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EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
Reporting the World’s roundtable was hosted
by journalist Anabel McGoldrick who posed
important issues about the role of the media in
covering the conflict:
“ENABLING DEBATE – Did we do a good job
of equipping readers and audiences to form their
own views on the merits – or otherwise – of
attacking Iraq?
“MISSING PERSPECTIVES – What about the
alternatives to war – non-violent ways of bringing
about regime change? What other evidence
was there about Iraq’s weapons programmes?
“WHY – Why did we go to war? Was it over
weapons of mass destruction? Removing Saddam?
Oil? To help establish a ‘New American
Century’ by force of arms?
“CONTEXT – How effective were the embeds?
Did we risk losing sight of the bigger picture?
Did they distract us from real fighting and real
casualties, such as the bombardment of the
Republican Guard positions around Baghdad?
“MISINFORMATION – Were facts ‘created’ in
order to be reported? What really happened to
Private Jessica Lynch; how many times did we
hear that Umm Qasr had fallen or that there was
an uprising in Basra? And was there anything
staged about the fall of the Saddam statue in
Baghdad?
“SECURITY – Is the world now a safer or more
dangerous place? Is Iraq now becoming a quagmire?
Was Iraq liberated or did the war leave it
as a chaotic, seething hotbed of resentment?
How is it affecting the war on terrorism?”
I was asked to have a say in the very heady
company of newspaper editors and the head of
news for the BBC. Happily, there is a transcript of
my intervention to draw on so I can get it right:
“The war that you saw in Europe, the war that
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people saw in the Middle East and the war that
we saw in America were different wars with different
focus and a different emphasis. And I
believe that CNN’s decision to offer two distinct
newsgathering services, and I speak as a former
CNN producer by the way, I believe that was
because Chris Cramer and Rita Golden and their
people knew that the rest of the world would not
accept the jingoistic news coverage that was
being fed to people in the United States and they
were right to take pride in what they did.
“But I challenge this notion that was very common
in the top media executives, that we can’t
get ahead of our audience, the audience was
gung-ho for the war, therefore we have to give
the audience what it wants and I think in doing
so there was an abdication of journalistic responsibility.”
TWO NATIONS, TWO WORLDVIEWS
THE New York conference showcased the differences
between British media discourse and our
own. It was clear that the journalists from London
were far more outspoken and adversarial
than their American counterparts.
Gary Younge of The Guardian noted that the
U.K. media had covered Northern Ireland and
French media had covered Algeria in much the
same way that the U.S. media covered Iraq. But
he was also blistering in his assessment of U.S.
media telling me: “… Just a half an hour of any
kind of news TV show or reading the papers,
you’re wondering, you think you’ve lost half of
the paper. Where’s the bit where you criticize,
where you analyze, where you go into some
depth and rip this thing apart?”
New York Magazine’s Michael Wolff chal-