*WELL, MAYBE IT ISN’T ALL TRUE

*THE PAIN WE DO NOT SEE

*BRIEFING MORE, KNOWING LESS

LATE BREAKING ANNOUNCEMENT: I will be writing a new column, tomorrow, Saturday March 29.

What is real? What isn’t? When is telling actually selling? Watch the TV coverage of this human disaster in the desert and you tell me. The complaints about managed media coverage seems to have started trickling back into media-land. MSNBC which can, in a nano-second, go live to Doha, can’t seem capture the same immediacy in the streets in New York where anti-war (and increasingly anti-media) protests continued this morning with more arrests. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was, for the first time that I have seen last night, acknowledging that there is a legitimate dispute about the reliability of the coverage and its impact. Nic Robertson of CNN, reporting now from Jordan also acknowledged that journalists from other countries view developments differently that the merry band of Embeds.

THE PULSE OF PROPAGANDA

The propa-news reached a new low this morning with NBC’s Bob Arnott salting the truths by saying they are so much more motivated, brave and patriotic than the actors who play soldiers in the movies. It was almost as bad as Fox News’s Bill O’ Reilly on The Pulse, which airs on cable and on Fox News, which savaged Saddam’s son with so much rhetorical overkill and bad music that it looked like a World War II propaganda films hatched in Dr. Goebbel’s ministry of misinformation. (The word rape must have been cited a thousand times just, in case you missed it the first 999 times. When will O’Reilly do a similar trash job on the US Air Force Academy–at which there has been testimony that virtually every female student has been raped?)

After an hour of news that seemed as if it was coming straight out of official military briefings, including detailed descriptions of humongous bunker buster bombs that left a mushroom cloud over Baghdad. No attempt was made to explain WHY these bombs were necessary, or what their consequences were. Listen to Robert Fisk of the Independent on the bombing of that market in Baghdad that the US government is implying was caused by Iraqi defense missiles. Ask yourself why we never hear anything approaching this angry tone in US journalism?

OUTRAGE JOURNALISM

“It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

“Two missiles from an American jet killed them all by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

…’We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to ‘liberate’ them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I’ll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan’t mention the pilot.”

Are we seeing the death and destruction? Word of it is rarely heard at the briefings that get wall to wall coverage with all the talk of how we are on “plan.” Briefing-based journalism is a joke. Tomdispatch.com explains why:

“Let’s start with a touch of irony. For thirty years, the men (and lone woman) now running our country have also been running away from Vietnam. In this war, it only took six days for Vietnam to catch up to them. Last night, for instance, here’s what I noticed on the CBS and ABC national news, followed by the Lehrer News Hour. CBS led off with word that the U.S. military in Iraq, where all was going according to plan and on schedule, had nonetheless called for reinforcements from the States to guard exposed supply lines and 700 soldiers from an armored unit were being shipped out immediately. As the Vietnam War went on, of course, the military was always offering public reassurances about how splendidly things were going and then asking the President for more men. (DS: the latest is that another 100,000 are being flown in. All according to plan, of course.)”…PBS also aired clips of the daily Centcom briefing in Qatar. The uniformed briefer seemed distinctly on the defensive. A Canadian reporter was shown complaining that the military never displayed videos of missiles that missed their targets or hit wrong targets and demanded to know when some would be available. Then, to my surprise, a CBS correspondent rose to complain fairly vehemently that, while “embedded” reporters were offering many tiny pictures, the “big picture” was supposed to come from Centcom; instead, he commented, all that was being offered were videos of micro-air strikes. In fact, all the Pentagon news conferences of the day managed to look both ridiculous and untrustworthy as spokesmen and women tried to pin the blame for civilian casualties from the missile-in-the-Baghdad-market on the Iraqis.”

WHY ARE WE HERE?

I was struck by two questions raised at yesterday’s CENTCOM briefing. which focused on what is happening in the “theater.” Great word that to explain why we are seeing so many performances. (Today’s sequel was airing as I left the bunker in which I was in-bedded to come to work.) Michael Wolff of New York Magazine had the chutzpah to get up and challenge the whole ritual by asking about its “value” proposition. “Why are we even here, in this million dollar media center?” was his question. It seemed to piss off the briefer because it was a bit pissy, even though he offered it “with respect.” Wolff is not a journalist to be messed with.

