Why Didn't Iraq Turn the Election?

This is a question I've been asking since that fateful night. Here is a great article that says a lot about how the Bush administration contained the content of the news. Its an important work, one that needs to be dissected and understood until we can stand toe to toe with the disinformation artists of the administration.
TomDispatch - Tomgram: Michael Massing on Iraq coverage and the election
In the end, the war in Iraq did not have the decisive impact on the election that many had expected. In the weeks before the vote there were the massacre of forty-nine Iraqi police trainees; a deadly attack inside the previously impenetrable Green Zone in Baghdad; the refusal by an army unit to carry out a supply mission on the grounds that it was too dangerous; the explosion of several car bombs at a ceremony where soldiers were handing out candy, killing dozens of children; the abduction of contractors, journalists, and aid workers, including the director of the CARE office in Baghdad; the release of a report holding the highest reaches of the Pentagon and the military responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib; a report by President Bush's hand-picked investigator confirming that Iraq had long ago lost its ability to produce weapons of mass destruction; and the spread of the insurgency to every corner of the country, bringing reconstruction to a virtual halt. All of this, in the end, counted for less to voters (if the exit polls are to be believed) than such issues as whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry and whether discarded embryos should be used for stem cell research.


Tomgram: Michael Massing on Iraq coverage and the election
Along with Jack Shafer of Slate, Michael Massing was one of
the first media critics to take on our imperial press for the shameful
way it caved to the Bush administration in covering the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq. He did so in two devastating critiques in the New
York Review of Books. They added up to little short of an
indictment of the work of the New York Times and the
Washington Post in particular. The first of these pieces must be
considered at least in part responsible for the fact that, last May
26, the editors of the Times finally felt called upon to
publish
a relatively weak mea culpa about the paper's Iraq reporting that
named no names and was tucked away on an inside page, and then for
the far stronger piece published four days later by the paper's
forthright public editor Daniel Okrent. In Massing's latest essay
below, he considers how coverage of the war affected the election --
or rather why the war didn't prove as decisive as might have been
expected in the voting booth.
There can be little question that the administration's Iraq
disaster chased the President to the polls on November 2; that, put
another way, a ragtag group of insurgents who, 18 months ago, weren't
even on the administration's radar screen, actually threatened to
deprive him of a second term in office. There can also be little
question that the war in Iraq, along with the various administration
lies and misdemeanors that got us there, was a significant factor in
mobilizing an anti-Bush electoral movement of striking scope. Why
exactly the costs of the war didn't penetrate further into George
Bush's America and what role the media may have had in blunting the
war's significance are questions Massing now takes up. His piece
represents perhaps the opening salvo in a longer-term discussion.
Massing's previous critiques of pre-war and wartime coverage have
been collected in a tiny paperback,
Now They Tell Us, The American Press and Iraq. (A version of the
book's introduction by Orville Schell -–
Why the
Press Failed -- has already been posted at Tomdispatch.) Massing's
latest piece appears below thanks to the kind permission of the
editors of the New York Review of
Books. (It will appear in the December 16 issue of that magazine.)
Tom
Iraq, the Press and the Election
By Michael Massing
In the end, the war in Iraq did not have the decisive impact on
the election that many had expected. In the weeks before the vote
there were the massacre of forty-nine Iraqi police trainees; a
deadly attack inside the previously impenetrable Green Zone in
Baghdad; the refusal by an army unit to carry out a supply mission
on the grounds that it was too dangerous; the explosion of several
car bombs at a ceremony where soldiers were handing out candy,
killing dozens of children; the abduction of contractors,
journalists, and aid workers, including the director of the CARE
office in Baghdad; the release of a report holding the highest
reaches of the Pentagon and the military responsible for the abuses
at Abu Ghraib; a report by President Bush's hand-picked investigator
confirming that Iraq had long ago lost its ability to produce
weapons of mass destruction; and the spread of the insurgency to
every corner of the country, bringing reconstruction to a virtual
halt. All of this, in the end, counted for less to voters (if the
exit polls are to be believed) than such issues as whether
homosexuals should be allowed to marry and whether discarded embryos
should be used for stem cell research.
