DANNY SCHECHTER

WEAPONSOF MASSDECEPTION

HOW THE M

EDIA FAILED TOCOVER

THEW

ARON

IRAQ

N E W S D I S S E C T O R / M E D I A C H A N N E L . O R G

ColdType

EMBEDDED..

EMBEDDED

BOOKS BY DANNY SCHECHTER

Media Wars: News at a Time of Terror, Rowman & Littlefield, USA 2003.

Inovatio Books, Bonn, Germany 2002.

The More You Watch The Less You Know, Seven Stories Press, l997, l999.

News Dissector: Passions Pieces and Polemics 2000, Akashic Books (2000), Electronbooks.com(l999)

Falun Gong’s Challenge to China, Akashic Books, 1999, 2000.

Hail to the Thief, How the Media "Stole" the 2000 Presidential Election (Ed. with Roland Schatz),Inovatio, 2000, Germany, Electronpress.com. U.S.A.

EMBEDDED: WEAPONSOF MASS DISTRACTION

HOW THE MEDIA FAILED TO COVERTHE WAR ON IRAQ

DANNY SCHECHTERN E W S D I S S E C T O R / M E D I A C H A N N E L . O R G

WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTIONPublished in Canada by COLDTYPE.NET, a division of News Design Associates Inc.10469 Sixth Line, RR#3,Georgetown, Ontario L7G 4S6, CanadaTel: (905) 702-8600 / (905) 702-8526 / Fax: (905) 702-8527 Email: tonysutton@newsdesign.net Web site: http://www.coldtype.net

In association with MEDIACHANNEL.ORG575 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York l0018 USATel: (212) 246-0202 x3006Email: dissector@mediachannel.org

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrievable system, ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwiseexcept for reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Copyright ©2003 Danny Schechter

DEDICATIONTo all who fought and the many who died to penetrate the "fog" of war in search of truths hidden in the sands of Iraq, the files of government agencies and the studios of media companies.

And to my colleagues at Globalvision and Mediachannel.org for giving me a platform for these dissections. And to Tony Sutton of ColdType.net for believing that others should have access tothem.

And, as in all my earlier books, to my daughter Sarah Debs Schechter who knew that there wassomething horribly flawed in what she was seeing, hearing and reading about this "war."

Hopefully, this work will help her understand why and how.

BOOKS BY DANNY SCHECHTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

DEDICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

PROLOGUE TO A POST LOG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

IINNTTRROODDUUCCTTIIOONN

BLOGGING THE WAR AWAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

CCHHAAPPTTEERR OONNEE:: WWIINNNNEERRSS AANNDD LLOOSSEERRSS

TRAINING THE MEDIA FOR WAR: A PENTAGON

PRESS REPORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

REPORTS ON THE POST-WAR WAR: ASSESSING

THE AFTERMATH AS A WAY OF SEEING HOW

WELL THE MEDIA PREPARED US FOR

THE OUTCOME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

CCHHAAPPTTEERR TTWWOO:: PPRROODDUUCCIINNGG TTHHEE WWAARR

HOW A MEDIA-MILITARY MERGER PRODUCED

THE WAR AND PREPARED US TO WANT TO SEE IT . 51

WORDS FROM THE WISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

CCHHAAPPTTEERR TTHHRREEEE:: CCOOUUNNTTDDOOWWNN TTOO WWAARR

DISCREDITING THE U.N.; DENIGRATING THE

INSPECTORS; PREACHING TO THE COUNTRY. . . . . . 77

CCHHAAPPTTEERR FFOOUURR:: MMOOBBIILLIIZZIINNGG OOPPIINNIIOONN

PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES; RIGHTWING

LIBERATION THEOLOGY; MEDIA DEBATES; PREPARING THE COVERAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

15 BUNGLED STORIES (EDITOR AND PUBLISHER) . . 107

CCHHAAPPTTEERR FFIIVVEE:: BBAATTTTLLEEFFIIEELLDD BBLLUUEESS

THE QUAGMIRE DEBATE; TV GENERALS DISSENT; TALKING ENDLESSLY ABOUT “THE PLAN;” EMBEDS

ON PARADE; CENTCOM NEWS NETWORK . . . . . . . 111

WAR AS ONE BIG JOKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

CCHHAAPPTTEERR SSIIXX:: SSUURRRROOUUNNDDIINNGG BBAAGGHHDDAADD

INVASION ENCOUNTERS RESISTANCE; THE FALL

AND RISE OF PETER ARNETT; THE DEBEDDING

OF GERALDO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

WORDS OF THE WISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

CCHHAAPPTTEERR SSEEVVEENN:: WWAARR KKIILLLLSS JJOOUURRNNAALLIISSTTSS

JOURNALISTS BECOME THE STORY; WAR PRIORITIES SHIFT; NOAM CHOMSKY’SVIEW; RIP; KELLY AND BLOOM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

ANOTHER WAR OF WORDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

CCHHAAPPTTEERR EEIIGGHHTT:: SSOO TTHHIISS IISS VVIICCTTOORRYY??

THE LOOTING OF BAGHDAD; WAS THIS EVEN

A WAR? WERE JOURNALISTS MURDERED? WAS BBC BIASED? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

THE STATUE SPECTACLE: WE WANTED IT TO BE

TRUE BUT IT WASN’T, BY TED RALL . . . . . . . . . . . 228

CCHHAAPPTTEERR NNIINNEE:: RREEMMEEMMBBEERRIINNGG TTHHEE FFAALLLLEENN

CALL FOR MEDIA CRIMES TRIBUNAL; COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS REPORT; ROSTER OF THE DEAD AND THE MISSING . . . . . . . 233

FACTS FROM FAIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

CCHHAAPPTTEERR 1100:: WWHHAATT CCAANN YYOOUU DDOO AABBOOUUTT IITT??

