Discussion Papers
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
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
(www.reportingtheworld.org)
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
|
