Media Coverage: A View from the Ground

By Reese Erlich, Target Iraq. Posted February 28, 2003.

Reporters become real friendly, real fast in Iraq. You have a lot of shared experiences -- from poor telecommunications to suspicious Iraqi officials to exasperating editors back home.

So Bert and I hit it off right away. Bert is the pseudonym I've chosen for a reporter with a major British media outlet. I'm not using his real name because I have no desire to get him into trouble. Reporters will tell things to each other they would never say publicly. So I'm inviting you into a metaphorical bar where, after a few beers, reporters let it all hang out. Bert and I had agreed to share a cab for a ride out of Baghdad. We passed over the city's modern freeways, reminders of the country's pre-sanctions wealth.

I mentioned that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding the ruling Baath party headquarters, which had been destroyed by a U.S. missile attack.

"He has lots of money for that," I noted casually.

"You'd get along fine with my editors," said Bert jovially, in an accent stuck partway between Oxford and south London. "They love to hear about Iraqi corruption and bad allocation of resources."

Bert is a political moderate highly critical of Hussein's government, but feels pressured by his much more conservative editors. "Whenever I propose stories showing the impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis," he said, "the editors call it 'old news.'" But the editors never tire of reworking old stories about corruption and repression in Iraq. Bert has internalized his editors' preferences and generally files stories he knows they will like. The alternative is to write stories that will either never get published or come out buried in the back pages.

The problem goes beyond disputes between reporters and editors. Most journalists who get plum foreign assignments already accept the assumptions of empire. I didn't meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the U.S. and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force. They disagreed only about timing, whether the action should be unilateral, and whether a long-term occupation is practical.

Most people in the world, and much of the media outside the U.S. and Britain, still believe in national sovereignty, the old-fashioned notion enshrined in the U.N. Charter. No country has the right to overthrow a foreign government or occupy a nation, even if that nation horribly represses its own citizens. If the U.S. can overthrow Hussein, what prevents Russia from occupying Georgia or other former Soviet republics and installing friendlier regimes? The permutations are endless.

Despite numerous speeches and briefing papers, the Bush administration never convincingly demonstrated that Iraq poses an immediate threat to its neighbors. Unlike 1991 when Iraq occupied Kuwait, not a single nearby country has said it fears invasion from Iraq. The U.S. would never take a resolution to attack Iraq before the U.N. General Assembly because it would lose overwhelmingly. It prefers backroom deals in the Security Council.

When I raise the issue of sovereignty in casual conversation with my fellow scribes, they look as if I've arrived from Mars. Of course the U.S. has the right to overthrow Saddam Hussein, they argue, because he has weapons of mass destruction and might be a future threat to other countries. The implicit assumption is that the U.S. -- as the world's sole superpower -- has the right to make this decision. The U.S. must take responsibility to remove unfriendly dictatorships and install friendly ones. The only question is whether sanctions or invasion are the most effective means to this end.

The Bush and Blair administrations are fighting a two-front war: one against Iraq, another for public opinion at home. The major media are as much a battleground as the fortifications in Baghdad. And, for the most part, Bush and Blair have stalwart media soldiers manning the barricades at home.

The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, having reported from dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting.

The typical would-be foreign correspondent graduates from college and gets a job with a local newspaper or broadcast station. The pay is low and the hours long. (Small town newspaper reporters can still start out at less than $18,000 a year.) But after perhaps two years, they advance up the ladder to bigger media outlets. After five years or so, some of the more dedicated and talented reporters get jobs at big city dailies or in major market TV/radio stations. A few start out freelancing from abroad and then join a major media outlet, but they are in the minority.

That first few years of reporting are like boot camp. Even the best college journalism programs give you only the sketchiest ideas about real reporting. I know. I taught college journalism for ten years. The university never teaches you to find sources on fifteen-minutes notice, how to file a story from the field when cell phones don't work, or how to write an 800-word story in thirty minutes. The journalist's best education is on the job.

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