In many ways the corridor correspondents of Kuwait are practicing stenography rather than journalism. This mecca of media management also offered up some US military of happy kids welcoming the troops and referenced the presence of 500 “Free Iraqi” soldier who are assigned to civil affairs units not combat ones. (ie. talking rather than shooting their way into Iraq.)

RE: THE BOMBING OF TV STATIONS

Earlier, my sometime bud Michael Massing popped up to challenge the bombing of the Iraqi TV station which is prohibited by the Geneva conventions. We were then told that the bombing was not against the TV, even though that is how it was described by all the US networks, but against some “command and control” facility hidden there in some undescribed “node.” One of our readers Jackie Newberry has a point about this

“It is my understanding that bombing a TV station, even though it is state controlled, is against the Geneva conventions. It is still a civilian installation. I heard from sources other than major media that civilians inside the station were killed and injured. That has not been reported here.

“Tonight the US dropped a huge bomb on the information ministry in Baghdad. Despite the reassurance that bombing is precision and surgical, I have heard a number of non-major media reports that there are a number of civilian casualties. All of this bears investigation by the press. I want to know the truth.”

TAKE-OUT SQUAD

It is not just the absence of facts that is distressing, it is the gleeful way the news of the destruction of a TV station was treated by US TV stations. (On Fox this morning, there was a wink and a nod discussion by the morning zoo team about how US programming is likely to be beamed in soon on via the hi-tech SOLO aircraft which broadcasts from the sky.) That is already happening in Basra according to this report in the Guardian: “British forces have taken Iraqi state radio and television off the air in Basra, according to unconfirmed reports from the BBC’s correspondent in southern Iraq. The report, published today on the BBC’s website, claimed transmitters in Basra were destroyed in overnight air raids and coalition forces have taken over a number of radio frequencies. The allied military is now broadcasting its own messages to the people of Basra, effectively isolating Basra from any communication with Baghdad.”

The media watchers of Fairness and Accuracy in Media are denouncing the reporting of the bombing of TV and radio stations: When Iraqi TV offices in Baghdad were hit by a U.S missile strike on March 25, the targeting of media was strongly criticized by press and human rights groups. The general secretary of the International Federation ofJournalists, Aidan White, suggested that “there should be a clear international investigation into whether or not this bombing violates the Geneva Conventions.” White told Reuters (3/26/03), “Once again, we see military and political commanders from the democratic world targeting a television network simply because they don’t like the message it gives out.”

“The Geneva Conventions forbid the targeting of civilian installations– whether state-owned or not– unless they are being used for military purposes. Amnesty International warned (3/26/03) that the attack may have been a “war crime” and emphasized that bombing a television station “simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda” is illegal under international humanitarian law. “The onus,” said Amnesty, is on “coalition forces” to prove “the military use of the TV station and, if that is indeed the case, to show that the attack took into account the risk to civilian lives.”

“Likewise, Human Rights Watch affirmed (3/26/03) that it would be illegal to target Iraqi TV based on its propaganda value. “Although stopping enemy propaganda may serve to demoralize the Iraqi population and to undermine the government’s political support,” said HRW, “neither purpose offers the ‘concrete and direct’ military advantage necessary under international law to make civilian broadcast facilities a legitimate military target.”

“Some U.S. journalists, however, have not shown much concern about the targeting of Iraqi journalists. Prior to the bombing, some even seemed anxious to know why the broadcast facilities hadn’t been attacked yet. Fox News Channel’s John Gibson wondered (3/24/03): “Should we take Iraqi TV off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?” Fox’s Bill O’Reilly (3/24/03) agreed: “I think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television…. Why haven’t they taken out the Iraqi television towers?”

“MSNBC correspondent David Shuster offered: “A lot of questions about why state-run television is allowed to continue broadcasting. After all, the coalition forces know where those broadcast towers are located.” On CNBC, Forrest Sawyer offered tactical alternatives to bombing (3/24/03): “There are operatives in there. You could go in with sabotage, take out the building, you could take out the tower.”

THEY CALL IT INTELLIGENCE

Never mind thinking about how these tough guys in the “take out” squad would feel if, god forbid, Iraq had the capacity to “take out” their pulpits? What is worse than the showboating and macho messaging is the lack of real perspective on the war itself.It seems as US intelligence was anything but — just as intelligence on the air is so often missing. Even Murdoch’s London Times realizes that the neocons who have been pumping for war for years before Bush was elected, got it wrong Richard Beeston and Tom Baldwin report:

“BRITISH and American intelligence badly miscalculated the level of resistance that coalition forces would encounter in Iraq, with analysts predicting that troops would reach Baghdad in days and defeat President Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks. As thousands more US soldiers began deploying in the Gulf for what could be a campaign lasting months, there were growing questions in London and Washington over the failure to anticipate the stubborn resistance being encountered.

