Reporting War Journalism in Wartime

REPO RTING WAR
What is the role of the journalist in wartime? When faced with the responsibility
of bearing witness to the horror of modern warfare, how do reporters negotiate
the competing demands of their employers, of governments and military sources,
even of soldiers in the field of battle? How do they manage the tensions between
objectivity, patriotism, and sympathy with the suffering of local people caught up
in conflicts?
Reporting War examines the nature of contemporary war reporting in a range
of locales, including Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East—especially Iraq—and
southern Asia. The contributors, both practising and former journalists and
leading academics, consider issues including the influence of censorship and
propaganda, 24/7 rolling news, military jargon such as “collateral damage,”
embedded and unilateral reporters, and the visual imagery of war.
The book’s major focus on the Iraq war encompasses media coverage of the
run-up to war, the war itself, the anti-war movement in the UK, Europe, and the
US, and the role played by news sources outside the mainstream, including the
satellite channel Al-Jazeera and online reporting.
REPO RTING WAR
Journalism in wartime
Edited by Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

First published 2004
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Taylor & Francis Inc
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group
© 2004 Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer for editorial matter and selection
© individual contributors for their chapters
Typeset in Goudy by The Running Head Limited, Cambridge
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the advice and information
in this book is true and accurate at the time of going to press. However, neither
the publisher nor the authors can accept any legal responsibility or liability
for any errors or omissions that may be made.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Reporting war: journalism in wartime / edited by Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer.
p. cm.
1. War—Press coverage. I. Allan, Stuart, 1962– II. Zelizer, Barbie.
PN4784.W37R48 2004
070.4’333—dc22 2004 00287
ISBN 0–415–33997–9 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–33998–7 (pbk)
CONTENTS
List of contributors viii
INTRODUCTION
Rules of engagement: journalism and war 3

STUART ALLAN AND BARBIE ZELIZER
PA RT 1
War in the twenty-first century 23
1 Understanding: the second casualty 25
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
2 Information warfare in an age of hyper-militarism 43

RICHARD KEEBLE
3 A moral imagination: the media’s response to the war on terrorism 59

SUSAN D. MOELLER
4 The PR of terror: how new-style wars give voice to terrorists 77

TAMAR LIEBES AND ZOHAR KAMPF
5 Researching US media–state relations and twenty-first century wars 96

PIERS ROBINSON
PA RT 2
Bearing witness 113
6 When war is reduced to a photograph 115
BARBIE ZELIZER
v
CONTENTS
7 The Persian Gulf TV war revisited 136

DOUGLAS KELLNER
8 Tribalism and tribulation: media constructions of “African savagery”

and “Western humanitarianism” in the 1990s 155
SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
9 Humanizing war: the Balkans and beyond 174

PHILIP HAMMOND
10 Prisoners of news values?: journalists, professionalism, and

identification in times of war 190
HOWARD TUMBER
11 Out of sight, out of mind?: the non-reporting of small wars and

insurgencies 206
PRASUN SONWALKAR
12 The battlefield is the media: war reporting and the formation of

national identity in Australia—from Belmont to Baghdad 224
MICHAEL BROMLEY
PA RT 3
Reporting the Iraq war 245
13 Militarized journalism: framing dissent in the Gulf Wars 247
STEPHEN D. REESE
14 War or peace?: legitimation, dissent, and rhetorical closure in press

coverage of the Iraq war build-up 266
NICK COULDRY AND JOHN DOWNEY
15 How British television news represented the case for the war
in Iraq 283
JUSTIN LEWIS AND ROD BROOKES
16 European news agencies and their sources in the Iraq war

coverage 301
TERHI RANTANEN
vi
CONTENTS
17 Al-Jazeera and war coverage in Iraq: the media’s quest for

contextual objectivity 315
ADEL ISKANDAR AND MOHAMMED EL-NAWAWY
18 Big media and little media: the journalistic informal sector during
the invasion of Iraq 333
PATRICIA AUFDERHEIDE
19 The culture of distance: online reporting of the Iraq war 347

STUART ALLAN
Index 366
vii
CONTRIBUTO RS
Stuart Allan is Reader in the School of Cultural Studies, University of the West
of England, Bristol. He is the author of News Culture (Open University Press,
2nd edition, 2004) and Media, Risk and Science (Open University Press, 2002).
His previous edited collections include, with Barbie Zelizer, Journalism after
September 11 (Routledge, 2002).
Patricia Aufderheide is Professor and Co-director of the Center for Social Media,
School of Communication, American University, Washington DC. She is the
author of many works of cultural criticism and commentary, including The
Daily Planet: a Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (University of Minnesota
Press, 2000).
Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor of Communication at California State Poly-
technic University, Pomona. Recent books include Approaches to Media
(co-edited with Chris Newbold; Edward Arnold, 1995), The Globalization of
News (co-edited with Terhi Rantanen; Sage, 1998), and The Media Book (co-
edited with Chris Newbold and Hilde Van Den Bulck; Hodder Arnold, 2002).
Michael Bromley is Head of Journalism at Queensland University of Technology,
Australia, and has taught journalism in the UK and US. A former journalist,
he has published widely on journalism and the media, and is a founding co-
editor of the journal Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism.
Rod Brookes lectures at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media, and Cultural
Studies, Cardiff University. He is the author of Representing Sport (Arnold,
2002).
Susan L. Carruthers is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University in
Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Winning Hearts and Minds: British
Governments, the Media and Colonial Counterinsurgency, 1945–60 (Leicester
University Press, 1995), and The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in
the Twentieth Century (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000).
Nick Couldry is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the London
School of Economics and Political Science. His books include The Place of
Media Power (Routledge, 2000), Inside Culture (Sage, 2000), Media Rituals: a
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Critical Approach (Routledge, 2003), Contesting Media Power (co-edited with

James Curran; Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), and MediaSpace (co-edited
with Anna McCarthy; Routledge, 2004).
John Downey lectures in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough
University. His publications include the co-edited Technocities (Sage, 1999).
He is presently working on a book about communication, technology, and
coercion.
Mohammed el-Nawawy is Assistant Professor, Department of Communication,
Stonehill College, Easton, MA. He is co-author of Al-Jazeera: the Story of the
Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (West-
view, 2003), and author of The Israeli–Egyptian Peace Process in the Reporting of
Western Journalists (Greenwood, 2002).
Philip Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Media at London South Bank University.
He is co-editor, with Edward Herman, of Degraded Capability: the Media and the
Kosovo Crisis (Pluto, 2000).
Adel Iskandar is conducting doctoral research at the University of Kentucky. He
is co-author of Al-Jazeera: the Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments
and Redefining Modern Journalism (Westview, 2003) and co-editor of a forth-
coming book on Edward Said.
Zohar Kampf is writing his PhD dissertation on the nature of political apology in
the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem.
Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at Lincoln University. His publi-
cations include The Newspapers Handbook (third edition; Routledge 2001),
Ethics for Journalists (Routledge, 2001), and Secret State, Silent Press (John
Libbey, 1997).
Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at
UCLA. Recent books include Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and the Theft
of an Election (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), The Postmodern Adventure: Sci-
ence, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (co-authored with
Steve Best; Guilford, 2001), Media Spectacle (Routledge, 2003), and From 9/11
to Terror War: the Dangers of the Bush Legacy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
Justin Lewis is Professor of Communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism,
Media, and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Among his recent books is
Constructing Public Opinion: How Elites Do What They Like and Why We Seem
to Go Along with It (Columbia University Press, 2001).
Tamar Liebes is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and
Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among her books are The
Export of Meaning (with Elihu Katz; Polity Press, 1992), Reporting the Arab Israeli
ix
CONTRIBUTORS
Conflict: how Hegemony Works (Routledge, 1997), and American Dreams,

Hebrew Subtitles: Globalization from the Receiving End (Hampton Press, 2003).
Susan D. Moeller teaches media and international affairs at the Philip Merrill
College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author
of Compassion Fatigue: how the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death
(Routledge, 1998). She is finishing a new book, A Hierarchy of Innocence: how
the Media Cover Good and Evil.
Terhi Rantanen is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the London
School of Economics and Political Science. She is author of The Globalization of
News (co-edited with Oliver Boyd-Barrett; Sage, 1998), The Global and the
National: Media and Communications in Post-Communist Russia (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2002), and The Media and Globalization (Sage, forthcoming).
Stephen D. Reese is Professor and former Director in the School of Journalism at
the University of Texas at Austin. He is co-editor of Framing Public Life: Per-
spectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World (Lawrence Erlbaum,
2001) and co-author, with Pamela Shoemaker, of Mediating the Message: Theo-
ries of Influence on Mass Media Content (Longman, 1991).
Piers Robinson is Lecturer in Political Communication at the School of Politics
and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool. He is author of The
CNN Effect: the Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (Routledge,
2002).
Prasun Sonwalkar lectures in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of
the West of England, Bristol. A former journalist, he has worked mainly on The
Times of India and Business Standard and was Editor of the Zee News channel.
Howard Tumber is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the School of Social Sci-
ences, City University, London. His recent books include Reporting Crime: the
Media Politics of Criminal Justice (with Philip Schlesinger; Oxford University
Press, 1994), News: a Reader (Oxford University Press, 1999), Media Power,
Policies and Professionals (Routledge, 2000), and Media at War (with Jerry
Palmer; Sage, 2004). He is a founder and co-editor of the journal Journalism:
Theory, Practice and Criticism.
Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A former
journalist, Zelizer’s books include Covering the Body: the Kennedy Assassination,
the Media and the Shaping of Collective Memory (University of Chicago, 1992),
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (University
of Chicago, 1998), Journalism after September 11 (with Stuart Allan; Rout-
ledge, 2002), and Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (Sage,
2004). She is a founding co-editor of the journal Journalism: Theory, Practice
and Criticism.
x
INTRODUCTION
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Journalism and war
Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer
The principles of reporting are put to a severe test when your

nation goes to war. To whom are you true? To the principles of
abstract truth, or to those running the war machine; to a fright-
ened or perhaps belligerent population, to the decisions of the
elected representatives in a democracy, to the exclusion of the dis-
senting minorities, to the young men and women who have agreed
to put their lives at risk on the front-line? Or are you true to a
wider principle of reasoning and questioning, asking why they must
face this risk? Let me put the question with stark simplicity: when
does a reporter sacrifice the principle of the whole truth to the
need to win the war?
Kate Adie, BBC war correspondent
“The very nature of war,” Kate Adie (1998) once observed, “confuses the role of
the journalist” (1998: 44). Confronted with the often horrific realities of conflict,
any belief that the journalist can remain distant, remote, or unaffected by what is
happening “tends to go out the window” in a hurry. Nevertheless Adie, at the
time the BBC’s chief news correspondent, offered no simple definition of what
the role of the journalist should be “when faced with the consequences of battle
and the muddle of war,” admitting instead that “I don’t have the answers, but I
keep on asking questions” (Adie 1998: 54).
War reporting, as Adie’s comments suggest, constitutes a litmus test of sorts for
journalism more broadly. While the role of war correspondent has long been asso-
ciated with a certain romantic lore, in actuality it is beset by an array of problems
associated with allegiance, responsibility, truth, and balance. Such problems arise
from time to time in the daily implementation of ordinary, everyday modes of
journalism, of course, but their apparent lack of easy resolvability in wartime
poses challenges that raise questions about the practice of journalism in more
forms than just reporting war. “We knew we were placing ourselves in the bull’s
eye of a war,” commented John Burns, chief foreign correspondent for The New
York Times, about the Iraqi conflict. “And I don’t think a journalist can sensibly
claim to have an exemption in a war zone. [By] the very nature of what’s about to
3
S T U A RT A L L A N A N D B A R B I E Z E L I Z E R
happen, there’s a significant risk that you can be killed” (CBC-TV, November 23,
2003).1 Journalists must be prepared to take that risk, but that does not make
them heroes, in his view. “When we find ourselves in very difficult situations, it’s
of our own choosing,” he added, but what is at stake is the need to “tell people as
much of the truth as you can.” Such observations, in our reading, suggest that tra-
ditional ways of thinking about the imperatives of war reporting and their
implications more broadly for journalism need to be examined anew.
The distinction to be drawn between patriotism and militarism is central to
the problems of reporting war. A reporter’s sense of national identity, however
defined, needs to be considered in a way that sheds light both on how it can
underpin journalism’s strengths while, simultaneously, recognizing the constraints
it can impose on the integrity of practice. Vital here is the (usually tacit) assump-
tion that covering the often harrowing nature of battle constitutes a higher order
of journalism. War journalists are thought to do what all journalists do, only in a
more heightened, vibrantly important fashion. To cover the story will entail,
more likely than not, encountering conditions of an entirely different order than
anything ordinarily associated with newswork. Images of the war reporter as
adventurer or risk-taker, in the optimum sense, or as daredevil, fortune-hunter, or
rogue, in the negative, help to fuel their celebration in novels, films, plays, and
other fictional treatments. Similarly implicit here, however, is the notion that
war reporters somehow “do journalism” better, that their experiences are more
authentic, engaged, and noteworthy than those of other kinds of journalists. And
yet, it is their very commitment to some rendering of national identity, even
patriotism, that is likely to engender a change in journalistic work. It may entail a
migration toward vague word choice, the absence of a broader perspective, the
lack of explicit images, even the wearing of flag pins. When journalists under
everyday conditions are seen to have strong sentiments for family, friends, or
community, they are often taken off the story that involves them. When their
sentiments for country are seen as strong in wartime, they are rarely removed
from the story; rather, the expectation, at least in some quarters, is that they will
simply change how they conduct themselves as journalists. The exceptional qual-
ity of this re-orientation deserves pause. It raises questions as to whether or not
our ways of thinking about war journalism, as a mode of practice, have fallen
short of the mark.
War reporting, in short, demands that notions of what constitutes good jour-
nalistic practice be realigned on the basis of different criteria than would typically
seem appropriate, criteria thrown into sharp relief—at times violently so—by
challenging circumstances. At the same time, war reporting’s positioning as a
litmus test for journalism also rests on an understanding of its capacity to influ-
ence public perceptions. Journalists are expected to function variously during
war: to be present enough to respond to what is happening, yet absent enough to
stay safe; to be sufficiently authoritative so as to provide reliable information, yet
open to cracks and fissures in the complicated truth-claims that unfold; to remain
passionate about the undermining of human dignity that accompanies war, yet
4
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
impartial and distanced enough to see the strategies that attach themselves to cir-
cumstances with always more than one side. In these and related ways, then, war
reporting reveals its investment in sustaining a certain discursive authority—
namely that of being an eyewitness. “I was there to witness,” Adie recalled, “to
repeat what I hear, to observe the circumstances, note the detail, and confirm
what is going on with accuracy, honesty and precision” (Adie 1998: 46). Though
Adie admitted that she needed faith that what she sought to communicate would
not be in vain, it was not her mission to advocate particular forms of action. Nor
was it easy to counter the deceptive nature of the battlefield. Witnessing was “the
only way you can stand by your words afterwards, the only guarantee that you can
give your listeners, or viewers, or readers. You saw it, you heard it, you are telling
the truth as far as you know” (Adie 1998: 47).
This act of witnessing, of seeing for oneself the heart of the story, encapsulates
the larger problem of determining what counts as truth in the war zone. It forms
the basis of the journalist’s relationship with diverse publics, where any one
claim to truth will be interpreted in conjunction with varied—at times con-
flicting—normative criteria. Truth-telling, it needs to be acknowledged, is
necessarily embedded in a cultural politics of legitimacy; its authority resting
on presence, on the moral duty to bear witness by being there. Being there sug-
gests that the violence, devastation, suffering, and death that inevitably
constitute war’s underside will somehow be rendered different—more amenable
to response and perhaps less likely to recur—just because journalists are some-
where nearby. And yet the experience of a reporter’s being there, so important
for distant publics eager for news of the events of a war-torn region, is shaped
quite systematically by a weave of limitations—political, military, economic,
and technological, among others—that together may curtail the experience in
drastic ways.
Anecdotal evidence from a range of wars bears this out, whereby a journalist’s
capacity to be present was limited, undermined, or even denied altogether when
the battleground was placed off limits, the military barricade went up, the cam-
eras broke down, or sources refused to talk. Moreover, a journalist’s sense of
citizenship, even patriotism, may call into question his or her perceptions of how
best to conduct oneself as a reporter. All too often, journalists encounter those
who demand to know: are you with us, or are you against us? It is at this point
that individual journalists determine for themselves what their role should be,
knowing that their ad hoc decision may have profound implications for how their
audiences come to understand the nature of war and the consequences for its vic-
tims. In so doing, they know that even the most basic expectation of journalists
in wartime—being there—is rarely realized entirely in the way they may have
wanted, given the exigencies with which they must cope.
Perhaps nowhere did this receive as much attention as during the recent war in
Iraq. The decision to embed reporters with the US and UK military forces—as a
way of ensuring that journalists could “be there”—raised expectations that the
ensuing coverage would be better, more comprehensive, fuller, and more reliable.
5
“The correspondent moving forward with a company or battalion of combat

troops,” Peter Preston (2003) argued, “will usually get the most vivid picture,
with the most telling detail.” Still, he added, such reports “may show little about
the overall flux of the battle. Often he or she, lacking the broad view, will be too
optimistic or pessimistic.” The use of journalistic “embeds,” moreover, generated
fears that the military would secure the media in its pocket, creating unusual
alliances and breaking down the autonomy with which journalism in wartime
likes to assume it functions. “Embedding,” commented Oliver Burkeman (2003)
in Washington at an early point in the conflict, “has been an astounding PR suc-
cess for the Pentagon.” Reporters, he observed, “use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’
profusely, identifying themselves with the military, and while this has prompted
concerns about objectivity among US commentators, it is not surprising, given
their very personal stake in their unit’s success.”
In retrospect, such observations underscored yet another litmus test, one exem-
plified by various commentaries on war journalism made by reporters and media
critics alike. Often missing in discussions about the relative successes and failures
associated with reporting the Iraq war was a recognition of how the (at times acri-
monious) debate about embedding—its perceived vices and virtues—was allowed
to displace other lines of enquiry and critique. That is to say, to the extent that
the microcosm of embedded reporters was allowed to stand in for the larger role
of the news media, it became that much more difficult to discern and analyze the
factors which characterized the overall coverage. Thus while embedded reports
were a mainstay of the coverage, especially in the case of the 24-hour television
news channels, other important factors shaping the war’s representation
remained under the radar of those tracking the progression of the war.
War in the era of 24/7 news

Television news, one opinion survey after the next indicated, proved to be the
most used—and most trusted—news source for people in countries such as the
US and Britain during the Iraq war. While the main network newscasts struggled
to hold the attention of their viewers, however, audience figures suggested that
the “rolling,” “around-the-clock” news channels went from strength to strength
in the early weeks of the conflict.
In the US, for example, the 24-hour news networks saw marked increases in
their audience ratings. Much to the surprise of some observers, Fox News sur-
passed CNN as the top-rated news channel. The latter network, which came to
prominence during the 1991 Gulf War (the breadth of its “blanket coverage”
being unprecedented at the time), nevertheless claimed that it had a greater
number of viewers watching overall. Still, the challenge posed by Fox was formi-
dable by any measure. Explanations for its new-found popularity typically
revolved around the stridently right-wing, pro-war stance informing its reporting
and commentary, generally said to be more “in tune” with public opinion than
CNN’s more “neutral” stance. The openly partisan agenda of Fox—its logo “fair
6
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
and balanced” being derided by critics as a misnomer—was discernible at a

number of different levels.
“By the time US soldiers were headed across the desert to Baghdad,” David J.
Sirota (2004) maintained, “the ‘fair and balanced’ network, owned by media
mogul Rupert Murdoch, looked like a caricature of state-run television, parroting
the White House’s daily talking points, no matter how unsubstantiated.” For Jim
Rutenberg (2003), writing in The New York Times, the “Fox formula” proved that
there were significant ratings to be gained in “opinionated news with an Amer-
ica-first flair.” Fox, he pointed out, represents a new approach to television
journalism, one that “casts aside traditional notions of objectivity, holds con-
tempt for dissent, and eschews the skepticism of government at mainstream
journalism’s core.” MSNBC, occupying a distant third place in the ratings, has
often been accused of “aping” a similar approach. “What Fox is doing, and frankly
what MSNBC is also declaring by its product,” Erik Sorenson, MSNBC’s presi-
dent, has acknowledged, “is that one can be unabashedly patriotic and be a good
news journalist at the same time” (cited in Rutenberg 2003; see also Plunkett
2003; Wells and Cassy 2003).
Debates about the so-called “Fox effect” on “middle-of-the-road” journalism
grew in intensity as the Iraq war unfolded. In any case, however, the growing pop-
ularity of 24-hour news, especially in the early days of the conflict, was difficult to
dispute. Viewing figures gathered in the US for the first five days following the
formal declaration of war indicated that CNN’s audience was up by some 393 per-
cent compared with the same week the previous year, while Fox News’ ratings
went up 379 percent, and MSNBC’s improved by 651 percent (Deans 2003).
While their audiences remained substantively smaller than those for the main
terrestrial networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, these figures were widely held to be
indicative of a growing preference among viewers to turn to the 24-hour news
channels for breaking developments, even in primetime.
In Britain, all three of the country’s rolling news channels—BBC 24, Sky
News, and ITV News Channel—witnessed significant increases in their viewing
figures at the outset of the conflict. The near-constant flow of images was recur-
rently singled out for particular praise by some, many of whom drew favourable
comparisons with the dearth of “colourful material” from the 1991 conflict. Steve
Anderson, controller of ITV News and Current Affairs, remarked:
The big difference this time around is technology has got better, lighter,
easier to handle and it’s cheaper. It’s much more effective and so it’s not
unusual to go straight to live pictures out of, say, Basra. Often the pic-
tures are mundane, but you can cut to it at the flick of a switch . . . Last
Saturday we showed pictures of Iraqis down by the Tigris looking for
downed pilots and firing into the water. It was a live event and we went
with it—it was an incredible image, but in the end it didn’t amount to
anything.
(cited in Doward 2003)
7
Rolling news, its advocators insisted, proved far more effective in bringing the
war into people’s homes than more traditional newscasts. Sky News’ leading posi-
tion in the ratings was frequently attributed to its oft-repeated claim to be the first
to break stories. So-called “BBC insiders” refused to concede this point, however,
and also insisted that the corporation engaged in more thorough fact-checking
processes than its rivals, which took time.
All too often this incessant drive to be the first to break the story meant that due
care and accuracy were sacrificed in the heat of the moment. Examples from the
crisis in Iraq were all too plentiful, not least with respect to the array of claims
made regarding chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
Reports broadcast on various rolling news networks in the US and UK also
included, for example, claims that Iraqi “drones” would be dispatched to spread
biological agents in the US; the Iraqi Republican Guard was planning to use
chemical weapons on coalition forces in the defence of Baghdad; a grenade attack
on a base in Kuwait was the work of terrorists (a US soldier was later charged); the
early fall of the port of Umm Qasr; various “bioweapon” caches, including missiles
containing sarin and mustard gas, had been found; the discovery of weapons-grade
plutonium; the seizure of various mobile “bioweapons” laboratories; the defection
of Tariq Aziz; the “uprising” in Basra, and so forth. These claims, among a myriad
of others, were later acknowledged to be false, if not necessarily by the network
which broadcast them in the first place (the Arab news network Al-Jazeera played
a vital role in challenging such claims, for example). A further, particularly con-
troversial example centred on the apparent “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch from
an Iraqi hospital. Once again, the key claims made were eventually shown to be
untrue. “None of the absurd hype that surrounded the case came from her,” the
BBC’s John Simpson (2003) remarked afterwards; “it was all the invention of the
US Army spinners, and a credulous press desperate for some genuine heroics in a
war which seemed disturbingly short of gallantry” (Simpson 2003: 313).
Some officials responded angrily to allegations of “propaganda” and “spin”
where instances of false reporting occurred, insisting that such were the types of
mistakes typically made in the “fog of war.” Others blamed “over-enthusiastic
reporters” for getting carried away. Seldom acknowledged, however, were the
range of pressures brought to bear on journalists to influence the nature of the
coverage. Here remarks made by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour are telling. Inter-
viewed on CNBC by Tina Brown, she was asked to comment on assertions that
Bush administration officials had intimidated journalists, not least into feeling
unpatriotic if they gave voice to criticism or dissent. She stated:
I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. I’m sorry
to say but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my sta-
tion [CNN] was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers
at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship,
in my view, in terms of—of the kind of broadcast work we did. I mean,
all of us should have . . .
8
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Here Brown interjected, asking: “And was there any story—was there any story
that you couldn’t do?” Amanpour replied:
All—it’s not a question of couldn’t do it, it’s a question of tone. It’s a ques-
tion of being rigorous. It’s really a question of really asking the questions.
All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it’s the administration,
the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions,
for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this
was disinformation at the highest levels.
(CNBC transcript, “Topic A with Tina Brown,”
broadcast September 10, 2003)
In using the term “disinformation,” Amanpour proceeded to add, “I mean that we