A CALL FOR MEDIA ACTIVISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

AFTERMATH: THE SUMMER OF SUMMING UP . . . . 243

MANHUNTS AND MEDIA MYOPIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

LETTER TO ED MURROW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 THE NETWORKS AND NEWS MANAGEMENT. . . . . . 262

CCHHAAPPTTEERR 1111:: IINNTTEERRNNAATTIIOONNAALL PPEERRSSPPEECCTTIIVVEESS

THE IRAQ WAR ON TV: A SPLIT REALITY

(FROM MEDIA TENOR IN BONN) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267LAST WORDS: DECEPTION AS POLICY . . . . . . . . . . 279

CCRREEDDIITTSSABOUT THE AUTHOR: DANNY SCHECHTER . . . . . . 283 ABOUT COLDTYPE.NET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284

CONTENTS

7

9

IT is safe to predict that the debate over therationale for and effects of the 2003 war onIraq will fester for decades to come. Why didthe United States act as it did? Did SaddamHussein’s Iraq ever really represent a threat toworld security? Was Baghdad seriously violat-ing United Nations restrictions on weapons ofmass destruction? Did these weapons stillexist when the war began? Did Washington’spre-emptive invasion, at a cost of $917,744,361.55, according to Pentagon accountants,free Iraq’s long-suffering people?

Other questions: what was the full and finalcosts in lives, military and civilian, limbs, anddestruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, economyand cultural treasures? Did that country’s peo-ple really welcome the “liberation” promised tothem in some 31,800,000 leaflets dropped ontheir country along with an unknown amountof deadly ordnance. (Newsweek estimated thatall of this paper could have been put to morepractical use in the form of 120,454 rolls of toi-let paper.)

The war had its official statisticians just assporting events do. They counted everything,including the 423,988 members of U.S. militaryunits deployed (as opposed to less than 10 per-cent of that number in other forces, just 42,987“foreign” troops rustled up into what was clum-sily labeled a “coalition of the willing.”

What was unaccounted for, at least by theinvaders and rarely shown in western media,were the civilian casualties. As a matter of pol-

icy, the United States refused to release any fig-ures or even estimates. The United Nations wastracking the problem. At the end of May, theiragencies were guestimating that the toll maysurpass ten thousand, a stunningly large num-ber, considering all of the assurances given thatevery effort would be made to limit damage tothe society and its long suffering civilian popu-lation.

According to Ian Bruce in the Glasgow Her-ald: “The toll will exceed the 3500 civilianskilled in the 1991 Gulf war and the 1800 to 2000innocent Afghans known to have perished dur-ing the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban andwipe out al Qaeda’s training camps.” HaidarTaie, who runs the Red Crescent’s tracingdepartment in Baghdad, said: “We just don’tknow for certain. But thousands are dead,thousands more injured or missing. It will taketime to reach a definitive count. It was certainlya disaster for civilians caught in the fighting.”

“The War For Iraqi Freedom,” as the Penta-gon and at least two networks branded it, wenton for 720 hours. It was well documented bythe Pentagon, which transmitted 3,200 hoursof video and took 42,000 pictures, most ofwhich the public did not, and may never, view.

What we did see, and read about the Iraq Waris the subject of this book fashioned in the heatof the conflict. If journalism is a matter of courseconsidered the first draft of history, this is one ofthe first book-length attempts to focus on thecoverage and its many flaws, written before our

PROLOGUE TO A POST LOG

PROLOGUE

10

memories fade. It focuses on the different ver-sions of the Iraq war that were transmitted ontelevision and in the press, the versions thatshaped impressions and public opinion.

This book is about more visible WMDs thanthe ones discussed in the media. It is about themedia itself viewed as a weapon system:Weapons of Mass Deception. Those weaponsdrove a media war, a war that many nowbelieve perverted freedom of the press in thename of serving it. Many used patriotism as apromotional tool, pandering to fears andnationalist sentiment.

There was warfare within the media, too, asmedia companies battled each other forscoops, exclusives, branding and positioning.They fought for market share, “mindshare” andad-spend share. Within the trenches of theindustry, and sometimes within the companiesthemselves, journalists and program producerswrestled with their colleagues and counter-parts for guests and a competitive advantage.They worked with the military discipline of sol-diers, only they were paid for their overtime.(When I worked at ABC, staffers were called“the troops.”)

Yet, even as they competed against theircounterparts, they also collaborated with eachother, often drawing on the same footage, car-rying the same stories, echoing the sameadministration claims and following the Penta-gon’s lead. Often they cloned each other’slooks, formulas, formatting and “enhance-ment” techniques. They often looked andsounded more alike than they thought. Theirsameness trumped their differences.

All news organizations rehearsed their cover-age, pre-produced graphics and features, and

“deployed” the latest techno toys. This mediawar brought out some of the best in journalismand too much of the worst. It showed the newsbusiness’ vast technological capacity to bringus live coverage from the battlefield, but alsodemonstrated its power to sanitize that cover-age and spin it propagandistically. It shame-lessly recycled stories, repeating key themes,updating updates, all while promoting its owncoverage.

This media war promoted the war it covered.It mobilized approval among opinion-makingelites in Washington, London and other worldcapitals. First, it constructed the political envi-ronment, contributing to the sense ofinevitability about the need for war and thenfostered approval for it. Critical voices quicklyvanished as fighting got underway.

The media war targeted the larger public, too,and in the United States at least, built what wasreported as a consensus for the war and anational acceptance of its official goals andeffects. The war coverage sold the war even asit claimed to be just reporting it. Media outletscalled attention to their news gathering tech-niques, but never to their effects. During thefirst Gulf War, communications scholars foundthat people who relied exclusively on televisionfor their news and information tended to knowthe least about the issues. I am sure similarstudies will produce similar findings about thiswar. Most Americans lacked much knowledgeabout the issue before the war. Only 13 percentof America’s teenagers could even find Iraq ona map. So much for the educational job doneby the media and the schools.

