COUNTING THE DEAD

BBC ADMITS MISTAKES

DEBATING THE EMBEDS

It is another CENTCOM Saturday. I awoke to the daily briefing, carried live on all the news networks, more air time for the briefing brigade, more government dominance of our airwaves. Today they were showing footage shot by “combat camera crews” — their own embeds — showing, they said a raid on the bad guys by the good guys. The same footage showed up later on MSNBC, not identified as shot by the military, Carl Rochelle wanted us to see it because the audio was so great. As the government continues to claim victory after victory, the bit about liberating Iraqis or seizing weapons of mass destruction seems to have been dropped from the parlance of propaganda. Instead our weapons continue to fall in Baghdad in what Susan Douglas in the Nation calls the equivalent of a football game between the Oakland Raiders and some peewee team.

And what are we seeing that they are not disclosing: amajor escalation, kick out the jams, blitzgrieg witg more bombing. We are being told that the president is “frustrated.” Call the Air Force. Reports Knight Ridder” ” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian aides have pressed Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, to attack the Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad as soon as Air Force planes and Army attack helicopters have softened them up, according to Pentagon officials.

“The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the civilian war planners want to clear the way for a swift takedown of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the Iraqi capital.

“So it apparently falls to one heavy Army division, one light Army division and a division-plus force of Marine infantry to destroy at least two and possibly more Republican Guard tank divisions dug in and blocking the approaches to Baghdad.

“In other words, roughly 100,000 U.S. servicemen could face about 30,000 Iraqi troops, not enough for the 4 or 5 to 1 ratio that conventional military doctrine calls for when attacking an entrenched enemy.

DEGRADED

“We are degrading the regime,” men in uniform tell us. All I can see is the degrading of TV News. As the body count grows, their casualties and ours are downplayed. Yesterday a reporters challenged the new DONALD about why the count of US dead and wounded looked funny. The ratio of wounded to dead always tends to be bigger. Rumsfeld was horrified, at the suggestion that the numbers could be messed, say the way AOL TimeWarner is being accused of overstating profits by $400 million. General Myers came to his rescue by suggesting there may be a “lag” in getting the facts out because families must be notified first.

All over the dial, journalists, Ted Koppel last night among them, pause to praise our troops even a s the rest of the world seems amazed by the courage or craziness of the continuing resistance. Those forces are regularlry denigrated as fanatics, death squads and worse. The idea that Iraqis, even those who hate the regime may also hate an invasion has not penetrated the network blockheads. Again, for contrast I watched the National, the news in Canada. It was so superior to what we are seeing that my faith in TV news was restored.

NO PAUSE FOR THE WAR WEARY

Saturday is usually a day off, but I can’t disengage from the media war. It follows me home, confronts me in my living room, on the radio, and in every newspaper I read. Keeping up with the news is of course, not keeping up with the war because what passes for news is so increasingly compromised. There are 50 new emails every time I ask for messages. It doesn’t stop. My colleague Michael Lee says he is numb. I can’t allow that to happen to me.

So, with you indulgence, may I share some items that never made into the weblog during the week. Some are about Iraq, some about the media. Connect the dot, s they say. We begin with our friends at FAIR, the media watch group which is churning out analysis and studies almost as fast as I am. They have a new ACTION ALERT:

PRO-TROOPS IS NOT PRO-WAR

“With citizens expressing their opinions on the war through marches andrallies across the country, many news outlets rely on the Associated Pressnews service to help them cover these important manifestations ofdemocracy. Unfortunately, AP has frequently used the terms “pro-war” and”pro-troops” interchangeably– a practice that distorts the views ofanti-war demonstrators and contributes to the media marginalization of thepeace movement.

“It’s likely that the overwhelming majority of participants at peace eventswould describe themselves as “supporting the troops,” in the sense ofbeing concerned for their well-being and hoping for their safe return. “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home” is a popular slogan at peacemarches, which tend to criticize George W. Bush and other administrationofficials, not rank-and-file U.S. military personnel.

“Nevertheless, AP and some other news outlets often use “supporting thetroops” as a synonym for “supporting the war”– and use “pro-troops” as ashorthand to describe rallies and demonstrations that are, in many cases,explicitly pro-war events. “Pro-troops” is frequently used as theopposite of “anti-war,” as if the only way to be supportive of soldiers isto advocate their involvement in war on Iraq….:

REPORTERS BEATEN

UPI reported Friday that. “U.S. troops detained three foreignjournalists on suspicion of espionage and beat two of them, relatives and aco-worker said Friday. They were released after 48 hours in Kuwait. Thejournalists, Dan Scemama, of Israel’s Channel 1 TV, and Boaz Bismuth, ofthe Israeli Yediot Aharonot, entered Kuwait without proper accreditation.Scemama said earlier this week he was denied accreditation because herepresented Israeli TV. The two teamed up with a Portuguese TV reporter,rented a jeep and entered Iraq on their own, driving alongside Americanconvoys. They phoned in reports based on conversations with U.S. troopsand Iraqis.”