“At the start of the war British military officers were confident that the southern city of Basra would fall quickly, that the Shia Muslims in the south would rise up against Saddam and that there would be token resistance on the road to Baghdad. ‚”The intelligence assessment seriously underestimated what to expect,” one Whitehall source, who briefed Downing Street on the dangers before the war, said.”His advice was largely ignored, even though Saddam was openly making careful preparations to defend himself. He armed and trained irregular forces, bribed tribal leaders and used propaganda to portray the looming war as an attempt by America to conquer the country and steal its oil.”

This is the old garbage in-garbage out problem. The war game exercises that prepared the troops were also fakeouts, as Julian Borger reported last August in The Guardian:

“The biggest war game in US military history, staged this month at a cost of £165m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure that the Americans beat their “Middle Eastern” adversaries, according to one of the main participants. General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the sprawling three-week millennium challenge exercises, were “almost entirely scripted to ensure a [US] victory.”

EMBEDDED SALES FORCE

The embedding of journalist policy is also helping the ‘coalition” sell the war. The Guardian reports today that “The defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, has claimed a PR victory over the war in Iraq, saying the practice of “embedding” journalists with troops has helped turn around public opinion. Mr Hoon said TV images from journalists accompanying the British troops were “at least partially responsible” for the swing in public opinion in favur of the war.”

Does this policy lead us closer to the truth — despite the glitzy footage that gives the war so much immediacy on TV. Even neocons Cokie Roberts and husband Steve Roberts see a potential problem writing:

“‘This is a war for truth,’ insists Pentagon spokeman Bryan Whitman. ‘The goal is to have accurate, truthful reporting from the battlefield.’ We agree. But that means the bad news along with the good, the victims as well as the victories. As ABC’s Ted Koppel put it: ‘I feel we do have an obligation to remind people in the most graphic way that war is a dreadful thing. Young Americans are dying. Young Iraqis are dying. To sanitize it too much is a dreadful mistake.’”

THE CONTRAST IS BREATH TAKING

Embedding does lead to many dreadful mistakes, as we hear some reporters recycling military lingo like “the enemy.” Here’s a report on now Martin Savidge a CNN embed covered one battle and then how the same confrontation was reported in The Age, a newspaper in Australia. First CNN:

“There is a lookout there, a hill referred to as Safwan Hill, on the Iraqi side of the border. It was filled with Iraqi intelligence gathering. From that vantage point, they could look out over all of northern Kuwait.

“It is now estimated the hill was hit so badly by missiles, artillery and by the Air Force, that they shaved a couple of feet off it. And anything that was up there that was left after all the explosions was then hit with napalm. And that pretty much put an end to any Iraqi operations up on that hill.”

The focus as you can see is on how the military saw it. Here’s the Australian Newspaper:

“About six hours after marines and their 155- millimetre howitzers pulled up at the border, they opened fire. Safwan Hill went up in a huge fireball and the Iraqi observation post was obliterated.

“‘I pity anybody who’s in there,’a marine sergeant said. ‘We told them to surrender.’

“The destruction of Safwan Hill was a priority for the attacking forces because it had sophisticated surveillance equipment and is near the main highway that runs from Kuwait to Basra and Baghdad. US and British forces could not attempt to cross the border unless it was destroyed.

“Marine Cobra helicopter gunships firing Hellfire missiles then swept in low from the south.

“Over the next eight hours, the marines opened fire with their howitzers, which have a range of 30 kilometres. They were supported by US Navy aircraft, which dropped napalm.

The Pentagon has since denied that napalm was used in the attack. A navy spokesman in Washington, Lieutenant Commander Danny Hernandez, denied that napalm - which was banned by a United Nations convention in 1980 - was used.”

EMBED EX-BEDDED

One of the CNN embeds has been tossed out of Iraq — and CNN is pissed. The Christian Science Monitor reports “Philip Smucker, a contract reporter for the Monitor and The Daily Telegraph of London, was escorted by the US Marines from the front lines of the war in Iraq Thursday. He is being taken to Kuwait, the Pentagon says, because of information Smucker reported in a broadcast appearance with CNN early Wednesday.