Not everyone who watched the build-up tothe war or the war itself bought into its terms

PROLOGUE

11

or was persuaded by its storyline. The war andits coverage also turned off and tuned out tensof millions who took to the streets, rejectingthe pro-war media frame, in the largest globalprotests in history. Relying on independentmedia, international newspapers and feistyweb sites for their information, they criticizedboth the policy and the press. In the aftermathof the giant February 15 2003 protests, TheNew York Times commented that there werethen two opposing global superpowers: themilitary might of the United States and worldpublic opinion. As the war erupted, the criticswere “disappeared” from the media view justas Saddam disposed of his critics. He used vio-lence; our media used inattention.

Even as those protests were often badly andin some cases barely covered, they neverthe-less spoke for millions who rejected the mediawar aimed at their minds and spirits. One canonly hope that, as the claims and “evidence”used to stoke up the war are unmasked, themedia role will also be seen for what it is.

As Paul Krugman commented on The TimesOp-ed page. “Over the last two years we’vebecome accustomed to the pattern. Each timethe administration comes up with anotherwhopper, partisan supporters (a group thatincludes a large segment of the news media)obediently insist that black is white and up isdown.

“Meanwhile, the ‘liberal’ media report onlythat some people say that black is black andup is up. And some democratic politiciansoffer the administration invaluable cover bymaking excuses and playing down the extentof their lies.”

Most of us were not on the battlefield. Ourunderstanding of what happened, our percep-tions, points of view and prejudices wereforged and framed by our media choices. Weneed to see that as a problem that demands tobe addressed. Just as we consider politicianslying to us a problem, media accountabilityand responsibility are as important as politicalresponsibility ●

13

INTRODUCTION

ew of us escaped seeing the non-stopreports from Iraq, from journalistsembedded and otherwise, reports fromwhat have been described as the front

lines of the fight for “Iraqi freedom.”Throughout the American media world andbeyond, there has been a hearty sense of a jobwell done, except of course, for regrets overthose colleagues and soldiers who never made ithome.

We all watched the war as if it was only a mili-tary conflict. It wasn’t.

There was also a carefully planned, tightlycontrolled and brilliantly executed media warthat was fought alongside it. For the most part,that other media war was not covered or fullyexplained even though it was right in front of us.

The media war was there in living color butmany didn’t realize it had a life of its own, influ-encing as well as transmitting the BIG STORY. Ithas to be viewed on more than one level. Not allthe news was what it appeared to be. In fact, it allfollowed a scenario, and served a function fore-cast years earlier by Canadian media guru, thelate Marshall McLuhan who predicted: “If therewere no coverage . . . there’d be no war. Yes, thenewsmen and the media men around the worldare actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.” McLuhan spoke of the media environ-ment and television as a medium that rarelycalls attention to itself. He called it “pervasivelyinvisible.”

The war coverage inundated us for weeks, as if

there was no other news in the world. It wasblow-by-blow and wall-to-wall, with the focus onthe U.S. military campaign as it rolled across thedesert. We watched as “the coalition” fought itsway into Baghdad, stronghold of strongman Sad-dam Hussein, capital of the regime whose over-throw had been demanded – and accomplished.We saw the images and heard first-personaccounts from many of the journalists abouttheir adventures, difficulties, scoops and disap-pointments.

War as propaganda

THE Baghdad-based reporters who workedunder limitations imposed by the now defunctIraqi Ministry of Information were not shy abouttelling us what they had to put up with. Whenthat ministry and the TV station it managedwere “taken out” in bombing attacks that mayhave flouted international laws, American news-casters cheered. Its propaganda function wascrude and obvious.

There was also propaganda flowing from otherregional media aimed at the “Arab Street” andthat also was crude and distorted – and, from itsperspective, also was effective. Many commenta-tors accepted pro-Iraq propaganda. They expec -ted far more Iraqi resistance than materialized.

While outlets like Al-Jazeera and Abu DhabiTV strived to offer professional reporting that insome instances out-scooped western networks,other commentary reflected longstanding cul-

BLOGGING THE WAR AWAY

15

INTRODUCTION

16

tural biases, anti-Americanism, inflammatoryantisemitism, with loads of violence and noattention paid to Saddam’s human rights abusesor women’s rights. Kurdish journalists, who livedthrough the impact of Saddam’s ethnic cleansingof rebellious Kurds in the north, criticized Arabsatellite stations for these serious shortcomings.

Many U.S. newscasts pointed to these flawsand biases in part to project their own work asbeing free of similar biases. “They” – the “other”– practiced propaganda common to backwardsocieties. We of the developed world practicedworld-class bias-free journalism, or so wewanted the world to believe.

Propaganda was pervasive

THE truth is that there were pervasive pro-West-ern propaganda techniques built into Americanmedia presentation formats. Many may be dis-guised; others obvious. They were also rarelycommented upon or critiqued, except by warcritics. Few journalists put their reporting skillsto work to report fully on their own govern-ment’s propaganda campaign and its interfacewith their own media products.

Washington’s anti-Iraqi propaganda was multi-dimensional and a key component of the “coali-tion” war plan (Deceptive words like “coalition”were themselves part of it.) Aimed at the Iraqiswas a well-crafted arsenal of psychological opera-tions or Psy-Ops carried out by an IO (InformationOperations) directorate that simultaneously tar-geted and destroyed the county’s communicationsystem and replaced it with its own. A secondfront – and perhaps a more important one – wasthe western public. Iraqis were targeted by bombsand information warfare while western audiences

had a well executed propaganda campaign oftenposing as news directed their way.

