THEY CAN SEE BAGHDAD

NEW STUDY ON THE EMBEDS

MURDOCH IN THE AMEN CORNER

O’ Say can they see, Baghdad in the springtime, rising mirage-like from the desert where the temperature is also rising and the media and the government seem to be getting more and more eager to get “it” over with. American forces are reportedly near the airport, liberating the suburbs and getting in position for a “final” push. The bulls on Wall Street are bullish and the Irish Studies professors in the Mission District of San Francisco are laying odds of a cease fire within 1-3 weeks. The Iraqis are fighting furiously, even taking down a plane here and helicopter there but the technology-and-weapons divide is so huge that it makes this one of the most lopsided wars in history. Roll on O’ Roman Legions. Sail On O’ Ship of Fate.

What are we seeing? Last night Aaron Brown of CNN had former Times war reporter Sidney Schanberg on to discuss coverage. (He wrote about that last week in The Village Voice. This week he offers a “dissection” of government lies. Glad that word is getting around. He told Brown that the structure of constantly updated TV News scrambles all understanding. He compared the coverage to keeping score of a sports events. (The BBC’s news chief apologized for a similar comment that aired there) Brown praised Schanberg as a journo great and acknowledged that it is challenging to keep up. Over on Nightline, at the same time, General Koppel was war-gaming his marine division’s next moves.

BRING ON THE BULLDOZERS

We worry about possible use of chemical and biological weapons. They contend with deadly anti-personnel cluster bombs which are routinely mentioned on TV but rarely explained. As they drop, they spray deadly pellets which make Swiss cheese out of your insides if you are in the way. If THEY had been using them, they would be condemned.

And still the weapons come. (Ever consider all the contracts for their replacement?) Now the Israelis are recommending that brigades of bulldozers be employed, the ones they are using in the occupied territories to level homes and destroy towns. Israeli Yagel Henkin very helpfully suggests in the New York Times today that “American commanders would do well to take a close look at the hard-learned lessons of Israel’s experience with urban combat.” (Israel’s General Sharon was in New York this week but I saw no coverage of his visit.) Unmentioned also: We need bulldozers here to move the media bull around.

HAS SADDAM SPLIT?

The Israeli intel site Debka, described by one correspondent on the Progressive Sociologists E-list as “a site of infinite humor, rumor, and other nonsense, from the Israeli right” is reporting exclusively “indications that Saddam Hussein, his sons and top Iraqi leadership members may no longer be in Baghdad.” It is not clear whether the Iraqi ruler has gone into hiding elsewhere in the country, the Middle East, or outside the region. Some top Iraqi officials have been sighted in other Middle East and European capitals. The disappearance of Saddam and his following would account for the feeble resistance Iraqi Special Republican Guard divisions put up to the coalition advance on the capital in last 48 hours.

Perhaps the Times is running Israeli advice to appease its right-wing critics, like the editors of the NY Post who devote a page today to attacking the Times for bias (If anyone should know about bias, it’s the editors of the Post), arguing that their coverage has been “defeatist.” They also detect a change in a pro-war direction. Their proprietor, Mr. Murdoch not only finances this type of politiicized media analysis but is calling on America to get even tougher.

A MESSAGE FROM MURDOCH

The Guardian reports: “Referring to the American people as “we,” Mr. Murdoch said the public was far too worried about what the rest of the world thought of the US’s declaration of war on Iraq. He said he believed Americans had an “inferiority complex” about world opinion and that Iraqis would eventually welcome US troops as liberators.

Mr Murdoch told a conference in California it would be “better to get war done now” rather than have a longer conflict that could prove more damaging to the world economy. “We worry about what people think about us too much in this country. We have an inferiority complex, it seems,” he said at the Milken Institute Global Conference yesterday.” Michael Milken, the convicted stock fraudster who funded the Institute was one of the financiers of the Murdoch Empire and a key advisor until a federal court ordered him to cease and desist. He later paid millions in fines for dealing with Rupert contrary to a court order..

WAR FATIGUE CLAIMS TV VIEWERS

The Networks are hoping to get the war over with. In England it is being reported that viewers show signs of war fatigue; ” Audience figures for the BBC1 and ITV late evening news bulletins dipped yesterday,” according to the Guardian. The Onion jokes about this with a simple headline: NBC Moves War To Thursdays After Friends.” The networks have already bailed out of wall-to-wall coverage and now report war news mostly on lighter watched cable networks.

