Media Loses the War

By Peter Y. Sussman, AlterNet. Posted May 20, 2003.

There is more shock than awe among Iraqis these days. Social disarray and increasing anti-Americanism (or "anti-occupationism") in Iraq have confused and dismayed the Bush administration as well as the American public. This is certainly not what we expected when we "won" this war.

American military might clearly overwhelmed the Iraqi forces, and Iraq's feared and despised regime evaporated. That seems to satisfy traditional definitions of victory in war. Yet the outcome has failed to meet our expectations. Just what did we "win"?

It is easy to attribute the problem entirely to the Bush administration's naive expectations for Iraqi "liberation." Top officials in Washington appear to have confused their own hopes and plans for the Middle East with those of the people who live there. But the press must share the blame for those faulty expectations.

The American press played this war as an action film, a video game writ large. So when our army beat their army, that should have been the end of it. Victory!

The press coverage, however, omitted or downplayed the unique Iraqi cultural, religious and historical context, and it gave insufficient attention to the preconceptions, the guesses and the fabrications by which the administration justified its decision to go to war. The media passed along without adequate investigation the administration's sloppy research (a plagiarized student essay!) about Iraq's purported international terrorism, and they took only cursory note of the outright forgery of a document that was central to U.S. claims of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The administration's nuclear claims were repeated in the press unchallenged -- even after the forgery on which they were based was exposed.

Journalists underplayed domestic and international opposition to the war and the diplomatic alternatives to military action. They adopted uncritically the administration's deceptive language by, for example, using the term "coalition forces" for what amounted to a coalition of three nations, at best, on the battlefield. They personalized and trivialized a complex international dispute with simplistic logos such as "Showdown with Saddam." Or they shamelessly borrowed outright the administration's own misleading slogan, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," thereby contradicting a central feature of the very form of democracy the U.S. was trying to export: a free and independent press.

Once combat started, the press's coverage was reduced to a single-minded military focus or mind-set through instantaneous dispatches from embedded reporters, glitzy battlefield graphics and those omnipresent military analysts, most of them colonels or generals who had retired from the very institution they were hired to critique. Some of those retired officers now work for military contractors; some participated in developing the plans whose execution they analyzed as quasi-journalists.

Did the press play the Pentagon's game? Consider the following comment by Eason Jordan, chief news executive for CNN, where much of the world went for its war news. Speaking on the network's program "Reliable Sources," Jordan said: "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."

So CNN hired commentators approved in advance by "important people" at the agency on which they would be commenting. That makes them little better than publicists for the Pentagon or for factions within the military. They certainly didn't have the independent perspective we expect of mainstream journalism; nor did those who took up so much air time on other networks. Some military analysts even referred glibly on air to "us" and "the bad guys."

The net effect of the saturation coverage given to partisan military analysts and to reporters embedded in combat units was to narrow the focus of attention to the tactics and machinery of the military -- and from a purely American perspective at that. The embedded reporters recorded the launching of American artillery shells, but they were not nearby when those shells landed to record what happened. Nor was there cultural, historic or diplomatic commentary comparable to the ever-present analysis by Pentagon retirees. Anyone who followed the war in the international press knows how limited was the information emanating from the American news media, with a few notable exceptions.

Given the press's single-minded focus on the mechanics of the military, is it any wonder that the American people would be unable to comprehend how, after the war was won on the battlefield, it may well have been lost in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, not to mention the rest of the Muslim world?

We Americans may suffer the consequences of this ambiguous and confusing outcome for many years. Let us hope that journalists can save us from similar grief in the future by learning how to cover war in terms that extend beyond the breathless dynamics of the battlefield.

Peter Y. Sussman is a member of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists and a co-author of its Code of Ethics. He has been conducting a series of workshops around the country on wartime journalism ethics. A version of this essay first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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