BBC: WE BLEW IT

Some media outlets are acknowledging that some of their news has been wrong. Albawaba.com reports from Qatar that ” A senior BBC News executive Friday admitted that the reporting of allied military claims in Iraq that later prove false, such as heralding the fall of Umm Qasr at least nine times, had “left the public feeling less well-informed than it should be”.

“Mark Damazer, the deputy director of BBC News, also admitted the BBC had been making mistakes “on a daily basis” during the first week of the Iraq conflict, but denied there was any deliberate bias towards either the pro or anti-war camps.

“”I don’t deny for a moment that the accumulation of things that have happened in the first week, such as the false claims about the fall of Umm Qasr and the surrender of the Iraqi 51st division, have left the public feeling they are not as well informed as they should be,” Damazer said.

“But it’s perfectly proper for us to say ‘a British defense source has said there’s an uprising in Basra’ and not report it as gospel truth. We attribute wherever possible to a source. The secret is attribution, qualification and scepticism,” he added.”

CALEB CARR: EMBEDDING IS BAD FOR WAR

Novelist Caleb Carr writes about the embedding of journalists in the New York Observer:

“With the decision to integrate both print and television journalists into military units (correspondents and cameramen not only travel but live and train with the soldiers), President George W. Bush and certain of his advisers demonstrated once again their belief that history has begun anew with them. In fact, the history behind this journalistic innovation is long, torturous and important.

‘Throughout the ages, few phenomena have incubated so much misery as the interaction between soldiers and civilian populations during wartime. From the beginning of organized violence, soldiers have viewed civilians as prey and spoils, while civilians have viewed soldiers as little more than rapacious criminals. So great did this mutual contempt grow that by the Middle Ages, philosophers, legalists and military men had begun to search for ways to limit the impact of the first group on the second.

“In the West, this movement led to the professionalization of armies and accompanying codes of discipline for soldiers. (In most of the rest of the world, however, soldiers’ treatment of civilians as sources of food and funds and objects of violent lust went on, as did the average civilian’s fear and hatred of combatants.) Western warriors began to do their work outside the direct view of most civilians. Various legal restrictions on just what and who could be involved in military engagements (culminating in the Geneva Conventions and Accords of the 19th and 20th centuries) dramatically reduced the risk run by noncombatants. Though these codes were often violated, outrages no longer occurred with anything approaching the regularity that they had in earlier centuries. More and more, civilians learned of war from the work of writers who witnessed it rather than by hard experience.

“By allowing the embedding of journalists, then, our modern army is again embracing medievalism. Our enemy, meanwhile, has used the methods of the Information Age to turn the power of televised images against us. This will not be the last reversal of psychological roles that we experience in this war. When we discover weapons of mass destruction, and when we learn just how willing Saddam’s legions are to kill their own merely to gain a temporary advantage, the moral momentum will shift back our way. But embedding has been an unnecessary and foolish experiment; and the sooner we pull the plug on it, the quicker we can go about the final, grueling business of subduing Saddam’s minions.

ANOTHER DANNY DISSECTS CALEB

Danny Cassidy of New College writes about Carr; “Mr, Caleb Carr’s groupy-like worship of the strategic nincompoop Rumsfeld has been as cheap and pathetic as Carr’s pretentious mind numbing Grad. school prose. Mr. Carr forgot a few things with his Pentagon prose, cheerleading, and phony “rocket science” analysis.

“1. Guerilla war — as once practiced from Vietnam to South Armagh to South Dakota.

“Heck, that ain’t fair! The Iraqis took off their uniforms and are taking out M-1 tanks with pee shooters on the back of 1980 Dodge pick-ups.

“2. The fatal error of the six hundred mile-long supply line and Murphy’s Law of Military Logistics. I learned that in the first year of my five years of military training.

“The Rummy Rocky Horror Show , “On the Road to Baghdad,” truly is a tragedy of monstrous proportions, starring Rummy and Wolfy. There is no Hope or L’amour..

3. “The quagmire of hubris and jungle (Vietnam) has been transformed into a true “desert storm” for President “Junior.”

“The apocalypse Now being launched in Iraq undoes BOTH Saddam AND the new US-Anglo-Zionist-Born-Again-Imperialist-Alliance.

“Mr.Carr should go back to writing soporific mass-market mass-murder books, disguised as historical fiction, instead of soporific mass murder marketing, disguised as journalistic military analysis.

“Carr’s strategic geniuses in Rummyville are now in a military and political WIN-LOSE situation in Iraq. First they win. Then the entire world loses.”