Even as the volume of network coverage declines, the level of media bashing is going up. Yesterday I reported on the denunciations of media skepticism by the top brass at the Pentagon. Today there is a report that Tony Blair’s home secretary Mr. Blunkett has been tasked to rein in the reporters in Baghdad because “progressive and liberal” opinion believes them. Earlier in the week, Blair’s spin doctor in-chief, Alastair Campbell, was even nastier.

“Saddam Hussein can go up and do a broadcast, and how many of our media then stand up and say what an amazing propaganda coup that was. “(Osama) bin Laden can sit in his cave and throw out a video and you get BBC, CNN, all these other guys, saying ‘What a propaganda coup’.”

AL-JAZEERA INFILTRATED?

Al-Jazeera carried many of those coups. Just coincidentally–or is it–they had a reporter tossed out of Iraq and, in retaliation, are pulling out all of their people. Why? There is speculation on the Arabic Electronic Mail Journal that “US central command has infiltrated al-Jazeera and used it in a way which resulted in the sudden Iraqi move against it.” This correspondent reminds us that “the station is partially financed by the government of Qatar, which also hosts the U.S. military’s Central Command for the region.”

Meanwhile Global Exchange reports: “Hacked off the Internet for showing controversial images from the Iraq war, the Arab news channel al-Jazeera said on Wednesday it was launching a new service to send its news to mobile phones. The Qatar-based satellite television channel will beam news alerts in both Arabic and English to mobile phones around the world, after its Arabic and English-language web sites were brought down by hackers.”

HE’S MAD AT THE MEDIA, TOO

Behind all of these attacks on the press seems to be growing anxiety in the White House. Unfortunately we have no real embeds there (You have to give big political contributions to get into bed in the Lincoln Bedroom), but USA today gave us a rare portrait yesterday of a President who is losing it. “News coverage of the war often irritates him. He’s infuriated by reporters and retired generals who publicly question the tactics of the war plan. Bush let senior Pentagon officials know that he was peeved when Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the army’s senior ground commander in Iraq, said last week that guerrilla fighting, Iraqi resistance, and sandstorms have made a longer war more likely.” He has a special epithet for members of his own staff who worry aloud. He calls them “hand-wringers.”

And then there was this: “He can be impatient and imperious. On March 17, before he delivered a 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam, Bush summoned congressional leaders to the White House. They expected a detailed briefing, but the president told them he was notifying them only because he was legally required to do so and then left the room. They were taken aback, and some were annoyed. Bush copes with anxiety as he always has. He prays and exercises.”

Articles like this lead the satirists of the Onion to imagine a still unspoken psychological insight into what the President is thinking.”‘The first couple days were really exciting,’ Bush said. ‘I was having all sorts of cool strategy meetings with these high-level military men I don’t usually talk to, and it all felt very historic. But now, it’s gotten to be kind of a monotonous grind. It’s always, ‘The line has advanced this much.’ ‘We need to wait for backup here.’ ‘We’re making good progress, but it’s been complicated by blah blah blah.’ It’s all these tedious, same-sounding details. Can I hear something new for a change, like ‘They surrender,’ or ‘Saddam’s dead?’ Something — anything but more stupid reports of sandstorms.”

THE MEDIA MASSAGE

Over at the Pentagon, Torie Clarke has to keep the Pentagon press corps in line. According to today’s New York Times, now that the news media has better access to the troops, she is being peppered almost hourly with queries from the battlefield about topics as varied as checkpoints, rations, rescues, and killings of civilians. More troubling, she faces a growing chorus, including several retired generals, questioning whether the war plan of Mr. Rumsfeld and his lieutenants was ill advised and whether the administration fueled unrealistic expectations that Iraqis would welcome American troops with open arms.

Episodes like the news briefing on Tuesday are part of the most difficult trial yet for Ms. Clarke, 43, who has devoted her career in politics and public relations to working with clients in tricky situations. As a campaign aide, she defended the first President Bush as his popularity evaporated in the polls. She later represented the cable industry when it infuriated consumers with rising rates and poor service.

