[iwar] [fc:How.much.can.we.believe.in.the.news.campaign?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-13 23:37:16
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 23:37:16 -0700 (PDT)
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How much can we believe in the news campaign?

Jay Rayner tells how the war of words opens another

Sunday October 14, 2001
The Observer 

Tayseer Allouni knew exactly what to do when the first bombs started
dropping on the Afghan capital last Sunday night.  As Kabul
correspondent for al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic news station and
the only television network with a presence in the city, he would have
to be the eyes of the world. 

He turned the bureau's news camera on the night sky to record the tracer
fire now arcing impotently towards the incoming missiles.  The pictures
were uploaded, via al-Jazeera's 24-hour satellite link, to the channel's
headquarters in Qatar, 1,200 miles away.  From there they were picked up
by broadcasters across the world. 

In London, the BBC's news producers saw the pictures and immediately
called the three correspondents they had managed to station in northern
Afghanistan with the opposition Northern Alliance on their satellite
phones.  The BBC's journalists on the ground knew nothing of the
attacks.  They had no way of knowing - Kabul is miles away across a
country with no modern communications network. 

The correspondents, including John Simpson, had to be told by London
that the attack had started so that, a few minutes later, they could
repeat the news back to the viewers in Britain.  'It was all
window-dressing,' one BBC producer said last week.  'The reporters in
Afghanistan didn't have a clue what was going on.'

Richard Sambrook, head of news for the BBC, put it more delicately.  'Of
course, we told our correspondents what we knew in London,' he said,
'But you don't just look to someone like John Simpson for a report on
what happened where they are 10 minutes ago.  You want analysis.'

If ever there was a symbol of the challenges the media are facing in
covering the conflict, it is the distance the echo from those falling
bombs had to travel before it could be reported.  There is a vast hunger
for information and the mass media with which to deliver it. 

And yet this is a war without a frontline upon which to station
reporters.  Unlike the Gulf War, when Peter Arnett of CNN was stationed
in Baghdad, and the Kosovo crisis, when Simpson was in Belgrade, the
Western media have no independent sources inside the battle zone. 

'This will be a particularly difficult war for us to cover,' says the
BBC's defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, now in Pakistan.  'Most of
the action will be invisible and there are no independent reporters able
to challenge the official version of events.'

As things stand, incidents such as the bombing of a refugee column
during the Kosovo crisis - first denied by Nato, and only admitted to
when journalists arrived at the scene - will this time round remain
unchallenged. 

There is, simply, an aching information vacuum at the centre of this war
on terrorism, which sources on both sides of the conflict - both
governments and terrorists - are trying to fill.  The result is an
increasingly difficult relationship between the US and British
governments on one side and Western journalists, who are not used to
being brought to heel, on the other.  This weekend's announcement that
the Blair Government is to follow President Bush's lead by calling on UK
broadcasters to think carefully before allowing video-taped messages
from Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network on to the air, is proof of
how tense that relationship has become.  In this conflict the mass media
has become as much of a weapon as the Tomahawk missiles launched from
the Arabian sea last weekend, only one that's less easily targeted. 

The first of those contentious videos aired on Sunday night, as the
bombs were dropping.  One of Osama bin Laden's couriers emerged in Kabul
to deliver a video-taped message for the world from his leader to the
al-Jazeera bureau.  It was broadcast live to Qatar. 

'From a journalistic point of view, the mere fact that the tape included
bin Laden's face for the first time since 11 September made it
important,' says Yosri Fouda, deputy executive director of al-Jazeera's
London bureau.  'And he expressed joy at what had happened, which was
also important.'

The next day, Tony Blair, dismayed at bin Laden's assertion that the
West was mounting a war on Islam, appeared on the same channel to rebut
the allegation. 

By the end of the week, however, following al-Jazeera's decision to
screen another al-Qaeda message, this time promising more terrorist
attacks, the news channel was no longer a route to hostile Arabic public
opinion for the Western alliance.  Now it was interpreted as a part of
the hostile public opinion. 

According to Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser to President
Bush, the tapes could contain coded messages to terrorist cells,
spurring them into action.  In a telephone conference call last
Wednesday morning with the presidents of the big five US networks, she
called on them to stop broadcasting the messages. 

Afterwards, the US broadcasters, carefully walking the line between
being seen to serve both journalistic freedom and the US national
interest, said they had taken on board what had been said.  'After
hearing Dr Rice we're not going to step on any of the landmines she was
talking about,' said Walter Isaacson of CNN. 

