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Fog Of Coverage Paved The Way For War |
Current rating: 0 |
by Antonia Zerbisias
(No verified email address) |
27 Mar 2003
|
Forget the fog of war.
It is the fog of war coverage that is fouling the airwaves. |
Over the past few days, the mainstream print media have devoted acres of verbiage to how TV is coping with the incoming information bombardment. Not very well, it seems.
The U.K.'s Guardian, just to cite one paper, turned out a devastating analysis yesterday, examining all the flip-flops TV made on the Basra uprising, or not, and the taking, or not, of Umm Qasr.
You can chalk up at least some of the sniping to professional envy/enmity not to mention a general misunderstanding amongst the ink-stained community of what their electronic rivals endure when they produce reporting on the run.
But then, even TV is turning a semi-sorta-kinda critical lens on itself, as CNN half-heartedly did yesterday, first with an essay on spin by weirder-by-the-day Aaron Brown, and then with house pet pundit Howard Kurtz, who writes a media column for the Washington Post.
Asked by Paula Zahn about sagging optimism about the war now evidenced in the polls, Kurtz said, "I think the problem here is the media were to some degree used by the Pentagon in the huge run up to the war, Paula, where we gave the impression that this was going to be if not a cake walk, a pretty smashing success for the United States and British forces."
Score a direct hit for understatement. And line many of the messengers up against a wall and hand out blindfolds for how they were complicit in reinforcing the White House line about Iraqi connections to Al Qaeda, about how Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and was ready to drop them on Times Square, about how U.N. weapons inspectors had found said WMD . . .
Yesterday, the trade publication Editor & Publisher, in an indictment of the media, used recent poll data to prove just how badly news organizations have failed the public.
"Thousands of American soldiers have marched into Iraq, bombs are falling, and oil fields are ablaze," writes Ari Berman.
"But when the war dies down, editors and media analysts should catch their breath and ask themselves: How much did press coverage (or lack of coverage) contribute to the public backing for a pre-emptive invasion without the support of the United Nations?"
Quite a bit, if the appalling ignorance of the majority of Americans is any indication. Still, the media aren't learning, even as the war marches into its second week.
Just yesterday, for example, it took CNN almost half an hour to catch up with what was already evident on BBC. As CNN was reciting the Pentagon line about precision bombing oh, and by the way, isn't it against the Geneva Convention to target a civilian installation such as Iraqi TV? there was BBC reporting on how a couple of missiles or bombs took out a Baghdad market.
Later, when President George W. Bush spoke at MacDill Air Force Base, he said, without proof, that the coalition forces were "taking every action we can to prevent the Iraqi regime from using its hidden weapons of mass destruction."
That claim ran unchallenged on CNN but not on CBC.
Then there's the business of Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network with some 35 million subscribers, among them some of the world's wealthiest people, including major investors in AOL Time Warner which owns CNN. For all the blah-de-blah-blah about liberating the Iraqi people and giving them Western democracy, CNN never discussed by the time I filed this column, anyway how Al-Jazeera had been banned from both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
"In light of Al-Jazeera's recent conduct during the war, in which they have broadcast footage of U.S. POWs in alleged violation of the Geneva Convention, they are not welcome to broadcast from our facility," Nasdaq spokesperson Scott Peterson told The Los Angeles Times.
Another big story you might have missed yesterday had you stuck to CNN related to how a division of Halliburton Co., a firm run by Dick Cheney until he became Bush's running mate in 2000, was awarded, without tender or publication of its value, the Pentagon's contract to extinguish oil well fires in Kuwait. CNN mentioned it in one sentence at 10 a.m. and, if it repeated it, I never heard it and I couldn't find it on its Web site.
Another failing is the lack of illumination being shed on the killing of veteran British war correspondent Terry Lloyd by American troops.
Instead, we are subjected to constant ominous warnings by Department of Defense spokesperson Victoria Clarke about what could happen to journalists who don't stay in bed with the troops.
Which leads to one of the most irritating aspects of the war coverage: the heavy reliance on tech talk and generals discussing strategy with pointers in map pits, all of which is supposed to pass for context and analysis.
As filmmaker Michael Moore told CNN's Brown late Tuesday night, "Thanks for letting me be the first non-general on here in the last few days."
But then, covering dissent is bad for business.
According to Broadcasting & Cable, the influential TV news consultancy Frank N. Magid Associates conducted a survey that reveals, "viewers tend to hate seeing (protests)."
That could explain why anti-war folks are now tarred as anti-troop by the media.
In other words, by showing their disapproval of the invasion, dissenters are "betraying" the boys and girls who are serving as cannon fodder. So what do viewers want?
