The Media, New Wars and New Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
By Pedro Caldeira Rodrigues
On 29 March 2002, one day after the beginning of the Israeli Defence Forces’ massive military offensive against the autonomous territories of the Palestinian Authority, CNN journalist Chistiane Amanpour was able to get into contact with Yasser Arafat by phone. The Palestinian leader was surrounded by over 70 tanks at his headquarters which lay in ruins. Amanpour asked him whether he “could do more in order to stop the violence”, in an obvious reference to the Palestinian suicide bombing attacks. Arafat got angry, accused her of concealing the “crimes of Israelis” with that question, and that was the end of the conversation. “What a great journalist you turned out to be, you should have more respect for your profession…”, said Arafat to the astonished Amanpour.
Previously, in 1998, during the Kosovo conflict, about one year before the beginning of the NATO attacks, a CNN team also led by Amanpour went into Pristina for just two or three days. With amazing technical support, the sole objective of the large team was to interview a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the Albanian armed group fighting the Serb forces. The report was made. A few days later, the then US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke visited the region and also had a meeting with the KLA’s leadership, which translated into the movement’s legitimisation by the US. The negotiated solution gave place to the military solution.
These two examples disclosure a specific and persistent way of doing journalism, where a tendency towards simplification and Manichaeanism is revealed: the tendency to blame, almost exclusively, one of the sides in a conflict for the worsening of the situation, and to juggle the information on the possibilities of negotiable solutions.
These are examples that keep on repeating themselves, as in the Middle East. In early April, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a US observatory on the media, released, a study on the use of the word “retaliation”, and its derivations, on ABC, CBS and NBS’s main nightly news between the beginning of the second Intifada, in September 2000, until 17 March 2002.
The study concluded that 79 percent of those references were related to Israeli “retaliation” against the Palestinians. Only 9 percent referred to Palestinian “retaliation” against Israeli. With both parts justifying their attacks as retaliation for past actions, US’s main TV channels chose to characterise Israel’s violence as “retaliation”, far more often than it did violent Palestinian actions.
Why this example? Because the term “retaliation” suggests a defensive attitude, a response to a specific aggression. It also implicitly places responsibility for the cycle of violence on the side that is suffering retaliation; notwithstanding the fact that the number of Palestinian civilian casualties was always higher than those of the Israelis.
As such, FAIR concluded that the disproportionate use of the word “retaliation” —79 percent against 9 percent— reveals a tendency to define Israel’s action as defensive, and the Palestinian one as aggressive. Once more, the main US broadcast media were able to “simplify” a rather complex conflict.
In the face of a very radicalised situation, where both parts have several propaganda weapons, the media, mainly the US televisions, rarely broadcast information on how to solve the long-time contentions in the Middle East area. Peace proposals or plans that were, or still are, under discussion are omitted, and the consquential is privileged by comparison with the essential. To make things worse, the media are deliberately excluded, often through violence, from areas where human rights abuses occur.
In this scenario, it’s not surprising that an “invisible war” has been settled in the editorial offices.
In the US, as revealed by several media observatories, signs of conflict radicalisation were never explained, which makes it possible to easily manipulate people and reach simplistic conclusions, such that Israel wants peace and Arafat doesn’t. Or the other way around.
The most balanced opinions are disregarded, and the entire story is focused on the main actors. The “peace field” is marginalised and almost reduced to silence, in the same way as were the voices criticising the specificity of the “war against terrorism”, declared after 11 September 2001 by the Bush administration, in an overall atmosphere of “reinforced national security”.
In fact, very few critical voices had access to television time, including in the debates. And many media, by allowing governments to be the ones to define what is in stake, have promoted the worst possible scenarios. When people don’t know what the alternatives are, they don’t fight for them. Mainly, because they are not revealed.
On the media’s usefulness
Ever since 11 September 2001 the media have had to seriously examine their role, their usefulness. This, despite fact that the events in Timisoara, Romania, in 1989, on the eve of the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, or the Gulf War, had already called the function of journalism into question.
But in this new international scenario following the devastating attacks on New York and Washington and therise of the so-called “new threats”, did the media really reflect about the “past lessons” and undertake a more cautious role, equidistant from the several powers, pledging themselves to conflict prevention, instead of its proliferation?