How did this happen? In many ways, George Bush's victory seems to
have confirmed the fact that large numbers of voters in America
today are very conservative, dominated by strong attachments to God,
country, and the traditional family. At the same time, it's not
clear to what extent the public was aware of just how bad things had
gotten in Iraq. For while there was much informative reporting on
the war, a number of factors combined to shield Americans from its
most brutal realities. A look at these factors can help to
understand some neglected aspects of George Bush's victory.
1.
Toward the end of September, Farnaz Fassihi, a correspondent for
the Wall Street Journal in Baghdad,
sent
an e-mail to forty friends describing her working conditions in
Iraq. Fassihi had been sending out such messages on a regular basis,
but this one seethed with anger and frustration. "Being a foreign
correspondent in Baghdad these days," she wrote, "is like being
under virtual house arrest.... I avoid going to people's homes and
never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more,
can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with
strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a
full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news, can't be
stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road
trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't
be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't
and can't." Citing the fall of Falluja, the revolt of Moqtada al-Sadr,
and the spread of the insurgency to every part of the country,
Fassihi declared that "despite President Bush's rosy assessments,
Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential'
threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and
active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United
States for decades to come.... The genie of terrorism, chaos and
mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American
mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle."
Fassihi's e-mail soon ended up on the Internet, where it quickly
spread, giving readers a vivid and unvarnished look at what it was
like to live in the world's most dangerous capital. Somehow, Fassihi,
in her informal message, had managed to capture the lurid nature of
life in Iraq in a way that conventional reporting, with all its
qualifiers and distancing, could not.
Other US correspondents in Baghdad were startled at the attention
her e-mail received. "All of us felt that we'd been writing that
story," one journalist told me. "Everyone was marveling and asking
what were we doing wrong if that information came as a surprise to
the American public." Reporters rushed to file their own
first-person accounts. Writing in the "Week in Review," for
instance, New York Times
reporter Dexter Filkins observed that "in the writing of this
essay, a three-hour affair, two rockets and three mortar shells have
landed close enough to shake the walls of our house. The door to my
balcony opens onto an Iraqi social club, and the roar from the
blasts set the Iraqis into a panic, their screams audible above the
Arabic music wafting from the speakers."
Interestingly, no such account appeared in the Wall Street
Journal. For Fassihi's criticism of Bush administration policy
outraged some readers, who insisted that she could no longer write
about Iraq with the necessary objectivity. In response, the
Journal announced that Fassihi was going to take a previously
scheduled vacation from Iraq and that this would keep her from
writing anything more about it until after the US election.
Both Fassihi and her editors insisted that this decision was not
a criticism of her, but some detected a pulling back by the
Journal, and an examination of its coverage tends to bear this
out. In the weeks before Fassihi's departure, the paper ran a number
of probing pieces on Iraq. On September 15, for instance, Fassihi
and Greg Jaffe, in a front-page story, described how the steady rise
in violence in Baghdad reflected growing cooperation among Iraq's
once highly fragmented insurgent groups. After Fassihi's e-mail was
circulated, however, such stories almost entirely disappeared from
the Journal's front page, and they were hard to find inside
as well. The resulting vacuum was filled by the Journal's
stridently conservative opinion pages, which every day featured one
or more editorials or columns insisting that the war was going well
and that anyone who felt otherwise was a defeatist liberal
uninterested in bringing democracy to the Middle East.
In one column, Daniel Henninger mentioned several Web sites that
readers interested in learning what was truly going on in Iraq could
consult. I looked up one of them,
HealingIraq .com. It
was written by an Iraqi dentist. His most recent posting began with
an apology for the long hiatus since his last filing. "The daily
situation in Baghdad is sadly too depressing to live through, let
alone write about," he lamented. He told of one friend who had been
shot in the stomach while working at an Internet café when an armed
gang sprayed a nearby car belonging to a lawyer who was pursuing a
case they wanted dropped. Another friend, a doctor, had been
kidnapped along with a pharmacist by ten armed men storming a
pharmacy that had supplied medications to the U.S. Army. Their
decapitated bodies were later found outside Baghdad. Such grim
reports were absent from the Journal's opinion pages, and,
increasingly, its news pages. Thus one of the nation's top
newspapers became effectively neutered as a source of reliable
information about Iraq.
