Front-Page War: How Media Complicity

¶ … Front-Page War:

How Media Complicity Created the War in Iraq

Two thousand years ago, an empire did not need justification to go to war. If the populace was unsupportive of the war, they could always be placated with mass executions, with bread and circuses. Two thousand years ago, if the military and its commanders wanted a war, all they needed was the command to march -- and if their victims were going to resist invasion, they did so through love of the fatherland, not because of some sort of multimedia spin control. Unfortunately for the hawks of the new American Empire, times have changed. America is an aging republic in which the opinions of the populace are still at least moderately important. Though the rulers of the nation may often go about their business impervious to the concerns of common folk, the national administration still cannot afford to go to war without the support --or at least generalized apathy -- of the voting public. Likewise, in the international environment today, an invaded nation cannot hope to continue fighting without the sympathy of the global community. So in order for a war to be fought and won, the management of public opinion becomes nearly as important as the management of an army. The importance of media as a means of manipulating public opinion and controlling the minds of the populace in favor of their own regime has become remarkably clear; over the past few years America has been sold the "War on Terror" with so much slick advertising and media manipulation that one might think it was the newest brand of soft drink.

The post-9/11 politicized media has been the dupe (or perhaps the co-conspirator) for many inflamed reports regarding "terrorist" links between Iraq and Ben Ladin, supposed weapons of mass destruction which threatened the world, and evidence that Hussein had plans to attack America. These rumors, all of which were latter quietly dismissed as false, were so often reprinted and re-hashed that they came to be seen as truth by Americans everywhere -- their consistent repetition by the media could be construed as directly responsible for America's acceptance of the war. As the ground war got under way, the media was under increased scrutinization, with both subtle and blatant forms of censorship abounding. Ironically, despite the overwhelming degree to which the mainstream media walked a patriotic party line, politicians and neo-conservative continually critiqued leading news sources for their liberalism. Of course, America has certainly not been alone in its use of distorted news stories and censorship. Saddam Hussein was infamous in his use of censorship and intimidation to control news sources; additionally America and its allies alleged that Arab-based news media sources have been heavily skewed against the invasion, and have supported terrorism against the occupying forces.

In both cases, the media has been more dramatically involved in this "war on terror" than in any prior war. The increased involvement of the media in wartime has, of course, been an on-going trend for many years, dating back past the Vietnam war. A reasoned case could be made to say that every war since the American Revolution has seen a higher level of media and journalistic involvement, and certainly there have been other instances where "yellow" journalism and irresponsible reporting have helped to drive violent engagements. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the "war on terror" has had a uniquely high level of media involvement, as nearly instant communications from the front have become commonplace. The war, for all sides, has been neatly packaged and defined. It has become a sort of glossy war, in which the atrocities taking place on both sides are carefully re-touched for public consumption. As Beeman describes it:

The result is that nothing is ever taken at face value, and nothing is proportionate. All actions are elevated to become mythic, dramatic enactments of the struggle between absolute good and absolute evil at every turn.... In this strange, media-dominated world, every action is set up in advance, played for the media and designed to have maximal rhetorical impact. President Bush mouths empty platitudes about fighting the "enemies of freedom" for the benefit of his extremist Republican core constituency. The heinous thugs carrying out acts such as the Berg beheading do so to indicate their willingness to exact a crowd-pleasing revenge on Americans recast as colonists, crusaders and captors. Both positions are dishonorable, for they bypass completely the welfare both of the combatants and the innocent citizens who are slaughtered in the fray.

The war has become a war of sound-byte rhetoric and brightly colored images, and the control of information has become just as important as the control of strategic geographical locations. When images and rhetoric get out of control of those who make the war, and the media is forced out of its government sanctioned telemetries, (as in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison torture, which was forced into the public attention) then and only then does the war itself seem temporarily unmanageable.

In studying the function and history of the media in this conflict, two central issues needs to be addressed. First, the way in which the conflict was created in the media, as hinted at above, deserves more careful attention. Additionally, the truths about censorship and government (both American and Iraqi/Arab) sponsorship and control over media needs to be explored. When these issues have been addressed and understood, the reaction of the American and Iraqi response to these media presentations may be most fully understood.