Explains British-based propaganda expert Paulde Rooij, in several well-sourced assessments:“One generally doesn’t think of psychologicalwarfare as something waged against the homepopulation; but this is perhaps the best way toappreciate the U.S. experience during the pastfew months. The objective of such a campaign wasto stifle dissent, garner unquestioning support,and rally people around a common symbol. Amer-icans, and to a lesser extent Europeans, have beensubjected to a propaganda barrage in an effort toneutralize opposition to the war, and this fitsdirectly into a psy-ops framework.”

Suddenly all the networks had platoons of retiredgenerals and pro-war military experts interpretingwar news. U.S. TV quickly resembled Chilean TVafter the coup. CNN’s news chief Eason Jordanrevealed that he had sought approval from the Pen-tagon for his network’s key war advisors. OneCanadian critic called the network, “the Pentagon’sbitch.” At war’s end, critic Michael Mooredemanded the “unilateral withdrawal of the Penta-gon from America’s TV studios.”

War as a political campaign

PENTAGON media chief Tori Clarke, who workedwith PR firms and political campaigns beforebringing a corporate style, and politically ori-ented spin operation into the Pentagon, admittedthat she was running her shop the way she usedto run campaigns. This approach was coordi-nated throughout the administration with “mes-sages of the day” and orchestrated appearancesby the President and members of his cabinet.They were not just selling a message but “man-

aging the perceptions” of those who receivedthem. Politically, they used “stagecraft,” a termthat once was used to refer to covert operations.On May 16th, 2003, The New York Times detailedhow the Bush Administration relies on TV enter-tainment techniques to sell the President and hispolicies. Significantly, media people are directingthe effort. Elisabeth Bumiller wrote:

“Officials of past Democratic and Republicanadministrations marvel at how the White Housedoes not seem to miss an opportunity to show-case Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lightedsettings. It is all by design: the White House hasstocked its communications operation with peo-ple from network television who have expertisein lighting, camera angles, and the importance ofbackdrops.

“TV news people have been tapped in thisaspect of the media war. First among equals isScott Sforza, a former ABC producer who washired by the Bush campaign in Austin, Tex., andwho now works for Dan Bartlett, the WhiteHouse communications director. Mr. Sforza cre-ated the White House “message of the day” back-drops and helped design the $250,000 set at theUnited States Central Command forward head-quarters in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war.

“Mr. Sforza works closely with Bob DeServi, aformer NBC cameraman whom the Bush WhiteHouse hired after seeing his work in the 2000campaign. Mr. DeServi, whose title is associatedirector of communications for production, isconsidered a master at lighting. ‘You want it, I’llheat it up and make a picture,’ he said early thisweek. A third crucial player is Greg Jenkins, aformer Fox News television producer in Wash-ington,” Bumiller revealed.

These smartly polished sales techniques

worked and typified the way the war was sold –and covered. It all underscores once again thatwe no longer live in a traditional democracy but,rather, a media-ocracy, a land in which mediadrives politics and promotes the military.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman,who has written about how media coverageshapes public opinion, makes another pointabout the way TV coverage distorts reality. “Theadministration’s anti-terror campaign makes methink of the way television studios really look.The fancy set usually sits in the middle of ashabby room, full of cardboard and duct tape.Networks take great care with what viewers seeon their TV screens; they spend as little as pos-sible on anything off camera.

“And so it has been with the campaign againstterrorism. Mr. Bush strikes heroic poses on TV,but his administration neglects anything thatisn’t photogenic,” Krugman wrote.

No wonder we had newscasts in which imagestrumped information. Clearly, just as the Penta-gon boasted of its war plan, there was anotherplan alongside it–a media marketing plan thatwas even more carefully guarded lest it fall intothe wrong hands. News management alwaysworks best when those who are its target areunaware of its dynamics.

War as a TV show

THIS war was a TV show on a new scale with asmany “events” as a televised Olympics. Mediaoutlets were willing, even enthusiastic partici-pants in presenting the made-for-television spec-tacle. It would be wrong and overly deterministicto conclude that these TV news operations weretaken over, duped or manipulated by the kind of

INTRODUCTION

17

INTRODUCTION

18

crude force that prevails in some other countriesbetween government agencies and the media.The Pentagon was not faxing instructions to thenewsrooms, nor would they have to. Media com-panies had their own reasons for playing the rolethey did, as did the “yellow press” publisherWilliam Randolph Hearst who used – and, manysay, started – a war as a way to sell papers. He isreported to have said: “You furnish the picturesand I’ll furnish the war” – at the beginning of theSpanish-American War.

Today the relationship between governmentand media is more symbiotic, even synergistic.Wars like the one in Iraq are staged to projectAmerican power to the world. The picturesadvertise that power (and market weapons sys-tems at the same time).

The news business is more than happy tooblige because war attracts viewers in largenumbers. Journalists quickly become intoxicatedby the ether of war and all the excitement anddanger that awaits on the front line. For manyreporters, war is where the action is. It is also acareer builder. Covering war has always been away for journalists to prove their bona fides, winbragging rights and, of course, move up the lad-der in the corporate news world.

Some journalists are drawn to war as mothsare drawn to flame and light. For them, war rep-resents the highest form of professional callingand appeals to their sense of patriotism andpride. Many promote the mission of those theycover as their own, just as many beat reportersare often co-opted by the officials and the agen-cies on which they report. The seduction is sub-tle. Some may be bought as intelligence assets,but most would resent any suggestion that theyhave sold out – or sold in. Years ago, Humbert

Wolfe penned a famous ditty about the waymany journalists voluntarily and enthusiasticallyserve the interests of others, without distance orskepticism:

“You cannot hope to bribe or twistThank God! The British JournalistBut seeing what the man will doUnbribed, there’s no occasion to.”Networks like war. It offers riveting program-

ming “reality”. They produce it as “militain-ment,” to borrow a term from TIME Magazine.Its life and death drama brings in viewers andholds attention. The spectacle builds ratings andrevenues. It also imbues news organizationswith a sense of importance and self-importance.It allows executives to demonstrate how valuablethey are to the national interest. Executives atMSNBC boasted of how their war coveragebrought Americans together and “emphasizedthe positive, not the negative.”