were all duped, everybody.” In describing her unease with “the relationship
between the media and the administration,” she stated her belief that there was
an intention “to deny what’s actually going on” on the part of officials. In the case
of her “perfectly routine” reports about the looting taking place, for example, she
commented that “the Secretary of Defense basically accused people like me of
selectively editing, of misrepresenting the truth.”
Despite Amanpour being one of CNN’s leading war correspondents, someone
who had been “embedded” with the military during the conflict, her comments
were promptly challenged by her network. Jim Walton, president of CNN News-
group, insisted that the network had not been subjected to undue influence.
“Christiane is a valued member of the team and one of the world’s foremost jour-
nalists,” he said. “However, her comments do not reflect the reality of our coverage
and I do not agree with her about this” (cited in The Guardian, September 16,
2003). Meanwhile a spokesperson for Fox News, Irena Briganti, responded by
likening Amanpour to a “spokeswoman for al-Qaeda” (cited in USA Today,
September 14, 2003), thereby effectively highlighting the very climate of self-
censorship at issue.
In what is typically a fraught relationship between the arch rivals, both CNN
and Fox News sought to reaffirm their self-proclaimed patriotism in different ways.
Fox, like MSNBC, was typically upbeat about the war’s progress. It ensured that a
US flag always appeared in the corner of the screen, intended to “strike a chord”
with viewers. It followed an aggressively partisan approach, where newscasters
referred to US and British troops as “we,” “ours,” “heroes,” and “liberators,” and
actively deflected criticism of the invasion. Evidently, if not surprisingly, the US
military, according to Simpson (2003), “liked Fox’s noisy, irreflective, triumphalist
style, and couldn’t understand why everyone couldn’t be like that” (Simpson
2003: 369–70). CNN was calmer in contrast, somewhat less likely to be as deferen-
tial to government and military officials (evidence of “liberal bias,” in the eyes of
some Republican critics), and preferred to uphold a stricter line between news and
editorial comment. Kathryn Kross, CNN’s Washington Bureau Chief, maintained
that “journalists serve their audience by being appropriately skeptical. If viewers
9
are after cheerleading, they’re looking in the wrong place. It doesn’t mean we’re
not patriotic” (cited in Kurtz 2003).
A wide array of commentators have expressed their alarm about this apparent
blurring of news and comment, not least with regard to the implications for repor-
torial standards. Greg Dyke, Director General of the BBC at the time, focused
public attention on this problem in April 2003. Speaking at a journalism confer-
ence in London, he addressed the challenges confronting television news. “We
must temper the drama and competition of live, rolling news with the considered
journalism and analysis people need to make sense of events,” he argued (BBC
News Online, April 24, 2003). More than that, however, Dyke added: “Commer-
cial pressures may tempt others to follow the Fox News formula of gung-ho
patriotism but for the BBC this would be a terrible mistake.” In acknowledging
that Fox New’s partisan pro-Bush stance had helped it to overtake CNN in aver-
age daily viewer ratings, he insisted that such “unquestioning” support for the
White House was typical of the other US broadcast news media during the con-
flict. In a fragmented marketplace, he argued, no news operation was sufficiently
strong or brave enough to stand up to government or military officials. Attempts
to mix flag-waving patriotism with journalism, he feared, would inevitably under-
mine television news’ credibility in the eyes of the public. “Essential to the success
of any news organisation,” he stated, “is holding the trust of its audiences.”
Dyke returned to this theme when giving a speech at the International Emmys
in New York in November 2003, where he accepted an award for broadcasting
excellence. “News organisations should be in the business of balancing their cov-
erage,” he argued, “not banging the drum for one side or the other” (cited in BBC
News Online, November 25, 2003). Citing research suggesting that only a tiny
fraction of the commentators aired on US television were opposed to the war, he
said: “I have to tell you if that was true in Britain, the BBC would have failed in
its duty.” In making the point that television news has a responsibility to broad-
cast a range of voices, he observed that viewing figures in the US for BBC News
(namely BBC World and News 24) had effectively “doubled” in the last year. For
Dyke, these figures showed that there was a growing audience for “impartial”
news. “Telling people what they want to hear is not doing them any favours. It
may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion, but
it’s what we are here to do.” BBC news reporting was hardly above criticism, of
course, being consistently assailed from both ends of the political spectrum.
Those on the right contended that it was “anti-war” in its coverage, while those
on the left believed that it relied much too heavily on pro-war sources of informa-
tion (echoes of this debate resounded throughout the Hutton inquiry and its
aftermath).2
Much of the criticism of the British 24-hour networks’ coverage of the Iraq
conflict centred on their widely perceived tendency to present images without
adequate context or explanation (effectively making them purveyors of “war
porn” in the judgment of some). Differences between the three networks—BBC
News 24, the ITV News Channel, and Sky News—in their coverage were most
10
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
notable at a stylistic level, given that they each operate under strict conditions of
“due impartiality” imposed by broadcast regulators. In sharp contrast with the so-
called “Fox formula” (likened, by some, to an “either you’re with us or against us”
mentality), the three networks share similar space in the middle of the news spec-
trum. As Matt Wells (2003) has pointed out, not only do they have broadly
similar news agendas, with correspondents situated in the same places, they also
hold a “determinedly Western” perspective in common. During the conflict the
“most frequent location of live two-way interviews,” he observed, were “coalition
command in Doha, military headquarters in Kuwait, the White House in Wash-
ington and Downing Street in London. Jerusalem, Amman, Cairo and Riyadh
have barely had a look-in.” The extensive use of such interviews, needless to say,
underscored the networks’ commitment to meeting the near-constant demands
of live reporting (which appeared with less frequency on the terrestrial networks
as the war went on—one major exception being the capture of Saddam Hussein).
For some critics, however, this approach to two-ways not only narrowed the
range of views on offer, it also seemed to value immediacy for its own sake. “Tele-
vision has become a 24-hour slog,” argued veteran war reporter Jon Swain
(2003), “with the result that while many of today’s TV reporters may have all the
traditional dedication and intrepidness of their predecessors, they cannot use it.”
In effect, he added, “[t]hey are tied to the satellite dish on the hotel roof ready to
deliver ‘live spots’ and so are unable to explore in depth the stories they are sup-
posed to be reporting” (see also Adie 2002).
Jon Snow (2004), anchor of Channel 4 News, has coined the phrase “Rooftop
syndrome” to describe the ways “war correspondents are held hostage by the vora-
cious appetite of 24-hour television news.” One such victim, he contends, was
the BBC’s Rageh Omaar, “the face of the war in Baghdad,” but whose rooftop
appearances on the Information Ministry and the Palestine Hotel meant that he
seldom had the opportunity to use his skills (see also Omaar 2004). Similarly per-
tinent here are the insights of Martin Bell (2003), recently retired from the BBC
after more than 30 years in journalism. The 24-hour news services have special
responsibilities, he believes, which are defined by F-words:
They aim to be first and fastest with the news. Their nature, too often, is
to be fearful, feverish, frenzied, frantic, frail, false and fallible. Some mis-
takes are bound to be made, as they always have been, by journalists
seeking to discover the truth in the fog of breaking news; but those mis-
takes do not have to be as systemic as they have become in the rolling
news business, when rumour masquerades as fact, and networks compete
wildly with each other to get their speculation in first.
(Bell 2003: 71; emphasis in original)
Bell is particularly troubled where the reporting of war and terrorism is con-
cerned, but believes the point can be made more widely. In calling for a measure
of self-criticism among journalists, as well as a code of practice (long overdue, in
11
his opinion), he proceeds to issue an appeal for a return to first principles. The
test of excellence, he argues, is not “We got it first!” but rather “We got it right!”
(Bell 2003: 71).
One year after the invasion of Iraq commenced, answers to the question of
how best to ensure reportorial standards of excellence are proving increasingly
elusive. Nowhere are the imperatives shaping television news thrown into
sharper relief than where the interests of public service collide with the private
ones of shareholders. To the extent that the news agenda is determined by its
potential for generating audience ratings (and therefore advertising revenue, in
the case of commercial networks), newscasts will consistently prioritize stories
revolving around drama, conflict, and controversy over and above (expensive,
less “ratings-efficient”) investigative journalism. War reporting is no exception to
this general rule. The dynamics underpinning 24-hour news—especially when
“going live”—raise significant issues regarding public perceptions about the
nature of war.
Jack Straw (2003), the British Foreign Secretary, has even questioned whether
the First and Second World Wars would have been won, had they been covered
by these channels:
Had the public been able to see live reports from the trenches, I wonder
for how long the governments of Asquith and Lloyd George could have
maintained the war effort. Imagine the carnage of the Somme on Sky
and BBC News 24. But it is also worth speculating how much harder it
might have been to maintain the country’s morale after Dunkirk had
live reports confronted the public with the brutal reality of German tac-
tical and military superiority. Could the ‘spirit of Dunkirk’, so important
to national survival, have withstood the scrutiny of 24-hour live news?
(Straw 2003)
Straw himself was doubtful, but nevertheless made the important additional
point that “in a democracy, the benefits of hour by hour and day by day reporting
from the frontline far outweigh the disadvantages.” And as he rightly pointed out,
some correspondents on the frontline have “paid the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit
of the truth” (24 in Iraq at the time of writing). Still, there can be little doubt that
his interests as a Foreign Secretary necessarily contradict, at times, the interests of
journalists committed to investigating the realities of warfare. Precisely how
these contradictions are negotiated on the ground, of course, will have profound
consequences for public trust in both government and journalism in times of war.
The chapters
Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime addresses the tensions, contradictions, and
contingencies that shape the journalist’s role in wartime. Recognizing that the
aim of war coverage is frequently defined in relation to the urgent need to keep
12
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
diverse publics adequately informed, Reporting War surveys the ways in which this
aim has been realized—or not—in the reporting of certain wars over recent years.
Our contributors, both practising and former journalists as well as academics with
a longstanding research interest in journalism, vary in perspective, academic dis-
cipline, and national origin, but they share the aim of recasting familiar
assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective.
Interwoven throughout the book are two main threads in thinking about the
relative strengths and limitations of war reporting. First, the book tracks the
forms and practices of reporting war across time. Focusing in the main on con-
flicts since 1990, it explores how the nature of war itself has been transformed,
and how these changes have impacted upon the modes for journalistic engage-
ment. These modes—typically characterized too narrowly around evolutions
in technology—will be shown to prefigure a repository of adaptations by which
journalists constitute themselves as responsible for bearing witness. Second, it
considers the reporting of war in diverse locales. Ranging from Africa, the
Balkans, the Middle East—especially Iraq—and southern Asia, the book attempts
to discern both the general features and distinct specifics of reporting in compar-
ative contexts. In so doing it asks, among other questions, in what ways do the
US and British news media, in particular, bring to bear Western assumptions—
political, cultural, and moral—about how and why war is waged.
Reporting War identifies and critiques an array of pressing issues associated with
conflicts over recent years, always with an eye to what they can tell us about
improving journalism today. Such issues include the influence of censorship and
propaganda, “us” and “them” news narratives, access to sources, “24/7 rolling
news” and the so-called “CNN effect,” military jargon (such as “friendly fire” and
“collateral damage”), “embedded” and “unilateral” reporters, visual images of war,
tensions between objectivity, patriotism and humanitarianism, and online report-
ing, among others. Sustained attention is devoted to considering changes in
journalistic forms and practices in the war in Iraq, and the ways in which they are
shaping eyewitness reporting of that conflict. Taken together, then, the book’s
chapters raise important questions about how the exigencies of reporting war
have challenged the practice of journalism, and what they may portend for the
very future of journalism tomorrow.
Part 1—war in the twenty-first century

Truth, it is often said, is the first casualty of war. It is appropriate, then, that the
first section of essays begins with Oliver Boyd-Barrett’s “Understanding: the
second casualty,” where he argues that the public is poorly served by mainstream
media reporting of war. In considering war reporting as a distinct genre of journal-
ism, he identifies a range of “casualties” to truth and understanding, engendered
by framing war through a narrative form that mainly serves government interests
and the media colluding with them. Such “casualties” are apparent in the choices
of which wars the news media decide to report; media representations of the
13
causes, durations and aftermaths of war; and a failure to contextualize conflict

within metanarratives of empire and control. War-reporting-as-genre, he con-
tends, obscures the nature of collusion between government and media, a
collusion that previous research studies only partially explain.
Richard Keeble’s “Information warfare in an age of hyper-militarism” com-
mences with the provocative assertion that there was no war in the Gulf in 2003.
Rather, he argues, a myth of heroic, spectacular warfare was manufactured, in
large part, as a desperate measure to help provide a raison d’être for the (increas-
ingly out-of-control) military industrial complexes in the US and UK—and to
hide the reality of a rout of a hopelessly overwhelmed “enemy” army. The links
between mainstream journalists and the intelligence services, this chapter sug-
gests, are crucial factors in the manufacture of the myth. But it is not essentially a
massive elite conspiracy, Keeble believes. Rather, the myth’s origins lie deep
within complex military, historical, and political forces. Moreover, as he shows,
the manufacture of the “war” myth has profound implications for any study of the
political and military origins of the conflict and media representations.
Susan D. Moeller, in “A moral imagination: the media’s response to the war on
terrorism,” considers how the post-September 11 Bush administration has used a
moral rhetoric to propel its “war on terrorism” policies, especially in Iraq, and
how that “morality” has echoed through the US media. In arguing that war
reporting is a subset of reporting on international affairs, she points out that many
concerns that bedevil international coverage are exacerbated when journalists
cover war. Considering the post-9/11 world, Moeller investigates issues of lan-
guage, access, asking the right questions, and not only challenging the “spin” of
the powers-that-be but also contesting the priorities set by those in power. To the
extent that the Bush administration categorized its foreign policy agendas under
the phrase “war on terrorism,” she argues, it effectively stamped those policies
with a moral imperative—an imperative, her analysis suggests, that the US media
have been loathe to challenge.
In “The PR of terror: how new-style wars give voice to terrorists,” Tamar
Liebes and Zohar Kampf argue that September 11, 2001 may be considered a
watershed in the gradual evolution of journalism’s approach to terror. If until
9/11 terrorists could capture the news media’s attention only via violent action,
they have now been given a voice by which they act as regular, sought after
sources. Rather than represent a front-page story recounting the merciless suffer-
ing inflicted on innocent victims, they now make statements, give interviews,
and explain their motives, while journalists, following in their trails, speculate
about their plans, ideologies, and psychological makeup. Analyzing the upgrad-
ing of terrorists to the cultural status of celebrities, Liebes and Kampf see live
“disaster marathons” as the beginning of a process by which journalists relinquish
control to terrorists and then pursue terrorists as legitimate news personas, dis-
connected from specific violent acts.
This section’s discussion is rounded out by Piers Robinson in “Researching US
media–state relations and twenty-first century wars.” Wartime relations between
14
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
the US media and government, he suggests, have traditionally been characterized

by media deference to, and domination by, official viewpoints. In recent years,
however, developments in communications technology (which reduce journal-
ists’ reliance upon official sources) and the ending of the Cold War (which recasts
the ideological bond between journalists and policy-makers) have been thought
to produce a more adversarial wartime media. Robinson critically assesses these
claims, identifying two key developments which suggest otherwise—the profes-
sionalization of government media management strategies and the replacement
of the ideology of the Cold War with the “war on terrorism.” Both have strength-
ened US government dominance of the media agenda in wartime, suggesting that
the thesis of significant change in the balance of power and influence between
the US media and government during war cannot be supported yet. Now, as in
previous wars, the media support US government war objectives.
Part 2—bearing witness

Barbie Zelizer’s “When war is reduced to a photograph” examines how reporting
war is characterized by a turn to the visual in providing accounts of the battle-
field. Tracking the display of still photographs across recent conflicts, she argues
that while war coverage typically shows more visuals, they do not necessarily con-
tain more information. Rather, journalists gravitate toward the familiar, dramatic,
aesthetic, and already meaningful in their depiction of war, thereby undermining
the provision of newsworthy and critically important information in wartime.
Zelizer discusses the characteristics of this turn to the visual, by which visuals are
used to cement public interpretations of more recent conflicts in conjunction
with wars experienced at other times and places and on different grounds. Muted
are questions about the value of the parallel and the ends to which it is being
used, suggesting that in the process of depicting war, visuals undermine the main-
tenance of a healthy body politic.
In “The Persian Gulf TV war revisited,” Douglas Kellner returns to 1991 to dis-
cuss parallels between the Gulf War of then and that of now. Kellner indicates
how the political economy of the US media facilitated the manufacturing of con-
sent for US government policies. Kellner reflects on why the Gulf war was so
popular with its audiences and how the Bush administration and Pentagon mar-
shaled public support for the war, suggesting that the effects of television and the
mainstream media are contradictory and may have unintended consequences.
While in the spring of 1991, the Gulf War constituted a tremendous victory for
the Bush administration and Pentagon, the event did not save Bush senior’s pres-
idency and eventually raised questions concerning whether he was really an
effective leader. For Kellner, its short-term effects in temporarily boosting Bush
senior’s popularity, when set in relation to the sudden shift in public opinion con-
cerning the war, point to the fickleness of audiences in a media-saturated society.
These audiences, he believes, soon forget the big events of the previous year and
immerse themselves in the latest media spectacle.
15
Attention turns to Africa in the next chapter, with Susan L. Carruthers’s

“Tribalism and tribulation: media constructions of ‘African savagery’ and ‘West-
ern humanitarianism’ in the 1990s.” Much Western news media reporting during
the 1990s, she maintains, confirmed Africa’s designation as a “hopeless conti-
nent”: presided over by machete-wielding warlords, marshaling the blood-lust of
child soldiers to barbarous, if not genocidal, ends. Accordingly, this chapter takes
as its focus Western media constructions of conflict in Somalia and Rwanda, pon-
dering both the so-called CNN effect, contrasting the attention paid to famine in
Somalia with media inattention to Rwanda’s genocide, and elaborating how a
distorting “ethnic violence complex” structures Western news media accounts of
the roots of African conflict. Carruthers explores journalism’s role in producing a
humane identity for the West, systematically erasing the latter’s own profound
implication in Africa’s “failure.” It is vital, she argues, that the language of West-
ern intervention be interrogated for its obfuscation of the entrenched, and
wrenching, processes through which the West continuously shapes Africa.
Philip Hammond’s “Humanizing war: the Balkans and beyond” provides an
interesting set of counterpoints. Pointing out that many commentators judge
NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia to have been an “illegal but moral” war,
abandoning the principle of non-interference in sovereign states in pursuit of the
higher goal of upholding human rights, Hammond suggests that despite evidence
to the contrary, Kosovo is still portrayed as a successful and ethical intervention.
In Hammond’s view, such claims rest on a number of falsehoods about the build-
up to war and the nature of the conflict, including mainstream journalism’s
complicity in treating the West’s public show of diplomacy as a genuine attempt
at mediation and Kosovo as a one-sided campaign of “ethnic cleansing” and
genocide. A predisposition to accept NATO propaganda and a search for moral
absolutes in the Balkans, Hammond contends, offset the felt lack of cohesion
and purpose in Western societies in the post-Cold War era. Today, even when
the use of “humanitarian” rhetoric in the war on terrorism has met with some
criticism, there persists an underlying agreement on the West’s “moral duty” to
intervene.
Howard Tumber’s “Prisoners of news values?: journalists, professionalism and
identification in times of war” argues that, in times of war, objectivity is a prized
status where the principles of detachment are a key element in the social con-
struction of the journalist’s own sense of professional identity. The Falklands/
Malvinas conflict, he suggests, was an excellent “bell jar” for examining the “per-
formance” of the journalists who accompanied the British military and for
assessing the ideal of objectivity in practical terms. Against this backdrop, he re-
examines the experiences of the small group of journalists who reported the
Falklands conflict of the early 1980s, before turning to the experiences of the
much larger group of reporters “embedded” with the military in the recent Iraq
war. Tumber’s analysis addresses some of the reportorial choices made by journal-
ists in both conflicts, especially where they were caught between identifying with
their military protectors and adhering to their professional values.
16
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
In “Out of sight, out of mind?: the non-reporting of small wars and insurgen-
cies,” Prasun Sonwalkar draws attention to the conflicts routinely ignored by the
media on national as well as international levels. He points out that the news
media typically cover only a small share of the world’s conflicts, even though
terrorism and violence are usually defined as being inherently—and irresistibly—
newsworthy and draws upon the findings of a case study of reporting in India, the
two conflict zones of Kashmir and the northeast. A conflict is likely to receive
coverage, he suggests, only if journalists see it as affecting what they perceive to
be the “us” or “we” of news narrative, while a conflict revolving around “them”
may be routinely ignored or accorded ad hoc coverage. Sonwalkar’s interviews
with senior Indian journalists reveal that Kashmir is seen as deserving of sus-
tained coverage because it involves the Indian national “we” (Hindus, Muslims,
the idea of secularism in India’s constitution), while the northeast conflicts are
consistently accorded low status, primarily because they involve India’s socio-
cultural “they” (tribes, Christians, hill people).
Which war is represented in Australia’s media arguably owes more to the cul-
tural and historical location of war reporting than to the power of oligopolistic
media ownerships over journalistic performance. This is the opening thesis of
Michael Bromley’s “The battlefield is the media: war reporting and the forma-
tion of national identity in Australia—from Belmont to Baghdad,” which
focuses on how journalists have shaped what war has meant to Australians and,
in so doing, revalidated certain Australian national values originating in the
foundation of the nation-state. Bromley argues that while much was made of the
pro-invasion stand taken by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers
before the war in Iraq; journalists could be relied on a priori to invoke and evoke
a mythology of war which tied military action seamlessly to Australian identity.
They were therefore largely supportive of military action. Notwithstanding con-
siderable public unease at Australia’s involvement in the invasion, once military
deployments were undertaken, journalists’ automatic reference point was the
ideal of the Australian “digger” (soldier) and the positive national characteristics
embedded in it.
Part 3—reporting the Iraq war