“My understanding of the facts at this point from the commander on the ground is that this reporter was reporting, in real time, positions, locations, and activities of units engaged in combat,” says Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. “The commander felt it was necessary and appropriate to remove [Smucker] from his immediate battle space in order not to compromise his mission or endanger personnel of his unit.”

“Smucker’s work in the Monitor is not at issue, but we have read the transcript of the CNN interview and it does not appear to us that he disclosed anything that wasn’t already widely available in maps and in US and British radio, newspaper, and television reports in that same news cycle. Of course, the Pentagon has the final say in the field about any threat the information reported might pose.”

URGENT: NEWSDAY REPORTERS MISSING

Yesterday, Newsday’s great reporter Laurie Garrett sent me a note about two missing colleagues. The first time I heard about this on the air was this morning:

“Two of my Newsday colleagues have disappeared in Iraq. They were based inBaghdad. On Monday they were rounded up by the Iraqi Ministry of Information, along with a handful of other journalists, and told their visas had been revoked and they were being evicted from the country. In his final communication to Newsday’s Matt McAllester indicated that government officials were taking the group to ‘the border’ (unclear which border) where they would be evicted from the country. There have been no further communications from any members of the group.

“Missing for Newsday are journalist Matt McAllester, an outstanding reporter and veteran of the Balkins war coverage. And his photographer colleague, Moises Saman. Newsday Editor-in-chief, Tony Marro, wrote: As you can imagine, all of us at Newsday are deeply concerned about the fates of our colleagues. Both are admired and beloved by everybody in the organization, and their disappearance has had a powerful impact emotionally on the entire institution.”

If you can help, please contact Laurie and Newsday.

John Burns of the NY Times was asked last night why he is still in Baghdad by PBS’s Charlie Rose. He explained that he thought it was safer than driving through the chaos to Jordan. To my surprise, while criticizing Iraq and explaining how hard their minders make his work, he has been treated with respect by Iraqi officials.

BS IN BASRA

Whatever the problems journalists are having, the people in Iraq have it worse. The coverage doesn’t always reflect this as Rahul Mahajan, a n expert on Iraq writes on ZNET: “Iraq’s desperate humanitarian situation has suddenly become a retroactive justification for the war, even for the attacking of civilian targets. The need to get aid into Basra has apparently prompted a British military spokesperson to designate it as a ‘legitimate military target’– language reminiscent of Gulf War I, when the saturation bombing of Basra was justified on the same basis.

“As verifiable civilian deaths mount toward 300 (http://www.iraqbodycount.net) in this ‘war of liberation,’ the need to establish American moral superiority is growing rapidly. Thus Donald Rumsfeld’s convenient rediscovery of the Geneva Convention and thus the American media hysteria over al-Jazeera, which has the temerity to provide balanced reporting of the war.

“Thus also a recent press conference by the execrable Andrew Natsios, head administrator of USAID, in which he raised the already stunning mendacity of the Bush administration to new heights. While beating his chest over the massive preparations the United States has made to avert a humanitarian tragedy in Iraq (always assuming the Iraqis don’t screw things up by continuing unaccountably to resist their liberation), he touched on the problems of Basra, where only 40% of the people currently have access to potable water.

“The genesis of said problems, according to him, is “a deliberate decision by the regime not to repair the water system or replace old equipment with new equipment, so in many cases people are basically drinking untreated sewer water in their homes and have been for some years.”)

“A deliberate decision by the regime.” The mind boggles. Ever since Iraq’s water treatment system was left in shambles by the Gulf War, where the deliberate targeting of the entire electrical power grid caused water pumping to shut down and sewage to fill the streets of Basra, the Iraqi government has scrambled desperately to repair its water system, only to come repeatedly face to face with one huge obstacle: the United States government.

“Joy Gordon’s excellent article, “Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction” (Harper’s, November 2002, text at http://www.scn.org/ccpi/HarpersJoyGordonNov02.html), documents at length her conclusion that “the United States has consistently thwarted Iraq from satisfying its most basic humanitarian needs.”

WHAT ABOUT THE UN, MATE?

On this point, the humanitarian issue was discussed by the UN Security Council yesterday. I saw no TV report in it. The only news I saw was on the ticker on NBC which explained that the US Ambassador had walked out after the Iraqi Ambassador branded the US as “aggressors.”

