Not My
War
EW readers express
their sentiments
Tax resistance. Rallies. Marches. Voting. Sign-making.
Calling Congress. Writing a letter to the editor. All
forms of protest deserve attention. Here, we give
a soapbox to some of our readers who’ve taken the
time to write in. We also include some notes on war tax
resistance and take a look at war media coverage.
News
Fog of War
Truth is victim of collateral damage.
By Alan Pittman
I
f the first victim of war is truth, the Iraq war, featuring the
latest modern weapons of mass communication, has
become a journalistic slaughterhouse.
The contrasts between Arab and U.S. media coverage of the
war are stark. In the U.S., Fox Cable News leads the pack with
flag-waving coverage of valiant American soldiers fighting a just
war. In the Arab world, the leading Al Jazeera Cable Network
shows pictures of children decapitated or gutted by the same
troops U.S. reporters laud as “heroes.”
The widening gulf of Gulf War II coverage may leave
Americans scratching their heads for decades with the 9/11 ques-
tion: Why do they hate us?
“This war has united the Islamic world from border to border
against the United States,” Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein
Fadlallah, an alleged leader of Hizbullah, told Newsweek.
“Instead of having one bin Laden, we will have 100 bin
Ladens,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warns.
Newsweek and Time, the leading U.S. newsweeklies, both
reported this week on the divergent Arab and U.S. coverage of
the war.
“In this war, the mighty but merciful allies target bombs care-
fully and tend to the enemy’s wounded. In that war, the allies
blow up women and babies,” reported Time, describing the con-
trast between U.S. coverage of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and
Al Jazeera’s coverage of “the invasion.” The article continued,
“If the war on American TV has been a splendid fireworks dis-
play and tank parade punctuated by press conferences, on Al
Jazeera et al., war is hell.”
Al Jazeera’s coverage, including images of dead and cap-
tured U.S. and Iraqi troops, has sparked intense criticism from
U.S. officials. But the attacks have come from both sides. Iraqi
officials recently expelled Al Jazeera’s Baghdad correspondent.
That makes the Arab network the only news network to have its
reporters expelled both by Saddam Hussein and the New York
Stock Exchange for its war coverage.
8 APRIL 10, 2003
You won’t see Al Jazeera’s
footage of civilian casualties on
U.S. networks. “U.S. TV tends to
treat civilian victims in the context
of showing allied medics helping
them, and some of its
coverage of the
war’s effects on
civilians
is
insultingly
picturesque,” Time reports.
Al Jazeera has an English language
web site, but it was brought down by
unknown hackers (Al Jazeera officials sus-
pect the Pentagon). The Arabic version
(www.aljazeera.net) is still loaded with pic-
tures you’ve never seen on U.S. television.
Despite the U.S. criticism, Al Jazeera has
often had more accurate information about the war
than U.S. networks, Time reports. Early U.S. TV reports
of a Shiite revolt in Basra and the capture of Umm Qasr were
shown to be inaccurate by Al Jazeera reporting at the scene.
The London Guardian newspaper and an Editor and
Publisher columnist compiled a long lists of factual errors by
U.S. and British media after the first week of the war. The false
reports included: a chemical weapons depot in northern Iraq; a
captured Iraqi general; an attack by 120 Iraqi tanks; Scud mis-
siles shot at Kuwait; an uprising in Basra; a mass surrender of
8,000 Iraqis and identifying a grenade attacker as a terrorist
rather than a U.S. soldier.
U.S. coverage of the war has relied heavily on reports by
about 600 journalists “embedded” with U.S. troops.
Supporters of embedding journalists say the coverage has
brought more exciting reports of frontline action. But critics
worry about whether reporters can remain objective while in bed
with the military.
Before the war, top U.S. officials predicted that the fighting
would be over quickly because Iraqi citizens would welcome
U.S. forces and rise up to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That pre-
diction was proved false. ABC reporter John Donvan says it’s
been difficult for the media to report on the views of Iraqi citi-
zens while embedded with U.S. soldiers.
“To show up with a Humvee with machine guns on top, and
guys in flak jackets and helmets, completely changes the dynam-
ic when you try to talk to people,” Donvan told the Washington
Post. “The whole hearts-and-minds thing cannot be done from
inside an embed.”
Another big problem with embeds is that it’s difficult to crit-
icize the soldiers around you who are protecting, feeding, driv-
ing and sheltering you. “I could see how it’d be hard to write crit-
ically if they made a mistake,” Donvan said. “I don’t think
I could do it. They’re my protectors.”
Sydney Schanberg, a former New York Times
correspondent who covered Vietnam, told the
Guardian that Pentagon rules requiring only
on-the-record interviews of troops by embed-
ded reporters are designed to ensure “good
PR.” In Vietnam, soldiers feared punishment,
he says. “Most things guys really wanted to
tell you were not on the record.”
Some reporters have tried to cover the war
as un-embedded independents. But the
International Federation of Journalists has com-
plained the U.S. military has forcibly removed such
reporters from Iraq.
Critics say the U.S. networks often appear to have little inter-
est in objectivity. “The networks are at war. Every cable news
channel has enlisted,” says columnist Norman Solomon.
Solomon faults coverage for reporting the “humanitarian calami-
ties” as only “PR problems” for the Pentagon. Instead of civilian
suffering, he says, the networks are filled with coverage of mili-
tary tactics and “worshiping” reports of the marvels of new high-
tech weapons.
Fox leads in using patriotism to pump ratings. “Fox is so bla-
tantly one-sided, it is appalling. Every time I turn it on, someone
is saying something evil about the protesters or being pro-Bush,”
says Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg.
But other networks aren’t far behind in flag waving. “It is
unfair to single out Fox News Channel for pro-American tilt or
jingoism in the early days of a war in which much of the broad-
cast media has reflexively rallied around the flag,” says a Boston
Globe columnist. On many networks, reporters refer to U.S.
troops and generals as “we.”
But we deserve better. Schanberg, the veteran reporter who
covered the “killing fields” of Cambodia, wrote in the Village
Voice that the gruesome images of war shown on Arab TV
shouldn’t be censored for American viewers. “If ours is truly a
democracy, the people should be told and shown — even if they
wish to turn their eyes away — exactly what is being waged in
their name.”
ew