U.S. media rapped over coverage of Iraq invasion

Harry Bhaskara, The Jakarta Post, Berkeley, California

The dust has yet to settle from the United States' invasion of Iraq but the Arab satellite news network has won the war on the airwaves. With its awesome war machine, the U.S.-led troops may eventually win the war but the American mainstream media is facing an unprecedented attack from its own public.

Antiwar protesters are increasingly shifting their criticism from the government to the news media more than a week into the invasion. On Wednesday March 26, they held up signs that said "Don't lie to me" and "Shame on corporate media scum" in front of the San Francisco office of Cable News Network (CNN). They vowed to come back this week and stage simultaneous rallies in New York and Washington DC.

The antiwar non-government organization MoveOn has demanded the media present the whole picture of the invasion. "The American media outlets have chosen to stifle or simply not show the most terrible and saddening aspects of this war. All we see on TV are retired military officers and administration officials narrating a clean and precise war that bears little resemblance to the chaos, bloodshed, and tragedy on the ground," it says.

MoveOn charges that the outlets are reluctant to air the voices of critics who are raising important questions about its effectiveness and purpose. And that they appear to have acceded to the Bush administration's desire to black out pictures or footage of civilian casualties.

Experts have long criticized the American news media because of what they see as widespread, less-than-critical reporting, with some worrying that it has come closer to the government's position, especially as ownership of the media is dominated by a few media magnates. The steady decline of the media started in the 1950s when commercial television made its inroads into the market.

It has slowly gnawed at America's famous freedom of expression. In the 1960s, Vietnam War protesters complained that journalists did little more than transcribe U.S. government briefings. In 1991, activists protested the televised coverage of the Persian Gulf War saying it looked like a video game.

But the turning point for the worst came after September 11. Only a few weeks after Sept. 11, Le Monde correspondent Eric Leser, quoted by the Paris-based Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF), said the U.S. news media had taken on a strongly patriotic tone and that news had lost out to propaganda soon after Bush's September 2001 Congress speech.

RSF also noted then that voices had been raised warning the public about a decline in freedom of expression and opinion, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, in exchange for tightened security.

Quoting Strobe Talbott, then deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, RSF said, "We are facing an enemy which is exploiting what it is about our society that makes it strong and effective: freedom, openness and freedom of movement. We have to be sure that we remain an open society, in which individual freedoms are respected."

But if today's news media reporting is any indication, those freedoms are the very victims of the terrorists' attacks. Part of the reason is that patriotism, which has always been discussed at home when the U.S. is at war, means different things to different people.

A quick look at both print and broadcast reports here shows that they have been focusing more on the explosions, the movement of troops and the official briefings. What is being implanted in people's minds is a clean and nice-to-look-at war not unlike those in a video game. Glaringly absent has been the human face of the war, the real human costs on both sides of the warring parties.

The 10 Arab satellite networks, notably the popular Al Jazeera, on the other hand have been relentless in their efforts to present a more comprehensive picture of the war, including the victims, accesses to officials of the belligerent parties and more air time allocation. This achievement has had its cost.

Since last week, Al Jazeera has been denied access from reporting on two of Wall Streets largest trading markets: the New York Stock Exchange and Nazdaq.

The ban came after the U.S. Defense Department complained loudly about the "graphic" footage of the war victims and the prisoners of war on Arab news media networks the department construed as violating the Geneva Convention. But local critics were quick to underline U.S. hypocrisy by pointing to reports about Iraqi prisoners of war in U.S. media and went back as far as Guantanamo to question the government's treatment of detainees there.

To be fair, American journalists have never been as sanitized in their coverage of war as in this Iraq invasion, although the 1991 Gulf War coverage had been a worrying sign. Some 500 American journalists are "embedded" with the military or assigned to travel with specific combat units.

This arrangement has restricted their movement. Another factor is that both the journalists and the military are employing cutting-edge technology. One example of the state-of-the-art weaponry used by the military is the pilotless Predator drones. Journalists are using videophones to bring real-time images home. While technology can be of much help, it has its limitations and a new technology is bound to be tested for its unforeseen obstacles.

No wonder some U.S. media outlets are trying to break this barrier to get more objective reporting. The Berkeley-based KPFA radio, for example, is relying on an American freelance journalist who reports live from Baghdad.

But there has been some cooperation too between the American and the Arab news networks, with Al Jazeera footage shown on American televisions.

A small note that says a lot about objectivity in reporting in the U.S. media is a chilling reminder of Indonesian news media's past grotesque sin: Its avoidance of using the word "invasion" under the Soeharto regime when it referred to East Timor's 1975 occupation. Today, most of America's media is avoiding the same word, preferring to use the terms "military campaign" or "attack" on Iraq, which are significantly softer than the word "invasion".

Harry Bhaskara (bhaskara@uclink.berkeley.edu) is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Journalism School, University of California, Berkeley.