The Media Creation of a Crisis

To say that the media created the war in Iraq is somewhat misleading. It would be most accurate to say that the media was the tool through which pundits and politicians gained the silent authorization of their people to begin the war. According to many sources which are just now coming to light, the Bush administration had designs to go to war with Iraq from the beginning of his presidency, though the plans were no doubt incompletely formed and awaiting a justification. Certainly Bush had many reasons to want to "finish" the work that his father had started in the Gulf War. So, despite the fact that evidence indicated that the terrorist activities of September 11th were not directly related to Iraq, the Bush administration immediately began to bandy about the idea that Iraq posed an equal terrorist threat to America which had to be countered. This supposed threat was thought to come from their links with al-Qaida and the illusory stockpiles of "dirty" nuclear and chemical weapons which the nation was believed to be hiding from inspectors. It would later appear that both of these threats were unfounded.)

If you just look at how this war developed, the administration made some serious claims that sort of fluctuated one to the other. Even before the war, none of those claims held up to scrutiny - and now, after, none of them do, says Robert McChesney." (Grimm) These claims were quickly picked up and parroted by the media, and it was then (and in some cases still is) difficult to find any evidence in the mainstream media that comprehensive investigative journalism attempted to validate these claims. In general, every media outlet repeated the party line that the "terrorist" state of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. As McChesney would go on to say: "The sort of press envisioned in the Constitution was, if you go to war, we have these independent institutions that hold you accountable. They don't just say, 'Great war, guys' and move on...If the Soviet Union cited reasons like this in their invasion of Afghanistan and Pravda reported nothing but what the government said, we would've dismissed it out of hand. Our press hasn't been much better." (Grimm)

To be fair, the false information provided by the administration has, after being proven inaccurate, has been reported as faulty intelligence rather than deliberate falsehoods. However, the fact that this was not discovered and discussed earlier is a direct indication that the media was overly swayed by the administration.

It is obvious how these mistaken "truths," repeated loudly and vociferously, could easily manipulate the general public into accepting a war they might otherwise have condemned. The Bush administration consistently released "Terror alert levels" which were reported offhandedly by all the news agencies without firm supporting evidence. These created a sense of general fear which needed a resolution of some sort. Many of these warnings regarded terrorist strikes with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons which could be used to infect subways, water supplies, sporting events, or other common civilian areas. When these constant, unformed threats were subtly (and sometimes, one remembers, not so subtly) linked to the "fact" that Iraq had developed chemical and nuclear weapons which could (theoretically) be used on American citizens, it seemed logical for many to react in favor of a preventive strike.

When politicians made statements such as "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, (George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003) the claims were quickly picked up and repeated by the media. So were claims that Iraq had nuclear weapons. "We believe [Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Dick Cheney, NBC's Meet the Press, March 16, 2003) Yet, after the search for chemical and nuclear weapons was eventually called off without any actual discover of such weapons, the media made startling little of the fact that Donald Rumsfeld said "I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons." (Senate appropriations subcommittee on defense hearing, May 14, 2003)

In fact, shortly thereafter "USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, echoed this fudging -- last year 'weapons,' this year 'programs' -- declaring that 'the jury's still out' on whether Iraq had WMD and that 'I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence.'" (Scheer et al.) similar phenomena occured with another major falsehood widely distributed in the media, albeit less vociferously insisted upon by the administration itself. Through-out the early months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the media was filled with the idea that attacking this nation would be a reasonable part of the "war on terror," and implied that Hussein had some direct connection with the events to September 11th.

To this day, over a third of Americans continue to believe that Hussein personally arranged the hijackings.

Even after the middle pages of major newspapers had already explained that intelligence showed Hussein was not directly involved in the September 11th terror attacks, a CNN/Gallup poll reported that "42% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. And 32% believe that Saddam Hussein personally planned the attack." (Roberts) Predictably, this has led to an environment in which a large number of people support the war on Iraq precisely because they believe that this is a direct act of retribution against those who stroke a blow to our nation. It is common to hear, in every day conversation, the assertion that Iraq started this war by its terrorist activities against America. This is despite the --much underreported fact -- that "President Bush, in a rare moment of candor, finally admitted half a year after the invasion that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein's Iraq had any links to the 9/11 attacks, undermining eighteen months of implying the exact opposite.. Yet in both of his recent big speeches... Bush again dished out the fundamental lie that the war and occupation of Iraq can reasonably be linked to the 'war on terror,'" (Scheer et al.) a theory which is continually repeated by the media to this day. Those few retractions which exist are often brushed under the carpet, a fact that major newspapers themselves admitted:

Here is the New York Times' ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, writing on May 30-14 months after the bombs began falling on Baghdad: "Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles... that provided perspective or challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby." (Gitlin)

As if these obfuscations were not enough, there appears to be a very large degree to which American policy officially equates reporting on Iraqi casualties as pro-terrorist and anti-American activity. This happens in very quiet ways among Western media sources, as when "the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion.... [a large percentage] of whom were women and children...by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others." (Pilger)

Censorship and Support

Much could be made of the way in which the media has been carefully guided around the Iraqi war. America has sent "imbedded" reporters with the troops -- handpicked journalists who were moving with units, and depended upon them for their safety.

