What is wrong with the media’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? According to Blair, the media are actually anti-war. In a speech in January he said the public are “constantly bombarded by the propaganda of the enemy, often quite sympathetically treated” by the mainstream media. A year earlier Blair denounced the BBC’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina as “full of hatred of America” and “gloating” at the country’s plight.
In November the government tried to ban ITV from embedding its journalists with British troops, accusing them of doing a “hatchet-job” on the military. Newspapers like the Daily Mail periodically lash out at the BBC for undermining the war effort.
These attacks play a dual role. On the one hand they bully the media into toeing the government line. But they also allow media bosses to pose as “independent”. Editors defend themselves like this: “We’re getting attacked from the right and from the left, so we must be somewhere in between, which proves our coverage is balanced.”
The truth is very different. Any serious analysis of the media shows how they have consistently fallen in behind the government in making the case of war and then backing “our” troops in the conflict. Recent research at Manchester University confirmed that, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, more than 80% of all television news stories took the government line on the moral case for war, while less than 12% challenged it. The research found that government accusations of BBC anti-war bias were unfounded: Channel 4 News was least likely to report coalition good news, with Sky News and ITV most likely. The BBC’s coverage fell in the middle ground. The findings supported earlier research by Cardiff University.
“Our side are the good guys”
Blair and the warmongers are applying to Iraq the hoary notion that nightly TV pictures from Vietnam turned Americans against the war. Daniel Hallin’s books have shown — although it was pretty clear at the time – that while liberal media organizations such as the New York Times and CBS were critical of the war’s tactics and “mistakes”, even exposing a few of its atrocities, they rarely challenged the positive motives by which the government explained what they were doing in Vietnam: “liberating” the population in a fight for freedom and democracy.
This is the main, underlying, problem with the UK media’s coverage of the “war on terror”: Britain and the US are assumed to be the good guys, trying to make a bad situation better, to stop people killing other people, to bring food, peace, prosperity, democracy, freedom. The fact that these are patently NOT the results of British and US intervention is either overlooked by the media or deemed the unfortunate consequences of otherwise good intentions.
Some examples (do you have suggestions of your own?). Here is Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor of the Observer, in a two-page spread on September 17 which described the US operation in Baghdad as “a desperate struggle to stop a brutal sectarian conflict from ripping the city apart”. I will return to the extremely doubtful nature of this definition of the US army’s role. But Beaumont went on to argue that Operation Forward Together was “the latest effort to improve the quality of life for the residents” of Baghdad (my emphasis).
As a matter of fact, Operation Together Forward “did not operate, did not go forward, and did not create togetherness”, as Juan Cole put it. Launched on June 14, the operation saw the bloodshed in Iraq reach record levels. It ended in late October with Bush admitting that the United States may be facing another Tet Offensive. As the Financial Times reported on October 21, this period saw “the worst violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion, with more than 100 civilian deaths a day over the past three weeks and more than 70 US military casualties”.
In other words, three-and-a-half years into an occupation that has give us Abu Graib, Haditha, a huge refugee crisis and up to 650,000 dead, the Observer’s foreign editor was still convinced that the US presence in the country was essentially benign.
It is less common now to encounter similar attitudes towards Iraq among senior editors expressed in public. Why? The scale of the disaster has been apparent for a long time, and opposition in the country to British involvement has been overwhelming. But it took General Sir Richard Dannatt’s admission in October that the war was lost to make newsrooms sit up and take notice.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the media have started a serious inquest into what went wrong in Iraq and why; explanation remains at the level of “mistakes”, “what ifs”, and of course blaming the Iraqis. Moreover, the media cling to the argument that things would get even worse if US/UK troops were to withdraw – as did the Guardian in its leader of September 23, which repeated the argument that US troops are somehow “protecting” Iraqis from each other.
Afghanistan is different. This, in the eyes of the entire British media, is still a “winnable” war and therefore NATO troops are bringing democracy, reconstruction and doing a great job fighting barbarism. Typical is the Independent on Sunday’s special issue of October 1 devoted to Afghanistan. The headlines say it all: “Tales of courage under fire”, “The sacrifice”, “Soldiers are not like us, they are better,” “Unlike Iraq, the Afghan war is winnable”. The leader, headlined “Right war, wrong tactics”, states: “Britain is one of the few nations that has made its commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan as a free country more than mere rhetoric. … The case for fulfilling our promise to the Afghan people is overwhelming in terms of simple morality…” (my emphasis)
Last November, a listener wrote to the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme asking why the invasion of Iraq was described merely as “a conflict”. She said she could not recall other bloody invasions reduced to “a conflict”. She received this reply from Roger Hermiston, assistant editor: “I think there’s a big difference between the aggressive ‘invasions’ of dictators like Hitler and Saddam and the ‘occupation’, however badly planned and executed, of a country for positive ends, as in the Coalition effort in Iraq.” (my emphasis)
John Pilger comments on the attitude revealed by this exchange: “An invasion is not an invasion if ‘we’ do it, regardless of the lies that justified it and the contempt shown for international law. An occupation is not an occupation if ‘we’ run it, no matter that the means to our ‘positive ends require the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, and an unnecessary sectarian tragedy.”
You don’t have to look too far to find motives for the US/UK invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan very different from those ascribed to them by the bulk of the mainstream media. Henry Kissinger has been heard to joke in private that: “I supported the invasion of Iraq for geostrategic reasons, but it never occurred to me that they would be stupid enough to try to turn the country into a democracy.” (Gideon Rachman, “The world may regret the end of the neo-con era”, Financial Times September 4 2006)
In contrast, many of the media’s senior managers have been stupid enough to believe Bush and Blair’s cant about bringing democracy to the Middle East, and continue to do so.
Dave Crouch
