Posted on 04/10/2003 6:17:15 PM PDT by MediaMole
By Diana Barahona, Northern California Media Guild
The January 24 article in The Guild Reporter about the Pentagon-sponsored boot camp for reporters, “New Face of War” by Jim Wolf, was shockingly naive for a union paper. It’s one thing for reporters to uncritically regurgitate Pentagon and administration lies for the mainstream press, but it’s another thing entirely to serve up the same propaganda in a publication that’s by and for media workers.
Media activists have a lot of concerns about the reporting—or lack of it—that’s to be expected from a pool selected and trained by the U.S. military, and they have nothing to do with the “false impression that [they] were being trained to take part in combat,” and even less with the “[erosion of] a military unit’s operational security.”
According to Sydney H. Schanberg, one of the media’s leading authorities on hazardous duty, in Vietnam only one in a thousand reporters would ever knowingly jeopardize a military operation, and that remains true today. (See “Schanberg’s Take on the Pentagon’s Media Rules—Analyzing the Conditions for ‘Embedded’ Reporters,” by Greg Mitchell in the Feb. 24 issue of Editor and Publisher.)
No, what is of concern are the severe limits the Pentagon will put on coverage, as detailed in the above-cited article, including “vague language restrictions, and situations where copy can be held, if not sanitized.” Then there is the threat of being expelled from the Pentagon group if the news is not flattering to the U.S. military. Raise your hand, anybody who thinks that the Army will be conducting tours of the destruction in Baghdad caused by 800 cruise missiles.
But external censorship by the Pentagon is only half of the problem; the media themselves already practice a great deal of internal self-censorship, and this is guaranteed to increase. According to Robert Fisk, “a new CNN system of ‘script approval’—the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitized—suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about.” (See “How The News Will Be Censored In This War” in the Feb. 25 Independent/UK.) Your use of quotes by CNN officials Walter Isaacson and Eason Jordan (from the Wall Street Journal) hardly added credibility to the piece.
Anybody remember the “Highway of Death”? This was a U.S. slaughter of an estimated 22,000 Iraqi military personnel and civilians who were retreating from Mutlaa, Kuwait toward Basra in Iraq, and who were out of combat. Or what about the civilian shelter in Rada that was intentionally targeted by not one but two missiles, incinerating hundreds of women and children? No, nobody in the U.S. remembers these things because they were not covered by the flag-waving hairdos that passed for reporters in 1991.
On Feb. 19 this year, the American Gulf War Veterans Association issued a press release stating it had a sworn statement from a veteran that he and others had been ordered in 1991 to ignite oil fields in Kuwait in order to lay the blame on Saddam Hussein: how many news outlets picked up this story? How many informed the public that the Kurds at Halabja were in fact killed by sarin gas used by Iranian forces, as reported by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency? How many pointed out that Hussein did not “kick the inspectors out” but that they were pulled out by the U.N.? The big lies of the past are still being repeated by a compliant press.
Robert Fisk recounts how, when Colin Powell was making his case for war before the U.N. Security Council, instead of Picasso’s Guernica there was another visual aid: a giant video screen behind Powell, displaying the words “Iraq: Failing To Disarm —Denial and Deception.” Fisk goes on: “Was this a CNN logo, some of us wondered? But no, it was CNN’s sister channel, the U.S. Department of State.”
More and more Americans are now looking to the British press for the real story about our empire’s actions abroad.
Granted this is a commentary piece, but it is representative of the politics in this union of supposedly unbiased reporters.
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Sydney Schanberg blames the murder spree of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (the "Killing Fields") on anger caused and justified by American action in Indochina.
Mr. Schanberg, please feel free to bite me.
So what we have here is a cry for reporters to remain blissfully ignorant of ways that their reporting unknowingly puts soldiers' lives at risk?
NUTS!
When we saw the reporters riding in the column of armored vehicles, in helicopters on combat missions, or sleeping on the dirt with the troops, it became obvious to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with military operations that if these people had not been selected and trained they'd have been a risk both to themselves and to the troops they were with. Those risks were extreme enough as it was.
What this author really misses isn't uncensored candor, it's her ability to spin the news with no danger of unfiltered camera work showing that she is lying. Fisk is a perfect example of this. How many would have believed his story that the U.S. was nowhere near the airport if there were no pictures of it to contradict him?
Wait a minute. You mean people like Mike Wallace can justify claiming they wouldn't warn the US of an ambush in wartime because they "are reporters" and must "remain unbiased"
But union membership isn't a problem?
Oh my, I see some hipocrisy here..
Yeah, who's ever seen those pictures? Excuse me, I mean who's seen those pictures less than a thousand times?
These were armed troops who had just finished murdering and raping and were still in fighting shape. What was to keep them from turning around and returning to fight? Admitedly not a very likely outcome but still possible. The equipment we took out and the soldiers we killed then aren't there to cause trouble now.
Oh yes, I forgot, the Iraqis were liberating Iraqi civilians being held captive.
"More and more Americans are now looking to the British press for the real story about our empire’s actions abroad."
I was thinking the same thing as I read the article. I guess the military training and real world experience might balance the indoctrination they get in J-School.
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