Meanwhile, pressure was building on other U.S. news organizations
as a result of the visit to the United States of Iraqi Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi in late September. In private, he was not
optimistic. As Peter Boyer reported
in
the November 1 New Yorker, Allawi told President Bush of the
conundrum facing him and the coalition -- that the insurgency
required forceful action, but that any such action could further
alienate the population, thus fueling the insurgency. In public,
however, Allawi joined with Bush in insisting that Iraq was making
progress and in blaming the press for making too much of the
negative. Fourteen or fifteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces, Allawi
asserted, were "completely safe," and the others had only "pockets
of terrorism." And this threw editors and reporters on the
defensive. "At the moment, there's real sensitivity about the
perceived political nature of every story coming out of Iraq," a
Baghdad correspondent for a large US paper told me in mid-October.
"Every story from Iraq is by definition an assessment as to whether
things are going well or badly." In reality, he said, the situation
in Iraq was a catastrophe," a view "almost unanimously" shared by
his colleagues. But, he added, "Editors are hypersensitive about not
wanting to appear to be coming down on one side or the other."
Allawi's visit to the United States was part of an intensive
campaign by the Bush administration to manage the flow of news out
of Iraq. As a matter of policy, any journalist wanting to visit the
Green Zone, that vast swath of Baghdad that is home to US
officialdom, had to be escorted at all times; one could not simply
wander around and chat with people in bars and cafés. The vast world
of civilian contractors -- of Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root,
of Bechtel, and of all the other private companies responsible for
rebuilding Iraq -- was completely off-limits; employees of these
companies were informed that they would be fired if they were caught
talking to the press. During the days of the Coalition Provisional
Authority, its administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and the top military
commander, Ricardo Sanchez, gave very few interviews to US
correspondents in Baghdad. They did, however, speak often via
satellite with small newspapers and local TV stations, which were
seen as more open and sympathetic. "The administration has been
extremely successful in going around the filters, of getting their
message directly to the American people without giving interviews to
the Baghdad press corps," one correspondent said.
The insurgents have done their part as well. In no prior conflict
-- not in Vietnam, nor in Lebanon, nor in Bosnia -- have journalists
been singled out for such sustained and violent attack. According to
the Committee to Protect Journalists, thirty-six journalists have
been killed in Iraq since the start of the war -- nineteen at the
hands of the insurgents. Two French journalists seized in August
remain missing. Until this fall, many journalists at least felt safe
while in their heavily guarded hotels. Then, in October, Paul
Taggart, an American photographer, was seized by four gunmen after
leaving the Hamra Hotel complex, one of the main residences for
Western journalists. He was eventually released, but it was
discovered that the captors had a floor plan of the hotel with the
name of every journalist in every room. Facing such perils, many
correspondents packed up and left.
2.
A number stayed, however, and, at considerable risk, set out to
describe the Iraqi maelstrom. Leading the way were three top U.S.
newspapers--the New York Times, the Washington Post,
and the Los Angeles Times -- backed by, among others, NPR,
Knight Ridder, and the Associated Press. The newspapers, in
particular, seemed driven by a sense that they had somehow let down
their readers during the run-up to the war, that they had not
sufficiently scrutinized the administration's case for war, and they
now seemed determined to make up for it. The New York Times,
for one, maintained a staff of forty to fifty people in Baghdad,
including four or five reporters plus assorted drivers,
housekeepers, security guards, and "fixers," those invaluable
interpreter/journalists who help visiting reporters understand who's
who, arrange interviews, and make sense of it all. With more and
more of the country off-limits to Western reporters, these fixers
were increasingly sent out into the field to find out what was going
on, and some emerged as enterprising reporters in their own right.