Positive coverage also helps networks gainmore access to the powerful, satisfying theiradvertisers in an industry where three out ofevery four commercials are bought by the 50most powerful companies. In 2003, pleasing theBush Administration also promised an economicbenefit, since while the war was being waged,media companies were lobbying for regulatorychanges that would benefit their bottom lines.FCC Chairman Michael Powell, son of the Secre-tary of State who was serving the war policy,rationalized the need for more media consolida-tion on grounds that only big media companiescould afford to cover future wars the way thisone was being covered.

The embedded journalist

THIS book focuses on the campaign thatinvolved co-opting and orchestrating the newsmedia. The most visible center of this strategywas the effort to embed reporters whose workwas subsidized by the Pentagon, overseen by“public affairs” specialists and linked to TV newsnetworks dominated by military expertsapproved by the Pentagon. When the war wasover, Rem Rieder, the editor of the AmericanJournalism Review (AJR) gushed: “It is clearthat the great embedding experiment was ahome run as far as the news media and theAmerican people are concerned.” Military Com-mander Gen. Tommy Franks agreed andpledged that embedding would be used in futureconflicts.

AJR writer Sherry Ricchiardi amplified theview most favored by the mainstream mediaorganizations that participated in the embeddingexperiment: “… despite initial skepticism abouthow well the system would work, and some dead-on criticism of overly enthusiastic reporting inthe war’s early stages, the net result was a farmore complete mosaic of the fighting – repletewith heroism, tragedy and human error – thanwould have been possible without it.” She quotesSandy Johnson, The Associated Press’ Washing-ton bureau chief who directed coverage of the1991 Persian Gulf War.

“Compared with the scant access allowedthen,” Johnson says, “This system has workedincredibly well.

“The naysayers,” she adds, “will be eating theirwords.”

Will we?Most embedded reporters claimed that they

were not really restrained but rather assisted intheir work by Pentagon press flacks. This isprobably true – and the reason the systemworked so well. Manipulation is always moreinsidious as well when the manipulated do notfully recognize how they are being used in a care-fully calibrated media spin operation. Many of the“embeds” acknowledged that they came to iden-tify with and sometimes befriend the soldiers inthe units they tagged along with, usually with thecaveat that it was no different from covering anybeat.

Former TV reporter Michael Burton offered adifferent view: “The idea originated with thePentagon, where military and political strate-gists pitched the idea to editors last year as acompromise. The Pentagon strategists, alreadyplanning for the Iraqi war, wanted proud, posi-tive, and patriotic coverage over the national air-waves. If the editors agreed to all their provi-sions for security reviews, flagging of sensitiveinformation, limitations on filming dead bodies,and other restrictions, then journalists would bewelcome. The editors not only went along – theyaccepted the ground rules without a fight.

“Now, the story of war is seen through the eyesof the American battalions, but without the realviolence. American children see more images ofviolence on nightly television than they do inthis war, because of the deliberate editing athome. Instead, they see a fascination with hightech weapons, battle tactics, and military strat-egy reporting,” Burton says.

He claims this leads to bias, although heacknowledges that many of his former col-leagues demur: “Some reporters disagree, say-ing that eating, sleeping and living with the U.S.troops does not make them biased (in spite of the

INTRODUCTION

19

constant descriptions of “we” and “us” whenreporters talk about the military units). They saythey are revealing more human-interest storiesin real-time. But, while embedded journalismprovides more opportunity for human interest, itonly does so from the American military’s per-spective.”

Veteran New York Times war reporter ChrisHedges seems to agree with this view. He toldEditor & Publisher magazine that he preferredprint reporting to the TV coverage but said thatboth were deeply flawed. “Print is doing a betterjob than TV,” he observes. “The broadcast mediadisplay all these retired generals and charts andgraphs, it looks like a giant game of Risk [theboard game]. I find it nauseating.” But even theprint embeds have little choice but to “look atIraq totally through the eyes of the U.S. military,”Hedges points out. “That’s a very distorted andself-serving view.”

The Project on Excellence in Journalism stud-ied the early coverage and found that half theembedded journalists showed combat action butnot a single story depicted people hit byweapons. There were no reporters embeddedwith Iraqi families. None stationed with humani-tarian agencies or the anti-war groups that hadbrought more than 15 million people on thestreets before the war in a historically unprece-dented display of global public opinion. Thecumulative impact of the embedded reporters’work prompted former Pentagon press chiefKenneth Bacon to tell The Wall Street Journal:“They couldn’t hire actors to do as good a job asthey have done for the military.”

War as sport

THEY were actors in a news drama that had allthe earmarks of a sporting event. In fact it seemsto be designed as one. I found propaganda ana-lyst Paul de Rooje’s perspective on this aspectvery insightful He writes: “Propaganda cam-paigns usually follow a theme … During the 1991Gulf War, the theme was the “video game”,which was evident due to the number of demoli-tion video clips. This theme couldn’t be reusedbecause the video-game scenes raised someuncomfortable questions about this enterpriseespecially among opponents of the war. It wastherefore necessary to conjure a new theme, andall indications are that this campaign followed a“sports show” metaphor. The main advantage ofthis approach is that Americans are very com-fortable with the “sport show” – it is part of theirdaily diet, it is intelligible to them, and it givesthem a passive “entertained” role. Casting prop-aganda in such a known, comfortable frameworkmakes people adjust favorably to the message…

“…When one watches a sports game, there isno need to think about the “why” of anything; itis only an issue of ‘supporting our team’. You arealso only supposed to root for the ‘good guys’team, and hate the ‘Iraqi meanies’. Dissidentvoices are also drowned out – you are only sup-posed to cheer for the home team… The ‘play-by-play’ military analysts incorporated thesports analogy completely–with maps/diagrams,advice to players, and making the audience thinkabout the marvelous strategy…”

How the war was shown

MANY of the cable news networks pictured Iraq

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as if it was the property of, and indistinguishablefrom, one mad man. Accordingly, attention wasfocused endlessly on where Saddam was, was healive or dead, etc. Few references were made toU.S. dealings with his government in the l980s orthe covert role the CIA played in his rise to power.