ONE MAN”S DEVIL IS ANOTHER MAN”S ANGEL

Some media analysts are noting that the over demonization of Saddam often seen in the media is backfiring. Not sure where this came from, but it merits a read: “Within a few weeks of the launching of the military action in Afghanistan, the Bush administration realized how its over-demonization of Osama bin Laden had proved counter-productive by giving him a larger-than-life image in the eyes of millions of impressionable Muslims all over the world who started seeing in him not a terrorist but as a true Muslim standing up to the might of the world’s sole superpower by the sheer force of his faith in his religion and in his co-religionists.

“A similar campaign of over-demonization of Saddam has given him an image of a valiant fighter against the sole superpower, which is widely viewed in the Islamic world as anti-Islam. Some of the most insightful accounts of the state of mind of the Iraqi people have come not from the so-called embedded and compliant journalists, but from ordinary foreigners from the Third World, such as nurses, humanitarian workers and students who have chosen to stay behind in Baghdad even at the risk of death as a mark of their solidarity with the Iraqi people.”

ARAB NEWS ON US NEWS

Arab News relays another critique of western news sources: byDr. Mohammad T. Al-Rasheed”If you are an independent journalist covering the war as objectively as possible, you will either be killed or disappear in mysterious circumstances. To avoid this, you have to be “embedded” with some unit of the invading armies. They will protect you, indoctrinate you, revise your copy, and cut your rations if you tell the truth.

“The term is rather unfortunate in its use. It gives the notion of being implanted or rooted in something, which is anathema to journalism altogether. It also has a vague negative hue to it.

“Psychologically, however, if you are embedded rather than attached or joining an army group, then you tend to see the shells coming from the other side as being fired against you personally or against the buddies you have been implanted amongst. And here lies the US Army’s kernel of malice. How else would you get, for example, a Walter Rogers of CNN shouting at the top of his voice with orgasmic vigor “We are watching history being made”?

“What were we watching? A column of tanks crossing the desert unopposed. I wonder what happened to that history when the column got bogged down at Nassiriyah? A US soldier was interviewed by one such journalist and said, “There are fanatics shooting at us from the other side….”

“The Americans have managed to personalize everything to do with themselves. If you fight me, you are simply a fanatic. Never mind that I’m invading your country, bombing your cities to oblivion, and doing it with such vulgar bravado….

“The Americans have complained about interviewing POWs on television. They are right, it should not be done. Yet, when John Walker Lindh, the American Taleban, was wounded and captured, who stuck a microphone in his face and aired it all over America? They say it was not an “interview” since it was done by an “independent” journalist.

“So the new use of the term means that state television is not allowed to interview POWs, but independent journalists can. Never mind that the interviews are aired on the same television screens the world over.”

FCC TIES NEW RULES TO WAR COVERAGE

For some time now I have been suggesting that media outlets are pulling their punches in the war coverage because their parent companies are lobbying FCC regulators for rule changes. Now, Colin Powell’s son Michael is proposing that the Republican domination Commission to make those changes as earlier as June. The Hollywood Reporter reports that “America’s top TV regulator has set June 2 as D-day for a half-dozen rules that will determine who can own a media outlet where. Powell’s tone before the audience of mostly media company lobbyists, executives and reporters appeared to be noticeably more bullish on the chances that the rules will be changed to make it easier for media companies to buy one another.

Broadcasting and Cable Magazine noted that Powell thinks bigger and better…”Powll said larger media companies will be better able to purchase resources necessary to cover the war in Iraq and other global news events.

“Size and efficiency are becoming more crucial to providing quality news and public affairs,” he said. “A complex world requires ever more sophisticated newsgathering capability.”

PROFILES IN COURAGE

Finally, from Hollywood comes word via Bill Berkowitz: Executives at DreamWorks, set to release “Head of State,” a new film byChris Rock, have advised the comedian not to make any derogatory commentsabout President Bush or the war in Iraq. According to the Drudge Report,one top studio source said: “We are confident Chris knows this is not theappropriate time to make jokes about war and the president. We don’t wantto get Dixie-Chicked, or anything like that, out of the gate. We’veinvested tens of millions of dollars in the making of the movie and itsmarketing.” –Bill Berkowitz, WorkingForChange.com,.

AVNERI ON WHY “THE PLAN” WENT AWRY

And what about the war itself? Here’s Israel’s Uri Avnery, an often astute observer asks: “where did they go wrong?” “An old truism says: “No war-plan does survivethe first clash with the enemy.” That is always true. But something evenworse has happened to the Americans now.

” In order to sell the war to their own public and to the world, Bush& Co. have painted the picture of a “surgical operation”.

” Quite simple: the Americans march on Baghdad in strength. The Iraqipopulation wants to get rid of their cruel dictator and greet theliberators with joy. The Shiites in the south shower them with rice.Sadam gets killed. The regime collapses like a house of cards. TheAmericans enter Baghdad in triumph. THE END. The whole business willtake a week, at most. No dead, no prisoners.