"Stories about technology that can protect troops or citizens at home, particularly in markets seen as terrorist targets or with large military bases."
So, fire up the weapons of mass pandering, folks. But you'd better get out the duct tape next time you hear CNN boast about how it's America's "most trusted name in news."
The incoming may not kill you but it should have you holding your nose.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
http://www.thestar.com/ |
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Media War: Obsessed With Tactics And Technology |
by Norman Solomon
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
27 Mar 2003
|
Two months ago, when I wandered through a large market near the center of Baghdad, the day seemed like any other and no other. A vibrant pulse of humanity throbbed in the shops and on the streets. Meanwhile, a fuse was burning; lit in Washington, it would explode here.
Now, with American troops near Baghdad, the media fixations are largely tactical. "A week of airstrikes, including the most concentrated precision hits in U.S. military history, has left tons of rubble and deep craters at hundreds of government buildings and military facilities around Iraq but has yielded little sign of a weakening in the regime's will to resist," the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Shrewd tactics and superlative technology were supposed to do the grisly trick. But military difficulties have set off warning bells inside the U.S. media echo chamber. In contrast, humanitarian calamities are often rendered as PR problems, whether the subject is the cutoff of water in Basra or the missiles that kill noncombatants in Baghdad: The main concern is apt to be that extensive suffering and death among civilians would make the "coalition of the willing" look bad.
But in spite of all the public-relations efforts on behalf of this invasion, the military forces of Washington and London remain a coalition for the killing of Iraqi people who get in the way of the righteous juggernaut. Despite the prevalent media fixations, the great moral questions about this war have not been settled -- on the contrary, they intensify with each passing day -- no matter what gets onto TV screens and front pages.
When U.S. missiles exploded at Iraqi government broadcast facilities Wednesday morning, it was a move to silence a regime that had been gaining ground in the propaganda struggle. Throughout the months of faux "diplomacy" and the first days of invading Iraq, the governments led by George W. Bush and Tony Blair had managed to do the nearly impossible -- make themselves look even more mendacious than the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein.
On the home front, most U.S. news outlets are worshiping the nation's high-tech arsenal. It was routine the other day when the Washington Post printed a large color diagram under the headline "A Rugged Bird." Unrelated to ornithology, the diagram annotated key features of the AH-64 Apache -- not a bird but a helicopter that excels as a killing machine.
We're supposed to adore the Pentagon's prowess; the deadlier the better. Transfixed with tactical maneuvers and overall strategies inside Iraq, media outlets rarely mention that this entire war by the U.S. government and its British accomplice is a flagrant violation of international law. Only days before the United States launched the attack, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the invasion -- lacking a new Security Council resolution to authorize it -- would violate the U.N. Charter.
In the capital city of the world's only superpower, the Post is cheering on the slaughter. "Ultimately the monument that matters will be victory and a sustained commitment to a rebuilt Iraq," the newspaper concluded. Its assessment came in an editorial that mentioned the pain -- but not the anger -- of family members grieving the loss of Kendall D. Waters-Bey, a Marine from Baltimore who died soon after the war began.
The Post's editorial quoted the bereaved father as saying that "the word 'sorrow' cannot fill my pain." But the editorial did not include a word from the dead man's oldest sister, Michelle Waters, who faulted the U.S. government for starting the war and said: "It's all for nothing. That war could have been prevented. Now, we're out of a brother. Bush is not out of a brother. We are."
The Baltimore Sun reported that Michelle Waters spoke those words "in the living room of the family home, tears running down her cheeks."
A week into this war, CNN's White House correspondent John King was in sync with many other journalists as he noted criticisms of the administration's "war strategy." The media anxiety level has been rising, but the voiced concerns are overwhelmingly about tactics. A military triumph may not be so easy after all.
Today, I took another look at quotations that I'd jotted at meetings with Iraqi officials during visits to Baghdad last fall and winter. (The quotes are included in "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You," a book I co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich.)
In mid-September, the elderly speaker of Iraq's national assembly, Saadoun Hammadi, told our delegation of Americans led by Rep. Nick Rahall: "The U.S. administration is now speaking war. We are not going to turn the other cheek. We are going to fight. Not only our armed forces will fight. Our people will fight."
Three months later, at a Dec. 14 meeting, Iraq's deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz said: "Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, including Americans -- because if they want to take over oil in Iraq, they have to fight for it, not by missiles and by airplanes ... they have to bring troops and fight the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army. And that will be costly."
The fuse lit in Washington is now burning in Baghdad. Our tax dollars are incinerating Iraqi troops and civilians.
No matter how long this war takes, it is profoundly wrong.
An excerpt from "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You," by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, is posted at: http://www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/index.html |
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