THE
REAL-TIME WAR
Defining News
In The
Middle East
BY
TERENCE SMITH
It was
April 9th, the day Baghdad fell to U.S. troops. Martin Savidge and
his CNN crew were riding in an armored column approaching the city
from the southeast. In the center of the city, a worldwide
television audience was watching as exhilarated Iraqis and U.S.
soldiers toppled the giant statue of Saddam Hussein.
Savidge, and the
marines, had been listening to cheers from Iraqi residents lining
the road into the city until suddenly, as they passed the campus of
Baghdad University, they came under small-arms fire. “We’re way
beyond sniper fire,” he said via videophone to Paula Zahn back in
the studio in New York. “This is an all-out engagement here, this is
warfare,” he continued in his cool, seemingly unruffled baritone
over grainy but incredibly dramatic pictures of the action. “That
sounds like more tank fire or more missile fire,” he said, his
breath coming a little more quickly now. “We’re being warned — hang
on — about small-arms fire coming at our position. As you can hear,
this is a far cry from the jubilant crowds we left — it’s just hard
to imagine — two blocks away!”
Savidge’s riveting
account was vintage war reporting, delivered firsthand in first
person in real time to an audience that listened as the marines took
fire, returned it tenfold, and after forty-five minutes of fierce
fighting subdued one of the last pockets of resisting Iraqi
fighters.
It was a perfect
example of how the Pentagon’s bold experiment with embedded
reporters was supposed to work and how, in some cases, it did
work.
Embedding —
assigning 700-plus U.S. and foreign reporters to train, travel, and
share danger and hardships with American military units — was the
most innovative aspect of the coverage of the second gulf war. It
made possible a kind of intimate, immediate, absorbing, almost
addictive coverage, the likes of which we have not seen before. In
the twenty-one days between the first air strike on Baghdad and the
collapse of Saddam’s regime, a new standard was set for war
reporting. It is impossible to imagine a future U.S. military
campaign without reporters embedded in frontline units, without
instant transmission from the battlefield, without “tank cams,”
“lipstick cams,” satellite phones, grainy-green night-vision
cameras, and all the high-tech paraphernalia that brought war in
Iraq directly into our living rooms and collective consciousness.
There is no going back.
That does not mean
the coverage was flawless. Far from it. As the media correspondent
for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, I watched, listened to, and
read the coverage, preparing segments for the broadcast and
frequently talking with correspondents, embedded and otherwise,
throughout the theater. On balance, I thought it was remarkable
work: courageous, honest, and largely accurate. But some important
questions need to be asked about the way the war was reported. For
example:
Did the media get
it right, or at least more right than wrong?
Mistakes were made, as
the White House likes to say, especially in the excitement and chaos
of the early going. The strategic southern city of Basra was
reported taken on March 23, when in fact it took British troops
another two weeks to subdue the resistance there. Scud missiles were
said to be striking in Kuwait that same day, when in fact they were
not. An entire Iraqi division was reported to have laid down its
arms and surrendered, when in fact it had not. A fast-moving convoy
of Republican Guards in 1,000 armored vehicles was repeatedly
reported to be moving south from Baghdad on March 26 to confront
U.S. forces, when in fact it was busy scattering under relentless
U.S. air strikes.
On the positive
side, there were occasions when the embedded media got the story
straight, in contrast to the version of events offered by the
briefers in the million-dollar press center in Doha, Qatar. When
U.S. soldiers tragically killed women and children in a van that
approached a checkpoint without stopping, for example, Centcom
described an orderly, by-the-book process in which the sentries
fired warning shots, then fired into the vehicle’s engine, and
finally fired on the passenger compartment when the van refused to
stop, killing seven.
In the next day’s
Washington Post, William Branigin, who was embedded with the
unit involved in the incident, described a far more chaotic
situation, with the commander screaming in frustration into his
radio because he thought the sentries failed to respond to his order
to fire the required warning shots. Branigin quoted the commander as
shouting, “You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn’t
fire a warning shot soon enough!” In all, ten civilians died, not
seven, Branigin reported.