“Bush and his people did not lie. They really believed that this isgoing to happen. As always, the spin-doctors succeeded in convincingthemselves.

“After drawing an imaginary map, they based their plans on it. Nowthey meet the reality. For example, because of their contempt for theenemy, the lines of communication were not properly secured, there wereno adequate preparations for the battles in the rear. After a rapidadvance through the desert that was mainly a logistic operation, theyreached the vicinity of Baghdad and thought that everything else will.”

SCOTT RITTER: US WILL LOSE

Scott Ritter, the former US marine turned hawkish UN weapons inspector turned dovish war critic is now predicting a defeat for the US in the war.” In an interview with Irish radio, Mr. Ritter said that the conflict Would become an “absolute quagmire,” and the US-UKadvance would stall outside Baghdad and fail to capture the city.

“We find ourselves… facing a nation of 23million, with armed elements numbering around 7 million –who are concentratedat urban areas. We will not win this fight. America will lose this war,”said Mr. Ritter.”

AU CONTRAIRE

While Americans pour French wine into the sewers in a symbolic protest against the French position, a more serious boycott of US goods is spreading throughout Europe. Reuters reports from Berlin:” No more Coca-Cola or Budweiser, no Marlboro, no American whiskey or even American Express cards — a growing number of restaurants in Germany are taking everything American off their menus to protest the war in Iraq.

Although the protests are mainly symbolic, waiters in dozens of bars and restaurants in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Bonn and other German cities are telling patrons, “Sorry, Coca-Cola is not available any more due to the current political situation.”The boycotts appear to be part of a nascent worldwide movement”.

One Web site, www.consumers-against-war.de, calls for boycotts of 27 top American firms from pretzels instead of hamburgers.

YOUR LETTERS

Larry of Austin writes about a letter he wrote the man behind “Shock and Awe: “I wrote Mr. Ullman a respectful, empathetic letter, pointing out the folly of killing to prevent violence and inviting him to put his keen mind to work in the peace movement. Thanks for the address.

“That “Pentagon Snuff Films” note I sent you, well, I expanded it into a big old article, and takebackthemedia.com posted it yesterday, in case you want to link to it. It’s under Commentary, in the center section of the screen. Thanks for posting the original thought.

“You’re doing a great job on the BBC vs CNN-through-the-looking-glass-darkly story. Censorship really is the biggest issue stateside. I guess the powers-that-be-now, who think we lost the Vietnam War because of TV coverage and protesters, are having their way so far, censoring the news and all. It won’t last, however. No way it can. Keep up your good work, Monsieur Schechter.

By the way, I’m buying everything I can French these days.”

Shebar is back: “I’ve enjoyed your Spanish- & Portuguese-language reports about your work. Nice to see you going global in content as well as spirit! Will you (or your correspondents) start quoting foreign-language news next? If so, how about starting with France, just to balance out all the crazy anti-French prejudice that’s being pushed these days? (I’m thinking about living on nothing but French toast, French fries, French wine, bread & cheese & French kisses until the Bush regime is toast.)

Jean E. writes to ask “I would like the address of the top officals at Cnn so I can protest their coverage of the war. I no longer watch any networks in the Usa as I think they are all Bush Whores. They bed down with the madman and his comrades.Thank Goodness we can still get Canadian stations on our home antennas.

Andrew Stone writes: “The best point I heard yesterday about the most dangerous aspect of state propaganda is that leaders themselves fall prey to the misinformation. I guess they’re expecting to TV to work it’s mighty magic like it did on them!

POETRY SLAM

And finally the last word goes to poet Eliot Katz who reports in his own way on “War’s First Week”

“The cakewalk

“has become a bit sticky

“some Iraqis have turned

“their daisies

into rifles

& hand grenades

seems many

don’t like tyrant Saddam

nor foreign invaders

dropping cruise missiles

and cluster bombs

In Basra the water supply

has been cut off

and we are seeing

the possibility

of humanitarian catastrophe

war should never

have been viewed

as a latenight poker game

initiated by those

too zealous

to send their own kids

into urban combat

It’ll take millions of patriots

& internationalists

(truthfully the same folks)

to throw the lunatics

out the White House

“Until then we are facing

more weekends from hell

as well more spring days

filled with thousands

marching down Broadway

for a democratic peace

This is one of the two

oldest stories on the planet

(both originating here)

Let the battle for ideas

replace those young corpses

growing cold under desert moons:”

LET WOLF KNOW

Wolf Blitzer on CNN is asking the question I ask you every day”What do youthink of the American media‚s coverage of the war? Just go tomy website http://www.cnn.com/wolf to let us know what youthink. Thanks, Wolf Blitzer,.” If you write to Wolfie, cc dissector@mediachannel.org. Globalvision is still seeking competent and committed interns and volunteers.