Is it possible to understand how the world we live in works, based on the information provided to us by the mass media? Or is it that the dissimulated language, the omissions, after all characterise an illusion called the ‘media era’, while power continues to have its own agenda: an unalterable power, which serves to protect its own interests, no matter what?
The media and the war in Afghanistan
According to several experts on the media phenomenon, the covering of the so-called “war against terrorism” declared by President George
W. Bush altered the traditional relationship between the media and the military. Contrary to what happened, for example, during the Vietnam War, the intense criticism of the past was abandoned and the media became the vanguard of publicising military successes.
US political and military leaders conveyed a clear message: the war in Afghanistan was merely the prelude for other military actions, while even in Afghan territory itself, conflict was far from over. By contrast, the media, mainly American, did not hide their exuberance over the war’s progress.
Reporting this war means a new era of American “war journalism”. In the Second World War, in Korea, in Vietnam, military public affairs departments had orders to expose the most positive scenario possible. Among the myths of the Second World War is the idea that the media were far more positive in their work than they were in Vietnam. In part that was so, because the media were engaged with the strategic aims of the war, as were the military. In Vietnam, the media ended up becoming critical of the war itself.
Especially in the US, the media and the military leaders seem to have now completely different tasks. The cautious tone is ignored, and the obsession with Afghanistan led the media to focus their attention in that field and to interpret the events as a “magnificent victory” for the US. It was a victory indeed, but far from being a definite one.
In general terms, the media reported the Taliban’s withdrawal from the power structures and the cities as the end of the Taliban, and the end of the war —in contrast to military leaders, who continued to emphasize the limits to that victory. Roles were reversed, and it was the media that started to draw a picture full of victories and successes. The media were once more unable to understand the war, and approached the conflict a kind of a “personal issue”.
The “why” continued to be much less important than what was happening, and the media kept on seeing victories where the military saw “battles in progress”, with inevitable consequences for public perception of the war.
In a way, the media now did the opposite of what was done in the Vietnam War, but they could potentially create an identical situation: people expect a swift end to the war, and start to get anxious when this doesn’t happen.
The attacks on New York and Washington and the declaration of the “war against terrorism” also meant the beginning of tremendous pressure on the media, so that US actions and politics were presented in the most convenient way for the administration. Numerous cases of censorship, and even more self-censorship, occurred, and many independent initiatives were mistaken for “absence of patriotism”.
The Anthrax Scare
But another problem is that the obsession with terrorism might make the media accomplices of terrorism, when they appoint themselves as “messengers of terror”. In this aspect, the case of anthrax is exemplary. Worldwide hysteria about anthrax, disseminated by the media, made people believe that it was a scourge that could attack anyone.
And yet, there were only a few dozen people infected, some of whom died. The coverage was absolutely disproportional to the real threat. And other threats, other much more serious diseases, other deadlier phenomena, were consigned to the back pages.
Then other alarms showed up: terrorist attacks on the San Francisco bridges, possible attacks during Easter, in a spiral of mistrusts, fears, suspicions: by now every threat seemed probable. In this sense, the media proved not to be very provident as they propagated exaggerated fears which may eventually turn insignificant terrorist actions into major public phenomenon.
The Pentagon and the war
Despite changes in the relationship between the media and the military, the Pentagon’s propaganda machine improved, with the collaboration of several departments. Restrictive policies were reinforced and last February, Washington Post reporter Doug Struck said that the American soldiers in Afghanistan threatened to fire against him if he kept trying to investigate a place where civilians had been killed. “Why doesn’t the Pentagon allow journalists access to investigate what is going on in Afghanistan?” he asked. Israeli soldiers showed the same attitude a few months later towards the journalists that tried to cover “forbidden military areas”.
In fact, democracy stops working if the public doesn’t have access to complete and reliable information on government activities. In the Afghanistan war, journalists and humanitarian organisations in the field had restricted access to many areas, and the main US TV channels almost never questioned the legality of decisions that involved attacking civilians.
Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch have shown their concern over the loss of civilian lives in Afghanistan and have appealed for a moratorium against the use of cluster bombs, but ABC, CBS or NBC have made no reference to this question. Some media even justified attacks against civilians. And when civilian deaths were being reported, like in Tora Bora, where the number of victims rose to 100, a CBS reporter considered that “so far few Afghans object to the civilians killed by US air strikes”.