This article goes on to say how well she is doing in winning hearts and minds from the media and the military. Maybe it is her colorful clothes which rated a fashion spread in the Post the other day.

IRAQ MISTREATS REPORTERS

Yesterday two Newsday reporters freed from prison in Iraq discussed their harrowing experience at a press conference in Jordan. Their newspaper reports: “Newsday staffers Moises Saman and Matthew McAllester were recently held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison for eight days with two other Western journalists and an American peace activist. They described seeing a man being beaten: “Journalists are meant to bear witness. That’s rather the point of our job. We watch and record and tell other people what we have seen, perhaps in the hope that an account, a witnessing, could eke away at badness. But I turned away and chose not to see a thing.”

“Eventually the beating stopped, and the man was dumped into his cell. The big guard seemed to have exhausted his fury. The block echoed as it always did when the iron bars of the prisoner’s cell door was closed and the click of its padlock confirmed that he would not be leaving his 6- by 10-foot room that night. With each breath he made a sort of crying sound. Sometimes he broke that rhythm to exhale his pain with more force, and the otherwise silent block filled up with what I wondered might be the man’s last gasp.”

US MISTREATS REPORTERS

This tearful and horrific account was given lots of airtime on all the channels as it should. An interview with non-embedded foreign journalists detained by US military forces was aired on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now yesterday, but not as far as I know picked up by any of the majors. It involved the experience of four so-called unilaterals. I reported on this last week.

One of them was Dan Scemama who describes meeting some US soldiers who suspected they were spies. “They took away ourcameras. They took away our ID cards. They took away our money. They tookour phones. They put their guns towards us. They forced us to lie down onthe floor. To take our shirts up to make sure we didn’t have any explosiveson our bodies and were arrested.”

At that point a Portuguese reporter asked the soldiers to phone home and tell his wife he was ok. Sceremama continues “Five soldiers went out of the camp, jumped on him and started to beat him and to kick him. We ran to his direction. They all put bullets inside the cannons of their guns, and they said if we move forward they shoot at us. We were standing like stupid guys. We sawour friend lying on the ground crying, hurting. They tied his hand behindhis back. They took him into the camp. And after half-an-hour, they let himgo, and came back to us all crying. And then came this Lieutenant Scholl.And he told us, Don’t mess with my soldiers. Don’t mess with them becausethey are trained like dogs to kill. And they will kill you if you tryagain.” They were held for 36 hours.

REPORTING ON THE CONTENT OF THE COVERAGE

The Project On Excellence in Journalism has issued a report on the embedded journalists. Here’s what they report: “The embedded coverage, the research found, is largely anecdotal. It’s both exciting and dull, combat focused, and mostly live and unedited. Much of it lacks context but it is usually rich in detail. It has all the virtues and vices of reporting only what you can see.”

In an age when the press is often criticized for being too interpretive, the overwhelming majority of the embedded stories studied, 94%, were primarily factual in nature.

Most of the embedded reports studied — 6 out of 10 — were live and unedited accounts.

Viewers were hearing mostly from reporters, not directly from soldiers or other sources. In eight out of ten stories we heard from reporters only.

This is battle coverage. Nearly half of the embedded reports — 47% — described military action or the results.”While dramatic, the coverage is not graphic. Not a single story examined showed pictures of people being hit by fired weapons.Over the course of reviewing the coverage, project analysts also developed a series of more subjective impressions of embedding. Often the best reports were those that were carefully written and edited. Some were essentially radio reporting on TV. Technology made some reports stand out but got in the way when it was used for its own sake. Too often the rush to get information on air live created confusion, errors, and even led journalists to play the game of ‘telephone,’ in which partial accounts become distorted and exaggerated in the retelling.”

ROY: “TAKING REVENGE

Indian author Arundhati Roy comments on the embeds in her most recent essay: “On March 21, the day after American and British troops began theirillegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an ‘embedded’ CNN correspondentinterviewed an American soldier. ‘I wanna get in there and get my nosedirty,’ Private AJ said. ‘I wanna take revenge for 9/11.’”

“To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was “embedded” he didsort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence thatlinked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJstuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin.‘Yeah, well that stuff’s way over my head,’ he said.”