This final section concentrates on the war in Iraq, still ongoing at the time of writ-
ing. It opens with Stephen D. Reese’s “Militarized journalism: framing dissent in
the Persian Gulf wars.” He argues that “consensual patriotism” drives the margin-
alization of dissent, considering how news works through routine practices to
generate specific frames of reference that anchor armed conflict, and its larger
policy implications, within definitions largely controlled by the military. Specifi-
cally, Reese examines how a local television news organization covered communal
responses to the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and how this extended into the more
recent conflict. In rooting news coverage within professional routines and familiar
and commercially appealing cultural themes, he argues, news coverage framed
17
dissent so as to pit it against a favored patriotic “support the troops” position. The
extent to which a military logic colors policy debate far from the war itself is con-
sidered in the light of more recent changes in the battlefield information
environment of Gulf War II in Iraq, and the location of audiences within more
globalized communities.
Nick Couldry and John Downey, in “War or peace?: legitimation, dissent, and
rhetorical closure in press coverage of the Iraq war build-up,” direct our attention
to British newspaper coverage of the onset of war. Analyzing the discursive posi-
tions and rhetorical strategies adopted by seven national newspapers during a
crucial week in the build-up to the 2003 Iraq war—the week of presentation of the
Blix report (beginning January 27) to the United Nations Security Council—they
show how these newspapers attempted to legitimize both war and peace. While
various notions such as the manufacturing of consent, the public relations state,
and the colonization of the public sphere emphasize the role of media in the repro-
duction of consent, the role of national newspapers in legitimating dissent was also
key. Couldry and Downey also examine the limits of this legitimation of dissent in
the build-up to the invasion of Iraq which they argue help to explain the pro-war
shift in public opinion discernible at the beginning of the war.
Justin Lewis and Rod Brookes offer what is in many ways a complementary
analysis, in “How British television news represented the case for the war in Iraq.”
Examining key features of the British television coverage of the war in Iraq, based
on an analysis of over 1,500 news reports broadcast by the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC 1), the Independent Television Network (for ITV), Channel
4, and Sky Television, they look at the overall shape of the coverage and then
explore the degree to which news channels accepted or challenged pro-war
assumptions during the war, notably about the threat of weapons of mass destruc-
tion and the enthusiasm of Iraq people for the US-led war. In so doing, Lewis and
Brookes explore a number of controversial issues. Was the BBC’s coverage anti-
war as many alleged? Conversely, were the “embedded reporters” effectively “in
bed” with the military? In answering these questions, they consider the relation-
ship between media coverage and public opinion.
When the first US missiles hit targets in Baghdad on March 20, 2003, news
organizations started hitting their targets around the world. Terhi Rantanen, in
“European news agencies and their sources in the Iraq war coverage,” discusses
how the war coverage affected the daily routines of European news agencies, such
as Reuters and Agence France-Presse. These agencies, she points out, are tradi-
tionally seen as the wholesalers of news to most media, and in a competitive global
media environment, have become one of the many sources used by the media. In
her chapter, Rantanen explores the measures the agencies took to cover the war
and the sources to which they subscribed. She also studies how news agency edi-
tors evaluated their news sources, suggesting that they share a professional
journalistic culture which goes beyond national boundaries. In the Iraq war, she
argues, sources outside Europe were seen as less reliable, and this applied to both the
US (such as the Associated Press) and Arab media (such as Al-Jazeera).
18
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Adel Iskandar and Mohammed el-Nawawy make Al-Jazeera the primary focus
of their chapter, “Al-Jazeera and war coverage in Iraq: the quest for contextual
objectivity.” Compared to its predecessors, Al-Jazeera represents a media revolu-
tion in the Arab world, the implications of which become particularly pronounced
at times of war. Indeed, Al-Jazeera’s success as a news organization with immense
popular appeal, they argue, is a product of its novel brand of journalism. To
describe the journalistic model within which the network operates, the authors
introduce the concept of “contextual objectivity.” Of particular interest in this
concept are the tensions embedded within it, along with the media’s reactions to
its application in war reporting—not least with regard to how it complicates the
work of journalists and media outlets alike. Iskandar and el-Nawawy argue that
this concept possesses the potential to serve as a useful standard by which all net-
works may be judged, a thesis which they explore via a close look at Al-Jazeera’s
coverage of the war in Iraq.
Attention turns in the last two chapters to the Internet, beginning with Patri-
cia Aufderheide’s “Big media and little media: the journalistic informal sector
during the invasion of Iraq.” Describing the flourishing of grassroots reporting,
opinion, and commentary on mainstream media during March and April 2003,
when a vigorous public-opinion minority in the US, along with international
voices, protested the US-led invasion of Iraq, she reports the findings of a
research project at American University’s Center for Social Media that surveyed
the journalistic “informal sector” during the war. Aufderheide contrasts this phe-
nomenon—which involved email, the Web, cable access, and public channels on
satellite TV—with the suppression of dissent on the part of large, entertainment-
oriented, US media companies. She proposes that the informal sector will
continue to grow and that relationships will develop between mainstream media
outlets and efforts in the informal sector, offering important evidence of a widely
shared demand for more public participation in decision-making and widespread
distrust of mainstream media reporting in crisis.
In drawing the book to a close, Stuart Allan’s “The culture of distance: online
reporting of the Iraq war” uses cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ notion of the
“culture of distance” to contextualize online journalism. Allan explores the
Web-based mediation of witnessing and the distant suffering of others by
addressing the use of the Internet as a news source during the conflict. He con-
siders both the online reporting of Al-Jazeera (www.aljazeera.net) and the rise of
warblogs, such as that belonging to Salam Pax, otherwise known as the “Bagh-
dad Blogger” (dear_raed.blogspot.com). Attention focuses on the ways in which
online reporting provides alternative spaces for acts of witnessing, a process
which is shown to be uneven, contingent, and frequently the site of intense
resistance. The culture of distance, Allan contends, is simultaneously a culture
of othering. At stake, in his view, is the need to deconstruct journalism’s “us
and them” dichotomies precisely as they are taken up and re-inflected in news
accounts where the structural interests of “people like us” are counterpoised
against the suffering of strangers.
19
Conclusion
All in all, Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime has at its heart a commitment to
exploring afresh the social responsibilities of the news reporter in public life
during wartime. It is not chronological, in that it leaps back and forth in time. It
is not comprehensive, in that it has not attended to every war that has occurred
over recent years. Neither has it conclusively raised all of the relevant issues in
the wars discussed in these pages. Even though the war in Iraq is still under way as
we edit this book, our hope is nevertheless to offer a timely intervention. In so
doing, we aim to contribute to a larger critical appraisal of both the guiding
imperatives of journalism in wartime and the ways in which these imperatives
impact more broadly across different modes of journalistic practice.
The echoes of war continue to resound long after the cacophony of battle has
been silenced. In this book, we have endeavored to create a forum of contem-
plation around war reporting—past and present—so as to help create spaces for
alternative voices to be heard. Our contributors, some of whom are former
reporters, have undertaken this work as academics committed to the study of news
and journalism, but also as citizens. “Citizenship,” as one of the last century’s finest
war correspondents, Martha Gellhorn (1988: 408), pointed out, “is a tough occu-
pation.” She believed that as citizens we are obliged to make our own informed
opinion and to stand by it. “The evils of the time change,” she observed, “but are
never in short supply and would go unchallenged unless there were conscientious
people to say: not if I can help it” (Gellhorn 1988: 408). Dissent, based on moral-
ity and reason, is at the heart of what it means to be a citizen. And while the
challenge of citizenship may be getting more difficult all of the time, there is nev-
ertheless always room for optimism. “There has to be a better way to run the
world,” Gellhorn insisted, “and we better see that we get it” (Gellhorn 1988: 409).
Notes
1 A transcript of this interview is available on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
webpage: http://www.cbc.ca/deadlineiraq/burns.pdf
2 The Hutton inquiry, named after Baron Hutton of Bresagh, was set up to investigate
the chain of events which led to the Government weapons expert David Kelly appar-
ently committing suicide after having been named as the likely source of a BBC report
by Andrew Gilligan. In the BBC report, Gilligan had maintained that an intelligence
dossier on Iraq had been altered under pressure brought to bear by the Prime Minister’s
office. The inquiry report largely exonerated the government, sparking allegations of a
“whitewash” by critics. A copy is available online at: http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.
org.uk/
References
Adie, K. (1998) “Dispatches from the front: reporting war,” Contemporary Issues in British
Journalism, the 1998 Vauxhall Lectures, Centre for Journalism Studies, Cardiff
University.
20
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Adie, K. (2002) The Kindness of Strangers, London: Headline.

Bell, M. (2003) Through Gates of Fire, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Burkeman, O. (2003) “US television,” The Guardian, March 27.
Deans, J. (2003) “Fox challenges CNN’s US ratings dominance,” The Guardian, March 27.
Doward, J. (2003) “Sky wins battle for rolling news audience,” The Observer, April 6.
Gellhorn, M. (1988) “Conclusion, 1988,” The Face of War, London: Granta Books.
Kurtz, H. (2003) “For media after Iraq, a case of shell shock,” The Washington Post, April
28.
Omaar, R. (2004) Revolution Day: the Human Story of the Battle for Iraq, London and New
York: Viking.
Plunkett, J. (2003) “US TV news too liberal, say Americans,” The Guardian, October 8.
Preston, P. (2003) “Here is the news: too much heat . . . too little light,” The Observer,
March 30.
Rutenberg, J. (2003) “A nation at war: the news media,” The New York Times, April 16.
Simpson, J. (2003) The Wars Against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad, London:
Macmillan.
Sirota, D.J. (204) “The Fox of war,” salon.com, March 30.
Snow, J. (2004) “Get that man down from the roof at once,” The Observer, March 7.
Straw, J. (2003) full text of Jack Straw’s speech, The Guardian, April 1.
Swain, J. (2003) “Why the reporter is the last bastion of truth,” The Observer, March 16.
Wells, M. (2003) “British 24-hour television,” The Guardian, March 27.
Wells, M. and Cassy, J. (2003) “Media: ungag us,” The Guardian, April 14.
21
Part 1
WAR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST

CENTURY
1
UNDERSTANDING
The second casualty
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
War reporting as genre

War reporting as a distinct category of journalism, a genre, is a generally taken-
for-granted feature of our information environment. This chapter explores the
implications of the genre for our (mis)understanding of wars and of the periods of
“peace” that allegedly separate them. In particular, I argue that the genre obfus-
cates the reasons why the media focus on some wars rather than others, often fail
to capture both the deep-level and proximate causes of wars or explain their
actual durations and aftermaths, and hide the extent of media manipulation by
official monopolization of information flows. The genre is not well suited to
covert and “designer” wars (such as the war on drugs). More importantly, I argue
that the genre plays into the hands of power, and this is nowhere more apparent
than the media’s failure to identify the metanarratives or grand strategies that
explain the links between different wars over extended periods of time. In effect,
therefore, the genre of war reporting serves a propaganda purpose. Its generic
character has been exploited by state and other propagandists in ways that cripple
the capacity of media consumers to make useful sense of the world. A celebrated
model of media complicity with propagandists in supposedly democratic societies,
the “propaganda model” of Herman and Chomsky (1988), only weakly explains
the absoluteness of complicity in times of war, and I extend this model to include
the element of penetration of media by intelligence services in conjunction with
the wars discussed here.
Knightley’s study, The First Casualty (1975, reprinted 2002) offers a set of clas-
sic examples of war-reporting-as-genre. He traversed the Crimea, US Civil War,
Boer War, World War I, Russian Revolution, Abyssinia, Spanish Civil War,
World War II, Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Gulf War I, and Yugoslavia, offering a
series of massive, violent conflicts that nearly all involved organized, “regular”
armed forces of distinguishable enemies, often nation-states, or of warring
regions, ethnicities or social classes within nation-states whose legitimacy was
contested.
Reporting war, especially combat, has always been typically dangerous, demand-
ing great resourcefulness in gathering and transmitting information. Journalists
25
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
may unthinkingly subscribe to or knowingly comply with the objectives, ideolo-

gies, and perspectives of one or another side to a conflict. Alternately, they must
struggle to make sense of the “big picture” in resistance to information monopolies
imposed by state and military. Such challenges and difficulties are the essence of
war reporting, and these attributes figure into the genre of war reporting that
results.
Problems of genre contour or boundary as the nature of conflict undergoes
change are to be expected. Genres routinely exhibit transformations and yield
hybrid forms in response to changing circumstances, artists’ search for new
expression, or changes in audience preferences and decoding skills. Genre is not
only about text but is also a feature of the “routinization” of production that
shapes audience reception and perception as much as it is shaped by them. Tradi-
tional conflicts between antagonists who are identifiable in terms of geography,
ideology, character, and interest serve important production as well as textual
functions. Classic warfare is the epitome of a “good story,” high in tension and
drama, with complex main plots and sub-plots played out within traditional
binary oppositions of aggressor and victim, winner and loser. While expensive to
cover, warfare is commercially rewarding for the media, since its threat and
unfolding ignite insatiable audience appetite for news. Advertisers may initially
fear the risk of juxtaposing products with unsavory and unsettling issues, but they
soon benefit from higher audience numbers and from the potential for linking
merchandise with the semiotics of patriotism. War provides a reason and a focus
for news editors in their decision-making about deployment of resources, identifi-
cation of sources and commentators, and news agendas. War provides a ritualistic
challenge, testing, and evaluation, that call upon extraordinary resources and
resourcefulness from media institutions, journalists, technicians, and other sup-
port workers. Their collective experiences feed the stuff of professional legend,
confirming and renewing the narrative of what it means to be a “journalist.” The
genre draws from and feeds into other forms of media production, including
motion pictures and television series, and all these in turn shape audience percep-
tions of and expectations about warfare and how the media should cover war.
Casualties of war reporting

Choice of war
The media are highly selective in their focus on wars and conflict. A war that does
not attract media attention is not therefore unimportant, of low intensity or scale;
nor is it necessarily of scant strategic importance to Western interests. While the
United States prepared to invade Iraq in 2003 and the media, especially television
news, beat the drums for war, there was equally if not potentially more serious ten-
sion brewing between the United States and North Korea. The evidence of actual
or imminent, hostile, nuclear capability in the case of North Korea was more
compelling than in the case of Iraq. Yet North Korea reporting was completely
26
T H E S E C O N D C A S U A LT Y
overshadowed by Iraq. War with Iraq suited the US administration’s game-plan of

reshaping the Middle East—a highly influential, controversial, “neoconservative”
policy that had mixed pro-Israel, anti-Arab overtones at the service of control
over world energy reserves, specifically, and US global hegemony, in general.
Before the dangers of post-war destabilization of Iraq became apparent, the war
promised to boost the likelihood of electoral success for the Republicans in 2004,
and it offered stunning profits for the military-industrial complex from the sales of
military equipment and reconstruction contracts.
Military and civilian casualties experienced by the US, Afghanistan and Iraq
between 2001 and 2003 were grave, but tiny in comparison with those in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (formerly Zaire), where four million lives
were lost between 1997 and 2003, more than any since World War II (Kiley
2003). Western interests in the Congo were considerable, but they had little
motivation for publicity. Several gigantic European enterprises (notably Belgian
and French) have large holdings in the Congo, and most of the country’s external
trade is with European states. The DRC is of especial interest to the US and
Japan for its resources of coltan, used in computer chips and other electrical prod-
ucts. Vast oil reserves are believed to lie near Lake Albert in the province of Ituri,
center of some of the most vicious bloodletting. US reporter Wayne Madsen pro-
vided congressional testimony in May 2001 that the US was using private
military contractors in the DRC, and that American companies, including one
linked to former President George Bush senior “were stoking up the conflict for
military gain” (Lokongo 2002). Fighting continued until a tenuous truce in April
2003 and the formation of transitional government. In July 2003, the UN Secu-
rity Council voted to impose an arms embargo on the DRC, but Britain and the
US stood in the way of extending the embargo to include Rwanda and Uganda,
which backed the militias that were slaughtering in eastern provinces (Kiley
2003). Wars, however grave, in which Western interests promote their goals
through proxy participants, many of whom have only a partial understanding, at
best, of the powers that support them (with or without the presence of covert
Western forces or mercenaries), are less likely to command mainstream media
attention than wars that directly engage the formal armed services of Western
powers and that require manifest accountability to their respective governments.
Causes of war
Causes of warfare are typically problematic. I draw a distinction between proxim-
ate and deep-level strategic causes. At another level are broader, longer-term,
non-strategic causes unlikely to be decipherable in their entirety by the actors
involved, but which will be pried to the surface by historians. Proximate
causes have curious relationships to deep-level causes. The “aggression” of one
party, for example, may have been provoked by an apparent “victim,” represent-
ing pre-emptive retaliation against the “victim’s” maneuver toward its own,
unspoken, deep-level ambitions. Proximate causes are generally those cited by
27
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
the participants, often formulaic and often bogus. The opening gambits of war-
fare occur when journalists are most vulnerable to manipulation by official
sources. In contemporary warfare officialdom seeks to monopolize communica-
tion flows by limiting journalistic access to sanitized information from official
sources, by rationing transportation and communications facilities, excluding
non-approved journalists from military protection and facilities, keeping jour-
nalists out altogether—as in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), corralling
select numbers into press “pools”—as in the Falklands (1982), Grenada (1983),
Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), and Gulf War I (1991–2) (Thrall 2000), or
“embedding” them within military units—as in Gulf War II (2003).
Official controls are also most likely to work effectively in the opening stages of
conflict. Issues of legality and morality may be under-articulated or unclear. Cri-
tiquing the US administration while troops initiate combat attracts accusations
of lack of patriotism, even treason (especially if reporters attend diligently to
information from the opponents’ side), and endanger journalists’ already
restricted access to official sources and to the battlefield. This very moment when
proximate and deep-level causes of war should be open to rigorous analysis is also
the time when such analysis is most difficult and least popular. Dissection and dis-
putation of causes can be a heady, intellectual, wordy, controversial exercise, at a
time when the media are most of all preoccupied with covering the action, at the
behest, they would say, of audience interest. Wars can and often do start with
greatly insufficient attention to the possible multiplicity of real causes; if, when
war formally begins, journalists have sacrificed context, the chances that they will
recover it in time, before the issues become history, are not encouraging. The
problems are compounded when journalists and audiences are ignorant as to the
locations of battle, their cultures and societies, as was the case in Afghanistan in
2001, and Iraq, in both 1990–1 and 2003.
Confusion over the causes and preludes to war is a common failing in war
reporting, which makes impossible an assessment by citizens about the meaning-
fulness of the very combat that is its focus. This was as true of the second Gulf War
in 2003 as of the first in 1990. The intelligentsia was better informed the second
time: they had studied the lies of the first war; were aware of the controversial
impact of UN sanctions on the civilian population (especially children) and of
the “no fly zones” imposed by the US and Britain, and many doubted the claims
from Washington and London that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the US or
was in possession of significant stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear
weapons. Such doubts fuelled unprecedented worldwide anti-war mass demon-
strations. A second difference was the speed with which the rationale for war
collapsed after initial combat, during the first weeks of occupation. Increasingly,
it appeared that the case had been built on exaggerations and outright decep-
tions. This was no surprise to anyone who had followed many of the “alternative”
news websites that provided day-to-day critical analysis drawn from a much wider
diversity of sources than available through the mainstream US media, and from
long before the war started as well as during and after the war. Among main-
28
stream US media, however, the networks (terrestrial and cable news channels in
the US) uniformly banged the drums for war long before the onset of invasion.
During the war, television networks’ news frames complied fully with US admin-
istration policy: they represented war as a necessary response to an immediate
threat by Iraq, justifiable even without UN sanction, whose resulting conse-
quences of death and destruction, both military and civilian, were inevitable
sacrifices. Within that frame there was scope for mild disagreement among the
Pentagon-vetted ex-military network commentators as to whether sufficient
numbers of troops had been deployed and whether initial combat strategies were
appropriate. But no network acknowledged the appropriateness of an entirely
alternative frame—namely that Iraq did not pose a significant threat to the US,
that the invasion did not have UN sanction but constituted an aggressive breach
of Iraqi sovereign territory which the Iraqis were fully justified in defending, and
that the consequences of war in terms of death and destruction amounted to war
crimes attributable to the US and its allies (Boyd-Barrett 2003b). Unlike tele-
vision news, the mainstream press captured a broader range of perspectives in the
period leading up to the war and occasionally achieved significant exposures
(including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s apparent acquiescence to Iraqi
use of chemical weapons in its war with Iran in the 1980s), but there was a cus-
tomary lack of outrage in face of growing evidence of subterfuge in the US
administration’s diplomacy and its case for war. Both before and during the war,
the press was slow to acknowledge the extent to which it had been routinely
duped by misinformation and fabrication (including the highly staged toppling of
the statue of Saddam Hussein, and the Hollywood-style make-believe attention
to the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch). Neither television nor the press seemed
capable of assessing and listening carefully to non-government expert sources,
including that of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who had argued that
the UN had indeed detected and supervised the destruction of most weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), and that any left in early 2003 would be inoperative.
Press controls and manipulation

War reporting is generally one sided. The media typically cover war from the point
of view of the country in which they and their major owners and readers are based,
reflecting the point of view of that country’s government and its foreign policy
elites. In part this reflects the difficulty that the media face in gaining protected
access to other parties, and when correspondents dare to try to achieve such access
they provoke charges of treason. Recent improvements in communications tech-
nologies have removed some of the physical impediments to multilateral coverage,
but there is little evidence so far of these being seriously put to use by mainstream
media for the purposes of achieving greater balance and a broader perspective.
Western reporting of the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were stories
told by Western correspondents reporting from Western positions speaking to
(mainly approved) Western political and military sources, mainly about Western
29
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
military personnel, strategies, successes, and, less often, failures, and backed with
comments from (often vetted) Western military “experts.” This myopia might be
attributed to media reluctance to be seen as relying on “unreliable,” “censored,” or
“unverifiable” reports, a hypocritical position that is blind to media dependence
on government or military sources of their own side for their most regular, profes-
sionally scripted or staged, and above all safe information, disinformation or lies.
When Gulf War I broke in 1990–1, the White House, putting into practice the
lessons it had learned from the Falklands War and from the US invasions of
Grenada and Panama during the 1980s, knew how to implement its strategy of
“control by press pool.” Several pools were organized, although few saw combat.
Those journalists not selected for pools stayed in Dahrain, viewing televised brief-
ings. Pool allocations were organized by the media themselves; big media rigged
the process to suit themselves. Pool reporters were accompanied at all times by
military escorts, had limited access to troops in the battlefield, and so were often
unable to provide an independent first-hand view of combat. Military public
affairs escorts warned pool members against violating guidelines, barred them from
places “they should not be,” and reviewed press stories before transmission back to
the press corps, if necessary passing them up to the military command for approval.
Independent journalists risked getting detained, lost, captured, or killed.
Afghanistan in 2001 was very different. Here, correspondents had exceptional
freedom to roam the country, but they did so with little protection or other sup-
port from the military. The build-up of American and Alliance forces following
September 11 generally occurred without media participation, and when Amer-
ica unleashed its first wave of attacks in October, “only a handful of journalists
enjoyed a vantage point within Afghanistan” (Dalglish et al. 2003: 14). Forty
journalists were allowed to join military forces on the USS Enterprise and two
other warships, but these ships were incidental to the strikes and restrictions were
imposed on what could be published. “In effect, most American broadcasters
scratched out coverage from Pentagon briefings, a rare interview on a US aircraft
carrier or a humanitarian aid airlift, or from carefully selected military videos or
from leads.” Reporters seldom had interviews with troops or secured positions
near the front.
Gulf War II in 2003 introduced the Pentagon concept of the “embedded”
reporter. Schechter (2003) argued that the media became part of a psychological
warfare directed to the domestic US population. Its objective was to stifle dissent,
garner unquestioning support, and rally around a common symbol. On the
ground, the Pentagon (Dalglish et al. 2003) provided billeting, rations, and med-
ical attention and some assistance with communications if necessary to as many
as 1,000 journalists, 662 of whom were attached directly to armed service units.
Reporters were discouraged from going out on their own. For the bigger story, the
US administration set the agenda through its “messages for the day.” These
ensured consensus across the administration and set the media agenda. The work
of embedded reporters was subsidized by the Pentagon, overseen by “public
affairs” specialists, and linked to television networks that were dominated by mil-
30
itary experts vetted by the Pentagon. Reporters were subject to 50 contractual

conditions, including a long list of things on which they could not report, such as
dead bodies. Stories had to be checked by the military. Reporters were not embed-
ded, noted Schechter, with Iraqi families, humanitarian agencies, or anti-war
groups. They sought few interviews with ordinary Iraqis, experts not affiliated
with pro-administration think tanks, military people other than the retired sort,
peace activists, or European and Arabic journalists.
Covert war
Some conflicts do not acquire the status of “war” in media eyes, though they may
be as violent, devastating, and, above all, strategic, as formal military conflict.
Conflicts in which the West has non-legitimate or illegitimate interests (in par-
ticular relating to the extension of capitalist markets) tend to invite covert
Western intervention and escape critical media attention. Former CIA officer
Ralph McGhee (quoted by Scott 1985) illustrated this when he averred that
“where the necessary circumstances or proofs are lacking to support US interven-
tion, the CIA creates the appropriate situations or else invents them and
disseminates its distortions worldwide via its media operations” (McGehee 1981).
Pilger (2001) related the case of the overthrow of the nationalist leader of
Indonesia, President Achmed Sukarno, by General Suharto in 1965–6. Suharto
was dictator of Indonesia for the following 30 years. Sukarno’s overthrow had
unleashed a pogrom, supposedly against suspected Communists but claiming the
lives of between 500,000 and a million people, including at least 80,000 in the
island of Bali, a slaughter that the CIA described as one of the worst mass murders
of the twentieth century (1968 CIA report quoted by Pilger 2001: 25). Britain and
the US had agreed in 1962 on the need to “liquidate” Sukarno, who as founding
father of the non-aligned movement of developing countries, had sought a “third
way” between the interests of the two superpowers. He had nationalized US eco-
nomic interests and kicked out the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank and used aid subsidies from the Soviet Union to confront the British in
Malaysia. The USA, under the executive leadership of Marshall Green, US
ambassador in Jakarta, with the help of Britain and Australia, spread anti-PKI and
anti-Sukarno propaganda, organized and propagandized the student movement,
equipped the army, handed over field communications networks, provided naval
escorts for Suharto military, and furnished lists of communist operatives for the
death squads (Kathy Kadane, quoted by Pilger 2001: 29). In covering Indonesia
then and later, Western media, including Murdoch’s The Australian, uncritically
framed the Suharto takeover as a positive outcome in the battle against commu-
nism. Many journalists celebrated the slaughter of up to a million people as good
news, while attacking those who accused Suharto of human rights violations.
The overthrow of Sukarno provided a model for American-directed death
squads in Operation Phoenix in Vietnam in 1967 which assassinated 50,000, and
for the US prosecution of civil war in Guatemala in 1968 from whence the model
31
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
spread to the rest of Latin America, including the overthrow of Salvador Allende
in Chile in 1973. More significantly yet, Suharto’s triumph was capped in 1967 by
a conference in Geneva sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation at which the
world’s leading transnational corporations (then as now, mainly American and
British) met with Suharto’s economic team. The conference planned Indonesia’s
transition, under a plan inspired by Ford Motor Co., in alliance with CIA front
organizations, to a “market economy,” and involved the parceling out of the
Indonesian economy to Western interests along with significant tax concessions.
The conference paved the way to the formation of the Inter-Government Group
on Indonesia, which Pilger (2001: 39) described as the “real and secret” center of
control of the Indonesian economy, and to the initiation of World Bank loans
that Sukarno had sought to avoid, sinking Indonesia into a $270 billion debt load
by 2000, even while the World Bank “lost track” of $10 billion of investments
that went to Suharto.
Issues of covert war were of considerable importance throughout the Cold War
and again during the “war on terrorism” (a war that, like the Cold War, also
resembles what I call the “designer” war below). Saunders (2003) noted that the
unofficial title for this war among top officials and ground-level operatives in the
US military and CIA was World War IV. He wrote (pp. 1–2):
Below the surface are dozens of operations, some secret and some simply
unnoticed, conducted by the CIA, the FBI, the diplomatic corps and
small, elite military squads . . . And much of the war is being fought by
foreign governments that are willing and able to do things Americans
wouldn’t or couldn’t . . . In some cases, that cooperation has led the
United States to endorse and enable activities that are deeply unsavory,
all in the name of stomping out terrorism.
He quoted Jonathan Stevenson, a senior strategist with the International Insti-