Independent reports once more became the exception, and reports on civilian deaths were often blamed on “Taliban propaganda”. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that “telling stories of civilians apparently killed by American bombs makes it more difficult to hunt terrorists”.
The person most highlighted in the propaganda perspective was Jim Miklaszewski, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, who several times characterised the issue of Afghan victims as an “offence” to the US, or
that the Pentagon “was acting defensively” due to the fact that Taliban propaganda led occidental journalists to places allegedly destroyed by aviation.
Another study made by FAIR on the “New York Times” and the “Washington Post” dailies revealed that in the weeks following the September attacks, the space granted to the supporters of a military response was overwhelming, whilst opinions standing up for a diplomatic approach and respect for international law, as an alternative to military action, were practically non-existent.
But even if the polls revealed that the majority of the population defended a military answer, the media’s duty should be to remain independent, and to listen to the greatest possible number of opinions. The most respected, and most influent, newspapers should have the task of providing readers with a wide range of opinions on how to approach terrorism, its causes and solutions. But if the aim was to promote a serious and critical debate, then both American dailies failed.
Furthermore, as a White House spokesperson admitted, a need to “demand a suspension of freedoms and rights in a way never seen up to the present, at least since the Second World War” began to be theorised.
Monopoly questioned
However, the Qatar-based Arab television channel Al-Jazira threw new dice, confirmed by recent events in the Middle East, where Arab satellite channels growingly impose themselves on CNN conflict coverage.
The answer to this new phenomenon revealed a lot of nervousness. Washington admitted to having directly chalenged Qatar’s emir on what was called Al-Jazira’s “incendiary rhetoric”.
Beyond the intense pressures on this Arab TV channel, the Bush administration decided to severely limit “sensitive information” on Afghanistan’s military operations, at the same time as the main televisions revised their alignments.
Whist the media were preparing for the war, some distinguished American journalists were suggesting military strategies that violated the laws of war and almost reflected terrorist strategies. For example, Billy O’Reilly, a Fox News Channel journalist, said in a programme that if the Afghan government did not give Bin Laden up “the US should bomb Afghan’s infrastructure to the limit —the airport, power stations, reservoirs and roads”. And he carried on: “The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. If they don’t rise against a criminal government, they’ll suffer hunger, full stop”.
In this way, the context of the crisis, the circumstances that led to Taliban’s seizure of power, the complicity of international powers in this process, all were concealed.
On 10 October 2001, the executive directors of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN gathered with National Security secretary Condoleeza Rice, and accepted the suggestion that future declarations of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group would be condensed and “inflammatory language” would be suppressed. A bad example, in which the government tells the journalists how they should transmit information. To Rice, and according to what was revealed, the main fear consisted in Bin Laden “being a charismatic speaker who could propagate the anti-American feeling to spread hate and incite his followers to kill Americans if he had 20 minutes on TV”.
The point here is not that Bin Laden or Al Qaeda were entitled to “equal time” in the broadcast media, but the government’s disturbing attitude to shaping or influencing the content of information. This in a climate of massive radicalisation, exacerbated patriotism, rising intolerance and attacks on civic and individual freedoms.
Support and criticism
Instead of keeping its distance, the media started to “support” government. However, there has been a rise of American media criticism towards the Pentagon, which tended to consider several newspapers or television channels as its exclusive spokesmen.
It was the growing number of incidents in the Afghan war, contrary to the official version, which gave birth to this small insurrection. Last March, the Washington Post dared to write “the explanations of [US Secretary of Defence] Rumsfeld and his commanders on the deaths of innocents caused by American attacks are filled with contradictions”.
The main factor leading to the exchange of bitter words between the media and the US government was the International Press Institute’s accusation of the Pentagon’s engagement with the Office of Strategic Influence, an organ with the task of producing worldwide disinformation in name of western interests, and particularly American ones.
But this decrease in the nationalist-patriotism fervour that was installed in the media right after 11 September 2001, did not prevent Time magazine (online) in early March from electing General Tommy Franks, chief of military operations in Afghanistan, as “figure of the week for his work in waging a war that became more and more difficult”, even considering him a “war hero”.
