Media Go to War

▪ 2004

by Peter Kellner

      On March 20, 2003, Anglo-American ground forces crossed into Iraq in order to overthrow Pres. Saddam Hussein. The U.S.-led coalition's war against Hussein was an entirely new experience, however, not only for the fighting troops but also for the reporters and crews covering the action. This conflict was the first sustained, conventional land war for many years to be fought by troops from major Western democracies. In the Gulf War of 1991, ground troops were in battle for just four days, while in Kosovo and Afghanistan ground forces from Western countries were not involved to any significant degree. In addition, technology had transformed the way the media worked. By 2003 satellite communications had become compact, mobile, and cheap; 24-hour television and radio news channels had become familiar throughout the world; and the Internet offered the capacity to deliver news around the globe just minutes after it had been written. Live reports could be transmitted from almost every battle zone, so the public could follow the war, or at least some aspects of it, virtually in real time. This resulted in some powerful images and pieces of reporting, both from the front lines of the coalition forces and from inside Iraqi cities, and, for the first time, from Arab as well as Western sources. The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV station had access to Basra and parts of Baghdad from which Western journalists were barred until those two cities were occupied by coalition forces.

      Journalists who wanted to report on the fighting from the front lines had two options. They could become “embedded” with coalition military units or operate independently as “unilaterals.” Some 600 journalists, about 450 of them from the U.S., chose to be “embeds.” Each lived with his or her unit and held the honorary rank of major. They witnessed the war firsthand, with almost complete access to the troops. In return, they agreed not to write about imminent attacks, future operations, or classified weapons. Journalists also agreed to report on military actions in only general terms to prevent Iraqi forces from securing vital intelligence. (Geraldo Rivera of Fox News was temporarily removed from his unit for revealing its exact position.)

      The embedded journalists produced many dramatic firsthand reports of the fighting as the coalition forces advanced on Baghdad, but doubts surfaced about their ability to assess the wider progress of the war. On March 26 several “embeds” reported that a convoy of up to 120 Iraqi tanks was leaving Basra. The next day a British spokesman admitted that only 14 tanks had left the city. In addition, the very status of these embedded journalists might have compromised their independence. Phillip Knightly, the Australian-born author of The First Casualty, one of the standard books on the history of war reporting, said, “I was able to find only one instance of an embedded correspondent who wrote a story highly critical of the behaviour of U.S. troops.” This was when William Branigin of the Washington Post reported the deaths of Iraqi civilians at a U.S. military checkpoint. The official account said that warning shots had first been fired at a car that refused to stop. Branigin wrote that no such shots were fired.

      The “unilaterals” had fewer constraints than their embedded colleagues but also far less access to coalition troops; thus, their ability to report the war proved to be no greater. One of the most significant false stories of the war—that, after 10 days, the U.S. forces were planning a pause in their advance on Baghdad—emanated from a group of unilaterals.

      The coalition established an official press centre at its central command in Qatar, where regular briefings were given to the world's media. Many journalists, however, complained that little useful information was provided. The head of communication planning at Britain's Ministry of Defence subsequently admitted severe shortcomings, including the failure to provide adequate “context-setting briefings.”

      Although the information provided in Qatar was generally accurate, if sparse, there were times when the fog of war obscured the truth. On April 2 reporters were shown military video film of the rescue of U.S. Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi military hospital near Nassiriya. According to the official account, which was widely reported around the world, Lynch was part of a maintenance team that had been ambushed on March 23. Nine of the team were killed; Lynch was stabbed and shot but continued to fire back at the Iraqi troops. After she was captured, she was harshly interrogated and slapped about the head. Eight days later U.S. special forces fought their way into the hospital against heavy resistance and rescued her.

      Key parts of this account were later found to be untrue. Lynch was wounded but not shot or stabbed, and another soldier in the unit (not Lynch) had fired back. Far from being badly treated in the hospital, she received the best treatment that the Iraqi doctors and their meagre resources could provide. By the time the U.S. special forces arrived, Iraqi troops had left the area. There was no resistance. Moreover, the Iraqi doctors had tried to hand Lynch back to the U.S. Army two days earlier, but when the Iraqi ambulance approached the American lines, U.S. troops opened fire and forced it to turn around.

      If the quality of information available to journalists on and behind the coalition lines was variable, it was no better on the other side. Hussein's regime provided no media access to Iraqi troops south of the capital, but it sought to have its side of the arguments—political, diplomatic, and military—conveyed to the outside world via journalists who remained in Baghdad and Basra, notably those working for Al-Jazeera. Although the American TV networks withdrew from Baghdad shortly before the start of the war, the BBC and other British broadcasters remained, as did television teams from many other countries. Some major American newspapers, such as the New York Times, had correspondents in Baghdad throughout the war.

      Iraqi officials—most notably the perennially optimistic information minister, Muhammad Saʾid al-Sahaf—consistently denied that the coalition forces were gaining ground. As late as April 9, Sahaf was predicting a comprehensive Iraqi victory, even as U.S. tanks could be seen behind him crossing the Tigris River in the heart of Baghdad.

      Iraq imposed no formal censorship on foreign journalists, and live reports were a regular feature from the roof of the Palestine Hotel, the de facto Baghdad headquarters of the international press. Some self-censorship, however, was inevitable. Most Western journalists, especially television crews, employed local staff as fixers, interpreters, and support staff and sought to protect them. Only when central Baghdad fell to coalition forces on April 9 did foreign journalists in the city feel able to abandon such restraint and to report without inhibition.

      The biggest media winners throughout the world were the television news channels, which saw their audiences increase dramatically. In the U.S., Fox News increased its audience fourfold to a daily average of 3.3 million viewers during the war, overtaking the well-established CNN (with a daily average of 2.65 million viewers). Fox benefited from taking a firmly pro-coalition stance toward the war, while CNN upheld its tradition of striving for objective detachment.

      Altogether, 15 journalists lost their lives covering the war, many of them almost certainly victims of “friendly fire.” Those dead included NBC TV's David Bloom, Michael Kelly (see Obituaries (Kelly, Michael )) of the Washington Post, Terry Lloyd from Britain's Independent Television News, Christian Liebig of the German magazine Focus, Julio Anguita Parrado of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, and Argentine television's Mario Podesta. In Baghdad two cameramen, one with Reuters and one with Spanish television, were killed when U.S. tanks fired at the Palestine Hotel, and an Al-Jazeera correspondent died when at least one U.S. bomb hit the station's Baghdad offices. The International Press Institute criticized the U.S. forces for these attacks on civilian targets. Despite high-tech developments, war correspondents in Iraq faced as many challenges and as much danger as those in previous wars ever had.

Peter Kellner is chairman of pollster YouGov Ltd. and the author of The New Mutualism.

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