tute for Strategic Studies in London: “Counterterrorism is now 90% law
enforcement and intelligence.” In other words, we have a war that did not con-
form to the appearance of conventional warfare but was closer to intelligence and
police work; operations were likely to be small and secret, sometimes illegal.
Those who promoted this war called it a war on terrorism; though critics
(Meacher 2003) argued that this claim was bogus, and that what the war was
really about was the seizure of global power by the USA.
Designer war
It is the “unofficial” causes and purposes of war that tend to get marginalized by
mainstream media in preference to the narratives relayed by official sources, the
sources that dominate all sourcing for mainstream media. This applies to conven-
tional wars and to conflicts or activities that may or may not be called wars.
The discourse over the “war on drugs” establishes an agenda in the Western
32
media that focuses on: the scale of drug addiction in the US and elsewhere; the
efforts of legal authorities to enforce drug laws; whether the war is being “won”
or “lost;” and, less commonly, the impact of drug crime on prison populations
and control. The costs of the war, rising from $1 billion in the Reagan years to
nearly $20 billion a year by 2002 (Troshinsky 2002) are less readily caught by
this agenda, which also obscures how money earmarked for the “drug war” is
often spent in support of counter-insurgency and, not coincidentally, in the pro-
tection of oil pipelines, as in Colombia. The media agenda marginalizes darker
issues associated with collusion between US government agencies and the drugs
business, and the exploitation of the “war on drugs” as a pretext for different
goals, including the access to minerals, protection of oil interests in Third World
countries, financing covert operations and supporting unsavory but useful
“assets” (Scott and Marshall 1998; Webb 1998; Cockburn and St Clair 1999;
McCoy 2003). In Panama, for example, General Noriega was for many years
favored by Washington; he was a CIA asset, carefully protected, among others,
by George H.W. Bush senior when Bush directed the CIA from 1976 to 1978,
and again when he became Vice President to Reagan. Noriega was helpful to
Washington in the Iran/Contra scandal, when the planes flying personnel
and supplies to fight the dirty war in Nicaragua—financed by Iranian money
that paid for US supply of arms to Iran via Israel—returned to the US laden
with drugs (feeding the “crack” crisis in impoverished, ethnic, inner-city zones
such as South Central Los Angles). Noriega disappointed Washington when
he refused to withdraw the treaty that his predecessor had signed with President
Carter, under which control of the Panama Canal would revert to Panamanian
control in 2000. The ostensible reason for the US invasion of Panama in
1989 was to protect the lives of US citizens (although, apart from some dubious
incidents most likely provoked by US special forces, it is doubtful that any US
lives were really at risk before the invasion, and to “restore” democracy (critics
noted that Panama had never had a functioning democracy). The immediate
outcome of the war was that Noriega was sent for trial on drugs charges to
Florida. But the far more significant outcome was that the Panamanian military
was liquidated, and a new US puppet government, in tune with US foreign
policy and business interests, was installed.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban had been persuaded by the US administration to
eradicate the opium trade, by means of a ban on opium cultivation in early 2001,
which Washington rewarded with a $43 million grant. Yet following the US
bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 and the routing of the Taliban, Afghanistan
became the world’s leading supplier of opium. If the proximate reason for the “war
on drugs” is the volume of illegal drugs entering the US, two important “deep
level” causes have to do with oil, and with the financing of covert paramilitary
operations (as in Laos in the 1960s, and in both Nicaragua and Afghanistan in
the 1980s). Consistent involvement in drug operations by the CIA (and other
intelligence and para-military organizations) in all parts of the world have been
reliably charted (Cockburn and St Clair 1999); such operations finance and help
33
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
provide a cover for covert military and political operations, bypass legal con-
straints, and provide substantial illicit earnings to the participants and their
political sponsors.
Durations and aftermaths

Poor media performance in exploring deep-level and even the proximate causes
of war is compounded by significant failures in their coverage of the underlying
political strategies during the course of wars, as well as of the factors that explain
the ending of wars—even stumbling over the issue of whether wars have actually
“ended.” Sixty years after the end of World War II, for example, the USA contin-
ues to maintain military bases in many of the countries that it then fought, and to
incur substantial war “expenses.” Many months after President G.W. Bush
declared hostilities were over in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, US sol-
diers were regularly coming under enemy fire, clashing with local resistance and
suffering significant casualties. The impulse of politicians and hence mainstream
media to declare “victory” can have more to do with propaganda than with polit-
ical reality. Even the admission of “failure” is suspect; Chomsky and Pilger
(quoted by Shah 2003) considered that the major US war aims in Vietnam were
in fact achieved.
In the fall of 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon and his associates
sabotaged the Paris peace negotiations, by covertly indicating to the South Viet-
namese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a
better deal than a Democratic one (Hitchens 2001). The South Vietnamese
withdrew from the Paris peace talks on the eve of the election, thus undermining
the electoral chances of Democratic Party hopeful, Vice President Hubert
Humphrey. Four years later, the Nixon administration concluded the war on the
same terms that had been on offer in Paris. In this period, many more hundreds of
thousands of lives were lost in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, as were those of
20,492 American service personnel. The mainstream media mostly reported the
Paris negotiations at face value at the time and later showed scant interest in
Hitchens’ revelations.
The ending of the war in Kosovo in 1999 again presented at least two levels of
explanation: proximate and deep-level causes. One proximate explanation for
why that war ended, argued Knightley (2002), was NATO’s claim that the bomb-
ing had worked and that the Serbs had no stomach for further casualties and
destruction. Alternatively, some correspondents at the time believed that the war
ended because in the June peace talks, Russia (Serbia’s ally) had urged Milosevic
to make a deal, threatening to cut gas supplies to Serbia.
A BBC documentary the following October noted that following Serbian
acceptance of the peace deal, the International Monetary Fund provided Russia
with nearly three billion pounds to pay off the interest on its foreign debts.
Knightley then went on to ask, some four years after the war, “what was the war
really all about?” (Knightley 2002: 508). Was it about ethnic cleansing of the
34
Kosovars? Probably not. Propaganda claims of 500,000 or more deaths proved

fantastical: sober assessments placed the upper estimate for the number of people
who had died in the Kosovo conflict at 3,000. Was the NATO bombing a US-
inspired policy of punishing the Serbs? But if so, punishing them for what?
Quoting a range of sources, Knightley variously suggested that the Serbs were
punished for the humiliation that the West had suffered at their hands in Bosnia
and for acting against the interests of US foreign policy. He quoted Russian dissi-
dent Alexander Zinoviev, who believed that the Serbs had threatened the policy
of Western powers to force the creation of a single system of global governance to
suit their own interests. Others suggested that Yugoslavia represented the gateway
between the West and central Asia. This view, incidentally, resonated with the
arguments of Brzezinski (1998), former National Security Adviser to President
Carter who, in his book, The Grand Chessboard, made the case for US seizure of
control of central Asia and subordination of the ex-Soviet republics, while noting
that only a pretext on the scale of Pearl Harbor would mobilize popular opinion
behind such an openly imperialist strategy. Some commentators, including Rup-
pert (quoted by Guerilla News Network, 2002) regarded Brzezinski both as
mouthpiece for Project for a New American Century, which urged the invasion
of Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and the radical reshaping of the Middle East, and as a har-
binger of 2001, in that Brzezinski had expressly identified Afghanistan as the key
piece of the jigsaw of the new Empire.
Consequences of war are equally poorly charted by media. As a prelude to the
US use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the military
leader of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, chose Hanford in east-
ern Washington as the site of the world’s first large nuclear reactor. In the 47 years
until its closure in 1990, this 570-square-mile complex experienced large releases
of radioactivity, “particularly iodine-131 which rapidly contaminates air, vegeta-
tion, and milk supplies,” and 441 billion gallons of contaminated liquids were
directly disposed into the ground, enough, in the words of one source, to have
“the potential to induce cancer in every person currently on the planet, 208 mil-
lion times over” (Alvarez 2003: 31). A related issue, one rarely discussed by either
the Pentagon or the media, concerns the use of depleted uranium (DU) in
artillery shells and Tomahawk missiles launched against Iraq in Gulf Wars I and
II, in Kosovo in 1998 and again in Afghanistan in 2001. Some 320 tons of DU
were used in Gulf War I, one thousand or more tons in the second. DU is
reprocessed nuclear waste from the manufacture of nuclear energy. It continues to
emit low levels of alpha radiation. It is cheap, and contributes to high-density
heavy metal shells that rip through tank armor like butter. They cause a radio-
active and highly toxic dust on explosion. Shells that do not explode eventually
release DU into the environment. Health implications are disputed within and
outside of the Pentagon. Major Doug Rokke, who headed the US Army’s DU
Project after the Gulf War and advocated a ban on the manufacture and use of
DU munitions, believes that many of the 221,000 veterans from Gulf War I on
permanent disability (29 percent of that war’s eligible veterans) were victims of
35
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
DU. Soldiers were ill-trained and ill-equipped to deal with radioactive munitions
in Gulf War I. It seems that during Gulf War II soldiers took considerable precau-
tions to avoid contamination, but Worthington (2003) noted that “any soldier
now in Iraq who has not inhaled lethal radioactive dust is not breathing.” Conta-
mination was even more likely to affect citizens. In addition to the US troops,
countless Iraqi and other civilians are believed to have suffered from a range of
health problems attributable to DU (Hecht 2003; Traprock Peace Center 2003).
Corroborating sources include the Royal Society, laboratories in Switzerland and
Finland, radiation expert Dr Helen Caldicott, a 1993 Pentagon report, the US
Army Environmental Policy Institute, the Uranium Medical Research Center in
Afghanistan (sources quoted in Worthington 2003). Dr Asaf Durakovic, profes-
sor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University and a former army medical
expert found that 62 percent of sick veterans had uranium isotopes in their bodies
and even semen. A Christian Science Monitor report (Peterson 2003) found high
levels of radiation in the vicinity of DU bullets littered throughout Iraq. Few such
sites had warning notices. DU has also been used in military practice maneuvers
in many US states. The half-life of DU is 4.5 billion years, the age of our solar
system.
Metanarratives of empire and control

Metanarratives such as that of the Cold War play out over lengthy periods, and
their significance is often misunderstood. While the US and its allies were instru-
mental in the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965, for example, this was the
culmination of a strategy of destabilization that started in 1953 (Scott 1985),
when the US National Security Council agreed to prevent permanent commu-
nist control of Indonesia.
The principal metanarrative for understanding war in the first quarter of the
twenty-first century is about the establishment of US capitalistic worldwide hege-
mony, so strong in 2003 that US defense spending exceeded that of the next 15
nations combined (Gwyn 2003), a hegemony that serves a plutocratic US elite,
its allies overseas, the corporations and finance houses that generate their wealth,
and the military establishment that protects it. The narrative stretches back at
least to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson in the first quarter of the twentieth
century, when Wilson advocated a doctrine of internationalism, a “crusade for
hegemony that wore the mask of idealism, and fought, not for spoils, or glory, but
to ‘make the world safe for democracy,’” cf. Raimondo 2002). This in turn built
on previous imperialistic escapades, including the US conquest of Spanish Cuba
and the Philippines in the Spanish-American war of 1898 and the establishment
of a US zone in Panama in 1904. Wilson argued in 1907 that “since trade ignores
national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a
market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which
are closed must be battered down” (Beams 2003). This narrative is also a story
about the struggle between international capitalism and the nation state. To
36
depict wars as struggles within and between nation states, as media persistently
do, misses this fundamental dimension.
The metanarrative of hegemony takes different forms in different periods and
is currently, in the form of the National Security Strategy pronounced by Presi-
dent Bush in September 2002, as robust as it has ever been. Although presented
by the media as a new development in response to the events of September 11,
2001, much the same principles of preventive war supremacy had been enunci-
ated in the past by Dean Acheson in 1963 (Barsamian 2003) and by George
Kennan in 1948. Kennan noted that “we have about 60 percent of the world’s
wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. Our real task in the coming period
will be to maintain this position of disparity” (Gwyn 2003). Stromberg (2002)
noted that by the late nineteenth century, US leaders had “asserted a non-
negotiable right of the US government to be “secure.” US planning in 1943–4 for
the post-war period determined that future US defense would require effective
control of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and that it could not allow rival
power to control the Eurasian land mass.
US hegemony is not simply about political or military hegemony nor even pri-
marily about these things. It is about economic hegemony and the US assertion to
its right to impose capitalism worldwide. Though terms such as “democracy” have
been frequently employed (as in William Kristol and Robert Kagan’s 1996 call for
a US “benevolent world hegemony”), it is “capitalism” that best explains the
intensification of US overseas interventions since 1990. US supremacy also
requires privileged access to the key resources on which its version of capitalism
depends, and for the past one hundred years or more this has included access to
cheap sources of oil. Western media typically fail to identify the relationship
between the wars in which the US engages and this metanarrative of US
supremacy. Most media coverage of the two Gulf Wars of 1990–1 and 2003 not
only failed to place them within the grander narrative of US hegemony but also
within the secondary narrative of oil supremacy. This secondary narrative is one
of at least 30 years’ duration and concerns US control of the Middle East and its
oil—not so much for the fuel, as for the power that control of the fuel bestows
over other regions and nations, notably Europe, Japan, and China.
The National Security Strategy, published in September 2002, claimed that
the attacks of September 11, 2001 had “opened vast, new opportunities” (p. 28).
This statement indicates a further narrative that the mainstream media have
been slow to recognize and prioritize—the narrative of the “neo-conservative”
influence in US foreign policy-making and, above all, what this influence signifies
(a rejection, among other things of Kissinger policies of co-existence). The core
of the neo-conservative movement came together with the formation in 1997 of
the Project for the New American Century. This group, together with the Com-
mittee for the Liberation of Iraq, a PNAC spin-off, and the American Enterprise
Institute, a conservative think tank that rented office space to PNAC, played a
highly significant role in pushing for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and in promoting
the cause of other interventions in the Middle East.
37
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
The metanarrative of US hegemony does not end with the acquisition of terri-
tory, military strength and trading power. Economic phenomena such as deflation,
stagnation, financial looting, over capacity, and massive economic imbalances are
reported by mainstream media as though these were quirky occurrences, either the
side-products of a “bubble” economy or the symptoms of a temporary economic
downswing. According to Beams (2003), they must be related to underlying pres-
sures within the capitalist system, in particular the declining rate of profit in the
period since World War II, a phenomenon that creates huge incentives for the
seizure and/or “privatization” of resources that are locked into national monopo-
lies or similar state-owned productive properties, even where these involve basic
amenities such as water, education, health, or power. The US push for global dom-
ination, argued Beams, is “driven on as it is by the crisis in the very heart of the
profit system, cannot bring peace, much less prosperity, but only deepening attacks
on the world’s people, enforced by military and dictatorial forms of rule.”
War reporting and the propaganda model

Time and again the media align themselves with state propaganda, most intensely
so in times of war. Herman and Chomsky (1988) developed a five-filter propa-
ganda model to explain this phenomenon, and the model fits well with the
sociology of mediated communication: corporate ownership and the profit orienta-
tion of the media; the influence of advertisers on media content; media’s
overwhelming dependence on official sources; media reporting routines that render
them vulnerable to manipulation (e.g. the “beat” system and its slavish depen-
dence on official sources); fear of “flak” by powerful sources; and sharing by many
journalists of official ideologies of anti-communism or pro-global capitalism.
One consideration that Herman and Chomsky eschewed, however, was the
direct purchase of media influence by powerful sources or the “buying out” of indi-
vidual media and/or journalists by government authorities. Herman and Chomsky
wanted to demonstrate that media complicity with propaganda did not require
“conspiracy theory”—not quite the same thing, perhaps, as demonstrating that
conspiracy does not happen. In the case of the media, this stand is peculiar to say
the least, since there is irrefutable evidence of wide-scale CIA penetration of the
media. The mid-1970s Senate (Church Committee) and House (Pike) investiga-
tions of the CIA exposed covert penetration of the media. The CIA published
hundreds of books whose purpose was to undermine the Soviet Union and com-
munism. Some were based on manufactured evidence. The agency owned
dozens of newspapers and magazines worldwide. Carl Bernstein, of “Watergate”
repute, wrote an article in 1977 revealing that over 400 US journalists had been
employed by the CIA, ranging from freelancers to CIA officers working under
deep cover. Journalists’ support for the CIA ranged from intelligence gathering
to serving as go-betweens with spies. Nearly every major US news organization
had been penetrated, usually with the cooperation of top management. The
Church Committee’s final report had called upon the intelligence community to
38
refrain from the use of journalists. In fact, the CIA merely curtailed the practice
(Houghton 1996). The Reagan administration had no qualms about returning to
old habits and included an illegal CIA-administered domestic propaganda war
among covert operations in central America. A CIA memo quoted by Cockburn
and St Clair (1999: 32) explained that the agency maintained “relationships with
reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network”
and that in many instances “we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change,
hold or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security
interests or jeopardized sources or methods.” This was confirmed by the Guardian
newspaper in 1991 (quoted by Pilger 1998: 496), whose correspondent Richard
Norton-Taylor disclosed that some 500 prominent Britons were paid by the CIA
through the corrupt, now defunct, Bank of Commerce and Credit International,
including 90 journalists, many of whom were in “senior positions.” Nor was it
likely that such corruption would be reserved for non-US journalists. In 1996, the
Council on Foreign Relations suggested that the CIA be freed from some policy
constraints on covert operations, such as the use of journalists and clergy as cover.
CIA Director John Deutch argued that American journalists “should feel a civic
responsibility to step outside their role as journalists” (Cockburn and St Clair
1999: 90). A 1997 law, the Intelligence Authorization Act, actually permitted
reinstatement of the practice, subject to presidential approval; in any case, the
CIA had reserved the right to use the practice, noting, as Deutch stated before
Congress, that it already had the power to use US reporters as spies. Following the
mid-1970s, furthermore, many propaganda functions were transferred by the CIA
and Congress to privately funded organizations, through conduits such as the Ford
Foundation and similar bodies; examples included The Asia Foundation, Congress
for Cultural Freedom, and the National Endowment for Democracy (Brandt
1997), and many of these finance supposedly free media operations. Elsewhere
(Boyd-Barrett, forthcoming), I explore the implications of such penetration for
war reporting in Iraq of 2003 and other conflicts.
Conclusion
My purpose here has been to dissect the limitations of war-reporting-as-genre. My
examples are intended to demonstrate that with respect to some of the most
important international conflicts in the past half century or more, the media’s
reporting of war has been almost guaranteed to misinform and obfuscate. Herman
and Chomsky’s acclaimed “propaganda model,” which helps account for media
complicity with propaganda, does not sufficiently address evidence of direct state
penetration and the covert control of supposedly independent, privately-owned
media, a phenomenon that may provide additional explanation for the media’s
continued adherence to a patently faulty genre. For the media have typically
failed on numerous counts: to probe stated proximate causes of conflict, to prise
out deep-level causes, to avoid complicity with state propaganda machinery, to
follow and make accurate sense of strategic changes in the courses of war, and to
39
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
fully determine the factors explaining the ending of wars, and the aftermaths and
other implications of war. On each of these counts, war reporting remains in the
service of propagandistic purposes.
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2
INFO RMATION WARFARE IN AN
AGE OF HYPER-MILITARISM
Richard Keeble
The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spread

inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths . . . in one
day than could have formerly been done in a century.
Karl Marx 1871
There was no war in the Gulf in 2003. Rather, a myth of heroic, spectacular war-
fare was manufactured, in large part, as a desperate measure to help provide a
raison d’être for the (increasingly out-of-control) military industrial complexes in
the US and UK—and to hide the reality of a rout of a hopelessly overwhelmed
“enemy” army. The links between mainstream journalists and the intelligence
services are crucial factors in the manufacture of the myth. But it is not essen-
tially a massive elite conspiracy. Rather, the myth’s origins lie deep within
complex military, historical, ideological, and political forces which it is crucial to
identify. Moreover, the manufacture of the “war” myth has profound implica-
tions for any study of the political and military origins of the conflict and press
representations.
The war problematic

The US/UK invasion was supposedly over Iraq’s WMD—yet none were ever
found. US/UK jets had been bombing Iraqi targets regularly since the end of the
1991 conflict so there was no clear start to the conflict. And with the president of
the defeated state melting away into thin air there was no clear end. Casualties
on both sides mounted as hostilities continued after the end of the so-called war.
Thus the bombing of Baghdad on March 20 became the manufactured “start” of
the “war” narrative; and there were two contrived endings: the symbolic toppling
of the Saddam statue before the world’s media on April 9 and the statement by
President Bush before a gathering of US troops on May 1 that the “major combat
operations” were over.
The “greatest battles since World War II” were predicted and celebrated in the
press, just as during the 1991 Gulf conflict. But again there was no real warfare:
43
RICHARD KEEBLE
no credible enemy. In a matter of days the world’s mightiest military power

inevitably crushed a ragtag army of conscripts and no-hopers. As defence expert
John Keegan (2003) commented in the Daily Telegraph of April 8: “In truth,
there has been almost no check to the unimpeded onrush of the coalition, par-
ticularly the dramatic American advance to Baghdad: nor have there been any
major battles. This has been a collapse, not a war.” Agence France-Presse (AFP)
photographer Cris Reeves, with the US marines, saw hardly any action at all. “It
was like two weeks of camping for me with 20-year-old marines. I was 48 so I was
exhausted” (Guillot 2003).
War is about killing. We know precisely how many Americans and British sol-
diers died. Some 115 US troops were killed in combat and 23 in accidents and
so-called friendly-fire incidents (though from May 1 to November 1, 2003 the toll
was 221 as the “war” dragged on); 19 British troops died in combat with 25 killed
in “non-hostile situations” (Beaumont and Graham 2003). All of these casualties
were profiled and listed in “rolls of honour” in the mainstream press (Epstein
2003). According to John Pilger (2003), as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians were
killed during the invasion—with thousands more injured. But the precise figure
of how many thousands of Iraqis perished, were maimed, or psychologically dam-
aged (in the lead-up to the invasion, during the invasion, and in the aftermath)
we will never know. So silence shrouds the essential horror.
The war’s most heroic story, the saving of Private Jessica Lynch, turned out to
be a completely manufactured drama (Kampfner 2003) while a Sky News “exclu-
sive” about a cruise missile launch from a Royal Navy submarine proved to be a
hoax. The outrageous victory claims of the Iraqi minister of information,
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (dubbed “Comical Ali” by the Western media), as
US troops captured Baghdad airport were only matched, given the scale of the
slaughter, by the US/UK’s fantastic claims over their supposedly precise weapons
(Mayrhofer 2003).
The controversial comment of the French postmodern theorist, Jean Bau-
drillard (1991), about the 1991 Gulf conflict—“there was no war”—appears
equally relevant to the 2003 conflict. The mainstream media, in effect, manufac-
tured the myth of war. Jack Lule (2002: 277) argued that myth is best understood
as “a societal story that expresses prevailing ideas, ideologies, values and belief.”
Accordingly, a tidy narrative of quick and relatively easy “warfare” (built around
myths of national glory, macho heroism, monstrous villainy and “precision
weaponry”) was manufactured in the British mainstream press while the reality
was an illegal, unnecessary assertion of brute force (Mailer 2003).
Militarism “out of control”