In early October, the New York Times's Edward Wong,
accompanied by a fixer and a photographer,
spent a day being guided through the streets of Baghdad's Sadr
City by a mid-level aide to Moqtada al-Sadr. At the time, US
warplanes were pounding the district on a nightly basis, but Wong --
whose itinerary included a kebab lunch at the aide's home, a street
that had recently been bombed, and a hospital where the wounded were
being treated -- found that the strikes were not having their
intended effect. "Loyalty to [Sadr] burns fierce here" in Sadr City,
"a vast slum of 2.2 million people, despite frequent American raids
and almost nightly airstrikes," he wrote on October 3. "The American
military has stepped up its campaign to rout the Mahdi Army, Mr.
Sadr's militia, on its home turf here, to drive him to the
bargaining table. But it is often impossible here to distinguish
between civilians and fighters."
After Prime Minister Allawi asserted that most of Iraq was safe,
the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran -- seeking a
statistical measure -- got hold of the daily security reports of
Kroll, a private firm working for the US government. These reports
showed that Iraq was suffering an average of seventy attacks a day
by insurgents, up from the forty to fifty that had occurred before
the handover of political authority in late June. What is more, the
reports showed, the attacks were occurring not only in the Sunni
Triangle but in every province of Iraq. "In number and scope,"
Chandrasekaran wrote on the Post's front page, "the attacks
compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying
campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with
assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim
prime minister that the instability is contained [in] small pockets
of the country." (Since he wrote, the number of attacks has
increased to more than one hundred a day.)
In the face of Bush administration efforts to portray the Iraqi
insurgency as made up exclusively of foreign fighters led by the
Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, several US news
organizations offered a more nuanced look.
The AP's Jim Krane, for instance, reported in early October that
the insurgents seemed to consist of four main groups, including not
only "hardcore fighters" aligned with Zarqawi but also conservative
Iraqis seeking to install an Islamic theocracy, Moqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army, and "Iraqi nationalists fighting to reclaim secular
power lost when Saddam Hussein was deposed in April 2003." This last
group, Krane wrote, was the largest. In other US wars, he noted,
"the enemy was clear." In Iraq, "the disorganized insurgency has no
single commander, no political wing and no dominant group." As a
result, "US troops can't settle on a single approach" to the
fighting.
In Washington, too, the press uncovered many significant stories
about US policy in Iraq. In one five-day period (October 22 to
October 26), the Washington Post's front page featured
stories on
* a poll showing that US-backed political figures were losing
ground to religious leaders;
* how the war in Iraq had diverted energy and attention from the
fight against al-Qaeda;
* how the CIA was secretly moving detainees out of Iraq--a
"serious breach" of the Geneva Conventions; and
* administration plans to ask for an additional $70 billion to
fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The biggest bombshell, though,
came on October 25, when the Times, in a two-column story
on its front page, reported that nearly 380 tons of high-grade
explosives had disappeared from a bunker south of Baghdad, and that
this had likely occurred after the US invasion. The story was
quickly seized on by John Kerry, who for the remaining days of the
campaign cited it as further evidence of the administration's
mishandling of Iraq. On the day before the election, CNN analyst
William Schneider said that the missing-explosives story seemed to
be an "important" factor in a last-minute turning of the polls away
from Bush.
3.
In the end, of course, the voters did not so turn. And leaving
aside any possible problems with the polls themselves, it's clear
that all those stories in the Times and the Post, and
the discussion they generated, did not have the impact on the public
that Schneider and many others had predicted. Understanding why
requires a look at some of the constraints under which reporters at
even the most aggressive papers worked. Just as reporters confronted
physical no-go zones into which they could not venture, they also
faced journalistic ones posing many perils.
Civilian casualties was one. Getting at this posed a number of
obstacles for journalists, the most obvious being the lack of
reliable figures. The US military does not offer information about
civilian casualties, and the estimates by private groups vary
wildly. At the conservative end,
Iraq Body Count, which
offers on its Web site a running total based on news reports, places
the number of civilian dead from military combat at between 14,300
and 16,500. At the upper end, a team of public health researchers
from Johns Hopkins University, using mortality estimates from both
before and after the war, has estimated that 100,000 civilians have
died either directly or indirectly as a result of the war. This
finding, published by
the British
medical journal The Lancet in late October, was questioned by
many other groups, including Human Rights Watch, which said that the
real figure was probably much lower but still unacceptably high.