This has widely been construed as support for the media, but others consider it to be a form of subtle censorship. "With reporters wed to a military unit on the battlefield, the relationship would be symbiotic. Self-censorship could be expected if reporters knew that exposure of operational secrets would crank enemy artillery around their foxholes following the 6 o'clock new..." (Ridge) Meanwhile, Saddam practiced an opposite sort of content control by confining journalists to specific areas on a daily basis, and merely "escorting" them to news-sites. "We were taken all together to the bombing sites by bus. It was a real struggle to get permission to wander around the city or to visit people in their homes. I managed to do it, but under very heavy pressure and only for short periods of time. There was no access to the front line, and in the hospitals, we were only allowed to visit the civilian casualties, not the wounded soldiers." (Boulat) In both cases, it appears, the combatants attempted to channel what would be shown to the world. However, there have also been far more blatant examples of censorship on both sides of the battle.

Apparently, Paul Bremer (Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for postwar Iraq) has recently "ordered his legal department in Baghdad to draw up rules for press censorship... Two months after 'liberating' Iraq, the Anglo- American authorities and their boss Paul Bremer... have decided to control the new and free Iraqi press." (Fisk)

The new guidelines suggest that newspapers who publish "wild stories" (Fisk) which may provoke violence against America. This apparently includes religious sources which create "unrest" by being against the occupation or the introduction of American-styled morals. Far more disturbingly, the U.S. has repeatedly attempted (and often succeeded) to censor mainstream Arab news networks, most notably Aljazeera, which has also been one of the main targets of Saddam-era censorship.

America's primary problem with Aljazeera appears to be the network's insistence on publishing often graphic details regarding civilian casualties and giving air play to the messages and demands of resistance groups. Western media has been strongly discouraged from showing the bodies of dead American soldiers or Iraqi civilians -- Aljazeera has shown both, in addition to airing executions of hostages and videos from resistors. "According to medics in Fallujah, the U.S. offensive claimed the lives of at least 700 Iraqis, mostly women and children, and left up to 1,500 others injured." (Mekay) Somewhat oddly, America responded to these allegations by shutting down Aljazeera's offices in Baghdad and Iraq. Additionally, " On several occasions, the channel's correspondents have also been banned from government offices and news conferences in Iraq." (Mekay)

Aljazeera has a history of being at odds with the administration of Iraq, whether that be American or Saddamite. "During the Iraq invasion, both Iraqi Government and U.S. officials expressed dissatisfaction with Aljazeera's coverage and called it biased... Even as U.S. officials were describing Aljazeera's coverage as misleading in their press conferences, the then Iraqi information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, was threatening the station's staff with serious consequences if they continued their 'pro-U.S. reporting.'" (Janabi) This double-sided condemnation continues to this day, with the U.S. continuing to accuse Aljzeera of siding with Iraqi insurgents while many of those insurgents have been issuing death threats to Aljazeera employees and demanding that they cease their pro-U.S. coverage.

Censorship within the American and Western-International press has been less blatant, if none-the-less chilling. For example, Paul Craig Roberts, an eminent conservative writer who served in Reagen's administration, recently had his columns pulled from publication by the Heritage Foundation because he did not support the war on terror, and suggested that it betrayed libertarian and traditional conservative values. Many other journalists have had similar experiences. In America, many accounts of censorship of websites, writers, and even school children, abound. (See an entire website dedicated to the issue at (http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org)

Far more blatant than these many, yet still legally isolated cases, however, is the evidence that America is purposefully controlling the degree to which foreign news correspondents are able to work in the United States. "Officials in DHS [Department of Homeland Security] decided to revive a visa requirement, dormant since 1952, that required journalists to apply for a special visa, known as an I-visa, when visiting the United States for professional reasons. This visa requirement also applied to so-called "friendly nations" - 27 countries whose citizens do not have to apply for a visa in order to visit the U.S. For personal reasons." (Regan) This ruling has resulted in scores of professional journalists, who may not have noticed the fine print in their visa renewal applications or waiver forms, being arrested, detained, and in many cases strip-searched, interrogated, and deported. As Slate.com has pointed out, the fact that America singles out journalists as needing particular monitoring "suggests there is something uniquely dangerous about journalism." (Regan) America is currently ranked by Reporters without Borders as 31st out 166 nations (among the bottom 20%!) for lack of international press freedom.