The war myth emerges from the fact that the force deployed by the US/UK bears
no relation to the threat posed. The US and UK are essentially fighting phantoms
of their own making: thus the threats are grossly exaggerated, fictionalized. The
US budget plans for 2004 incorporate defence spending of more than $400 bil-
44
I N F O R M AT I O N WA R F A R E I N A N A G E O F H Y P E R - M I L I TA R I S M
lion (alongside a record White House deficit of $455 billion)—and that does not
include the extra billions expected for the occupation of Iraq. This represents
more than all the military spending of the rest of the world and more than twice
the spending of the next 15 of the world’s powers. Moreover, the US has military
bases in three-quarters of the countries of the world and 31 percent of all wealth.
Robert Harvey talks of the “United States of the World” (2003: 13–36). This is a
military colossus (backed by the UK) of a kind never before seen since the
Roman empire—and it is running out of control. As the late historian,
E.P. Thompson (1982), argued, there is a technological imperative driving the
US and UK toward warfare and testing new military systems.
The boom in military spending, begun during the Korean War years of the
1950s, continued relentlessly during the Cold War. By 1990, more than 30,000
US companies were engaged in military production, roughly 3,275,000 jobs were
in the defense industries and 70 percent of all money spent on research and
development was directed at defense work (Drucker 1993: 126). With the demise
of the Soviet Union, the United States became desperate in its search for new
enemies (Keeble 1997). Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); Panama (1989); Iraq
(1991, 1993, 1998 and 2003); Somalia (1992–3); Serbia (1999) (Hammond and
Herman 2000); and Afghanistan (2001) were all puny powers rapidly crushed by
the overwhelming firepower of the American colossus in a series of manufactured,
media-hyped militarist adventures (Webster 2003).
In the UK, the arms industry is worth more than £5 billion a year, amounting
to 20 percent of global weapons sales. It employs up to 150,000 people, the UK
standing as the world’s second largest manufacturer after the US with 32 percent
of the market. Yet arms deals remain remote from public scrutiny, being run by
the Defence Export Services Organization, “a secretive group within the Ministry
of Defence, controlled by the arms companies themselves and with a history of
actively conniving at bribery” (Leigh 2003) .
Thus the US/UK responses to the September 11 attacks, with the launch of
the endless “war on terrorism,” the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
threats to the “rogue” states, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, are not distinctly new
strategies but accelerating long-standing strategies of military imperial adventur-
ism (Curtis 2003a, 2003b). Al-Qaeda, blamed for the September 11 atrocities
and a series of later attacks on Western interests, is a shadowy, elusive grouping
against whom traditional, war fighting strategies (involving major battle con-
frontations) are inappropriate. And so the US/UK is left manufacturing a
spectacle of traditional “warfare.” As US novelist Don DeLillo commented: “I’m
almost prepared to believe that the secret drive behind our eagerness to enter this
war is technology itself—that has a will to be realized. And that the administra-
tion is essentially a Cold War administration looking for a clearly defined enemy
which was not the case after September 11. Now there is a territorial entity with
borders and soldiers in uniform.”1
Moreover, given the integration of the media industries’ interests with those
of the military industrial complex and the importance of the media’s role in
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RICHARD KEEBLE
supporting the state’s militarism, it is worth identifying the media-military-

industrial complex as another factor behind the manufacture of the “war” myth
(Keeble 1997: 26; McChesney 2002).
Secrecy feeds the myth-making

Secrecy also feeds the myth-making. Alongside the “democratic” state in both the
US and UK there exists a secret and highly centralized state occupied by the mas-
sively over-resourced intelligence and security services (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ,
the Cheltenham-based signals spying centre), secret armies, and undercover
police units. Since the 1980s a raft of legislation, such as the Official Secrets Act,
the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and
Security Act 2001, has reinforced their growing powers (Morgan 2003). Mark
Almond (2003), lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford, has high-
lighted the extent to which intelligence has reached into the heart of the Blair
government: “More than any predecessor, Blair has relied on a kitchen cabinet in
Downing Street but one made up of a cabal of diplomats and intelligence officials
rather than ambitious, if unelected party apparatchiks. Hence the focus on global-
ization rather than domestic issues. Blair has liberated British politics from the
influence of politicians.” Professor David Beetham (2003) has similarly high-
lighted the “secret, warfare” state which has totally undermined the democratic
system.
But examining the activities of the intelligence services remains incredibly dif-
ficult. A few researchers and journalists—such as Stephen Dorril (2000), author
of a seminal history of MI6, David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor of the
Guardian, Martin Bright and Nick Cohen of the Observer, Paul Lashmar and
Chris Blackhurst, of the Independent, freelance Phillip Knightley, and Robin
Ramsay, editor of the alternative journal, Lobster, have managed to penetrate the
fog that envelops all the work of the spooks—but only slightly.
Spooks and hacks: close encounters of a strange kind

While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (vari-
ously represented in the press as “intelligence,” “security,” “Whitehall,” or “Home
Office” sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it
looks to be enormous. As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Guardian, com-
mented: “Most tabloid newspapers—or even newspapers in general—are
playthings of MI5.”2 Bloch and Fitzgerald (1983: 134–41) report the editor of
“one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” as believing that more than half its
foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. In 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor
revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the
now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journal-
ists (Pilger 1998: 496).
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay (1991:
46
x–xi) gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as
the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and
Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear
power industry and its satellite ministries, together with a network of senior civil
servants. As “satellites” of the secret state, their list included “agents of influence
in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of offi-
cial leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a
knighthood at the end of their career.”
Following the passing of the 1989 Security Service Act, links between the
media and MI5 and MI6 grew closer, according to James Adams (1994: 94–8).
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, even
claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street
newspaper.3
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the “war” and the
death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the
spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his
sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had
“sexed up” a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq. The Hutton inquiry, its every
twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal
media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and
Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those
facts will be forever secret. Moreover while the Gilligan affair might appear to
have reinforced the liberal notion of adversarial state–media relations, in fact, as
Rogers (1997: 64) argued, “this focus obscures the extent to which the media
have actually supported and colluded with the secret state.” Significantly, the
broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists’ links with the intel-
ligence services was ignored by the inquiry.
Yet during the Hutton period, a myth emerged that the 2003 invasion of Iraq
was the first conflict to be justified on (dodgy) evidence supplied by the intelli-
gence services. Yet even during the Vietnam conflict, intelligence on the strength
of the Vietcong was faked to make the case for war more plausible (Ramsay
2003). Similarly, the US attack on Libya in 1986—deliberately aimed to effect
“regime change” by assassinating President Gaddafi—was justified by President
Reagan on dubious intelligence (dutifully reported in the mainstream media) of
Libyan responsibility for the bombing of a disco in West Berlin, frequented by US
servicemen. Intelligence misinformation before the 1991 Gulf massacres con-
stantly “over-sexed” Iraq’s alleged nuclear capability since opinion polls in the
States showed fears of President Saddam Hussein as a “nuclear monster” were
most likely to win support for the military option (Reich 2002). Even during the
1991 Iraqi conflict much of the reporting was based on intelligence-driven dis-
information. For instance, while Iraqi soldiers were deserting in droves and
succumbing to one massacre after another, all the British media highlighted intel-
ligence predictions of the “largest ground battle since the Second World War.”
Images of enormous berms, sophisticated Iraqi defences and trenches of burning
47
RICHARD KEEBLE
oil filled the media. But in the end there was nothing more than a 100-hour rout.
Colin Powell, in his account of the 1991 war, estimated that 250,000 Iraqi sol-
diers were eliminated (Powell 1995).
Similarly since the September 11 atrocities in the United States, the London-
based mainstream media have been awash with intelligence-inspired leaks
stressing the dangers of terrorist attacks in Britain. Even the Independent, most
critical of the US/UK rush to military action, gave credibility to dubious “intelli-
gence” sources. On September 16, 2001, for instance, Lashmar and Blackhurst
reported that at least three terrorist cells linked to Osama bin Laden were at large
in Britain. An “intelligence source” was quoted as saying: “There is no reason
why what happened in America couldn’t happen in Britain or any European
country.” This is terrifying stuff. But how much is fiction? (Bright 2002). Similarly
in September 2002 the Daily Express was awash in intelligence-inspired scare sto-
ries. “Nuclear attack in just months” it thundered on September 9; “Anthrax
threat on our streets: Britain on alert for Saddam suicide squads” it reported the
next day. A climate of fear is manufactured allowing the apparatus of the national
security state (surveillance cameras, email snooping, arrest without trials, and
demonization of asylum seekers) to expand. On September 15, 2002, drawing on
intelligence disinformation linking Iraq to nuclear weapons, the Sunday Express
editorialized: “War brings evil but we believe the country must not be frightened
from doing what we pray will save the world from the greater evil of nuclear
bombs. We see no alternative but to help demolish the Iraqi regime.”
On March 18, 2003, before the major air assault on Baghdad began, the Sun
typically reported: “According to intelligence reports Republican Guard units
have been equipped with chemical warfare shells to make a desperate last stand
south of Baghdad. A source said: ‘They clearly have given some chemical capabil-
ity to some forces.’” On April 2 the Sun “revealed” that Saddam Hussein had
issued a coded chemical attack on US/UK troops. Coalition intelligence chiefs, it
reported, interpreted a reference to “catching breath” in a speech by Saddam
Hussein “as a signal for lethal chemicals or nerve gas to be unleashed against US
forces massing south west of Baghdad.” There were similar reports throughout the
mainstream press.
Dodgy dossiers and the epistemological implications

The problem with intelligence is that it can never be double-checked. By defini-
tion, it remains secret and exclusive. It could all be fiction (and often is). All too
often journalists are seduced by the attractions of secret exclusive information.
When politicians further doctor the evidence from the intelligence services, as
appears to have happened before the Iraqi conflict, for their own warmongering
purposes (with the creation of a new intelligence agency, the Office of Special
Plans, by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to manufacture evidence of
Iraqi possession of WMD) we have entered the realm of hyper myth.
As Dorril (2003: 4) commented:
48
The reality is that intelligence is the area in which ministers, and the
MI6 info ops staff behind them can say anything they like and get away
with it. Intelligence with its psychological invite to a secret world and
with its unique avoidance of verification, is the ideal means for flattering
and deceiving journalists.
The former foreign secretary, Lord Howe, told the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry:
“In my early days I was naïve enough to get excited about intelligence reports.
Many look, at first sight, to be important and interesting and significant and then
when we check them they are not even straws in the wind. They are cornflakes in
the wind” (Norton-Taylor 2003).
Another problem with intelligence is that anyone attempting to highlight its
significance is accused of lacking academic rigour and promoting “conspiracy
theory.” Certainly underlying the myth of “warfare” lie complex cultural, military,
and ideological forces. But given the close links between politicians, journalists,
and the intelligence services some conspiratorial elements have to be acknowl-
edged to be behind mainstream media’s coverage of the Iraqi crisis.
With the emphasis on intelligence, the focus of journalism shifts from objective,
verifiable “facts” to myth: in effect, there is a crucial epistemological shift. As Gen-
eral Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, admitted: “Intelligence
doesn’t mean something is true. You know, it’s your best estimate of the situation.
It doesn’t mean it’s a fact. I mean, that’s not what intelligence is” (Stephen 2003).
Similarly, the historian Timothy Garton Ash stressed: “The trend in journalism as
in politics, and probably now in the political use of intelligence, is away from the
facts and toward a neo-Orwellian world of manufactured reality” (2003). The
assumption of Iraq possessing WMD was based entirely on unverifiable intelli-
gence reports as is so much of the reporting of the “war on terror.”
The crucial role of embedded journalists in the

manufacture of the “war” myth
Most of US/UK imperialism advances essentially in secret. Both countries have
deployed forces virtually every year since 1945—most of them away from the
glare of the media (Peak 1992). But at various moments the US/UK chooses to
fight overt, manufactured “wars.” We, the viewers and readers, have to see the
spectacle. It has to appear “real.” During the first Gulf “war,” the pooling system
was used to keep correspondents away from the action (Keeble 1997: 109–26;
McLaughlin 2002: 88–93). And since most of the action was conducted over the
42 days from the air, with journalists denied access to planes, the reality of the
horror was kept secret.
In contrast, during the 2003 conflict, journalists were given remarkable access
to the “frontlines.” And those frontline images and reports from journalists who
were clearly risking their lives, aimed to seduce the viewer/reader with their fac-
ticity; the correspondents were amazed at their “objectivity.” Yet beyond the view
49
RICHARD KEEBLE
of the camera and the journalist’s eye-witness, with the war unproblematized, the
essential simulated, mythical nature of the conflict lay all the more subtly and
effectively hidden. Moreover, military censorship regimes always serve essentially
symbolic purposes—expressing the arbitrary power of the army over the conduct
and representation of “war.”
Significantly defence minister Geoff Hoon claimed: “I think the coverage . . . is
more graphic, more real than any other coverage we have ever seen of a conflict.”
Most of the critical mainstream coverage highlighted the information overload.
But, as David Miller (2003) commented: “It is certainly true to say that it is new
to see footage of war so up-close but it is a key part of the propaganda war to claim
that this makes it ‘real.’”
Some 600 US and 128 UK journalists, including journalists from the Western
Daily Press, Scotsman, Manchester Evening News, Ipswich Evening Star and Eastern
Daily Press, and one from the music network MTV, were “embedded” with military
units. According to Phillip Knightley (2003): “The idea was copied from the
British system in World War I when six correspondents embedded with the army
on the Western front produced the worst reporting of just about any war and were
all knighted for their services. One of them, Sir Phillip Gibbs, had the honesty,
when the war was over, to write: ‘We identified ourselves absolutely with the
armies in the field.’ The modern embeds, too, soon lost all distinction between war-
rior and correspondent and wrote and talked about ‘we’ with boring repetition.”
As the Times media commentator, Brian MacArthur, reported (2003):
“Embeds inevitably became adjuncts to the forces.” Audrey Gillan, with the
Household Cavalry for the Guardian, was one of the few to accuse the military of
censorship. She reported that soldiers complained of being like mushrooms—
kept in the dark with you know what shovelled on top of them—but she could
not use this phrase for fear of upsetting the brigade HQ.
Some 5,000 journalists were in the Gulf region to cover the hostilities. Two
thousand were in Kuwait and on ships with the US and UK naval task forces in
the Arabian Gulf; 290 were in Baghdad; 900 in northern Iraq with Kurdish fight-
ers: the rest were in Jordan, Iran, Bahrain, and at the Allied Central Command in
Doha, Qatar (Milmo 2003). Here there was little consistent challenge to the
dominant military agenda. On one occasion New York magazine writer Michael
Wolff (2003) dared to break ranks and ask the provocative questions: “Why are
we here? Why should we stay? What’s the value of what we’re learning at this
million-dollar press center?” He was soon to pay the price for his daring. Fox TV
attacked him for lacking patriotism and after right-wing commentator Rush Lim-
baugh gave out his email address, in one day Wolff received 3,000 hate messages.
Unprecedented access to the “front lines” was the carrot, but the stick was
always on hand. Fifteen non-Iraqi journalists were killed, two went missing and
many unilateral non-embeds were intimidated by the military. Had there been the
same death rate for journalists during the Vietnam war, there would have been
3,000 killed.4 As John Donvan (2003) argued, “coalition forces saw unilaterals as
having no business on their battlefield.” Unilateral Terry Lloyd, of ITN, was killed
50
by marines who fired at his car; Reuters camera operator Taras Protsyuk and José
Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television channel Telecino, died after an
American tank fired at the fifteenth floor of the Palestine hotel in Baghdad while
Tarek Ayoub, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, died after a US jet bombed the chan-
nel’s Baghdad office. Two journalists working for RTP Portuguese television, Luis
Castro and Victor Silva, were held for four days, had their equipment, vehicle, and
video tapes confiscated and were then escorted out of Iraq by the 101st Airborne
Division. How many Iraqi journalists perished in the slaughters we will never
know. For most of the Western mainstream media they are non-people.
The nature of the Fleet Street consensus

For the 1991 conflict all Fleet Street newspapers backed the military response
together with 95 percent of columnists. For the 1993 and 1998 attacks on Iraq
the consensus fractured with the Guardian, Independent, and Express coming out
against the attacks. Then for the NATO attacks on Serbia in 1999 virtually all of
Fleet Street backed the action, even calling for the deployment of ground troops
(which not even the generals dared adopt as policy). There was one exception—
the Independent on Sunday—and its editor, Kim Fletcher, left the paper just weeks
after the end of the conflict. But there was far more debate among columnists. A
survey I conducted showed 33 out of 99 prominent columnists opposed military
action against Serbia. For the attacks on Afghanistan and the toppling of the Tal-
iban, the whole of Fleet Street backed the action—but again there was a
wide-ranging debate among columnists and letter writers (Keeble 2001).
In 2003, with significant opposition to the rush to war being expressed by
politicians, lawyers, intelligence agents, celebrities, religious leaders, charities,
and human rights campaigners—together with massive street protests—both
nationally and internationally, the breakdown in Fleet Street’s consensus was
inevitable. Yet still for the invasion of Iraq, the majority of Fleet Street backed
the action (though columnists and letter writers were divided). The Independents
(the daily and Sunday), carrying prominently the dissident views of foreign corre-
spondent Robert Fisk, were the most hostile. Following the massive global street
protests on February 15, the Independent on Sunday editorialized: “Millions show
this is a war that mustn’t happen.”
The Guardian did not criticize military action on principle but opposed the
US/UK rush to war and promoted a wide range of critical opinions. The Mirrors
were also “anti” in the run up to the conflict (perhaps more for marketing reasons
since the Murdoch press was always going to be firmly for the invasion) with the
veteran dissident campaigning journalists John Pilger and Paul Foot given promi-
nent coverage. But then, after editor-in-chief Piers Morgan claimed his papers’
stance attracted thousands of protesting letters from readers, their opposition
softened. And the Mails managed to stand on the fence mixing both criticism of
the rush to military action with fervent patriotic support for the troops during the
conflict.
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RICHARD KEEBLE
The demonization of “Saddam”

The media’s focus on the “monstrous,” “evil,” global power of Saddam Hussein
has since 1990 been an essential ingredient of the propaganda strategy to manu-
facture the credible enemy. The Iraqi president has clearly been an appalling
dictator—as critics have been stressing since the 1970s (though the CIA played
significant roles in the two coups that brought Hussein’s Ba’athists to power in
1963 and 1968). But in the 1980s, when Iraq was closely allied to the West
during its eight-year war with Iran, Fleet Street’s coverage of Hussein was rare and
generally positive. Even the reporting of the chemical bombing of Kurds in Hal-
abja on March 16, 1988 was notable for its restraint. And the Iranians, not
“Saddam,” were blamed (Casey 2003).
The demonization of “new Hitler,” “madman,” “monster” Saddam, the “butcher
of Baghdad” only began in earnest following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in
August 1990. And this hyper-personalization of the conflict has remained a con-
stant feature of the press coverage ever since—even in newspapers critical of the
US attacks of 1993, 1996, 1998, and 2003. It serves to simplify an enormously
complex history and direct all blame at one man.
During the 1991 massacres, Fleet Street constantly focused on Iraq’s army as
being “1 million-strong,” the “fourth largest in the world,” “full of battle hardened
fanatics” following the 1980–8 war with Iran. In reality, the Iraqi army was war-
weary, full of bare-footed conscripts desperate to surrender, quickly destroyed in a
massive 42-day assault. In this context, the stress on “global terrorist” Saddam in
the propaganda was crucial in the manufacture of the credible enemy (Keeble
1998).
By 2003, Iraq was a completely dysfunctional state, destroyed following more
than a decade of UN sanctions and constant weekly bombings by the US/UK—
hardly covered in the mainstream media—and with a profoundly unpopular
regime. Thus, the focus on the demonized personality of “Saddam” throughout
the media was all the more important in the creation of the war myth. On
March 19, as Iraqis prepared to defend Baghdad, the Sun reported on Saddam
Hussein: “Fiend to unleash poisons.” Another report described him as a “mon-
ster.” The following day the Sun reported Lt Tim Collins calling for “Our boys to
‘rock the world’ of Saddam’s evil diehards.” Saddam was planning to poison Iraq’s
water system “as a last act of savagery.” In the Daily Star of March 28, the Iraqi
president was described as “an evil dictator,” a “brutal tyrant” while an unnamed
military source is quoted as saying: “There appear no depths to which Hussein
will not stoop.” As the US troops approached Baghdad, on April 4, the Mirror
framed its coverage entirely around the personality of “tyrant” Saddam. “What
will he do?” asked its front page headline. “As US troops reach Baghdad, the
world waits for Saddam to play his final, despotic card.” Significantly, the Mail’s
logo for its coverage of the conflict was “War on Saddam.” On March 30, the
Sunday Telegraph editorialized, highlighting his unique barbarism:
52
Saddam’s record means that the coalition forces must be ready for any-
thing. This, after all, is a dictator who planned during the last Gulf War
to chain American PoWs to the front of his tanks; a murderer who—
uniquely in the history of depravity—has turned chemical weapons on
his own people.
On March 20, Julian Borger, in the Guardian, grappled with the contradictions.
On the one hand, he reported: “In terms of technology and sheer might, this
coming conflict is likely to be one of the most unequal in history.” Yet, to reaffirm
the myth of war, there is always the Saddam demonization card to play. So Borger
continued: “But the Iraqi leader’s proven readiness to embrace desperate and
unconventional measures makes him potentially a far more dangerous foe than
any the Pentagon has taken on in recent years.”
Significantly, the Observer, in outlining its support for military action in its
leader of January 19, framed its entire argument around the demonized personal-
ity of “Saddam.” First it referred to the “nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime and
the call by many Iraqi exiles and dissidents for him to be overthrown.” The war
was not about oil. “For the second motive for displacing Saddam is the danger he
poses to the wider world.” And it concluded: “If Saddam does not yield military
action may eventually be the least awful necessity for Iraq.”
The manufacture of the precise, clean, humanitarian war

Central to the manufacture of the war myth is its representation as clean, precise,
and humanitarian. All the US/UK overt major military interventions since Viet-
nam, up to 2003 were largely risk free, taking less than 1,000 US troops’ lives. All
resulted in appalling civilian and enemy soldier casualties. Yet the propaganda—
in Orwellian style—has constantly stressed the precision of the weapons and
claimed the raids were for peaceful purposes: to introduce democracy and free-
dom. Casualty figures were always covered up (or dubbed in the militaryspeak
“collateral damage”). According to Cummings (1992: 121) the 1991 conflict
appeared not as “blood and guts spilled in living colour on the living room rug”
but through a “radically distanced, technically controlled eminently ‘cool’ post-
modern optic.” Kellner (1992: 386) described it ironically as “the perfect war.”
During the “humanitarian” NATO attacks on Serbia in 1999, hundreds of civil-
ians were killed (Chomsky 1999; Hammond 2000). A leaked government report
later revealed that only 40 percent of RAF bombs hit their targets while the hit-
rate for the high explosive, 1,000 lb bomb was just three out of 150, or 2 percent
(Plavsic 2000).
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the press constantly reaffirmed this same pro-
paganda stress on precision, yet reached new heights of exaggeration. As the Sun
of March 20 reported beneath the headline: “The first ‘clean’ war”: “A senior
defence source said last night: ‘Great attention to precision-guided weapons
means we could have a war with zero casualties. We are a lot closer toward that
53
RICHARD KEEBLE
ideal. We may be entering an era where it is possible to prosecute a humanitarian

war.’” In effect, could not the military’s rhetoric about precision and smart
weapons have betrayed its ultimate ambition—to destroy war itself?
Even the Guardian, one of the most critical of the US/UK rush to invade Iraq,
reported on March 19: “The last Gulf War may have marked the introduction of
space age weapons—from laser-guided bombs to cruise missiles smart enough to
know which set of Baghdad traffic lights to turn left at—but as collateral damage
figures later proved, the technologies were still largely in their infancy.”
Following the Ameriyya shelter bombing by an American Stealth jet during
the Gulf massacres of 1991 (when hundreds of Iraqi women and children per-
ished) most of Fleet Street blamed “Saddam,” described it as a propaganda coup
for the Iraqi leader or claimed it was inevitable (Keeble 1997: 166–72). All of this
was part of a strategy to deflect blame for the atrocity away from its perpetrators.
Similar strategies appeared during the 2003 invasion. For instance, after a bomb
fell on a Baghdad market on March 26 most of Fleet Street followed the military
agenda and questioned whether the Iraqis (incredibly) had fired the missile. In
the Mail of March 27, the headline focused on “the propaganda coup Saddam had
hoped for” while correspondent Ross Benton reported: “It was the first major inci-
dent of ‘collateral damage’ since the war began but allied officials said they could
not confirm that the bombs were dropped by US or British warplanes.” The Sun
on the same day headlined “Who’s to blame?” and reported: “If the market blasts
were caused by off-target Allied bombs, it will be a propaganda gift to Saddam.”
The Guardian, alongside a moving eye-witness account by Suzanne Goldenberg
of the aftermath of the bombings, highlighted US “confusion over blame for
raid.” But the Mirror, fiercely anti-war at the time, discounted US denials and
condemned it as “the worst civilian outrage since the war began a week ago.” No
paper listed nor profiled the 14 Iraqis reported killed: they were the nameless vic-
tims of the carnage.
Even in those newspapers critical of the US/UK invasion, the dominant
images reflected the military agenda of marginalizing the reality of the slaughter.
For instance, a special issue of the Independent Review of April 9, 2003 was
devoted to images from the conflict. But out of 14 photographs, just three focused
on Iraqi casualties while another showed blurred images of bodies on a road after
a “friendly fire” attack on a convoy of US and Kurdish forces. The pro-Blair
Times’ section 2 issue of April 10 carried 49 images: out of these just five showed
casualties (but pictures of 24 British soldiers killed and the coffins of another six
were also carried). Similarly the Sun’s “24 page souvenir” of April 15 displayed 43
images—all of them predictably celebrating US/UK military heroics, with no
casualties shown and Iraqis almost invisible. Again pictures of “the brave men
who died for freedom” were carried. The Observer of April 13 carried an eight-
page “war in pictures” supplement: out of 50 images, just six focused on casualties.
The unnamed dead were always Iraqi.
54
The manufacture of heroism in a post-heroic age

