'It's more than
exciting, Christiane'
By Orna Coussin
24 March, 2003
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."