Amid such conflicting estimates, journalists -- unable to visit
most of the sites where civilian deaths occur -- have been
exceedingly cautious. A correspondent for a major U.S. paper
described for me the dilemma he faced in a place like Falluja (this
was before the current U.S. offensive). His paper, he said, has an
Iraqi staffer in the city, and after each US bombing he would go to
the scene and report back that a certain number of civilians had
died. "But," the correspondent said, "I want to see it myself." He
elaborated: "If you get a press release from the US military saying
it dropped four five-hundred-pound bombs on insurgents in Fallujah,
and we know from our people that twelve people were killed, and they
say it was Zarqawi's men, we'll print what they say -- that it was
Zarqawi. Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya every night run interviews with
hospital directors, who say a man, his wife, and their three
children were killed. The U.S. military says that the director's
been threatened. I don't know. It's very frustrating because we
can't go in. You're left with 'he said/she said.'" Here, then, is
another of those journalistic conventions -- the need for "balance"
-- that deters papers from getting at one of the war's most
disturbing dimensions.
Needless to say, the insurgents themselves have ruthlessly killed
many civilians, in attacks that often target them. An admirable bid
to weigh all this was made by
Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder. Youssef learned that the Iraqi
Health Ministry had since early April been gathering statistics on
civilian casualties from hospitals in fifteen of Iraq's eighteen
provinces. Youssef obtained the numbers through September 19 and
totaled them up. The number of dead came to 3,487, of which 328 were
women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis had been injured. Hospital
officials believed that most of the dead were civilians, and Youssef,
analyzing the circumstances of their death, was able to see a
pattern, which she described in her lead: "Operations by US and
multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many
Iraqis -- most of them civilians -- as attacks by insurgents." Iraqi
officials, she added, "said the statistics proved that US airstrikes
intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent
civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular
acceptance of the American-backed interim government."
After Youssef's report appeared, other news organizations began
clamoring for similar numbers. Within days, the interim government
ordered the Health Ministry to stop issuing them. The silence again
set in.
4.
The gingerly approach to civilian casualties in the U.S. press is
part of a much larger hole in the coverage, one concerning the
day-to-day nature of the U.S. occupation. Most of the soldiers in
Iraq are young men who can't speak Arabic and who have rarely
traveled outside the United States, and they have suddenly been set
down in a hostile environment in which they face constant attack.
They are equipped with powerful weapons and have authority over a
dark-skinned people with alien customs. The result is constant
friction, often leading to chronic abuses that, while not as glaring
as those associated with Abu Ghraib, are no less corrosive in their
effect on local sentiment.
One journalist who has seen this firsthand is Nir Rosen. A
twenty-seven-year-old American freelance reporter, Rosen speaks
Arabic (a rare skill among Western reporters in Iraq), has a dark
complexion (allowing him to mix more easily with Iraqis), and
prefers when in Iraq to hang out with locals rather than with other
journalists. (In the late spring, he managed to get inside Falluja
at a time when it was a death trap for Western reporters; he
described his chilling findings
in
the July 5 issue of The New Yorker.) Seeing Iraq from the
perspective of the Iraqis, Rosen got a glimpse of how persistently
and routinely American actions alienated them. "People have to wait
three hours in a traffic jam because a US army convoy is going by,"
he notes. "Guns are pointed at you wherever you go. People are
constantly shouting at you. Concrete walls are everywhere. Violence
is everywhere."
In October 2003, Rosen spent two weeks embedded with a US Army
unit near the Syrian border. In sweeps through neighborhoods, he
said, the Americans used Israeli-style tactics -- making mass
arrests in the hope that one or two of those scooped up will have
something useful for them. "They'll hold them for ten hours in a
truck without food or water," he told me. "And 90 percent of them
are innocent."