Modern war-fighting strategies have virtually eliminated the possibilities of heroic
action. Technology has taken the place of men (and the occasional woman). Sol-
diers now largely press buttons and watch the consequences on a video.
Electronics and space-based technologies are all-important. Luckham com-
mented (1984: 2): “We are now entering a stage in which the manufacture of
warfare is overtaking man and expropriating his culture. Automated warfare and
the nuclear bomb have deprived man of his capacity to strive for glory, recogni-
tion or safety through combat.”
Slaughtering thousands of conscripts, soldiers, and civilians in appalling mas-
sacres is hardly heroic. Yet society desperately needs its heroes. And so the
spectacular “war” provides the perfect theater for the manufacture of heroism.
Thus, the patriotic pops are full of celebrations of “Our boys” and their heroic
deeds. Typically, the Sun’s leader of March 21 highlighted Prime Minister Tony
Blair’s “sombre and emotive” broadcast hailing the “heroism of Our boys and
girls.” On March 24, it listed the 31 US and British soldiers killed under the
headline: “How the tragic heroes perished.”
During the 1991 Gulf massacres there was virtually no hand-to-hand combat,
and so in an attempt to revive the heroic images of World War II, the press con-
stantly used cartoon representations and photographs of troops in training. In
2003, no such devices were necessary. The “frontline” shots were enough to pro-
mote the myth of “real” battle.
The most blatant manufacture of heroism surrounded the exploits of Private
Jessica Lynch which gripped the world’s media on April 3, 2003. Under the
strapline, “An incredible story of heroism as teenage PoW snatched back,” the
Sun reported on the “daring midnight raid.” “Army supply clerk Jessica, 19, was
plucked to safety by US special forces from a hospital used as a base by Saddam
Hussein’s death squads.” And it went on to quote Brigadier General Vince
Brooks: “America doesn’t leave its heroes behind. Never has, never will.” Along
with the rest of the mainstream media, the Guardian framed its coverage around
the title of the Hollywood blockbuster Saving Private Ryan. Under the headline
“Saving Private Lynch: how special forces rescued captured colleague,” it reported
on the “daring midnight raid.” But in the end, all was found to be fiction. There
was no gun battle—simply because there were no Iraqi soldiers in the hospital at
the time, as Kampfner (2003) revealed in the Guardian.
Given the prominence of media hype in current conflicts it is inevitable that a
few critical journalists will deconstruct certain events and expose their manufac-
tured dimension. Even the Sun, on April 15, exposed the story of the heroic “Stay
lucky” soldier pictured wearing a helmet riddled with bullet holes as a prank. But
focusing on individual hoaxes is very different from highlighting the whole “war”
as a construct.
55
RICHARD KEEBLE
The essential task

A few months before his death in September, Edward Said (2003) identified the
way in which the dominant discourse in the US/UK before the invasion of Iraq
fabricated an “arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an
ersatz model of free market ‘democracy.’” But he concluded with typical opti-
mism: “Critical thought does not submit to commands to join in the ranks
marching against another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash
of civilizations we need to concentrate on the slow-working together of cultures
that overlap, borrow from each other and live together.” Indeed, while US/UK
militarism appears out of control my analysis here argues that it is built on lies,
misinformation, and myth. And by exposing the lies and the myth, by joining
with the global movement for peace and human rights, we can all help put a
brake on the US/UK military juggernaut.
Notes
1 Quoted in “Notes from New York, a profile of DeLillo,” by Duncan Campbell, The
Observer, May 4, 2003.
2 Quoted in Seamus Milne (1994) The Enemy Within: the Secret War Against the Miners,
London: Verso; reprinted by Pan in 1995: 262.
3 Phillip Knightley interviewed London, September 25, 2003.
4 Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN, quoted in Jessica
Hodgson (2003) “Mother of all war journos,” The Observer, November 2.
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58
3
A MO RAL IMAGINATION
The media’s response to the war on terrorism
Susan D. Moeller
Once upon a time there lived a mandarin in China. Sequestered in his palace his
sleep was untroubled, even when a calamity befell a hundred million of his
people. Destruction of that immense multitude held little interest for him; he
snored “with the most profound security.” Then, late one evening his lapdog
nipped him on his littlest finger. The court doctor came to minister to him and
told him that if the injury grew worse over the night, he might well have to
amputate the finger. Oh, how his sleep was disturbed then. The dull pain of the
bite and the greater agony of wondering whether he would have to suffer the loss
of his little finger kept him awake through all the dark hours.
The eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot and the eigh-
teenth-century Scottish political economist Adam Smith both told versions of
this tale of the Chinese mandarin (Smith 1976; Ginzburg 1994). The inherent
drama of the fable is in the mandarin’s complete moral disregard of the value of
the lives of his subjects. Yet, as Diderot and Smith and generations of moral
philosophers since them have explored, there are ways—there must be ways—to
make the lives of distant strangers of value to us.
One plausible manner in which to do so is through what has been called
“enlightened self-interest.” A broader and more long-term understanding of self-
interest, for example, might have influenced that self-centered despot to
comprehend that the deaths of so many of his subjects could not but negatively
affect his own luxurious lifestyle. His sleep might then have been troubled as he
contemplated his future loss of living standards and he might have applied him-
self to figuring out what could best ameliorate the situation. Perhaps among those
possible remedies might have been some that would not just protect his own
resources, but that might prevent future losses of life: the building of a dam, if the
calamity was a catastrophic flood; the institution of mandatory grain reserves, if
the calamity was caused by a plague of locusts.
When contemplating action, noted the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard
Feynman, the core political question is: “Should I do this?” Yet, in order to deter-
mine whether a certain action “should” be taken, Feynman argued that another
59
SUSAN D. MOELLER
question has to first be addressed: “If I do this, what will happen?” The first ques-
tion, “what will happen?” may have an answer that can be arrived at empirically.
The answer may be knowable. In an example that Feynman gives, for instance, it
may be evident that the enactment of a certain economic policy will cause a
depression. But it may not inevitably follow that a depression is something to be
avoided at all costs. The answer to the question “Should I do this?” is a matter of
judgment.
You see, only knowing that it is a depression doesn’t tell you that you do
not want it. You have then to judge whether the feelings of power you
would get from this, whether the importance of the country moving in
this direction is better than the cost to the people who are suffering. Or
maybe there would be some sufferers and not others. And so there must
at the end be some ultimate judgment somewhere along the line as to
what is valuable, whether people are valuable, whether life is valuable.
(Feynman 1998: 44–6)
War reporting is a subset of reporting on international affairs. Many of the con-

cerns that bedevil international coverage are even more problematic when
journalists cover war. Lives are not only perceptibly “valuable” during times of
conflict, as in Feynman’s formulation, but lives are waged and lives are lost
depending on the policies and strategies that are chosen. Ergo, the journalistic
problems of language, of access, of asking the right questions, of not only chal-
lenging the “spin” of the powers-that-be, but contesting the priorities set by those
in power, take on extraordinary significance. This chapter considers how the
post-9/11 Bush administration has used a moral rhetoric to propel its “war on ter-
rorism” policies, especially in Iraq, and how that “morality” has echoed through
the American media.
The moral high ground

US politicians cannot afford to be seen as putting self-interest above concern for
the community. Not for Americans has been the unvarnished self-interest of the
mandarin, however much reality suggests that Americans are no more excep-
tional in the exercise of policy than other nations. “An Iraq invasion without UN
sanction would be a pre-emptive attack by the world’s only superpower,” wrote
the editors of the Los Angeles Times on March 14, 2003 in an editorial headlined
“The right way in Iraq.” “It would probably be successful in the initial military
phase—but at what cost? A pre-emptive strike can be justified if the threat is
imminent and unavoidable. With neither of those conditions proven, a pre-
emptive attack yields the moral high ground. The US would be cast as the global
bully, seeking to arrogate the installation of governments in other lands” (Los
Angeles Times editorial 2003: 14).
The ethos of American policy has been that self-interest may be a driving
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A M O R A L I M A G I N AT I O N
factor in the formation of behavior, but by itself is not sufficient cause for action.
A higher motivation must be claimed—such as President Bush’s “crusade” against
terrorism or his commitment to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” as he called for
in the days after September 11. Values must lie alongside interests. Moral inten-
tion, in other words, is assumed to be essential to Americans’ high regard of
themselves. Philosophers, politicians, and the public alike assume a tie between
public policy and moral obligation.
At any given point in history, however, certain policies which have been
deemed to be moral, in hindsight look less so.1 The impetus for action which
appeared to be concern for others has been revealed to be a mandarinesque self-
interest, with very little of it “enlightened.” During the nineteenth century, for
example, journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote an editorial supporting the annexa-
tion of Texas in the July/August issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic
Review. The article persisted through history, for in it O’Sullivan argued that it is
“the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the
continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great exper-
iment of liberty and federaltive [sic] development of self government entrusted
to us.”2
The doctrine of “manifest destiny” helped generations of Americans rationalize
the institution of policies that were racist at best and genocidal at worst. Yet the
argument for “manifest destiny” was couched in moral language and cited Provi-
dence as the ultimate originator of the doctrine—territorial expansion was not
only inevitable and divinely ordained, but would bring “liberty, civilization and
refinement” to the “masses of mankind.”
Although the phrase “manifest destiny” was coined in the mid-nineteenth
century, the nation—and before that, the colonies—had always thought of itself
as a place apart, not just geographically, but morally. The new world was to be in
the words of John Winthrop in 1630, a “city upon a hill,” and those who lived in
it were to be “blessed” by “the Lord our God . . . in the land whither we go to pos-
sess it.” Those who came to America, and those who have helped to define these
United States have incorporated into their visions a destiny not imitative of the
destinies of other nations or other empires. As O’Sullivan wrote six years before
his “manifest destiny” editorial,
Our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation
and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the
past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire
development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and
national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to
be the great nation of futurity.
(O’Sullivan 1839)
“America,” he argued, “is destined for better deeds.” Here, in an essay that early
laid out his thoughts on “manifest destiny,” we hear not only the call of duty but a
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SUSAN D. MOELLER
religious charge of responsibility. “What friend of human liberty, civilization, and

refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristoc-
racies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed?” he asked.
What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and

injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with
moral horror from the retrospect? . . . We must onward to the fulfillment
of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our orga-
nization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade
and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our
high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and
effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to estab-
lish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable
truth and beneficence of God.
(O’Sullivan 1845)
People of conscience must be morally affronted by the abuses and injustices sanc-
tioned by “monarchies and aristocracies,” dictators, and warlords, O’Sullivan
argued. Americans have a responsibility to protect the oppressed and to enforce
the basic rights of all human beings. But in what cause were these words applied?
Minus the more flowery rhetorical flourishes, this passage could have been
seamlessly included in President George W. Bush’s address to the joint session of
Congress on September 20, 2001, when he outlined “our war on terror.” That war
began, he said,
with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every ter-
rorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated . . . This
is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just
America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight, this is civilization’s fight, this
is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and
freedom.
Bush ended his speech with the same invocation of God that O’Sullivan had made:
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Free-
dom and fear, justice, and cruelty, have always been at war. And we
know that God is not neutral between them. Fellow citizens, we’ll meet
violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and
confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God
grant us wisdom and may he watch over the United States of America.
(US Newswire, September 20, 2001)
Why such language? It offers moral justification. Historian Jackson Lears wrote in
a New York Times opinion:
62
The proposed war against and rebuilding of Iraq has brought the senti-
mental, self-satisfied sense of Providence back into fashion. One might
have supposed that an attack on our country would have rendered
utopian agendas unnecessary—as it did for most Americans during
World War II. But while a war on terrorism may not need Providence to
justify it, a war to transform the Middle East requires a rhetoric as
grandiose as its aims. The providentialist outlook fills the bill: it pro-
motes tunnel vision, discourages debate and reduces diplomacy to
arm-twisting.
(Lears 2003: A25)
The war on terrorism

The Cold War framed the world into an “us” versus “them” arena. Not only rela-
tions with the Soviet Union, but also international affairs in Africa, Asia, and
central America were referenced through the concern that countries in those
regions might be susceptible to communism. The fear of “losing” countries to the
Soviets gave birth to the domino principle and the notion of proxy states—poli-
cies that prompted the American engagement with countries such as Vietnam,
Nicaragua, and Ethiopia.
The meaning of the Cold War went well beyond the James Bond stereotyping
of who were the good guys and the bad guys. The Cold War defined who Ameri-
cans could support and who they could not—anyone who was a friend of the
USSR was no friend of the USA’s. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic
made for some very uncomfortable bedfellows, but it helped immensely in clarify-
ing who Americans should care about, in defining who mattered.
Then the rattling of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, which culminated in the
tumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, changed not only the political landscape in
Europe but the perception of global politics. Entire regions fell off the political
and media radar. Nasty conflicts in out of the way places no longer mattered as
proxy wars; brutal struggles for power were dismissed by both politicians and the
press as internecine tribal or ethnic or religious conflicts without external ramifi-
cations (Moeller 1999: 287). There were few perceived over-arching reasons as
to why outsiders should care about Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, or even
eastern Europe any more. No dominant vision—or even snappy moniker—
appeared to unify what was happening, despite a call by many that
“humanitarianism” compelled engagement. Indeed, there was a general retreat
from international affairs on the part of both the Bush senior and Clinton White
Houses as well as the media.
Then came September 11. “Every nation in every region now has a decision to
make,” said President George W. Bush in his speech on September 20. “Either
you are with us or you are with the terrorists” (US Newswire, September 20,
2001). Within just weeks, Bush’s new “war on terror” frame became the default
test used to discover who were America’s global “friends” and “enemies.” The war
63
SUSAN D. MOELLER
on terrorism became the window through which all international events were
viewed—a situation that emphasized places and events that had (or were pur-
ported to have) connections to “global terrorism,” but that left others that didn’t
neatly fit the terrorism frame out of public view.
Newsrooms scrambled to cover both domestic and foreign terrorist-related
events—a scramble made all the more ungainly because all but a few media out-
lets were woefully understaffed with reporters expert in international affairs, a
consequence of the past years’ closing of overseas bureaus and cutbacks on time
and space devoted to foreign news in order to save money and boost profits.
Understaffing—and the prior undervaluing of international coverage—made it
more difficult for news organizations to cover the assumptions behind the “war on
terror” frame, and parenthetically made it more difficult for them either to nimbly
cover the changing terrorism story (from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, to
anthrax, to the axis of evil, to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, to WMD, etc.), or to
cover foreign stories unrelated to the terrorism arc.
Three months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, on the 60th
anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Bush defined his conception
of terrorism before more than 8,000 sailors and marines and their families
assembled on the vast deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enter-
prise. “We’re fighting to protect ourselves and our children from violence and fear.
We’re fighting for the security of our people and the success of liberty,” Bush
said. “We’re fighting against men without conscience but full of ambition to
remake the world in their own brutal images” (US Newswire, December 7, 2001).
Bush described these men as “a movement, an ideology that respects no bound-
ary of nationality or decency . . . They celebrate death, making a mission of
murder and a sacrament of suicide.” And he compared the 9/11 “terrorists” to the
enemies of World War II: “They have the same will to power, the same disdain for
the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in
just the same way . . . Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased; they must
be defeated” (US Newswire, December 7, 2001).
Naming not just the 9/11 conspirators, but a much larger conception of “the
enemy” as “terrorists” and naming America’s cause as a “global war against terror-
ism”—rather than a more limited effort to eradicate al-Qaeda or to capture Osama
bin Laden—was an attempt by President Bush to forestall and even pre-empt
media and public criticism of such ancillary agendas as overthrowing Saddam. The
Bush administration succeeded at labeling its foreign policy objectives as part of a
war against terrorism, thus making it very difficult for political opponents or media
commentators to challenge the president without coming off as not only “soft” on
defense, but as cavalier about the lost American lives of 9/11.
The Bush administration’s tactics that effectively proscribed dissent were
familiar ones from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The only way to be “for” ter-
rorism is to redefine terrorism as something else, to change not just the language
but the focus and context of the debate. In the Israeli–Palestininan skirmishing
for the moral high ground there, Israeli officials have long cited Palestinian “ter-
64
rorism” as their rationale for their policies, which have included helicopter mis-
sile attacks against Palestinian buildings, “targeted assassinations,” closures of
Palestinian towns and villages, and razing of the homes of alleged militants.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad spokespeople have claimed that Israeli “state terror” has
forced them into such strategies as suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli
soldiers and civilians. Both sides emphasize context. Both sides assert that their
actions are retaliatory; that they are not the perpetrators, but instead the victims.
Both sides also contest who are the civilians—in other words who are the legiti-
mate targets of attacks: Israel argues that the settlers are civilians, while many
Palestinian militants consider the settlers who have built homes on land seized in
the 1967 war to be combatants in effect, because they have been the leading edge
of the Israeli occupation and have been protected by the Israeli military. New
York Times reporter Serge Schmemann wrote,
One side invokes the murder of Israeli innocents by human bombs, the
other speaks of the injustices suffered by the Palestinians . . . This min-
gling of acts of murder with a desire for freedom has enabled the leaders
on both sides to befuddle their people and their supporters, portraying
suicide bombers as martyrs in a just struggle of national liberation, or
casting the destruction of the institutions and symbols of Palestinian
statehood as a war on terrorism.
(Schmemann 2002: section 4: 1)
The challenge with such terms as “innocence” and “terrorism” is that their mean-
ing is in the eye of the beholder. President Bush’s post-9/11 call for a broader war
on terrorism had its contemporary antecedents with similar rationales: in this
case Bush characterized those who perished on September 11 as “innocents” and
those who killed them as “terrorists.” And the media responded as they always
have at the start of a national crisis—they rallied in support of the president and
appropriated his characterization of the situation. At the end of October 2001,
for example, the then-CNN chairman Walter Isaacson wrote a memo to his staff
that ordered them to balance the broadcast images of civilian devastation in
Afghanistan with reminders of the American lives lost at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. Isaacson suggested language for his anchors, including:
“The Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize civilian casu-
alties in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists
who are connected to the September 11 attacks that claimed thousands of inno-
cent lives in the US.” It “seems perverse,” Isaacson said, “to focus too much on
the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” (Kurtz, October 31, 2001: C1).
But like the Israeli and Palestinian labeling, pro-al-Qaeda and pro-Saddam
forces familiar to viewers of Al-Jazeera also described as “innocent civilians”
those who died in Afghanistan or Iraq as a result of American bombing. Post-
September 11, there is a larger recognition that innocence is conferred, rather
than inherent, that innocence needs to be asserted; it is not unequivocally
65
SUSAN D. MOELLER
self-apparent. During World War II, those who were killed in Nanking or in the
Blitz or in the concentration camps were just called “civilians.” Their innocence
was implicit in their status as civilians. Saying “innocent civilians” would have
been redundant. Today the innocence of the victims on each side of the war on
terrorism is loudly proclaimed—just as it has been in the Israeli–Palestinian con-
flict. Affirming one’s innocence may confer no protection, but it allows one to
lay claim to the moral high ground.
Chosen words
“Terrorist” and “terrorism” have long been charged words because the terms are
used as political epithets, but they are rarely defined. There are political sensitivi-
ties about the usage of these terms and phrases that the media rarely
acknowledge. When Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld says that North Korea is
a “terrorist regime,” for example, few journalists define that phrase—or contrast
the kind of terrorism attributed to North Korea with the terrorism attributed to
al-Qaeda. All terrorism is conflated, a conflation that has helped leave the
impression in American minds, for example, that Saddam Hussein was in part
responsible for the attacks of 9/11.
Americans want to believe that they hold the moral high ground. And they
are abetted in their belief by media that do not always explain that that ground is
contested—and that the language used to make the moral case is typically loaded.
“After 10 months of strife,” reporter Cameron Barr of the Christian Science Moni-
tor wrote a month and a half before September 11, “the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict is increasingly defined by ‘terrorism’—both the act and the epithet” (Barr
2001: 1). But, he continued, “perhaps no word in modern political usage is more
controversial than ‘terrorism.’ The United Nations spent 17 years trying to come
up with a universally accepted definition, and failed.” Walter Laqueur, in a recent
article “Left, right and beyond: the changing face of terror,” observed that terror
“is not an ideology or a political doctrine, but rather a method—the substate
application of violence or the threat of violence to sow panic and bring about
political change” (W. Laqueur 1996; Purdum 2002: section 4: 1). In his earlier
book Terrorism, Laqueur noted that “it is not the magnitude of the terrorist opera-
tion that counts, but the publicity.” The terrorist is inseparable from his or her
beholder. As reporter Melvin Maddocks has said, “A terrorist without an audi-
ence is inconceivable” (Maddocks 1980).
“Terrorism is theater,” wrote terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins.
All terrorist acts involve violence or the threat of violence. A terrorist

act ordinarily would be considered a crime—murder, kidnapping, arson.
Most terrorist acts would also violate the rules of war . . . What sets ter-
rorism apart from other violence is this: terrorism consists of acts carried
out in a dramatic way to attract publicity and create an atmosphere of
alarm that goes far beyond the actual victims. Indeed, the identity of the
66
victims is often secondary or irrelevant to the terrorists who aim their

violence at the people watching.
(www.csmonitor.com)
After September 11, 2001, a number of media outlets took it upon themselves to
give their readers and viewers a hasty history course in terrorism. “The word orig-
inated during the French Revolution when enemies of the state were guillotined
in the Reign of Terror,” reporter Jim Auchmutey reminded the readers of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “‘Those hellhounds called terrorists . . . are let loose
on the people,’ British politician Edmund Burke wrote in one of the earliest
usages cited by the Oxford English Dictionary” (Auchmutey 2001: 1D).
Geoff Nunberg, on National Public Radio’s interview program “Fresh Air,”
(Bogaev and Nunberg 2001) traced the changing meaning of the term, noting
that in the late nineteenth century some like the Russian revolutionaries who
assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881 viewed it as “a justified political strategy,”
and even Jack London believed that terrorism could be a “a powerful weapon in
the hands of labor.”
By the mid-twentieth century, terrorism was becoming associated more

with movements of national liberation than with radical groups and the
word was starting to acquire its universal stigma . . . most of the Third
World movements that resorted to political violence in the 1950s and
1960s didn’t call themselves terrorists. They preferred terms like freedom
fighters or guerrillas or mujahaddin. Terrorism became a condemnation,
a word used only by the colonial powers. That’s the point when news
organizations like Reuters started to become circumspect about using
the word to describe groups like the IRA and the African National
Congress . . .
By the 1980s, Nunberg noted, terrorism began to be applied more generically “to
all manners of political violence,” including acts such as the fatwah against
Salman Rushdie, which Nunberg observed “was far from an act of indiscriminate
violence; more like state-sponsored contract killing.” New York Times editor
A.M. Rosenthal even attacked Christopher Hitchens for “refusing to describe the
fatwah against Salman Rushdie as terrorism.” “By then,” Nunberg commented,
“the word ‘terrorism’ had acquired a kind of talismanic force, as if refusing to
describe something as terrorism was the next thing to apologizing for it” (Bogaev
and Nunberg 2001).
But these thoughtful attempts to locate the meaning of the word “terrorism”
did not typically wrestle with the consequences of the Bush administration’s
usage of the term “terrorism” and its choice to aggregate its foreign policy deci-
sions under the rubric “war on terrorism.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the
Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and the former J. Sinclair
Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard
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SUSAN D. MOELLER
Law School, was one of the few to early point out the effect of that choice. “From
a legal perspective, the difference between calling what has happened war and
calling it terrorism is considerable,” she wrote in the Washington Post the Sunday
after 9/11. “Terrorism is a matter for the courts and prosecutors. War is up to our
military forces. But which best describes what we face now?” (Slaughter 2001).
Those rare media institutions which did caution about the usage of the word
“terrorism” were pilloried for their lack of patriotism. Media columnist Howard
Kurtz reported on a Reuters internal memo written by Stephen Jukes, the wire
service’s global head of news, after the 9/11 attack. “We all know that one man’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle
that we do not use the word terrorist,” said Jukes in a conversation with Kurtz.
“To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist
attack.”
“We’re trying to treat everyone on a level playing field,” Jukes said, “however
tragic it’s been and however awful and cataclysmic for the American people and
people around the world . . . we don’t want to jeopardize the safety of our staff.
Our people are on the front lines, in Gaza, the West Bank and Afghanistan. The
minute we seem to be siding with one side or another, they’re in danger.” “We’re
there to tell the story,” Jukes told Kurtz. “We’re not there to evaluate the moral
case.” Despite the reasonableness of Jukes’ responses, Kurtz chided him for his
(and Reuters’) “value-neutral approach”—as if fairness and balance were not
vaunted journalistic values, especially in the coverage of international issues
(Kurtz, September 24, 2001: C1).
Before 9/11, a number of media outlets in addition to Reuters had a policy in
place about the use of the words “terrorism” or “terrorist.” The Associated Press,
according to its spokesman Jack Stokes, uses a variety of terms and does permit
the use of the word “terrorist” for those in non-governmental groups who carry
out attacks on the civilian population (Gelfand 2002). Other news organizations
have shunned the words in reference to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, aware of
the politicization of the words, but have had no compunctions about using the
terms in other circumstances. Roger Buoen, the assistant managing editor of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, explained in a pre-9/11 statement to his
paper’s ombudsman that the paper tried to avoid “characterizing the subjects of
news articles” in order to let readers make up their own minds on the evidence
presented. “In the case of the term ‘terrorist,’” he wrote, “other words—‘gunman,’
‘separatist,’ and ‘rebel,’ for example—may be more precise and less likely to be
viewed as judgmental.” And Buoen also noted that the paper was especially con-
cerned about perceived bias in its Mid-east coverage: “We also take extra care to
avoid the term ‘terrorist’ in articles about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict because
of the emotional and heated nature of that dispute. However, in some circum-
stances in which nongovernmental groups carry out attacks on civilians, the term
is permitted” (Gelfand 2002).
The dilemmas of talking about “terrorism” do not stop with problems of defini-
tion. A few news outlets observed problems of labeling as “terrorist” even those
68
groups which the US government has identified as terrorist. As Todd Purdum of