Thus, room for dissidents against the “military line” became very reduced. For some media, civilian casualties were simply not news. And the well-known journalism technique of “burning the lead” was revealed: the story begins with what everyone knows, while the real news, the surprising and significant, is “pulled” down, where there is less chance of its being read and commented on.
Lessons from the Gulf
In 1991, in the Gulf War, the fact that the public opinion was cudgelled with the “miraculously small number of casualties” on the great coalition side, surely motivated by the triumph of recent technology, and with the 250 thousand or more Iraqis annihilated, greatly contributed to the recurrence of new situations, such as in the Balkan wars, in particular the Yugoslavia bombings.
When it was decided to attack Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991, the now US vice-president, Dick Cheney, was Secretary of Defence. A strategy was delineated to “face the media”, in collaboration with the then General Chief of Staff of the US Armed Forces, Colin Powell, now responsible for the Department of State. Information would only be released if it favoured the operation’s political aims. Military censors vetted newspaper articles and reporters were confined to the pool systems, always under escort. At that time, Powell justified these restrictions to prevent “security failures”.
Newspaper directors were now called to the Defence Ministers’ offices to receive “suggestions” and instructions. In the Gulf, or in the so-called “Kosovo war”, BBC and ITV field journalists were invited to behave in the same way. The Economist then considered that “the truth about the Gulf war must wait for the end of the conflict”. And when some journalists announced some of the terrible “collateral effects”, their patriotism was immediately questioned, and their reports were considered a “disgrace for their country”.
In Kosovo, the ghosts of Second World War, the Nazis and the Holocaust were even invoked by the media to describe the situation in the field and to justify the attack against Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. And one must remember the way the media reported the decisive Rambouillet conference, a negotiation initiative meant to attempt to halt the conflict, which sank due to the general media-fed belief in the inevitability of the attack on Yugoslavia.
One must also emphasize that during the Bosnian war, which exclusively grabbed media attention, news in Rwanda emerged, suggesting the beginning of a large-scale genocide. For weeks, the media kept silent, though they knew what was happening.
Still Afghanistan
As Noam Chomsky highlighted, in the two decisive months prior to the beginning of the Gulf War, the tendency amongst the most powerful American media was practically to ignore the diplomatic initiatives trying to avoid the conflict, placing an emphasis rather on the inevitability of the military action. Journalism definitely wore a military uniform.
Simplification instead of analysis, omission instead of information: the crisis in research journalism also determined the parameters in which the media work, and the perfection or imperfection of what they transmit, of the “truth” they transmit.
In the Gulf War, in the former Yugoslavia conflicts and especially in the Afghan war, a substantial change in “patterns of conformity” occurred. As the journalist and writer Baptista-Bastos warned in a recent article, the concept of “truth” conveyed by the main, respected political leaders becomes a “unilateral truth”, seen as total. In this aspect, the anti-terrorist pretext allows for a “dramatic mental simulation”, which recognises any other armed intervention as legitimate, anywhere in the world, whenever there is suspicion of “terrorism”.
The field reporters would not have been able to perceive the problem’s specificity due to several deficiencies. But they served an “ideology”, in a logic of metaphorical reasoning that accepts as right and just what is seen as “retaliation”. The power system outlined after 11 September 2001 wasn’t determined by the information transmitted by the media. And so, the “information consumer” is unable to build formulae for personal reflection and analysis, and is more vulnerable to the “inevitable” scenarios.
In the case of the war in Afghanistan, the key Portuguese media also lined up with the “war against terrorism” slogan, pushed by the London and Washington governments. But El Mundo (Spain) called it an “offensive”, and The Guardian (Britain) an “attack on Afghanistan”.
But in general, the most powerful media showed little concern in approaching the roots of conflict, their nature, the characteristics of the regimes involved, the various diplomatic initiatives.
It is important in this context to recall the impact of the Vietnam War on the American public opinion, mainly due to the presence of reporters at the frontline, which brought to perplexed citizens images of increasing defeat, loss of American lives, discontent and demoralization, leading to pressure for the end of the conflict.