THE SKEWING OF SAFIRE

Tom Paine.com features apiece by former CBS 60 Minutes producer Barry Lando vivisecting a recent column by William Safire of the NY Times:

“‘France, China and Syria all have a common reason for keeping American and British troops out of Iraq: the three nations may not want the world to discover that their nationals have been illicitly supplying Saddam Hussein with materials used in building long-range surface-to surface missiles.’

“That was the lead of William Safire’s recent two part series “The French Connection” in The New York Times, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. With the Times’ august imprimatur, Safire’s charges have been relayed around the globe, in newspapers, magazines and Web sites, fueling the rising storm of outrage against the French.

“But Safire’s double broadside is more Francophobia than fact. He is way off beam; his articles are filled with error and innuendo. What makes matters worse is that editors at both The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune knew there were serious questions about Safire’s charges, yet the papers went ahead and published the second part of his series.” Lando shows the many errors. See Tompaine.com

WHY WE KNOW WHAT WE DO

The ultimate test of the coverage is: is it making us more informed. Editor and Publisher reports the opposite is occurring:

“Somehow, despite the US media’s exhaustive Iraq coverage, a very large segment of the American public remained underinformed about key issues related to the Iraqi crisis. In a January poll, 44 per cent of respondents said they thought most or some of the September 11, 2001, hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 per cent of those polled offered the correct answer: none. This was remarkable in light of the fact that, in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, few Americans identified Iraqis among the culprits. So the level of awareness on this issue actually decreased as time passed. In the same sample, 41 per cent said that Iraq already possessed nuclear weapons, which not even the Bush administration claimed. Despite being far off base in crucial areas, 66 percent of respondents claimed to have a good understanding of the arguments for and againstgoing to war with Iraq.”

WATCH FOR

Program Notes: the New Discovery Times Channel is now on the air, a $100 million dollar TV venture by the NY Times…. Recent Oscar-winner Michael Moore (”Bowling for Columbine”) will be the satellite guest REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, tonight, FRIDAY, MARCH 28 (11:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m. live ET; tape-delayed PT), exclusively on HBO. As previously announced, Jeanne Garofalo, Michael Graham and Larry Miller will be the roundtable panelists, and comedian Bob Odenkirk will perform…..At 7 PM, CSPAN brings together Daniel Ellsberg and William Kristol, to discuss the War on Iraq.”

DISSECTOR IN THE MEDIA

We are producing an extended media report for World Link TV. We will let you know when it airs. German radio and TV stations seem particularly interested in what I have to say about the coverage. US stations, less so. I was just interviewed in Brazil as well. Here’s a taste of what Luiz Carols Erbes wrote in Caxia do Sul:

Caxias do Sul - Danny Schechter, 60 anos, é um crítico da cobertura da guerra contra o Iraque por parte da mídia norte-americana. Autor de uma newsletter diária sobre o que sai na imprensa, disponível no Mediachannel (www.mediachannel.org) e por e-mail (o serviço é gratuito, basta se cadastrar), o ex-jornalista da ABC e CNN define a abordagem como patriótica, e afirma que o apoio da maioria da população ao presidente George W. Bush é fruto dessa cobertura.Autor de cinco livros sobre jornalismo, entre os quais “The More You Watch The Less You Know” Quanto Mais Você Vê, Menos Você Sabe), Schechter passou a ser procurado para entrevistas desde o início da guerra. Na segunda-feira, atendeu a três jornais, entre os quais o Pioneiro, por e-mail. Confira trechos da entrevista:

Pioneiro: Como você define a cobertura da guerra a Iraque pela TV americana? Danny Schechter: A linha entre ufanismo patriótico e jornalismo foi cruzada repetidamente. Vários meios de comunicação dos Estados Unidos optaram por uma cobertura patrioticamente correta, da forma como a mídia brasileira fez nos dias da ditadura, para obter simpatia e prover bons índices de audiências, orientados militarmente. Muitos jornalistas aqui vêem como uma vergonha o fato de os estúdios de TV serem invadidos por militares que comentam sobre táticas e tecnologia sem nenhuma consideração sobre custos e conseqüências.”….

You didn’t know I spoke Portuguese? Sorry, I don’t.

INTERNS WANTED

Globalvision is seeking a few competent motivated and conscious interns willing to help us keep our work. We also welcome your letters and comments. Have a great weekend if you can under the circumstances. I am reachable at dissector@medichannel.org