The New York Times noted, “With rare exceptions, like Iraq, the United States
government’s official definitions of terrorist entities focus on organizations and
individuals, not governments. Israel, as American officials often note, is a democ-
racy accountable to the norms of international law. The practical effect is that
only the Palestinians, who lack a state, are generally labeled terrorists” (Purdum
2002).
Officials use language with calculated intent—administrations previous to
President Bush also spoke with care. Back in the waning days of the Carter
administration, for example, the president indulged in “one of the clarifying acts
of foreign-policy-through-semantics,” as Maddocks wrote, when he declared that
it was “terrorists” rather than the government of Ayatollah Khomeini who were
responsible for the hostage-taking (Maddocks 1980: 23). A less successful attempt
by a president to justify his actions through considered word choices was Presi-
dent Clinton’s attempted side-stepping of the term “genocide” in reference to
Rwanda. The State Department was caught out in that case by the media—the
advantage for the administration of denying that “genocide” had taken place was
too obvious. “How many ‘acts of genocide’ does it take to make a genocide?” was
just one of the questions asked of the State Department spokesperson (Moeller
1999: 290–1).
President George W. Bush has had enormous success in agenda-setting. After
September 11, it was a short step for many media to first source the terms of “the
war on terror” and “terrorist” to the president and other administration officials,
then as the terms slipped into common usage to begin applying the terms to the
Bush foreign policy goals without attribution. The US media generally acqui-
esced with the deliberate terminology chosen by the administration.
By contrast, before, during, and after the Iraq war, British news outlets were
more willing to challenge the White House’s interpretation of events. In the
aftermath of Bush’s May 1 speech proclaiming “victory” in Iraq, for example, the
Guardian pointed out that the Bush administration had used the term “terrorist”
as a conscious element in its foreign policy—with groups or countries it wants to
condemn, noted the Guardian, it applies the term terrorist, with groups it is inter-
ested in allying itself to, it ignores a prior label of terrorist. “Growing US pressure
on Iran takes many forms, much of it questionable and some of it deeply hypocrit-
ical,” observed the leader article in the Guardian on May 20. “A campaign of
public accusation is now in full flood; in the past few days alone, National Secu-
rity Adviser Condoleezza Rice has reiterated her view that Iran harbours
al-Qaeda terrorists, while another official claimed it is stockpiling chemical
weapons. Pressure is applied,” the article continued, through such means as “US
collaboration with the Iraq-based, Iranian opposition Mujahedeen,” which also is
a way that “the Bush administration seeks to convince the world that Iran, like
Saddam’s Iraq, constitutes a threat that may one day have to be extinguished by
force.” The irony of all that, said the Guardian, is that “Iran, for example, helped
the US pursue al-Qaeda fugitives from Afghanistan; there is no evidence of
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SUSAN D. MOELLER
collusion with al-Qaeda now. But Tehran is justifiably outraged by US sponsor-

ship of the Mujahedeen, who Washington itself has long labelled terrorists”
(Guardian leading article 2003).
Asking the questions

In September 2003, celebrity journalist Tina Brown on her CNBC cable show
“Topic A with Tina Brown” asked CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour whether
journalists had been limited in what they could cover during the American war
in Iraq: “It’s not a question of couldn’t do it, it’s a question of tone,” replied
Amanpour.
“It’s a question of being rigorous. It’s really a question of really asking the
questions. All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it’s the
administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask
enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction.”
And then Amanpour added that part of the cause of the journalists’ fail-
ures and/or reticence was that they had to contend with “disinformation
at the highest levels.”
(www.mediaweb.co.za)
A hundred and fifty years ago, in the era when “manifest destiny” was first enun-
ciated, there was no precedent of an investigative press that could critically
examine the statements and contentions of public officials, that could challenge a
foreign policy that seemed to have little basis in fact or that seemed geared only
to rally the audience for partisan political ends. Now, in the first decade of the
twenty-first century there has been little incentive to do so, despite the rich
precedents of journalists challenging the powers-that-be in decades past. In the
current profit-driven deadline news business there has been little inclination to
examine the operating assumptions of foreign policy when the effects of that
policy have been so demanding of coverage. It has made sense that over the last
several years, coverage of breaking news—such as the US troop engagement in
Iraq—is what blankets the news, while coverage of the motivations behind for-
eign policies has been minimal. It has been easier to embed with the troops, and
give a-day-in-the-life style coverage, than do enterprise reporting.
As a result, during the Iraq war and the immediate “aftermath,” many journal-
ists toed the administration’s and Pentagon’s line in Iraq, foregoing their own
investigation of events. New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning reporter John
Burns noted his disgust over the media coverage of Iraq in an interview included
in an edited collection of journalist interviews, Embedded: the Media at War in
Iraq, an Oral History. “Now left with the residue of all this, I would say there are
serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers and small newspapers
and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents
the obligation of telling the truth about these places,” Burns said. “It’s not impos-
70
sible to tell the truth.” More information could have been gotten out about the
Bush administration’s stated rationale for American involvement, and even
about the Iraqi regime, he argued (Burns 2003).
Increasingly more journalists and pundits have been speaking out, charging
that during the pre-war period and the “hot” conflict in Iraq most of “the media
largely toed the Bush administration line in covering the war and, by doing so,
failed to aggressively question the motives behind the invasion,” as USA Today
media critic Peter Johnson wrote (Johnson 2003). “For some reason or another,
Mr Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which
is still an open case,” noted New York Times reporter Burns (Burns 2003: 161).
But by the end of the Iraq conflict in the late spring of 2003, it was not so much
that the media accepted the administration’s rationale for its policies—in fact by
then many journalists, especially editorial and opinion writers were downright
skeptical of the linkages Bush had drawn between other nations’ purported
WMD and the concomitant terrorist threat to the US, for example. By then, it
was not that journalists remained uncritical of the statements emanating from the
White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, as that they still were
too accepting of how international issues and events were prioritized.
Too often the recognition that the administration gave to terrorism and pur-
portedly related issues, such as WMD, received comparable recognition from the
media—even if journalists criticized the administration’s “spin.” In effect the
media continued to confirm the Bush administration’s political and diplomatic
agenda-setting. Through overly stenographic reporting on the president, the
media amplified the administration’s voice—so when Bush said to the country
that Americans are vulnerable to WMD in the hands of terrorists, the media
effectively magnified those fears, even while they challenged the prior assump-
tion that Iraq had been an “imminent threat.” “The nation is being trained to
consider terrorism only in its most apocalyptic forms,” Mark Leibovich of the
Washington Post noted in May 2003. “Many sociologists, scenario planners and
counterterrorism experts believe the government and the media are too focused
on extreme menaces—namely the terrorist attacks that involve weapons of
mass destruction” (Leibovich 2003). Again, it had been President Bush who set
the tone for the apocalyptic approach. As his carrier speech on May 1, 2003
detailed:
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against

terror. We’ve removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut off a source of terror-
ist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain
weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is
no more . . .
(United Press International 2003)
Home Security Secretary Tom Ridge underlined that fear when he moved the US
terror alert back to Orange later that same month. Ridge noted that while there
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SUSAN D. MOELLER
was no specific threat against the US that had prompted the heightened status,
“weapons of mass destruction, including those containing chemical, biological or
radiological agents or materials, cannot be discounted,” he said (Langley 2003).
Framing the news

During the Cold War, policy makers, NGOs, and the media had prioritized the
rights of states—concern over the ability of certain states to trigger Armageddon
caused the plight of the individual, however poignant or horrific, to pale in com-
parison. After the Cold War, and the lessening of the global nuclear threat, they
all shifted to emphasize individuals and to highlight minority group identity.
Human rights became a core measure by which the American media evaluated
international actors and events in the world community. As Harvard professor
Michael Ignatieff has written, “We are scarcely aware of the extent to which our
moral imagination has been transformed since 1945 by the growth and practice of
moral universalism, expressed above all in a shared human rights culture.” The
language of human rights became a familiar and essential component of global
communications and international diplomacy. It found its way into both the
media’s assessment of “foreign” affairs and governments’ justifications for their
actions. It did not become so central a feature of policy that it overrode security
interests, but it became impossible, at least for Western powers, to appraise their
foreign policy—whether relating to trade issues or military engagement—without
considering the human rights repercussions.
For a window of time during the 1990s, the American mainstream media,
while often mediocre in their coverage of the world, went beyond merely reacting
to foreign policy. The entrée of humanitarianism and human rights allowed the
media to pry open the decision-making process and ask tough questions. Invest-
ing in human rights coverage permitted the media to do what historian Thomas
Laqueur has recommended: expand “the moral imagination that allows us to
regard the suffering of distant humans as making the same sort of claim on us as
the suffering of proximate ones” (T. Laqueur 2001: 131–5).
The power of the media to highlight human rights abuses and to draw atten-
tion to how political was the process of assessing those abuses, brought into
prominence the hypocrisy of the Bush senior’s administration’s decision to head
to Somalia rather than to Bosnia, for example, and the Clinton administration’s
ducking of responsibility for the Rwandan genocide. Human rights came to be
understood as a political component of foreign policy, not merely as part of a
humanitarian agenda. Despite the rhetoric, it became clear that human rights
would be protected only if it served American interests—variously defined—to
do so.
Just as the presidents in the 1950s and 1960s were consumed by not “losing”
countries to Communism on their watch—a fear that resulted in the escalation
of the Vietnam War—in the 1990s, Presidents Bush and Clinton were fearful of
American troops losing their lives overseas. As a result the presidents avoided
72
military engagement in situations that threatened to turn into Vietnam-like

“quagmires,” and were more sympathetic to purely humanitarian relief efforts
where victims could be rescued without danger. The US government became
conditionally willing to use military action to rescue foreign victims and clothed
its limitations as well as its proclivities in the rhetoric of human rights. In truth,
the de facto policy of a zero tolerance for American casualties was a better predic-
tor of American engagement than human rights policy, but even so, that
compassionate rhetoric handed journalists a platform from which to critique
public policy. Since the goals of human rights, humanitarianism, and civil society
were stated goals of the administrations, journalists now had an “obligation,” not
just an “interest” in reporting on how well those ideals were being upheld.
Through the “election” and first months in office of President George W. Bush,
that responsibility continued. September 11 brought it to an abrupt end. Over-
night President Bush adopted language (and policies) limiting domestic civil
liberties and human rights using the justification of his declared “war on terror-
ism.” “Ours is a great land,” Bush said in a speech in November 2001, “and we’ll
always value freedom. We’re an open society. But we’re at war. The enemy has
declared war on us. And we must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty
to destroy liberty itself” (US Newswire, November 29, 2001). Civil liberties and
human rights seemed expendable in the face of “higher” priorities—and the
multilateral coalition used to fight the war against the Taliban, which included
groups and nations with poor records on human rights, such as the Afghan
Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, further distanced the administration from
considering human rights to be at the core of its foreign policy. (Although ironi-
cally, as a number of commentators have remarked, the war in Iraq could
have—should have—been justified by the Bush administration on human rights
grounds alone. “[I] never believed Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction
that threatened us,” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote after the dis-
covery of the multitude of mass graves, “but . . . this war could easily be justified by
his mass destruction of his own people”) (Friedman 2003: A25).
Without human rights as an inescapable formal foreign policy instrument, the
media lost much of their capacity to see into policy and probe for answers. Yet, as
philosopher Akeel Bilgrami has noted, not taking a moral stance toward the
state, not holding it accountable for more than rational self-interest may encour-
age the state to be “morally insensitive.” “It may be,” he suggested, “that if we
showed all these moral responses toward them, we would encourage in them a
greater sensitivity to moral issues and standards” (Bilgrami 2002). There is practi-
cal value in moral accountability.
The responsibility to tell stories is not a light one—it does not begin or end
with a facile relating of information. Before 9/11, the American media covered
the battles of Mogadishu, Srebrenica, and Kigali, among other places, but also
documented the failures of American foreign policy by holding the government
and international organizations morally as well as politically accountable for their
actions. They did so not by resorting to political persuasion or even by being
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SUSAN D. MOELLER
actively adversarial. They held the political actors liable by being eyewitnesses to
events, by communicating bluntly what they saw and heard, by publicly juxtapos-
ing a statement made previously with a comment made later. In those instances,
the media not only cultivated a moral imagination in their audience but also
understood that they had a responsibility to do so—the human rights of distant
strangers were reported on because the well-being of those strangers was under-
stood to be relevant to Americans.
If the media were delegates to the mandarin, representing the concerns of his
subjects, what arguments would they have at their disposal to convince him to
become engaged by the trials of people he had never seen? They could try to cul-
tivate a moral imagination in him sufficient to acquaint him with others’ pain
and torments. In his awakened awareness of the vulnerability of his own comfort
he could find cause to alleviate the suffering of those others. The virtue in empa-
thy is that it is both a welcome gloss over the cold habit of self-interest as well as
a meaningful and practical end in itself.
In the real aftermath of 9/11, challenging the terrorism frame is itself an act of
moral imagination. The “if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us” attitude of Pres-
ident Bush’s war on terrorism is a new variant of “manifest destiny”: American
“destiny” is “manifest.” Or else, just as the “Cold War” label seduced the media
and entire nations into believing that it explained everything, even though it
omitted much and distorted more, so too the terrorism frame threatens a nuanced
understanding of the world. Both dangerous simplifications of the world order
were articulated by politicians who then accused those who didn’t believe of
being unpatriotic—even those who only wanted to challenge the application,
not the need for such policies.
The war on terrorism substitutes moral rhetoric for a moral imagination. “His-
tory has driven us toward moral enlightenment—and then left the final choice to
us,” wrote author Robin Wright. “Religious motivation isn’t necessary. Simple self-
interest will do” (Wright 2003). Enlightened self-interest. Self interest of the kind
that would convince a mandarin to care for those “hundred millions of his
people.”
Notes
1 Of course there also remain campaigns that have retained their moral flavor, even in
historical hindsight—such as the American Civil Rights campaign, as articulated by
such Christian preachers as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Junior.
2 In a recent book, author Linda Hudson argued that it was not O’Sullivan, but a nine-
teenth-century political writer named Jane McManus Storm Cazneau who wrote the
anonymous “Annexation” article (Hudson 2001).
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www.mediaweb.co.za/ArticleDetail.asp?ID=2572
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4
THE PR OF TERRO R
How new-style wars give voice to terrorists
Tamar Liebes and Zohar Kampf
Media coverage of terror has slid in and out of the coverage of war, largely because
recent wars have been preceded and followed by episodes of terror. A loosely
linked chain was created in the wake of September 11, whereby al-Qaeda’s attack
led the US to declare war against the regime in Afghanistan, and then against
Iraq, motivated, in part, by the allegation that Saddam Hussein had supported
the September 11 terrorists. Similarly, the outbreak of Palestinian violence in
2000 and the bloodshed which followed, led to the so-called “a-symmetrical” or
“low-intensity” war which the Israeli army had declared against the terrorists. In
all three wars, the lines between terrorists and “harborers” were blurred, with the
two becoming interconnected symbols in an “axis of evil.”
The logic of fighting evil regimes with the aim of abolishing terror is fraught
with internal contradictions not only for politicians and generals, but also for jour-
nalists. Consider how the inability of winning against terror in Afghanistan and
Iraq altered the framing of war itself. Starting as an almost naïve proclamation of
the triumph of good against evil, the aftermath has altered the story and the ways
in which it is covered. Terror, seeping in, stained the victory with daily doses of
bloodletting, re-framing reality as an explosive, here-to-stay routine. The high-
spirited coverage of war, now seen as unfinished, has transformed into the nagging
coverage of the confused, chaotic, violent routine of the aftermath of war.
The process reminds us once again that distinct, relatively short, media
events—such as operation “shock and awe,” and, mutatis mutandis, the Twin Tower
attack—invite journalists to mobilize and join in the crisis, or the high-powered
action, as players rather than spectators—embedded with the army in Iraq, and
connecting with the traumatized public after September 11. But once the glamour
of the event fades, its overriding power exhausted, the media are left to themselves
to search for and compete over the best follow-up stories.
We argue that the unfinished story of September 11, reinforced by the in-
conclusive aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq, has sent media off on their own
search for terrorists. Uncontrolled and undefeated, they remain the mysterious,
evasive power, which may raise its head at any time, anywhere around the globe,
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TA M A R L I E B E S A N D Z O H A R K A M P F
remaining a constant threat. This multi-branched story, with its significant serial
character, plays on the public’s deep seated anxiety, on the prurient desire to get
acquainted with these behind-the-scene heroes, but no less on the ambition of
journalists and their sense of adventure. While terrorists have to hide from the
military forces pursuing them, interaction with the media is of mutual interest,
resulting in various versions of hide-and-seek. Thus, in parallel to the (widely
criticized) patriotism that characterized US media coverage of the wars in
Afghanistan and in Iraq, the same media have developed new genres of covering
terrorists, quite apart from the coverage of terror attacks, which may even be
characterized as “unpatriotic.”
This chapter argues that September 11 changed the image of terror and the
journalistic approach to terror. Thus, following September 11, which effectively
demonstrated the power of new-style international anarchic terror, terrorists have
come to be labeled enemies, rather than criminals. And, if until September 11 ter-
rorists could capture media attention only via violent action, following it the
terrorists have been given voice. We argue that there has been a gradual shift
whereby terrorists have become regular, sought after sources, achieving a status in
which they speak for themselves, are listened to, explain their motives, and, to
some extent, set the news agenda. Rather than a bloody blot on the front page rep-
resenting the merciless suffering inflicted on innocent victims, they now make
statements, give interviews, and negotiate with governments, while opinion edi-
torial writers and commentators, following their trail, speculate about their plans,
their ideologies, and their psychological makeup.
In what follows we analyze this change, bring evidence to substantiate it, pro-
pose possible causes, and discuss some of the ethical issues it raises. First we point
to the processes that changed the character of both terrorist and media organiza-
tions during the 1990s, and the ensuing new genres of reporting terror. Live
disaster marathons signal the beginning of journalists relinquishing control to ter-
rorists, followed by the media’s regular pursuit of terrorists as legitimate news
personas, disconnected from specific violent acts. We bring initial evidence for
this transformation from television news channels and from the inside pages of the
printed press. Second, we offer four possible reasons for the upgrading of terrorists
to the cultural status of celebrities. Third, we define and illustrate new-style genres
of covering terror. These quasi-news soft formats include unmediated showing of
“home movies,” interviewing by proxy stories of search and find missions, center-
ing on the journalists heroic endeavors; and psychological profiles of (live or dead)
terrorists, provided by families, friends, and colleagues. In both the coverage of
war, and in the new formats of covering terror, journalists end up compromising
professional norms, as access is controlled by the sources (the army/ the terrorists).
The media in pursuit of terrorists

Whether terror is directed to achieve political aims, to create public pressure on
decision-makers for negotiating an ad hoc case, or to spread diffuse shock and
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THE PR OF TERROR
fear, it relies on the media for realizing its aims. Until recently, most media
researchers agreed on the way in which news media cover demonstrators, rioters,
and protest movements, and, all the more so, terrorists. They argued that whereas
politicians and representatives of the elite are free to address the media at any
time (crossing the threshold through the “front door”), the only chance of radical
groups to invade the screens is via the “back door,” that is, by the use of violence
(Gitlin 1980; Wolfsfeld 1991). Hence, a trap emerged in which groups such as
the anti-Vietnam movement in the US, Aldo Moro’s kidnappers in Italy, and the
Palestinians during the 1980s found themselves. The more violence they created,
the greater the chance of crossing into the screens and being viewed by the
public. The chance, however, was also greater for the coverage to be more nega-
tive, and therefore act as a boomerang.
Two processes during the 1990s radically changed the character of both terror
itself and the way in which it was covered. Until that time, terrorist groups such
as the IRA, the Red Brigade or the PLO, even if they had international connec-
tions, were perceived as an internal national phenomenon, handled in the
domestic field. Governments treated terrorists by controlling their appearance—
more precisely, their non-appearance1—on local media. This was done by
legislation, by putting pressure on national media, or by negotiating and reaching
an understanding with media institutions over limiting exposure to terrorists.
Media institutions followed suit, adopting internal directives for limiting cover-
age (Weimann 1999).2 The situation in which both terror and media were
operating within the nation’s boundaries made it possible for governments to
limit the terrorists’ capacity to exploit the media for creating public anxiety,
enhancing their bargaining power while holding hostages, or communicating
with their own supporters.
This contained situation changed when connections among terrorist organiza-
tions in various countries tightened, making terror into an international network.
At the same time, revolutionary communication technologies created a new
media ecology, transforming the journalistic profession and its locus. Thus, the
(insufferable) ease of transmitting live from various sites disintermediated editors
by interrupting news editions with “breaking news.” The realization of the
public’s right to know by the accepted journalistic practices suffered another blow
by the establishment of new competing media channels, broadcasting around the
clock and viewed beyond the state’s borders, with each quoting everyone else,
and with every channel doing its best to keep zapping viewers from escaping. A
significant example is the taking root of the marathonic live format throughout
and following terrorist attacks, which in effect cancelled the editor’s role, and,
with it, the striving for fair, precise, and responsible news, and the obligation for
not publishing, knowingly or carelessly, untrue or inexact information. The genre
of disaster marathons caused public criticism of journalists for playing into terror-
ists’ hands, that is, for inadvertently doing them a service (Liebes 1998).3
Whereas live marathonic broadcasts make for controversial journalism, their
format does not deviate from the principle of covering terror only when it acts.
79
The significant upgrading of terrorists’ status in the media, apparent following

September 11, should be seen as the result of the acknowledgment of terrorists as
another regular beat on the editorial map. This legitimacy means that they are reg-
ularly monitored, that their reactions to relevant events are sought out, that their
threats are given central space, and that journalists take risks to reach their hiding
places for an “inside” look and an exclusive scoop. Terrorists in Afghanistan,
Baghdad, and Gaza have no more need to act in order to appear (or, rather, to
exist)—they have been acknowledged as an institutional news source. The mean-
ing of this change (to which we were introduced as television viewers and
newspaper readers) is that terrorists, who had been perceived as despicable crimi-
nals, with no legitimacy for appearing as news persona, have turned into a new
sector of celebrities in popular culture. As we demonstrate in what follows, jour-
nalists seek out terrorists to discover their face “behind the news,” in an attempt to
understand their motives, environment, and vision, and to present them to press
and television audiences in the West.
Such a change can be expected to be found in the “soft” genres of news, such as
in-depth interviews, human stories, and profiles of celebrities. Thus, we looked at
two kinds of journalistic genres in the printed and electronic press. In the press we
chose the New York Times weekly magazine as a suitable host for clusters of inti-
mate stories, exposing the profiles of news personas. On television we observed
the appearances of superstar Osama bin Laden on interviews and on “home-
movies”.
By locating items on the basis of a key word search, we found all the appear-
ances of the words “terror/terrorist” in the New York Times Magazine between the
years 1996 and 2003.4 Choosing September 11 as the watershed (keeping in
mind, however, that the process had started earlier and speeded up significantly
from this point on), we assumed that before this date soft items featuring terror
would focus on the personal stories of the victims, not of the perpetrators. Follow-
ing September 11, we expected that personal stories featuring terrorists would be
added, and that these stories would be disconnected in time (and place) from the
terrorist events.5
Our findings confirmed our expectations. In the six years prior to Septem-
ber 11, “terror” stories in the New York Times supplement focused only on the
victims and their suffering, with no attempt to look at terror through the eyes of
the terrorists themselves.6 In the 15 months following September 11 we found six
human interest stories, such as interviewing groups, elaborating motives, or inter-
viewing relatives, all of which focused on the profiles of terrorists.
The results of our examination of bin Laden’s appearances on television show
that in the five years prior to September 11, he was interviewed three times (on
Al-Jazeera, CNN, and ABC). From September 11, 2001 to the end of 2002, he
scored 15 appearances. As interviewing the world’s most wanted person was close
to impossible, 14 of these interviews were in the form of unmediated “home
movies” (the equivalent of free advertising). As we elaborate in what follows, it is
ironic that America’s number one enemy, a sought after criminal, who was
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THE PR OF TERROR
responsible for the most destructive (physically and symbolically) terrorist attack
directed at the US, became a superstar for whom major ethical principles of jour-
nalism were being compromised.
Possible reasons for the upgrading of terrorists to superstars