In another incident,
Dexter Filkins of The New York Times was there to quote a
sergeant’s chilling explanation of why his unit shot and killed a
woman who was standing near some Iraqi soldiers. “I’m sorry, but the
chick was in the way,” the sergeant said.
There is no
substitute for up-close reporting like that. But at the same time,
the embedding procedure poses obvious risks. There is a real danger
of getting too close to your subject. It’s a “professionally
treacherous” situation, Jim Dwyer of The New York Times said
in an interview from the field. “You are sleeping next to people you
are covering. Your survival is based on them.” The examples of this
were not generally egregious. There was no misreporting of facts,
but rather an empathetic tone in a lot of the embedded reporting
that was understandable, I suppose, but lacked the skeptical, hard
edge it might otherwise have had. Judith Miller of The New
York Times, for example, was attacked by Slate’s Jack
Shafer and other media critics for her credulous coverage of
MET-Alpha, the weapons inspection team to which she was attached.
When the team interviewed an Iraqi scientist who said that the
Hussein regime had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction days
before the war began, Miller, who never interviewed the scientist
herself, described it as a “silver bullet” in the search. Shafer and
others accused her of functioning, effectively, as a spokeswoman for
the unit.
The veteran war
correspondent Chris Hedges wrote in The Nation that the
embedding process induces reporters to perpetuate the myth of war as
an ennobling exercise. “They depend on the military for everything,
from food to a place to sleep. They look to the soldiers around them
for protection. When they feel the fear of hostile fire, they
identify and seek to protect those who protect them. They become
part of the team. It is a natural reaction.”
So the reviews on
embedding are mixed and will be debated for some time. But overall,
on the issue of accuracy and fairness, I would give the media a
grade of . . .B+
Did the Big
Picture emerge from the soda-straw views of the fighting provided by
the embedded reporters?
It is generally true
that the embedded reporters were able to describe only the narrow
slice of the battlefield that they could see or hear. The
National Journal’s George Wilson described being embedded
with a Marine artillery unit as akin to being the number-two dog in
a sled dog team. “You saw an awful lot of the dog in front of you,”
he said, “and a little to the left and right.”
More broadly, the
television coverage provided by embedded reporters was often long on
image and short on detail. You saw and heard some of the bang-bang,
but the larger narrative was often missing.
Newspaper coverage,
by contrast, tended to be more comprehensive. Readers who followed
the daily lead-all articles written by Patrick Tyler in The New
York Times, and similar summary pieces in The Washington
Post and Los Angeles Times, got a good picture of the
overall progress of the war. They were aided immeasurably by the
full-page maps that charted the troop movements, most of which were
simpler and easier to comprehend than the high-tech studio
sand-tables favored by the corps of television generals. So the big
picture, at least in terms of the fighting, was there to be had.
Overall grade . . .B+
Was Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld right when he accused the media of
lurching from positive to negative in reporting the war?
“We have seen mood
swings in the media from highs to lows to highs and back again,
sometimes in a single, twenty-four-hour period,” he said at a
Pentagon briefing about ten days into the fighting. “For some, the
massive TV coverage — and it is massive — and the breathless reports
can seem to be somewhat disorienting.”
Rumsfeld is right on
this one. In the first days of the war, when U.S. units were racing
almost unimpeded toward Baghdad, many news organizations described
the fighting as the proverbial “cakewalk” that some of the war’s
supporters had predicted.
Dexter Filkins of
The New York Times was so impressed with the way the first
units broke through the Kuwait-Iraqi border and overran the town of
Safwan, he predicted in an off-air interview with the
NewsHour that he would be filing from Basra the next day.
Instead, stubborn Iraqi resistance kept British troops at bay for
two weeks.
A week later, as
Iraqi irregulars were harassing and slowing U.S. units in Nasiriya’s
“ambush alley,” commentators back in Washington were describing a
Vietnam-like quagmire. The “operational pause,” when units stood in
place and waited out a vicious sandstorm, was widely reported as a
sign of a flawed battle plan and overextended supply lines. Then,
after the sandstorms had cleared and the U.S. units resumed their
northward march, many organizations were caught by surprise by the
speed with which the Army and Marines took Baghdad. In hindsight,
more patience and a longer view would have produced better reporting
and analysis. Overall grade for consistency . . .C-
Did the media
fall for the Pentagon’s spin?
