Global Policy Forum

By Orna Coussin

Gregg Gursky, a cameraman for the American Fox news network, was arrested last Friday and handcuffed. The security people forcibly took away his camera, and removed the videotape. It didn't happen in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, but in Washington, DC, the capital of the United States. The cameraman had only filmed members of the Viriginia State Police arresting a man "of Iranian descent," as they put it, who was driving a commercial vehicle on the main highway.

The Pentagon military police, who wanted to prevent the broadcasting of the pictures - claiming that the United States is in a state of emergency - returned the videotape to the managers of the popular news network only the next day, after intense negotiations between the sides. "A worrisome development tonight," reported presenter Brit Hume, referring to the incident on his program Special Report. "A development that apparently reflects the restrictive information policies of the Defense Department."

Media critics in the American press point out, however, that restriction of information is in any case characteristic of television coverage of the attack on Iraq. Blatant government censorship, of the type exercised by the Pentagon, is only a small and marginal part of the story.

"In the belly of a dragon"

There is criticism, for example, of the Fox network producers, who decided on their own to hand over to the Pentagon a videotape documenting the crash of an American helicopter, in which four U.S. marines and five British commandos were killed. In reply to the question of reporters, the Fox producers explained they had chosen not to broadcast the footage as "a gesture of good will toward the British government." (Sections of the tape were finally broadcast at a late hour that same evening.)

Especially harsh criticism is being leveled by American newspapers in recent days over the fact that the vast majority of television correspondents covering the war are "embedded" reporters, who have joined units of the U.S. Army, and whose reports therefore tend to adopt the military viewpoint. CNN reporter Walter Rogers, who is attached to the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry, and reports from inside one of the tanks moving across the desert, supplied the clearest example of the tone of the coverage: In a conversation with his colleague, correspondent Christiane Amanpour, he reported excitedly, almost ecstatically, that he was moving inside "a huge wave of steel." He added that it was like "galloping inside the belly of a dragon," quoted with pride the commander of the brigade, who said, "If we meet Iraqis along the way, we'll simply kill them, we'll find the enemy and grab him by the nose," and even specifically added: "It's more than exciting, Christiane, to see this huge armored force rolling across the desert in the direction of Baghdad."

In contrast to Rogers and the tone of his coverage, which is typical of CNN, and to the reports of his American colleagues, who point out, prior to reports devoid of information, that "we are not allowed to supply details, we can only say we have embarked on an additional stage," the skeptical and critical tone of the British Sky News network - sometimes ironic and amused - is exceptional.

After a report by one of their correspondents who is attached to the same unit, at the Sky studio they commented, "Actually, as far as we know, they might be taking him for a spin around Kuwait; he actually has no way of knowing with certainty that he is on the way to Baghdad." And at the same opportunity they specifically added: "We are not receiving the entire picture. For example, we have no reliable information about pockets of opposition to the American forces."

As a rule, on the British news networks, Sky and BBC, and in total contrast to the American networks, skeptical comments were heard on the weekend, including the concept "American propaganda;" comments about psychological warfare and disinformation; criticism of the briefings of journalists by the U.S. Administration ("We actually left the briefing with less information than we had before") as well as questions about the name given to the massive bombardment of Baghdad on Friday: Shock and Awe. "I am certain there is nobody in the world now looking at these pictures who doesn't feel something in his heart for the residents of Baghdad," said the presenter on Sky after the bombardments had been shown on the screen for a long period, in the silence of the studio. "These are in fact shocking and terrible pictures," he added.

The voice of the Iraqis

At Sky there was empathy for the situation of the residents of Baghdad, but as in most of the television reports, they didn't let the Iraqis themselves be heard.

Most of the American networks took their reporters out of Baghdad even before the war. The CNN crew was expelled by the Iraqis on Saturday, after two and a half days of attack. As the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Since most of the reporters are attached to the army or report from outside Iraq, the pride of the networks lies in the voices they will bring from Baghdad, the ability to describe real scenes from the area, or at least the possibility of telling the American audience what is being shown on Iraqi television. The problem is that only few were there."

Some of the networks decided against direct coverage. The American networks NBC, CBS and ABC took their crews out of Baghdad at the start of last week, out of concern for their welfare. ABC used the services of an American radio correspondent, Richard Engel, who remained in the capital. At CBS and Fox they relied on the reports of David Chater, a Sky correspondent.