Richard Sambrook of the BBC, speaking before this weekend's announcement
from Downing Street, says no such pressure had yet been brought to bear. 
Nor would the BBC be swift to oblige if it were.  'This idea that the
tapes may contain hidden messages is very hard to prove or disprove,'
Sambrook says.  'I think it's up to governments to show this is a
serious issue rather than merely raise the possibility.'

Certainly, it seems unlikely there were hidden messages within that
second tape.  Unlike the bin Laden tape, the second was heavily edited
before being shown and there was no way its creators could have known
which parts would be cut.  'They really go on and on in rhetoric,' says
Yosri Fouda of al-Jazeera.  'We left just enough of it for them to make
their point.'

However, the BBC has been the focus of other complaints from the
Government.  Last Wednesday morning, the BBC's Kate Adie inadvertently
revealed Tony Blair's travel plans during his diplomatic mission to the
Middle East, which Downing Street had asked the media to keep secret. 

The next morning Sambrook went on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to
discuss the row and again revealed something of the Prime Minister's
movements.  'It would have been better for everybody had I not named the
cities,' he said afterwards.  'I should just have referred to the Middle
East.  But I didn't actually give the itinerary and in any case the
information was already available on the international wire services.'

Sambrook's point, that the modern media are not linear, with information
going in one end and coming out the other, but far more complex and less
controllable, is a factor with which Western governments are still
trying to wrestle. 

Last week, President Bush expressed outrage that a CIA report indicating
it was '100 per cent certain' there would be further terrorist attacks
in the US, had found its way to the press.  'Officials are really
dismayed about how much information is getting out here both on the
terrorist investigation and the military preparations,' says Kevin
Whitelaw, a reporter covering security matters in Washington DC for the
American magazine US News and World Report. 

Bush said the information supplied to Congress, whose members he
believed to be the source of the leaks, would be limited.  He was
swiftly forced into a U-turn by Senators and Representatives from both
sides of the political divide.  The irony is that the US media have
already proved willing to comply with military orders when it matters. 
Seventeen news organisations knew three days before that the bombing of
Afghanistan was to start on Sunday, and said nothing. 

In London, attempts to control the media have been equally clumsy. 
'Initially, the Ministry of Defence told us they would like us to clear
our stories with them,' says war correspondent Robert Fox, now with the
Evening Standard, who has covered conflicts from the Falklands war to
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the wars in Bosnia.  'We told
them that was not the game at all.  They also discouraged us from going
to other sources.  Someone like me, who has many contacts within the
military, is simply a complete pain to them.' The Ministry of Defence
denies trying to control coverage. 

The real problem for Western politicians trying to hold together a
fragile international coalition is that the media have great power to
magnify.  Footage of Palestinians on the West Bank celebrating the 11
September attacks was hugely damaging to a Palestinian Authority
desperate not to enrage the US, even though the crowd numbered no more
than 15 to 20. 

Those numbers were irrelevant.  The images still went about the world. 
(It led to claims that the footage was a fake, recycled from the Allied
invasion of Kuwait; the claim has been investigated by the BBC and
firmly rebutted.) By last Friday, the authorities in the Gaza Strip were
banning reporters from the area, and arresting newspaper editors, to
prevent them covering a rally by Islamic militants. 

But it is not only the tiny Palestinian Authority that is falling foul
of the media's reach.  James Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State
in the State Department during the Clinton administration who regularly
briefed the press during the Kosovo crisis, says the same is happening
to the Bush administration.  And this has contributed to hostile Arab
public opinion. 

'Perhaps because they're new to the job, some of the officials are not
realising their every word is going around the world due to the global
nature of television,' Rubin says.  'The secret to a good briefing is to
have both a domestic and a foreign element.  But because the original
attack was on New York and the USA there's now a very America-centric
flavour to the briefings.'

The White House press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, formerly Bush's campaign
spokesman, has come under particular attack.  In one infamous briefing,
shortly after 11 September, he warned Americans to 'watch what they say'
and was immediately accused of trying to smother dissent, especially in
the media.  The language was a mistake - Fleischer later admitted as
much - but he had pointed up the clear conflict between a country trying
to wage war and the modern media trying to report it.  The age of
deference has gone. 

And yet, as Tony Blair said last Thursday, there is still a propaganda
war to be won; one that may be even more important than the shooting
war.  'One thing becoming increasingly clear to me is the need to
upgrade our media and public opinion operations in the Arab and Muslim
world,' Blair told reporters on his plane from Oman.  'There is a need
for us to communicate effectively.'

The truth is, however, that neither he nor President Bush controls the
media.  As each complicated day of this conflict passes, that is
becoming ever clearer. 

Related article:

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