In contrast, the Gulf War meant the beginning of the “clean, controlled” war, without images or with staged ones —a war without casualties, without blood, at least on the “right side”: a tendency that continued to increase and to become more sophisticated.
The end of an era?
One may ask, as information professionals do, where are the brilliant international reporters of decades ago? Can we speak about the decadence of a noble cause, as the word “moral” continues to prevail, in an attempt to “win the hearts and souls”?
The Australian journalist John Pilger recalls that during the First World War, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George told C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, “If people really knew the truth, the war would end tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and cannot know”. At the same time the impartial correspondent of The Times, Sir Philip Gibbs, swore “truth had been told, beyond the hard realism of horrors and casualties, and of facts and criticisms…”
Robert Miller, United Press correspondent during the Korea War in 1952, revealed himself as less subtle. He said: “There are certain ‘facts’ and stories on Korea published by editors and directors that were simply made up … Many of us who sent stories knew they were false, but we had to write them because they were official communications from headquarters and they were sent for publishing even if those responsible knew they were false”.
But there are other stories. William Howard Russell, The Times envoy to the Crimean War, a conflict that happened over 150 years ago, says in his diaries that the articles he sent by horse and steamboat to his London newspaper, took over a week to reach the editorial office. “Should I say these things or should I restrain my words?”, asked Russell of his editor. And he would reply: “continue to say as many truthful things as possible”. They were both accused of treason, until Russell’s brave reports forced the Government to resign.
So, all journalists must be confronted with the challenge of examining their work in war promotion, propaganda and its myths, in the pressures used by several organisms, including media administrations, which like to claim for themselves the monopoly on morality and credibility.
These references remind the young Swedish journalist and writer Stig Dagerman who, in occupied Germany during the “German Autumn” after the Second World War, sent great reports about real-life conditions and the humiliations to which the German population was subjected by the victorious Allies, relating, after all, some hidden truths. But no matter how unpopular or disturbing reality is, the rest isn’t journalism.
Many of these testimonies could indeed be applied to today’s wars, such as the 1991 Gulf War, NATO’s bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999, the war in Afghanistan of 2001-02, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When an American radio station systematically omits the number of Palestinian deaths and emphasises the Israeli victims, what is it doing? Trying to prevent conflict, suggesting that there is a possible negotiable way out, or justifying the Israelite army’s military attacks in the name of the “fight against terrorism”?
Propaganda journalism, serving power, has hardly been importunated by the huge technological advances in the media. The media, the “fifth element” as Ignacio Ramonet calls it, still has a short memory, and the same “truth recipe” is still pursued without many obstacles. And a kind of insensible, undetectable and unrecognisable censorship seems to prevail, often hidden behind false principles of objectivity, with the aim of minimising or denying responsibility of the world’s great powers for their extremely violent actions. Or the supremacy of a more or less conscious self-censorship, fed by disinterest, that predominates in so many editorial offices.
The media and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003
The successful Anglo-American military attack against Iraq, begun in March 20, 2003 and ended one month later with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, has determined a new and hitherto unknown relationship between the media and political-military power, whose main feature until now has been tension.
As a result of the selective invitation made to several media, mainly British and North American, to join the military units that invaded Iraq, the concept of the embedded journalist has arisen.
This phenomenon, by which the media were able to accompany the military in a new version of “live war”, seemed to be the proof of a new “friendship and approximation” policy of the military towards the media, notwithstanding the several questions that immediately arose regarding the limits of journalists’ performance and their freedom to inform.
According to the expression used by Professor Mário Mesquita, the condition of “integrated” or “embedded correspondent”, forced to comply with certain rules of conduct, did not however prevent some journalists from escaping the censorship of the commander of the military unit where they were working and of reporting some of the war’s horrors.
Despite the continuation of the Al-Jazira phenomenon, the “creation machine” of the great media spectacle has only improved and adapted itself to the new realities. The innovation of “embedded” journalists doesn’t appear to have implied any noteworthy change in the possibility of a better understanding regarding this war.
However, as underlined by Professor Telmo Gonçalves in an article published by the Portuguese daily “Público” in early April 2003, and beyond the restrictions imposed on journalists, the Pentagon’s promised “war without censorship” did not translate into more than an adaptation of media rules to the new televised dynamics.