Saddam was as demonized in 2003 as Osamabin Laden had been in 2001, with news beingstructured as a patriotically correct moralitysoap opera with disinterested good guys (us) bat-tling the forces of evil (them/him) in a politicalconflict constructed by the White House along“you are either with us or against us” lines. Fewexplained that there had been an undeclaredwar in effect for more than a decade with Iraq(and Islamic fundamentalists) well before the hotwar of 2003 was launched. That was a war foughtwith systematic bombing in the name of defend-ing no-fly zones and a campaign of U.N.- imposedsanctions that may have caused as many as a mil-lion deaths. This context, in fact, most contextwas missing. The coverage recalled the title of abook on our media culture published some yearsago, aptly entitled “The Context of No Context.”

The imbalances of coverage

THERE were many stories in this war but mostfollowed a story line that reduced the terms ofcoverage to two sides, the forces of light versusthe forces of darkness. This is typical of all warpropaganda. In this war it was presented on oneside, the “good side,” by endless CENTCOM mil-itary briefings, Pentagon press conferences, AriFleischer White House Q&As, administrationdomination of the Sunday TV talk shows andoccasional Presidential utterances riddled withreligious references. Counter posed on the other

side, the “bad side,” were the crude press con-ferences of Iraq’s hapless minister of misinfor-mation, a cartoon figure whom no one took seri-ously. The two armies were spoken of as if therewas some parity between their capacities. Therewas endless focus on the anticipated chemical orbiological weapons attacks that never came, andon the weapons of mass destruction – findingWMD was a major reason for the war – that haveyet to be found (at this writing).

Omitted from the picture and the reportagewere views that offered any persuasive counter-narrative. There were few interviews with ordi-nary Iraqis, or experts not affiliated with pro-administration think tanks. Or with military peo-ple, other than retired military officials whoquibbled over tactics not policy. Or with peaceactivists, European journalists and, until late inthe day, Arab journalists. We saw images fromAl-Jazeera but rarely heard its analysis. This listof what was left out is endless. Footage was san-itized, “breaking news” was often inaccurate”and critical voices were omitted as Fox Newsplayed up martial music and MSNBC ran promosurging “God Bless America.”

The role of Fox News, an unabashed 24-hour- a-day booster of the war, probably deserves a bookof its own. Its aggressive coverage pandered tothe audience, simplified the issues and attackedcompeting media outlets and correspondentswho deviated in any way from the “script” theywere promoting. Fox’s apparent success inattracting viewers with its non-stop hawkish nar-rative led to a “Fox Effect” that caused many com-petitors to try to emulate its approach. MSNBCwas accused of trying to “outfox Fox.” Its coveragepolarized the media war and bullied war critics.

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War as staged spectacle

ONE of the most dramatic stories of the war wasa dramatic rescue of U.S. POW Jessica Lynchfrom an Iraqi hospital. It was covered for days astriumph for the U.S. military. A month after itoccurred, The BBC took a second look. Itsreporters found that the truth of what happenedcontradicted what seemed at the time like aMade for TV Movie (and yet may inspire one!).

Reported Ellis Henican in Newsday: “Her res-cue will go down as one of the most stunningpieces of news management yet conceived.” AndJohn Kampfner, a British journalist who hastaken a hard second look at the case for the BBCand the Guardian newspaper, concurs. His docu-mentary, “Saving Private Jessica: Fact or Fic-tion?” aired in Britain on March l8.”

Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Timesadded: “Sadly, almost nothing fed to reportersabout either Lynch’s original capture by Iraqiforces or her ‘rescue’ by U.S. forces turns out tobe true. Consider the April 3 Washington Poststory on her capture headlined ‘She Was Fight-ing to the Death,’ which reported, based onunnamed military sources, that Lynch ‘contin-ued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustainedmultiple gunshot wounds,’ adding that she wasalso stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in.

“It has since emerged that Lynch was neithershot nor stabbed, but rather suffered accidentinjuries when her vehicle overturned,” Scheerwrote. “A medical checkup by U.S. doctors con-firmed the account of the Iraqi doctors, who saidthey had carefully tended her injuries, a brokenarm and thigh and a dislocated ankle, in contrastto U.S. media reports that doctors had ignoredLynch,” he concluded. (Later, the claims in the

piece would be challenged as distorted by Geof-frey Sherwood on Asia Times: “Kampfner'sanalysis was flawed on several levels. If CENT-COM went to great lengths to manipulate thewar reporting, as Kampfner alleges, then it failedmiserably." This debate is likely to continue.)

The war’s other “most dramatic moment” wasthe toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein.Many media critics like Ted Rall debunked thisstory thoroughly. “The stirring image of Sad-dam’s statue being toppled on April 9th turns outto be fake, the product of a cheesy media opstaged by the U.S. military for the benefit of cam-eramen staying across the street at Baghdad’sPalestine Hotel. This shouldn’t be a big surprise.Two of the most stirring photographs of WorldWar II – the flag raising at Iwo Jima and GeneralMacArthur’s stroll through the Filipino surf –were just as phony.”