Writing
of his experience in Reason magazine, Rosen described how a unit
he accompanied on a raid broke down the door of a house of a man
they suspected of dealing in arms. When the man, named Ayoub, did
not immediately respond to their orders, they shot him with
nonlethal bullets. "The floor of the house was covered with his
blood," Rosen wrote. "He was dragged into a room and interrogated
forcefully as his family was pushed back against their garden's
fence." Ayoub's frail mother, he continued, pleaded with the
interrogating soldier to spare her son's life, protesting his
innocence: "He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub's four girls
and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot,
screaming, their eyes wide open in terror, clutching one another as
soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two
compact discs with Saddam Hussein and his cronies on the cover.
These CDs, called The Crimes of Saddam, are common on every
Iraqi street and, as their title suggests, they were not made by
Saddam supporters. But the soldiers couldn't read Arabic and saw
only the picture of Saddam, which was proof enough of guilt. Ayoub
was brought out and pushed on to the truck." After holding Ayoub for
several hours in a detention center, the soldiers determined that he
was innocent, and they later let him go.
Rosen believes that such encounters are common. The American
soldiers he saw "treat everybody as the enemy," he said, adding that
they can be very abusive and violent. "If you're a boy and see
soldiers beating the shit out of your father, how can you not hate
the Americans?" He added: "Why doesn't anybody write about this in
the New York Times or the Washington Post? The AP
always has people embedded -- why don't they write about it?"
One reason, he suggests, is that embedded journalists who write
negatively about the US military find themselves "blacklisted." It
happened to Rosen: a series of stories he wrote for Asia Times
about his experience while embedded elicited an angry letter from
the commander and the public affairs officer of the unit he
accompanied, and he has not been allowed to become embedded since.
Other correspondents told me of similar experiences.
Another reason why news organizations don't write about such
matters is suggested in the recently released DVD version of Michael
Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11. It contains as an added
feature an interview with Urban Hamid, a Swedish journalist who in
late 2003 accompanied an American platoon on a raid in Samarra.
Hamid's experience was similar to Nir Rosen's, with the difference
that he caught his on tape. In it, we see soldiers using an armored
personnel carrier to break down the gates of a house. We see the
soldiers rush in with their rifles pointed ahead, and terrified
women rushing out. An elderly man on crutches is rousted up and a
plastic bag is placed over his head. The soldiers go through the
family documents, trying to determine if this man is connected with
the insurgency, but because they don't speak Arabic they can't
really tell. Nonetheless, they take him to a detention center, where
he joins dozens of others, their heads all sheathed in plastic.
Celebrating the arrests, the soldiers take pictures of one another
with their "trophies." One soldier admits that he's surprised they
didn't find more weapons. "The sad thing for these guys is that
we'll probably let them go because their names don't match up," he
says.
In the interview, Hamid says he asked many Iraqis if they'd heard
of things like this, and they all told him "of course." "It's
preposterous," he says, "to think there is any way you win
somebody's hearts and minds by imposing such a criminal and horrible
policy." Hamid says that he tried to sell his tape to "mainstream
media." First he approached the "Swedish media" but got no response.
He then approached the "American media," with the same result. "It's
obvious," he says, "that the mainstream media exercise some kind of
self-censorship in which people know that this is a hot potato and
don't touch it, because you're going to get burned."
5.
Is self-censorship among US news organizations as widespread as
Hamid says? The group he's referring to, of course, is television
news, and it's here that most Americans get their news. For six
weeks before the election I watched as much TV news as I could,
constantly switching from one station to another.
Viewing the newscasts of the traditional networks -- ABC, CBS,
and NBC -- I was surprised at how critical of Bush policy they could
be. When Prime Minister Allawi claimed that fifteen of Iraq's
eighteen provinces were fit for elections, Charles Gibson on ABC's
World News Tonight asked Pentagon correspondent Martha
Raddatz if this was true. "I can give you a two-word answer from a
military commander I spoke to today," Raddatz replied. "He said, ‘no
way.' And one other commander said, ‘Maybe nine, ten, of the
eighteen, and that's being generous.'" On many nights, the networks
aired "mayhem reels" out of Iraq, two minutes' worth of cars afire,
blood stains on payments, bodies being carried from rubble. In
addition to relaying scoops from the daily press, the networks broke
some stories of their own. On the Sunday before the election, for
instance, 60 Minutes ran a hard-hitting segment about a unit
of the Oregon National Guard in Iraq that lacked such basic
equipment as the armored plating needed to protect soldiers in
Humvees from roadside bombs. Such reports appeared often enough to
reinforce longstanding conservative complaints that the networks are
inherently "liberal."
