsense anchors, tenacious correspondents, perceptive features, and a host of commentators steeped in the knowledge of the Middle East, in contrast to the retired generals and colonels we saw on American TV.” One British reporter asked at a Centcom briefing just as Baghdad was about to fall, “Is this war going to make history by being the first to end before its cause could be found?”

According to Massing, “I was shocked by its (American TV’s) mawkishness and breathless boosterism. Its anchors mostly recounted tales of American bravery and daring –do MSNBC’s embedded reporters seemed utterly intoxicated by the war — CNN International, however, bore more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic edition – a difference that showed just how market-driven were the tone and contents of the broadcasts. For the most part, US news organisations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see.” The writer also speaks of the ignorance of most of the American reporters sent out to cover the war. One of them, embedded with a Marine unit declared over the phone, “We’re about to cross the Ganges.” When he was told that he must mean the Tigris, he replied, “Yeah, one of those biblical rivers or other.”

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