Competing narratives

OUTSIDE the United States, there were compet-ing narratives in the coverage of the war. Ameri-cans saw a different war than the one presentedin the media in Europe and the Arab world.These differences raised “vexing questions” formedia scholar Jacqueline E. Sharkey “about theresponsibilities of the press in wartime, journal-istic values such as objectivity, and the relation-ships among the press, the public and the gov-ernment . . . During the war in Iraq, televisionnews operations in Arab countries providedviewers throughout the world with an alterna-tive view of the conflict, “ she wrote in the AJR.

“Arabs and Muslims are getting a dramaticallydifferent narrative from their American counter-parts,” says Fawaz Gerges, who holds a chair in

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Middle Eastern studies and international affairsat Sarah Lawrence College and is an ABC newsconsultant on the Middle East. The U.S. net-works have focused “on the technologicallyadvanced nature of the American militaryarmada,” he says. “The Arab and Muslim presstend to focus on the destruction and sufferingvisited on Iraq by this military armada.”

The U.S. government has at times sought tosilence Arab media outlets. In other instances,U.S. media outlets like Fox News denouncedtheir news coverage, in one case, as “culturallyArab.” The U.S. military bombed Baghdad’sArab media center during the war, claiming twolives. In mid May 2003, The Wall Street Journalreported from Mosul: “The U.S. Army issuedorders for troops to seize this city’s only televi-sion station, leading an officer here to raise ques-tions about the Army’s dedication to free speechin postwar Iraq, people familiar with the situa-tion said. The officer refused the order and wasrelieved of duty. The directive came from the101st Airborne Division’s commander, Maj. Gen.David Petraeus, who has ultimate authority inMosul and the rest of northwest Iraq, the peoplefamiliar with the matter said. He said it wasaimed at blocking the station from continuing tobroadcast the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera.”

Media Writer Norman Solomon noted in a syn-dicated report carried on Al-Jazeera’s website:“Widely watched in the Arab world, Al-Jazeera’scoverage of the war on Iraq has been in sharpcontrast to the coverage on American television.As Time Magazine observed: “On US TV itmeans press conferences with soldiers who havehand and foot injuries and interviews withPOWs’ families, but little blood. On Arab andMuslim TV it means dead bodies and mourning.”

Coverage in Europe also differed from thatoffered by U.S. media outlets. Writing fromSpain, professor Herman Gyr noted, “It is oftenhard to believe they are covering the sameevents and the gap between American andglobal perceptions of this war will certainly havesignificant repercussions for some time tocome.”

“In the end, I think, the difference between thetwo views of the war (that of America & Israelversus that of the rest of the world) boils done toa single question: Were there alternatives?Americans were told by their media that therewere no alternatives and that the only optionwas for Americans to get in there and get the jobdone (=war) and let the rest of the world bedamned. The rest of the world was told by theirmedia that there were numerous other options(diplomatic, economic, etc.) that would haveinvolved less death and destruction In short,there were two very different wars to watch: onealmost entirely military in nature (the Americanversion) and another portrayed in unrelentinglyhuman terms (the global version),” Gyr con-cluded?

What many Americans don’t know is thatsome U.S. outlets offered competing narrativesas well. CNN mounted two expensive news gath-ering operations. CNN America offered coveragefor the “homeland” that was often a thinly dis-guised form of boosterism, while CNN Interna-tional served the rest of the world, with a morenuanced picture.

Independent journalist Michael Massing whospent part of the war encamped at the CENT-COM media center in Doha, Qatar, explained thisseeming conflict in The New York Review ofBooks:

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“The difference was not accidental. Six monthsbefore the war began, I was told, executives atCNN headquarters in Atlanta met regularly toplan separate broadcasts for America and theworld. Those executives knew that (Paula) Zahn’sgirl-next-door manner and Aaron Brown’s spaceymonologues would not go down well with theBritish, French, or Germans, much less the Egyp-tians or Turks, and so the network, at hugeexpense, fielded two parallel but separate teamsto cover the war. And while there was plenty ofoverlap, especially in the reports from the field,and in the use of such knowledgeable journalistsas Christiane Amanpour, the international edi-tion was refreshingly free of the self-congratula-tory talk of its domestic one. In one tellingmoment, Becky Anderson, listening to one ofWalter Rodgers’s excited reports about U.S.advances in the field, admonished him: “Let’s notgive the impression that there’s been no resist-ance.” Rodgers conceded that she was right.

“CNN International bore more resemblance tothe BBC than to its own domestic edition, a dif-ference that showed just how market-drivenwere the tone and content of the broadcasts. Forthe most part, U.S. news organizations gaveAmericans the war they thought Americanswanted to see.‘”

Obviously I could not see all the coverage orcompare and contrast it in any systematic way.What is clear and important to recognize is thatthere are different ways stories can be covered.Media diversity matters.

The outside view of a media insider

THIS book brings together an outsider’s cover-age of the war focused on covering the coverage.

I was ‘self-embedded’ in my small office in NewYork’s Times Square, the media capital of theworld, as editor of the not for profit Mediachan-nel.org, a global media monitoring website withmore than l000 affiliates worldwide. I focused oncovering the coverage on a global basis everyday, and disseminating my findings, ruminationsand dissections (I am known as “the news dis-sector”) in a daily weblog. Many of theseweblogs run 3,000 to 4000 words a day, and oftenappear seven days a week, which speaks to myobsession, fixation and passion on this subject.Call it what you will.

In addition, I write regularly on media issuesfor the Globalvision News Network (www.gvnews.net) that has 350 media partners in l00 countries.I was able to access this unique internationalnews source as well.

I also bring to this work nearly 30 years ofexperience inside the U.S. media system. Thereis a mission to my “madness,” as well as amethod. From years of covering conflicts on theradio in Boston and on TV at CNN, ABC Newsand Globalvision, the company I co-founded, Ihave come see how often inadequate is the “firstdraft of history,” as daily journalism is called.How it excludes more than it includes. How itnarrows issues while framing them. How it tendsto mirror and reflect the worldview of decision-makers while pandering to the patriotism of theaudience. And, most interesting, now that wehave the web for daily comparative access to sto-ries in different countries on the same subject,how ideology and cultural outlook shape whatwe report and choose not to report.