“According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of theAmerican public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible forthe September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Andan ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that SaddamHussein directly supports al-Qaeda. What percentage of America’s armedforces believe these fabrications is anybody’s guess.”

THEY ARE GETTING IT WRONG

Editor and Publisher’s Greg Mitchell has been looking at the accuracy of what we are seeing. His report is damning: “The war is only a week old and already the media has gotten at least 15 stories wrong or misreported a sliver of fact into a major event. Television news programs, of course, have been the prime culprits. Newspapers, while they have often gone along for the ride, have been much more nuanced and careful. Newspaper coverage has not been faultless, as photos and headlines often seem “shock-and-awe-struck” but, compared with TV, newspapers seem editorially–and mentally–balanced. Some have actually displayed a degree of skepticism at claims made by the military and the White House–what used to be known as “journalism.”

INCOMING: YOUR LETTERS KEEP COMING

Tom Fry of Sedona, Arizona writes “I just came across your site and love it. I stopped watching TV days ago and get all my news from internet sources and occasionally NPR. Anyway, nowhere am I hearing the most obvious question being asked. According to the administration, we launched this war to disarm Saddam of his WMD. Prior to the war, when Colin Powell was asked about the inspectors not finding any WMD and what was the administration talking about, he smirked and said well, ‘I think our intel is a lot better than Hans Blix’s.’ Leaving aside the matter that witholding relevant intel from the inspectors puts us in material breach of the UN resolutions, if we know all about these WMD, why don’t we parachute a Special Forces team and some reporters to the sites and say ah-ha, here it is? It’s been 8 days, and the best we’ve got is somechemical suits and a factory that’s been dormant for 5 years. Do you know ofanyone that’s pressing on this issue?” There have been a number of reports of late suggesting that Washington’s priorities have shifted and that disarming Iraq is no longer at the top of the list. Surprised?

Luis Fernando Ayala, a journalist writes from Mexico: “Such an important, brave information effort deserves recognition. Written media are back in the fight for fair news coverage. Shame on electronic media, shame on American journalists that serve fascist purposes knowing–for sure–the lie to the public. Congratulations. Glad to see that the U.S. can offer some clean shits in this grotesque, dirty brothel.”

Max writes from Berlin, Germany “I heard about your site in German TV-Channel “Arte,” where Mr. Schechter gave an interview. It’s good to see that it is not the whole U.S. reporter charge that stays on the same line if it is about to give some reasons for war. Please continue your engagement to talk to European media. But I miss a forum for the users, so that we can be part of your network. Thanks, Danke und viel erfolg to bring us a bit more truth.”

M Gill comments: “With all the fighting over the past few days, I find it impossible to believe we have not had more of our troops killed. A rising body count would shift the public opinion about the war. Where can we get the numbers and how can we get them out there?”

Aum worries about us: “While you watch the media, isnt the us govt watching you??? How would you know? Are free-speaking people disappearing here like other dictatorships have people missing? The Patriot Act did away with many freedoms and Patriot II will undoubtedly finish the job…ITS FRIGHTENING….”

Bhakti checks in from Salt Lake City: “I’m still paranoid. I could access the site on 4.1.03 at 9pm mountain time, but not at 11:30 pm, after trying to see the al-Jazeera site. Then I couldn’t get to it at 7 am 4.2.03 or at 9 pm same day. THANK you for putting me on the list. I need a lot of satire and political cartoons these days and a lot of good info. Thank you again for hanging in there and keeping up the blog.”

TIME AND TIME AGAINStew Albert, one of the great Yippies of the 60’s and an old friend sends in some verse on the reporting from Portland. It is called Time and Time Again.
Ever wonder what it was like
to live in a country
where the media was government controlled?
And reporters acted like
Willy Loman
door-to-door salesman
peddling propaganda not shoe laces?
Awake, arise
and read your morning paper
where
Iraqis fight because Saddam forces them,
civilians are being killed only by Iraqis,
massive long intense battles occur
without American casualties
and Britain bombards a city
in support of its inhabitants.
Read all about it.
Going around in circles
Getting dizzy, but the date never changes,
dusty or wet
it’s always 1984″

I embrace the view more than the verse. We labor on here at Mediachannel.org hoping that you will continue to support our work. I will be launching a more formal appeal tomorrow for donations and help. Write to me: dissector@mediachannel.org