By the way, Sky is also boasting of an exceptional journalist achievement in the present coverage of the war: The network's Iraq correspondent Ross Appleyard, they announced repeatedly over the weekend, is the only independent television correspondent reporting from inside Iraq (in other words, he is the only one who is not attached to the army). He did in fact manage to bring a few valuable pictures, which were not seen on the other networks, including a mosque that had just been abandoned, which contained equipment the soldiers had left behind as they fled, a run-in with nervous American soldiers who threatened him with cocked rifles, and a quick glance at the confusion that seems to characterize the U.S. Army: "An American force stopped me a short while ago," he reported, "and after identifying myself I showed them the way to Highway 80 [the route to Baghdad]." Appleyard added with a smile: "It must be a coincidence, and doesn't say anything about the U.S. Army's sense of direction."

The almost complete absence of Iraqi faces from television coverage - they don't even talk to American or British relatives of Iraqis, in order to hear a little about the feelings of people there - is not a new phenomenon in the culture of war coverage, as pointed out by Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent (who together with his colleagues at The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of international terror in 2001). In a conversation with the editors of the online magazine of the American Press Institute, Poynter - a Web site which is presently putting together a broad and thorough survey of how the war is being covered - Hedges discussed some of the characteristics of the culture of war reportage: War correspondents, he says, are addicted to fighting and forget their journalistic status, the coverage endows war with "a mythic narrative, which doesn't actually exist in war itself," as he puts it. The coverage of wars "looks for heroes and crowns them, the enemy is absolute evil, and it's preferable not to give a human face to those who are harmed by the war." Hedges adds that what always happens in time of war is that the government dictates the language we use. He says it's not important whether the Pentagon confiscates videotapes or allows them to be broadcast, because the major confiscation has already taken place: the confiscation of language.

In an article on the Poynter Web site by journalist Keith Woods, he points out that in recent days many correspondents have been using, with quotation marks and without any critical approach, the names and labels given by the army to attacks - "smart" bombs instead of laser- or computer-guided bombs, "marginal damage" instead of "wounded and dead civilians," and "decapitation" instead of "assassination" or "murder," and names of operations such as "Iraqi freedom." Chris Hedges suggests that American journalists get a copy of "Politics and the English Language," written by George Orwell in 1946 (it can be printed out in its entirety from the Internet), which describes the power of language to cause moral destruction, especially in time of war.

The Vietnam War is considered the last American war in which American correspondents were allowed to walk around in war zones and report from them almost independently. This opportunity gave rise to several pictures which are etched in the public awareness: American soldiers setting fire to Vietnamese huts with Zippo lighters, a police officer executing a member of the Vietcong on a Saigon street, a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing her village after a napalm bombardment. It's hard to imagine such pictures from Iraq today - not because the horrors don't occur, but because the journalists' point of view is more limited than ever before, and self-censorship is sweeping and thoroughly internalized. As reported already in 1965 by Bernard Paul in the New Republic, the very fact that the United States is bombing from the air with powerful B-52s dictates an impersonal attitude towards the enemy. Already then he argued that nobody cares who the people are who are harmed by these bombardments. In Vietnam there were in fact free journalists, but the attitude was already dictated from above, and limited the variety of viewpoints supplied by correspondents.

Many media critics point out that in the era of news channels, which broadcast 24 hours a day, the American people do not receive more information than they received in previous wars - the opposite is the case. Americans can find coverage that is more multilayered, including the point of view of the Iraqi people, which President Bush presumably wants to release, but for that a certain effort is required of them - they have to give up television and gather information from a few newspapers and from Internet sites.

In the Boston Herald, Americans could recently read a report by Jules Crittenden about U.S. soldiers who got drunk and vomited on their uniforms in a camp in northern Kuwait (a report whose legitimacy was discussed in the press, and which the reporter himself was hesitant about publishing). They can also read a report by journalist Jeremy Scahill from Baghdad, which appears in the leftist newspaper The Nation. Scahill spoke to Christians in Iraq who prefer to have Saddam remain in power, because he at least has protected them from fundamentalist Muslims. He says other Baghdad residents said to him outright: "It's true we don't want Saddam, but we most certainly don't want America."

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