"Avoid Media Stew of Malice"

Or, "The triple war".

A reader calls to my attention a David Warren article in today's Ottawa Citizen, which is also available at his website:

.... But while the allies move from victory to victory on the first two "fronts", they are suffering serious and mostly unavoidable setbacks on the third, propaganda, one. I am tempted to stop and argue with the barrage of media reports -- the "24/7 battery of lies" to which I referred in a former article; a remark which filled my inbox with hate mail from my fellow journalists. But there is too much of it for one writer to deal with.

It begins on the small scale with remarks made in sheer ignorance. For instance, an Abrams tank with its treads blown off has not been "destroyed"; its crew is alive, and the tank can be fixed. Or, Apache helicopters grounded by a sandstorm have not been "turned back by Iraqi defenders". A frequent misunderstanding is about sandstorms themselves, which present a net advantage to U.S. forces. At the battle of Najaf, Monday into Tuesday, they were annihilating Iraqi fighters by the hundred. The U.S. soldiers could see them clearly as heat signatures on their equipment; whereas the Saddamites could not see the Americans.

But it gets much worse than this. To present civilian deaths, such as those in a Baghdad market, even as a U.S. "mistake", on the basis of Iraqi sources only, is to disseminate Saddamite propaganda. In this case alternative possibilities include an Iraqi inside job, to create a much-needed atrocity story (something they have repeatedly tried elsewhere); a misguided Iraqi surface-to-air missile; or an American cruise missile or bomb deflected from a nearby target by Iraq's recently-acquired Russian GPS-jamming equipment. And even if it were an American mistake, Western journalists participating in the subsequent Iraqi media tour of the site are directly assisting in a propaganda stunt, designed to inflame anti-American opinion throughout the Arab world, and beyond it.

On the large scale, we have the persistent display of doubts about tactics and strategy from journalists without any qualifications to judge them: who know no military history, indeed hardly any history at all; nor are they in possession of many current facts. Their motives are, moreover, clear enough: for many are people whose anti-Bush and anti-American attitudes were on display long before the war.

We also have, in vast doses, a somewhat less political morbid sentimentality that should have no place in war reporting, for it clouds all judgement on matters of life and death.

As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, the shamefully inaccurate broadcasting of the BBC has a direct military consequence. "One of the key elements ... in this battle is the willingness of the Iraqi people to stand up to the Saddamite remnants. That willingness depends, in part, on their confidence that the allies are making progress. What the BBC is able to do, by broadcasting directly to these people, is to keep the Iraqi people's morale as far down as possible, thereby helping to make the war more bloody, thereby helping discredit it in retrospect."

The BBC is hardly the only source of disinformation on the war; it is everywhere in the "liberal" media, filling the front pages of papers such as the New York Times: pure editorializing founded on half-ignorant, half-intentional misinterpretations of facts and non-facts. The attitudes of these journalists are exposed in the tone of the questions they ask at e.g. Pentagon and CENTCOM press conferences. In the BBC's case, an internal memo from the network's own defence correspondent has come to light, in which he assails his colleagues for persistently leading newscasts with reports that are, in his own capitalized words, "NOT TRUE".

I want to tell my readers directly: do not be discouraged by, and avoid wallowing in, this rich stew of malice. The media front may look grim; but the war itself is going very well.

I watched the news conference of George Bush and Tony Blair this morning. Bush showed himself to be a man of the people: he is getting as impatient with arrogant, hostile, ignorant, and stupid questions from reporters as the rest of us are.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 03/27/03 12:14:21 PM
Categorized as War.