Yet even these "liberal" outlets had strict limits on what they
would show. On September 12, for instance, a group of American
soldiers patrolling Haifa Street, a dangerous avenue in central
Baghdad, came under fire. Another group of soldiers in two Bradley
fighting vehicles came to rescue them. They did, but one of the
vehicles had to be abandoned, and a jubilant crowd quickly gathered
around it. A banner from a group associated with Zarqawi was
produced and placed on the vehicle. Arab TV crews arrived to record
the event. At one point, two US helicopters showed up and made
several passes over the vehicle. With the crowd fully visible, one
of the helicopters launched a barrage of rockets and machine-gun
rounds. The vehicle was destroyed, and thirteen people were killed.
Among them was Mazen al-Tumeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al-Arabiya
network who was doing a TV report in front of the Bradley. Hit while
on camera, his blood spattering the lens, Tumeizi doubled over and
screamed that he was dying.
The video of Tumeizi's death was shown repeatedly on al-Arabiya
and other Arabic-language networks. On American TV, it aired very
briefly on NBC and CNN, then disappeared. On most other networks, it
appeared not at all. Here was a dramatic piece of footage depicting
in raw fashion the human toll of the fighting in Iraq, yet American
TV producers apparently feared that if they gave it too much time,
they would, in Urban Hamid's phrase, get burned. (I still have not
heard of a single instance in which the killing of an American in
Iraq has been shown on American TV.)
This fear seems especially apparent on cable news. Given the
sheer number of hours CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have to fill, it's
remarkable how little of substance and imagination one sees here.
CNN still bills itself as "the most trusted name in news," but one
wonders among whom.Its breakfast-time show, American Morning,
offers a truly vapid mix of bromides and forced bonhomie. In
mid-October, with a grinding war and bruising electoral campaign
underway, the show spent a week in Chicago, providing one long,
breathless promo for the city. Every hour or so, correspondent Brent
Sadler would produce an update from Baghdad. For the most part, he
offered rip-and-read versions of U.S. press releases, with constant
references to "precision strikes" aimed at "terrorist targets" and "Zarqawi
safehouses." Not once did I see Sadler make even a stab at an
independent assessment.
For analysis, CNN leaned heavily on safe, establishment-friendly
voices, including many of the same retired military officers who
appeared in the run-up to the war. On October 15, for instance,
former General George Joulwan discussed with Wolf Blitzer the need
for Americans to do a better job of explaining to Muslims how much
they'd done for them over the years. Blitzer agreed: "I don't think
a lot of Muslims understand that over the past fifteen years, every
time the U.S. has gone to war, whether in Kuwait, or Somalia, or
Kosovo, or Bosnia, or Afghanistan or Iraq, it's to help Muslims."
Joulwan: "We've saved tens of thousands of them. We need to
understand that, and so do our Muslim friends."
Thankfully, not everything on CNN descended to this level. The
network's reporting on the election in Afghanistan was crisp and
informative, thanks largely to Christiane Amanpour's sharp reports.
Aaron Brown's nightly show, while often slow-paced, offered a sober
look at serious issues. And occasionally a truly stellar bit of
reporting poked through, as when Jane Arraf, breaking loose from her
embed with a US unit laying siege to Samarra, found that many of the
claims she'd been fed were untrue. "The US said more than one
hundred insurgents were killed, but residents saw it differently,"
Arraf reported. The signs of destruction all around her, she stated
that "it was hard to find anyone who believes any of the people in
hospitals are insurgents."
Rare on CNN, such reports are almost entirely absent from Fox
News. The channel continues to insist that it is "fair and
balanced," but hardly anyone takes this seriously anymore. Still, I
was not prepared for just how blatant and pervasive its bias was.
This was apparent throughout the presidential campaign, with George
Bush forever portrayed as resolute, principled, and plainspoken, and
John Kerry as equivocating, elitist, and French.
The slant was evident in the coverage of the war as well.