Initially, the rules forced on journalists by the Pentagon received particular criticisms. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world entering Kuwait were obliged to sign a two-page, fifty-article document, drawn up by the Pentagon as an effort to allow the media access to the battlefield unprecedented since the Vietnam War. But suspicions remained high.
In Telmo Gonçalve’s opinion, while the invasion’s outcome remained uncertain, the long expectations war in previous months had created a climate of anxiety in audiences and the media, which would inevitably lead to excessive media coverage of the conflict.
When the “end of military operations” was announced, the Pentagon ended up by making a positive evaluation of the work of the “embedded” journalists, meaning that this new “friendship policy” towards the media might continue and develop.
Paradoxical situations
In the specific case of the United States, media control by huge corporations and the problem with patriotism as a result of the 11 September attacks is once again conditioning journalist activity. It was considered that the objective of the “integrated reporters” system, within the so-called “Rumsfeld doctrine”, was to produce war reports with three characteristics: proud, positive and patriotic.
On the other hand, surely most American and British soldiers sent to military operations in Iraq were not informed on the political and financial support provided to Saddam by their governments during the darkest moments of his regime.
As in previous conflicts (like Afghanistan), the North American observatory FAIR noted that most American media ignored the bombing of Iraqi civilians, while several well-known journalists were once again under huge pressures due to their critical stances on the war.
NBC, Disney, News Corporation, AOL-Time-Warner, MGM and Universal Studios are some of the 13 North American companies that control the global communications network. Many of them have very close relationships with the Bush administration, which was translated into an almost total alignment with official stances regarding their approach to the conflict. News Corporation’s “Fox News” was a particular example of this situation.
However, and when it came to written press, there was a somewhat paradoxical situation in Portugal. Unlike in most European countries, and despite the majority of the population’s opposition to the war, the two major dailies in Portugal (Público and Diário de Notícias) and the main weekly one (Expresso) took a pro-conflict stance in their editorials. In the case of Público, this position was mainly expressed in the director’s articles. And these stances were by no means shared by most of the respective staff of these papers.
Nevertheless, in the US, and for the first time in recent history, there was no enthusiastic adherence by most of the national newspapers, and only one third of the editorialists were clearly aligned with the administration. Newspapers with the tradition of non-signed editorials, such as the “New York Times”, “Washington Post” or “Los Angeles Times”, took an “officially” critical stand towards the White House’s policy.
Real and virtual
Notwithstanding this, the majority of American public opinion was supportive of Washington’s policies towards Iraq. An influent conservative newspaper, the “Wall Street Journal”, was even actively supporting George Bush’s policy, inviting several European leaders to subscribe to a manifesto favourable to his stance, which justified the need for a military attack based on the danger placed by the Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”. Weapons that were never found, probably because they did not in fact exist.
A “New York Times” and CBS/News study revealed that 42 % of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, whilst an ABC opinion poll found that 55 % believed that the Iraqi leader directly supported Al-Qaeda.Faced with the imposition of a belligerent logic that flew in the face of international legitimacy and led to an unprecedented division in the United Nations, NATO and even the European Union1, several analysts came back to the same question: what can media professionals in the field do, within a logic of peace journalism, that is, journalism that is meant to prevent or, as in this case, to transform conflicts? The answer: develop a good capacity of judgement, report events with honesty and admit to their audience the limitations of their work.
This is not what happened in the Jessica Lynch case. Private Jessica Lynch was a North American soldier who, according to the main western broadcast media, was injured and captured in an ambush, to be afterwards heroically rescued by her unit.
In a BBC investigation made public in May, reporter John Kampner uncovered the true story, sustaining that Lynch’s rescue operation was nothing more than a huge media performance. The testimonies of Nassiriyah hospital’s doctors, from where Lynch was rescued, revealed that there were no longer Iraqi soldiers there when US Special Forces entered the building. Private Lynch had been well looked after and the doctors had already unsuccessfully attempted to hand her in to the Americans a couple of days before.
Broadcast media primacy
This disclosure is extremely significant and revealing of the media’s current state. With the so-called “aesthetics of politics”, as defended by several analysts and researchers, there is a tendency for information to disappear beyond mere images. In the era of media, the media create their own truth in a context of crisis —a crisis that affects mainly the written press and radio, not simply due to the “image dictatorship” but also related to the drastic reduction of advertising income.