That made it possible for me to monitor andreview, with the help of readers and other edi-tors in our shop, coverage from around the

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world. Clearly some of it brought biases asstrong as our own, but also offered information,context and background missing in U.S. mediaaccounts. Most of our news outlets, for example,covered a war IN Iraq; others spoke of the warON Iraq.In the U.S., there was often no linebetween jingoism and journalism.

This is the essence of the analysis I offered,day after day, cobbled together from articlesfrom the world press, independent sources,international agencies and my own observationsof the U.S. cable coverage, network shows, BBCand CBC News. I relied on the coverage fromaround the world to offer far more diverseaccounts of the facts on the ground as well astheir interpretation.

I began each morning at 6:00 a.m., watching TVat home with a remote in my hand and a notebookby my side. Daily, I scanned CNN, BBC, MSNBC,Fox and whatever else was on. I read The NewYork Times, the New York Post and other dailiesand weeklies, as well as news magazines andopinion journals. I clipped away in a frenzy.

I was in the office at 7:00 a.m. and was soon hop-scotching between web sites and email over flow-ing with stories I missed. I would cut and paste,collate and collage and then start writing. Iworked fast, and sometimes sloppily. I squeezedin as much as I could and thought relevant and auseful corrective to the main media frame. Fortu-nately, I had few distractions. No phones. No onebugging me. I posted at 9:00 a.m. with an editor tooversee the copy and correct my many typos.Within an hour, we tried to send the weblog out tothe many Mediachannel readers who subscribed.

After work, I’d be radar-locked back on thetube, watching the late news, the talk shows andeven comedy programs. I found that the Comedy

Channel’s Jon Stewart was often more on targetthan the news networks. I preferred Canada’snewscasts to our own. Sometimes CSPAN fea-tured talks or hearings worth paying attention to.When I couldn’t take it anymore, I tuned out anddropped off to sleep and then did it again the nextday. Sometimes I had trouble sleeping as the stu-pidity of the coverage recycled in my brain.

I guess I am one of those “feelers” whoempathize with war’s victims more than the sol-diers whose deadly work was often sanitized. Onthe tube I kept hearing about the “degrading” ofIraq’s military while witnessing the degrading ofjournalism itself.

Watching the media war took a personal tollon me. I was often bleary-eyed, wandering towork in empty streets, as the city woke up tonew terror alerts and fear that the war had con-sequences that we were not ready for. What keptme going was the constant supply of items,extracts from news stories and comments fromreaders. As well as a lot of encouragement of atype that most journalists rarely get. Journaliststend to resent our readers and rarely interactwith them, but they help me enormously.

Fortunately, the weblog gave me the space andthe freedom to have a rather extended say. Couldit have been shorter? Probably. Would it havebeen as comprehensive? No. Clearly the haste ofthe effort did not permit as much reflection as Iwould have liked. I am sure my work is flawedwith unintended errors, some of my making, andsome in the reports I quoted. Covering war isoften as chaotic as war itself.

You will encounter duplication. The reason issimple. While I was blogging daily for MediaChannel, I also produced weekly reports on warcoverage for the Globalvision News Network and

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occasional articles for Alternet, Znet and otheroutlets. So there is some repetition even thoughI tried to avoid overdoing it. I decided againstrewriting everything for this book because Ibelieve there is value in putting all of this mate-rial written at the time together in one place. Ibelieve even those who saw the original reportswill welcome a chance to reread this body ofwork, especially, now, before our memories fadeor when we prefer to forget all the pseudo newsthat bombarded us. It is important to rememberour minds were invaded along with Iraq. Wewere targeted, too. Taken together, it is my hopethat the book may be a useful in encouragingmore critical reporting when Washington startsto prepare for the next war, and the one afterthat.

I deluge. You decide.

Not alone

IT may all sound crazy, and admittedly idiosyn-cratic, but at least I know am not alone. Increas-ingly I hear comments like “disgusting” appliedto the way the war news was being presented. Atone point, I led the blog with comments by thehead of the BBC, Greg Dyke, as reported in theGuardian:

“BBC director general Greg Dyke has deliv-ered a stinging rebuke to the U.S. media over its“unquestioning” coverage of the war in Iraq andwarned the government against allowing theU.K. media to become ‘Americanized.’”

What bothers me about his remarks is the all-too-common view that “unquestioning coverage”is what all of American journalism has become.It has not. I hope we are demonstrating that thisone-note war journalism charade (parade?)

doesn’t speak for all Americans. I have collected excerpts from weblogs and

longer pieces for this book. My hope is that it willencourage others to scrutinize the coverage andtake responsibility for their media choices andfor trying to improve our press. I hope it will con-tribute to the construction of a counter narrativethat challenges all the half-truths we saw.

America’s media is too important to be left inthe hands of the few who own it, and the mar-keters who run it. Media responsibility has tobecome an issue, not just a complaint. Condemn-ing governments for exaggerated claims aboutWMDs and an invented war rationale is notenough. Our media has to be held accountablefor serving as their megaphone.

The future of our democracy depends on it.

Questions to ponder

IN this regard I, like so many others, am left withdeeper questions than the ones I began with.There are no easy answers.

Some years ago, an old friend, social historianStuart Ewen posed a few such questions in “PR:A Social History of Spin,” on the power of publicrelations, showing how scientific and welladvanced the engineering of consent hasbecome. He asks:

“Can there be a democracy when the public isa fractionalized audience? When the public hasno collective presence?

“Can there be a public when public agendasare routinely predetermined by “unseen engi-neers?

“Can there be a democracy when the tools ofcommunication are neither democratically dis-tributed nor democratically controlled?

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