In a word, yes. Remember
“shock and awe?” Given the advance billing, news organizations
played the Pentagon’s game by suggesting that the first phase of
bombing in Baghdad would be decisive.
Beyond that, too
many reporters accepted the military’s description of the Republican
Guard as a formidable force, when in fact those units rolled up like
a cheap carpet in the face of the U.S. advance. News organizations
accepted without much question the Pentagon’s forecast that Baghdad
would be fiercely defended. When it fell with only spotty
resistance, the American performance seemed all the more impressive.
Amid all the reports of success, major battlefield lapses were
insufficiently reported and analyzed. The first major assault by
Apache helicopters was one example. The raid was a disaster, with
one aircraft downed, its crew captured, and the rest of the choppers
so badly shot up by ground fire that the entire unit was rendered
incapable of fighting. But it was reported as just one more
development in a busy day of war news. Overall grade for gullibility
. . .C-
Did media
jingoism compromise objectivity?
Again, guilty as
charged. It was not just the flagrant examples: the on-screen flags
and lapel pins, the breathless embedded television correspondent
describing how “we” went on patrol. It was the cheerleading, can-do
tone that infected too much of the reporting as U.S. forces advanced
against an overpowered, overwhelmed enemy. After all, it was never
going to be a fair fight between the superbly equipped,
precision-guided U.S. military machine and the rag-tag Iraqi units.
The U.S. had been bombing Iraq for a decade, destroying its air
defenses and grounding its air force. Too little of the reporting
pointed out those realities.
Also, the war had an
almost sanitized quality as it came across on U.S. television
screens. In part, this was due to the long-distance nature of the
fighting; Iraq was a huge, spread-out battlefield. But news
organizations also were concerned about the impact back home, and
thus showed few if any American casualties and only occasional Iraqi
victims. European and pan-Arab channels showed far more. The
contrast was striking. The concern for the sensibilities of the U.S.
audience and the troops was understandable, but the net result was a
“clean” war, rather than the gory mess it was.
In addition, few
questions were asked when the much-advertised weapons of mass
destruction failed to materialize, and the larger political goals of
the war were not subjected to hard-headed analysis. The rise of
anti-Americanism in Europe and the Arab and Muslim world was muffled
once the shooting started. News organizations described how “freedom
fries” had replaced French fries on some menus, but spent little
time examining the actual content and motivations behind the French
position. It was as though the powerful images from the battlefield
drowned out more thoughtful evaluation of what was really happening.
Overall grade for balance . . .C
Even larger
questions arise for the media in the postwar period.
Will news organizations
be willing to commit the staff and airtime and space to cover the
complex but less sexy task of rebuilding Iraq? Or will the
bean-counters compel most journalists to abandon the field? Here,
the early signs are not good. The networks moved quickly to call
most of their reporters home. It remains to be seen how many will be
deployed in the region six months from now.
Will the hard
questions be asked about what the war accomplished and what it did
not? Or will the media move on to the next crisis, as with
Afghanistan? Again, the signs are not encouraging. As the fighting
subsided, and we learned more about the Hussein regime, there should
have been more pieces analyzing whether, in fact, Iraq had posed a
national security threat to the United States, as President Bush
repeatedly contended. What, exactly, were the links between Iraq and
international terrorism? Did Iraq really play any role in September
11? All good questions, awaiting answers.
Will news
organizations hold the administration accountable to its promise to
vigorously pursue an Israeli-Palestinian settlement? Or will that
commitment be ignored?
Will the cable
channels switch their famously fickle focus to more tabloid fare?
Will it be wall-to-wall Laci Peterson rather than the aftermath of
the biggest U.S. adventure overseas since the first gulf war?
Gulf War II, the
real-time war, it seems, has so far posed more questions for news
organizations than it has answered.
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Terence Smith is the media correspondent and senior
producer for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He has covered
wars in Vietnam, Israel, and Cyprus.