In this way, broadcast media reinforced their position as a privileged means of channelling information. And investment in this sector remains a priority. In the end of April 2003, the United States government finally launched its satellite television station in Arabic for Muslim Iraq. It was produced in the Grace Digital Media (GDM) studio, controlled by fundamentalist and clearly pro-Israeli Christians.
GDM, as stated by Russel Mokhiber and Rober Weissman, is controlled by the fundamentalist Christian millionaire Cheryl Reagan, who assumed control from the Federal News Service last year and
(1 In Europe, the public opinion of a large majority of countries, including Eastern European ones, was against the war.)
whose role is to “transmit evidence of God’s presence in today’s world”.
This new “media offensive” coincided with the attacks on non-embedded journalists covering the war that caused three dead and four wounded, which according to FAIR seem to have been “deliberate”. In one of the incidents of 8 April 2003, on the eve of the famous overthrowing of Saddam Hussein’s statue with the marines’ help, a North American tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel, where most of the “non-embedded” journalists were. In total, thirteen journalists died during the three weeks of war, until the military of the Anglo-American coalition entered Baghdad.
Soon before, American forces had started two separate, but almost simultaneous, attacks on the Arabic television stations Al-Jazira and Abu Dhabi’s offices in Baghdad. These two television stations spared no efforts in showing the huge human costs of this war. Both of them had informed the Pentagon of their exact location, but similarly to the incident at the hotel, Pentagon authorities stated that their troops were attacked from those buildings. The journalists in question immediately rejected these accusations.
These incidents may translate in the future into a continued fragile situation for all the media and journalists that choose not to accept the authorities’ invitation to “incorporation”. The lack of respect for the protection granted to journalists by the Geneva Convention is a new and extremely disturbing sign, because unbiased reports are fundamental to understanding all the realities of a war.
What to do?
Then what can be done, as was recently asked by Danny Schechter, MediaChannel’s editor? At least, suggest a different proposal, give voice to other voices, to other alternatives, project independent analysts, and leaders of conflicting communities that affirm themselves as a credible alternative to the dominant, militarist and radical speech, that only fuels the conflict.
A decisive question can lie in an attempt to explain what is at stake, in the way the conflict’s motives are assimilated by the readers and the hearers. Although this approach depends of “subjective” factors, such as media’s direction availability to choose this way, or the journalists’ own choice in the field.
But, in practical terms, peace initiatives are usually ignored by journalists that rather seem to choose a “way ahead”. Do journalists unavoidably contribute to perpetuating the circle of violence, or is it possible to do more, to help readers or viewers to understand the need to find fair and balanced solutions? These are questions that will remain in the frontline of our concern.
References
CHOMSKY, Noam (2001), O Novo Humanismo Militar. Lições do Kosovo. Porto:
Ed. Campo das Letras. CHOMSKY, Noam (2000), Discurso da Dissidência. Lisboa: Ed. Dinossauro. CORREIA, Fernando (1997), Os Jornalistas e as Notícias. Lisboa: Ed. Caminho. MCCHESNEY, Robert (2000), New Media, Poor Democracy. Illinois: University of
Illinois Press. FARBIAZ, Patrick (1999), Comment manipuler les médias. 101 recettes subversives.
Paris: Ed. Denoël. JANUS 2003. Lisboa: Ed. Público e Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa KNIGHTLEY, Phillip (2000), The first casualty. The war correspondent as hero and
myth-maker from Crimea to Kosovo. London: Prion Books Ltd. PILGER, John (1999), Hidden Agendas. London: Ed. Vintage. RAMONET, Ignacio (1999), A Tirania da Comunicação. Porto: Ed. Campo das Letras. RAMONET, Ignacio (2001), Propagandas Silenciosas. Porto: Ed. Campo das Letras. VÁRIOS (2002), O Império em Guerra. O Mundo depois do 11 de Setembro.
Porto: Ed. Campo das Letras. PÚBLICO, Lisboa El PAÍS, Madrid El MUNDO, Madrid Internet: Fairnesse & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
www.fair.org The Media Channel www.mediachannel.org
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