Whenever news about Iraq came on, the urgent words "War on Terror"
appeared on the screen, thus helping to frame the war exactly as the
President did. "Did the President and his administration take their
eye off the ball in the war on terror?" Brit Hume asked one night.
For an answer, Hume spoke with Richard Miniter, the author of
Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on
Terror. No bias there. After the Washington Times
reported the discovery in Iraq of a computer disk belonging to a
Baath Party official that contained data showing the layout of six
schools in the United States, Fox asked, "Can your school be a
potential terrorist target?" This time, Fox turned to Jeffrey
Beatty, a former Delta Force commander who, it so happens, runs an
antiterrorist consulting firm. In fact, Beatty said, schools are
potential terrorist targets, and they had better take precautionary
measures now. On The O'Reilly Factor, the central
question for weeks was "Should CBS fire Dan Rather?" Bill O'Reilly
spent far more time dissecting Rather's mistakes at CBS than he did
analyzing Bush's deeds in Iraq.
And that's how Fox wants it. The most striking feature of its
coverage of the war in Iraq was, in fact, its lack of
coverage. A good example occurred on the Saturday before the
election. That morning, the US military announced that eight Marines
had been killed and nine others wounded in attacks in the Sunni
Triangle. It was the highest US death toll in nearly seven months.
After reading the news on the Web, I tuned in to Fox's 11 AM news
summary. It made no mention of the dead Marines. The next hour was
taken up by a feverish program on hot stock picks. Then came the
noon newscast. After spending ten minutes on the Osama bin Laden
tape, the presidential campaign, and the tight race in Ohio, it
finally got around to informing viewers of the Marines' deaths. It
then spent all of twenty seconds on them. As it turned out, that
Saturday was a particularly bloody day in Iraq, with a series of
bombings, mortar attacks, and ambushes throughout the country.
Viewers of Fox, however, saw little of it.
This formula has proved very popular. The O'Reilly Factor
is currently the top-rated cable news show, and Fox's prime-time
audience is on average twice as large as CNN's. That audience still
trails far behind that of the traditional networks, but Fox has much
more time to fill, and it does it with programming that is far more
overtly ideological than anything else on TV. Its constant plugging
of Bush, its persistent jabs at Kerry, its relentless insistence
that Iraq is part of the war on terror and that both wars are going
well -- all have had their effect. According to election-day exit
polls, 55 percent of voters regarded the Iraq war as part of the war
on terrorism, as opposed to 42 percent who saw it as separate. And
81 percent of the former voted for George Bush.
In some ways, the coverage of the war featured a battle as fierce
as the political one between Democrats and Republicans, with the
"red" medium of Fox slugging it out with the "blue" outlets of the
Times and the Post, CBS and ABC. CNN seemed somewhere
in between, careening wildly between an adherence to traditional
news values on the one hand and a surrender to the titillating,
overheated, nationalistic fare of contemporary cable on the other.
In the end, CNN -- influenced by Fox's success -- seemed firmly in
the latter camp. It offered the superficiality of Fox without any of
its conviction. This hollowing out of CNN was, in a sense, an
enormous victory for the Bush campaign. Overall, in analyzing the
reasons for Bush's triumph, the impact of Fox News should not be
overlooked.
Now, with President Bush preparing for a second term, what can we
expect from the press in Iraq? The initial signs, from Falluja, are
not encouraging. Even allowing for the constraints imposed by
embedding, much of the press seemed unduly accepting of US claims,
uncritically repeating commanders' assertions about the huge numbers
of insurgents killed while underplaying the devastation in the city.
And little attention was paid to the estimated 200,000 residents
said to have fled Falluja in anticipation of the fighting. Amid US
claims that the city had been "liberated," these refugees seemed
invisible. But, in light of the coverage in recent months, this
should have come as no surprise.
-- November 16, 2004
Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia
Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign
affairs. He is the author of
Now They Tell Us, The American Press and Iraq, based on his
articles on press coverage of the Iraq war in
The New York Review of Books.
This article will appear in the December 16 issue of that magazine.
Copyright C2004 Michael Massing
This article appears in the December 16 issue of The New York
Review of Books.