The automatic, universal adoption of the genre of breaking news—that is, live
marathonic broadcasting during, and in the wake of, a multi-victim attack—facil-
itates the upgrading of terrorists to superstars. This format is shaped by techno-
logical developments that allow for the simultaneous live transmission from
multiple loci, in effect getting rid of the function of editing and thereby abandon-
ing the broadcast to the terrorists. Exactly at a moment of crisis in which the gov-
ernment is weakened, and a space opens for media to take the lead, television,
taken by complete surprise, has no tools with which to make use of this opportu-
nity. In a media ecology that dictates broadcasting live, leaving no time for acting
professionally, the switch from “chronology” to “history” (Carey 2002) may cause
journalists to lose their privileged status. On September 11, instead of taking the
lead, anchors and reporters gave up on their distanced position and joined the
public to watch the performance with bewilderment and amazement. Thus, the
various channels ended up competing with one another over promoting the ter-
rorists’ message (Blondheim and Liebes 2002). Bin Laden’s attack, constructed as
an unfinished story, in which the crucial question of “who has done it” was left
open, meant that days later the media were engaged in the mystery of finding out
more about the event’s heroes, wondering who bin Laden was and where he could
be found. The process of media’s crowning bin Laden as mega-star was boosted by
the US government. The world’s only superpower declared war against the man.7
Second, the ecological change in the environment of media, with news chan-
nels such as CNN and Sky broadcasting to different target audiences the world
over, pushes for less identification and a more independent position toward the
channel’s home country. Moreover, the existence of satellite channels, broadcast-
ing from and to Arab states, and considered “democratic,” allow CNN-like news
channels more flexibility in giving voice to terrorists. “Quoting” from channels
such as Al-Arabia, Abu Dhabi or Al-Jazeera, whose more empathetic stance
toward terrorism offers an address for terrorists to send tapes and grant inter-
views,8 softens the criticism against the Western channels as giving legitimacy to
terrorists. Moreover, in parallel to the internationalization of news channels, the
international connections among terror organizations have tightened, increasing
the universal relevance of stories about terrorist attacks and their protagonists.
When a terrorist attack occurs elsewhere it is less problematic to relate to terror-
ists as protagonists and, at the same time, interest in terror stories, terrorist
tactics, intentions, and personalities, is ensured.
Third, there is the change in the intellectual atmosphere in the postmodern
era, which (in spite of the overriding importance of competition over audiences)
can also justify the change in journalistic practices (Ezrachi 2002). The new
81
historiography heralds the end of the grand narratives of the postcolonial era,
narratives well known for their being a “white mythology,” aimed at repressing
various others. Its demise points to a need to offer alternative grand narratives to
the repressed (Weinrib 2003). The first step is raising the heretofore depressed
awareness of those whose voice is not heard. In this spirit, media scholars such as
Nick Couldry (2001) see in the World Trade Center attack a statement of the
repressed, those pushed to the margins by the institutions of media, and left in a
state of symbolic inferiority. According to this perception it is possible to prevent
future attacks by listening to the voice of the repressed, and thus contributing to
the creation of more equality between the worlds. Based on the notion that a
genuine act of communication emerges out of interruption rather than out of har-
mony, thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard insist on the importance of
communicating with alterity rather than with sameness (Pinchevski 2003). By
talking to people who are like oneself only reinforces one’s own perceptions by
their reactions. Levinas argues that attention has to shift from the content of
conversation to the communication act or, in other words, from what was said to
the fact of saying. The spirit of these perceptions softens the traditional view,
according to which journalists should be careful not to appear to be conducting
negotiations with terrorists, or, worse, giving them a platform for propaganda.
Last, the increasing personalization of politics (of which the media are a main
culprit) and, with it, the incessant search for new superstars (Kellner 2003), cre-
ates the right atmosphere for the protagonists of terror to become international
celebrities. Status conferral, as Lazarsfeld and Merton were aware of, is indifferent
to whether whoever appears is an honorable hero or a lowly villain. Villains,
notably gangsters, are well known heroes (albeit tragic) in the heart of American
popular culture (Warshow 1979). Moreover, in the era of multiculturalism, the
judgment of celebrity as villain or hero itself increasingly lies in the eye of the
beholder (as seen in the split reactions of the American public in the Clarence
Thomas affair, or in the O.J. Simpson trial). And regardless of what the judgment
is, curiosity only speeds up when a celebrity is discovered as a villain at heart.
Ways of abandoning journalistic norms in the

media coverage of terrorists
A look at the various tactics and formats of covering terrorists reveals different
types of deviations from heretofore accepted journalistic practices. As mentioned
above, one blatant practice, endorsed by news directors, is the unmediated showing
of mysteriously arrived terrorists’ tapes. The reality in which any pictures of mega
terrorists are regarded as major “scoops” allows for scrapping the most elementary
criteria demanded for other news items: when/where/by whom was the tape
recorded? is this the person we claim it is? is he still alive? This handing over of
full control to terrorist sources, and (totally or partially) relinquishing the jour-
nalists’ professional role, amounts to providing unpaid advertising to terrorists, a
service that would never be given to domestic political leaders.
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THE PR OF TERROR
Terrorist-made videotape vignettes often belong to the genre of “home movies,”

possibly aimed as teasers to chasers, a “proof” that the terrorists are alive and doing
well. The latest video to date, as Washington Post writer Philip Kennicot told us
(September 11, 2003), “arrived right on schedule . . . to mark the second anniver-
sary of September 11” and features “a pastoral walk in the woods, a dreamscape . . .
by the perverse logic of dreams, all the more threatening.” Another sub-genre of
self-produced terrorist tapes consists of a formal public address, in which terrorists
directly appeal to “fan” and/or “enemy” audiences, encouraging the first and
threatening the latter (as in bin Laden’s tapes congratulating terrorists in Iraq,
warning the US troops, or in the suicide bombers’ announcements of personal
wills).9
In the format labeled “quasi interview,” journalistic control is compromised by
delegating the job not quite to the terrorists themselves but to proxies (trusted by
terrorists) who have access, as in the case of CNN’s collaboration with Al-
Jazeera, elaborated on below.
However, when journalists do venture into enemy territory, in an attempt to
create direct contact with subjects in their hiding places, they risk compromising
professional principles in different ways. One danger is that the risky, adventurous
route of “getting there,” managed by the terrorists, ends up filling the whole
frame. Accepting the terrorists’ offer, and thereby abiding by their rules, makes
the journalist dependent and somewhat vulnerable along the way, and the rela-
tionship that develops between him and his sources becomes the real story. The
game of treasure hunt takes over and overshadows whatever story the journalist
was out to get. The reporter becomes the hero of the story, but so do his hosts,
who, instead of repeating their hate mantras, reveal themselves as considerate,
generous, and human. Even if journalists do attempt to carry out their journalistic
work, the shift in the balance of power once they get there, and their precarious,
somewhat threatened and semi-hostage position makes them feel grateful to their
hosts and does not encourage adversarial positions.
In addition to the repeated airing of terrorist home videos, the intervewing by
proxy, and the journalist’s “being there,” other genres increasingly found on the
weekend magazines (and their television equivalents) are “soft” stories, of the
kind that can be shown at any time. These items present a range of personalizing,
humanizing, and biographical stories, sociologically or psychologically oriented. The
product of making contact with would-be or imprisoned terrorists, or with fami-
lies, childhood friends, foes, teachers, and colleagues of terrorists, laced these
stories with information received from sociologists, psychologists, and criminolo-
gists. Zooming in on the profile of terrorists who have died, or vanished, or both,
they invade one life speculating about how did he transform into a terrorist, what
was it that caused him to abandon everything, who was he influenced by, and
what could have saved him. Personalization thus skirts around the political issues
of terrorist actions and ideologies, choosing the easy, popular way of exposing the
tragedy of one man, one family or one football team in stories disconnected from
the acts of destruction and their ramifications.
83
Interviewing by proxy
Among the forms of the coverage of terrorists discussed, interviews, even if
second hand, still present an attempt to carry out journalistic work, however
constrained. Before examining the question of interviewing by proxy, the funda-
mental issue of whether terrorists should be given voice at all needs to be
confronted. Whereas a case can be made for distinguishing between terrorists
acting for the legitimate cause of fighting occupation, it is difficult to justify inter-
views with a hiding terrorist, promoting acts of mass destruction, based on the
belief that there is no possibility of compromise between Islam and the infidels
(the Americans, capitalism, Western culture).10 Whereas news reports on terror-
ists within the mandate of surveillance (on clues to the identity of perpetrators,
on progress of the chase, etc), devoting television prime time to the pre-
advertised exclusive scoop of listening to bin Laden, means that the system to
whose eradication he dedicates his life is giving him the stage (Blondheim and Liebes
2002). Arguments such as “know your enemy” or the need to “release pressure” in
order to avoid an explosion, relevant to local conflicts with limited goals (the
Palestinians in Israel, the IRA in Britain), do not hold in the case of diffuse and
total terror (Blum-Kulka, et al. 2003). Second, even if the White House claim
that bin Laden makes use of being interviewed for transmitting operational orders
is not particularly convincing, there is nothing like appearing on American net-
works for strengthening his power among his supporters. And third, for CNN’s
original target audience, the fact of incorporating bin Laden in familiar formats
(with its careful distribution among “different voices”) means more than the
unmediated broadcast of his repetitive mutterings to his cohorts in a foreign lan-
guage, and it may even create an illusion of lessening the threat, while contributing to
its increase. And last, taking into account his consistent effort never to incrimi-
nate himself directly or be discovered, and his use of Western channels to
strengthen himself vis à vis his supporters, there is no hope that bin Laden (or his
cohorts) would cooperate in the way in which other interviewees are expected to
do.
But even if the principle according to which the interviewing of terrorists
is a legitimate journalistic mission is accepted, the professional compromises
that media are pushed to make exactly in such ethically borderline cases are ques-
tionable. Note that the more dangerous the terrorist, the more painful the
concessions.
As stated above, Osama bin Laden’s appearance on CNN on February 1, 2002
in what the network called “an interview” is a good example of demonstrating
the risk to journalistic ethics in interviewing by surrogate. The show features
segments of an interview granted to Tayseer Alouni, an Al-Jazeera reporter,
three months earlier, to which CNN was allowed to add written “omnibus”-style
questions. That CNN’s bosses were aware of the problematics of interviewing by
proxy can be seen by their avoidance of the issue in their (misleading) introduc-
tion to the program: “Accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden said ‘the
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THE PR OF TERROR
battle has moved to inside America’ in the only television interview he’s granted
since the September 11 attacks—now airing for the first time.”
Missing in this framing is the fact that the “scoop” was by then old news (also
reported by The New York Times in December 2001), and that Wolf Blitzer (or
any other CNN reporter) was not holding the microphone.
The professional issues demonstrated by this case study allow for the reexami-
nation of the definitions of terms such as “scoop,” “news value,” and “news
interviews.” Specifically, the dubiousness of the interview under scrutiny can be
put in the form of a number of ethical issues:
First, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out (October 18, 2001), the interview
was planned “even as (CNN) executives added that they don’t know whether he
is dead or alive,” that is, they were giving up on the fundamental practice of being
able to grant their audiences the basic knowledge of whether or not the inter-
viewee is the person CNN claims he is. The question—is this the real bin
Laden?—takes on particular relevance after the known practice of the appear-
ance (mostly on audio tapes) of “doubles” of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar,
following the Iraq war. As no Western journalists could ever meet with bin Laden
following September 11 (and as very few saw him before), there would always be
a doubt as to the authenticity of tapes emerging from somewhere.
Reactions of the competing news channels to the interview expressed mixed
feelings of “criticism, curiosity and envy,” making it quite clear that given the
opportunity they would do the same. Expressing the belief that at war journalists
should be patriotic (a belief reaffirmed by US journalists during the Iraq war), and
voicing a softer version of Condoleezza Rice’s concern with the channel’s hand-
ing airtime to bin Laden for communicating with his own supporters, CBS News
President Andrew Heyward stated that “CNN should not be seen bargaining
with terrorists” or “as providing a platform for propaganda.” In a similar spirit, the
interview was called “a slap in the face of the American people” and was com-
pared to “interviewing Adolf Hitler or Emperor Hirohito, who ordered the attack
on Pearl Harbor.”11
Further, competing news channels criticized the interview’s newsworthiness,
illustrating the confusion around this term (ironically the first critic was Al-
Jazeera’s Director General, who decided not to air the interview for reasons of
lacking “newsworthiness”). Strictly, the criterion for judging an interview as
“newsworthy” consists of whether any new, significant information was gained by
talking to the interviewee. CNN’s own definition for the journalistic scoop they
were offering viewers can be found in Blitzer’s opening promo: “Late October, in
the only television interview with Osama bin Laden since the September 11
attacks, broadcast here for the first time, he makes clear that the war of terror is
not finished.” As what is highlighted as the new information in the quote could
not be of great surprise for CNN audiences, the interview’s news value must lie
in the first part of Blitzer’s introduction. These words hold the promise of seeing
bin Laden for the first time since the September 11 attack. The offer to look at
bin Laden’s face connects directly with the viewers’ awed curiosity about the
85
hidden protagonist of the September 11 trauma, a collective nightmare which

had remained an unfinished narrative, with only occasional glimpses at the puta-
tive villain, who, regardless of the price on his head, remained free, unreachable,
and enigmatic. This need to see bin Laden is what Peter Bergen, a CNN terror
analyst, means when he states: “Frankly, if he was reading out of the telephone
book it would be newsworthy.” If he is right, this may be an example of the trade
off between the status attributed to the interviewee and the amount of new infor-
mation gained. The more status, the less crucial the new information.
That the interview stands for the kind of journalism in which it is the “authen-
tic” encounter with the persona that counts, not the words, is confirmed by
CNN’s method of interviewing. Carried out by giving a list of written questions
to Al-Jazeera’s Tayseer Alouni, it was rightly criticized as unprofessional. Giving
up on the direct questioning, CNN’s competitors argued, means losing the possi-
bility of surprising the interviewee, and/or challenging him.12 Moreover, by losing
the most essential journalistic instrument they also gave up on the hope that he
could be led to answering the questions considered crucial for the American
public. In other words, they did not even have the opportunity to be seen as car-
rying out negotiations with the terrorists. Yet, when it concerns “the most wanted
man in the world” and “if it’s this or nothing” (Andrew Heyward, CBS news pres-
ident, Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2001), CBS as well as MSNBC were also
ready to make an exception.
This brings us back to the point that for the US audiences, the message obvi-
ously lies in the pictures, not in Blitzer’s translated choice of quotes. Nobody
would expect bin Laden to admit to being in charge of the September 11 attacks
(after all, there is a price on his head). And, unsurprisingly, he does make sure to
restrict his own role in the attack to that of a supporter and believer, appointing
God (whom he mentions no less than 36 times) as the active leader of the attack.
Last, there is the problem of the proxy’s identity, which public criticism of
CNN has failed to question. Not surprisingly, Alouni, working for a channel
known all along as empathetic to bin Laden (“Al-Jazeera is not bin Laden’s for-
mally, but he clearly is its star,” says Fouad Ajami, New York Times Magazine,
November 11, 2001), was chosen for being trusted by bin Laden. His arrest in
September 2003 as an al-Qaeda supporter indicates that the doubts about his
acting as a CNN messenger may have been justified, and that Blitzer’s comple-
ments for his creating “good professional rapport” with bin Laden were at most
only half true (that is, the rapport was good, but not quite professional).13
Other formats presenting the terrorist persona on global news media raise sim-
ilar ethical issues to the ones highlighted by the CNN–Alouni interview, giving
them more weight. Stories in which personal biographies are drawn, motives
sought out, and experts on the human psyche and on environmental circum-
stances consulted, all contribute to the process of personalizing terrorists and the
upgrading of their status, turning them into a new class of celebrities fraught with
internal contradictions. Threatening, mysterious, and enigmatic yet sometimes
all too human, struck by fate, and deeply committed to the cause, they have
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THE PR OF TERROR
become the best show in town. This means that journalists are prepared to take
personal risks to seek them out and talk to them in person.
“Getting to know you”: the new genres of covering terror

In a world turning into a frontier, in which people lose their sense of personal
security, with personalized politics in which the strongest man in the world is
chasing villains in the old Western style, the media also join the chase. Both the
security forces and the journalists pursue terrorists to the end of the world. The
military are looking for their heads; the media want to hear what they have to say.
Whereas, as we have shown, the handing over of the interviewing of terrorists
to mediators raises serious professional problems, embarking on the risky road of
making direct contact with terrorists (or their sympathizers) tends to compromise
professional practices in a different way. In the pursuit of terrorists, journalists
sometimes become occupied with the journey of getting there and with their own
heroic endeavors along the way. Having gotten there, as the balance of power
shifts—with journalists finding themselves as quasi-hostages and terrorists playing
hosts—control slips again, and the journalists risk being compromised by their
subjects, or, worse, falling in love with them.14
The case of ABC’s John Miller’s interview with bin Laden (May 1998) shows
how the story of “getting there” can make the journalist into a hero, and, more
important, how it seems to influences the tone and content of the interview. High-
lighting the story of how “Miller and his crew were led by armed Islamic militants
by foot through the mountains of southern Afghanistan to meet bin Laden at a
secret hideaway,” the questions he ends up posing allow his interlocutor to present
himself in a favorable light. Rather than directly challenge his interviewee, Miller
attributes the questions about bin Laden’s terrorist activities to the American
authorities, thereby distancing himself from the accusations, and making them
sound more tentative.15 This can also be seen in his use of subjective, “soft,” verbs
for describing the degree of conviction held by the authorities—they “believe,”
they “paint him as a terrorist leader,” “investigat(ing) a suspicion . . . ” Whereas in
the case of ordinary news interviews (Clayman 1992) such mitigating techniques
could be deployed for creating a neutral/objective, appearance, in the setting of
bin Laden’s interview, conducted as it were in his hideaway, surrounded by mili-
tants with drawn guns, it is more feasible to see them as used for ensuring the
journalist’s survival behind enemy lines.
The first question posed by Miller (as quoted by the ABC network Internet
site), focusing on bin Laden’s heroic past, is most flattering: “Mr bin Laden, to
Americans you are an interesting figure: A man who comes from a background of
wealth and comforts who ends up fighting on the front lines. Many Americans
think that’s unusual.”
In case the point about bin Laden’s sacrificing his comfortable life for a
cause was missed, Miller goes even further, comparing bin Laden to a no
87
lesser character than US president Teddy Roosevelt, ending with “you

are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt.” Interviewing by
proxy could not be more flattering than the way in which ABC’s corre-
spondent carries out his job. Whether overawed by his getting an
interview, or by the need to get back, Miller does not exactly give a hard
time to his interviewee. Much less flattering were bin Laden’s cohorts
granting interviews to journalists for settling internal accounts. Thus,
Jaffar Omar Talib, we are told [New York Times, March 10, 2002], “dis-
misses bin Laden as lightweight,” and an interview with Abu Abbass,
Achille Lauro’s kidnapper, starts with: “To hear Abu Abbass tell it, ter-
rorists like Osama bin Laden give terrorists like him a bad name.”
(Newsweek, November 4, 2002)
A recent example of a feature story, in which talking to terrorists is framed by the

writer as a journalistic feat, and which tends to romanticize its subjects, is Scott
Johnson’s Newsweek cover story (October 10, 2003), featuring a terrorist group
called “the Army of Muhammad.” Johnson turned out to be particularly lucky as
his interview was carried out a few days prior to the group’s blowing up the UN
headquarters in Baghdad. Trying out names—“guerrillas” on the cover, “resis-
tance fighters” in the story’s headlines—Johnson’s photograph features three
men, waving their “AK-47s,” their eyes peeping out of cracks in the kaffiyehs
hiding their faces. The cover announcing an “Exclusive: inside Iraq’s resistance,”
and underneath: “A behind–the-lines-look.” The headlines in the inside pages
make sure we would not miss the point by repeating the scoop: “Inside an enemy
cell.”16
Johnson became the real hero of his story only a few days later, when “his” ter-
rorists made the headlines. Similarly, Suleiman A-shafi, Israel’s Channel II
journalist, and a Palestinian himself, interviewed Hammas leader Ismail Abu
Shnev, in an item which opened the evening news show on the next day, follow-
ing Shnev’s killing that morning. And Daniel Pearl became a tragic hero as he
was killed by his interviewee in the meeting they had arranged.
Significant as it may be, undertaking the risky route for meeting with a star ter-
rorist is relatively rare. The more common type of coverage, less taxing for
reporters, aims at getting the public acquainted with “ordinary” terrorists. The
bulk of the New York Times Magazine corpus we examined consists of reports
focusing on the story of one terrorist, a human being like us, who, because of an
unhappy psychological disposition, or a difficult childhood, or pure bad luck, was
caught up in a tragic situation. Some of these stories reconstruct the terrorists’
profiles after their death, while others investigate the lives of terrorists in hiding
or in prison.
In the following example, a feature shown on 60 Minutes (CBS, May 28,
2003) tells the story of a suicide bomber. Framing the event as a melodrama for
which only fate is to blame, it illustrates the problematics of this increasingly
popular genre of journalism. Bob Simon, out to investigate the phenomenon of
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THE PR OF TERROR
women suicide bombers in Palestinian society, stumbles on a perfect case in

point. It is an attack on a supermarket in Jerusalem in which two girls died.
One, an 18-year-old Palestinian, and the suicide bomber; the other, a 17-year-
old Israeli, and the victim. The Palestinian, we are told by Simon, was a
good-looking, successful pupil, engaged to be married—“no different from the
neighbor’s daughter”—who became a terrorist, surrendering to forces larger than
herself. The victim, on the other side, sent by her mother to buy food before the
Sabbath, entered the neighborhood supermarket when chance caught up with
her. The story reverberates with familiar echoes of “if only . . .,” “she was not sup-
posed to go by this bus,” “she happened to be late that morning,” spoken by
broken-hearted mothers, the day after. The parallel narratives proceed by inter-
viewing family members (the bomber’s father, the victim’s mother), highlighting
the photographs of the two beautiful girls, which fate so tragically brought
together.
The problems with this emotionally moving narrative lie exactly in the power-
ful neat symmetrical structure, which has given up on distinguishing between
perpetrator and target and represents the two girls as arbitrary victims of fate.
Typical to this kind of story, the journalists’ search for a motive focuses on the
personal lives of the would be terrorists. Repeatedly, the reason for becoming a
terrorist lies somewhere in the person’s psychological make-up, and/or in a consti-
tutive event in his or her biography. Thus, responsibility is shifted from the
perpetrator to either internal or external reasons over which he or she has no
control. This psychologized approach fits the character of personalized human
stories. It also prevents a structural analysis.
The closest this genre gets to discussing social and political factors is when a
psychologist invited to interpret the motivation of the story’s protagonist touches
on the larger context by mentioning environmental influences. This skirting on
the political, without straying too far from the personal, can be demonstrated by
another 60 Minutes report (May 5, 2003). This time Bob Simon attempts to con-
struct a profile of a suicide bomber with the assistance of a Palestinian psychiatrist
and an Israeli psychologist, two experts on the human psyche. Even when the
report is defined in terms of exploring an issue, not in the more usual terms of
telling the story of one person, the experts chosen are specialists concerned with
the workings of the (individual) mind, thus framing the issue as psychological (or
psychoanalytic). Nevertheless, in offering two alternative explanations, the
Palestinian psychiatrist, in what may be seen as a deviation from his field of
expertise, does introduce the idea of a change in the social environment in which
teenage Palestinians grow up. Proposing a strictly psychological explanation, Dr
Eyad Sarraj characterizes the personality of a would-be terrorist: “They are usually
very timid people, introvert, their problem was always communication in public,
or communicating their feelings.” However, in his alternative explanation, Sarraj
shifts the emphasis from the individual psyche to external social pressures.
Describing a process of changing fashions in Palestinian society, in which teenage
role models have undergone a dramatic change, he compares the time of his own
89
growing up with the present, touching on the political: “In all my teenage time
my symbols were body-building and movie stars, and singers, and people like that.
Then it changes . . . the guerrilla, the fighter; then it was the stone thrower, and
today it is the martyr.”
A slightly different variation of journalistic missions aimed at uncovering the
roots of the phenomenon takes reporters into the field in an attempt to investi-
gate the home roots of celebrity terrorists (now dead, in hiding, or in prison) by
visiting their “natural” environment, and meeting the families in which they
grew up. One such story is based on interviews with family members of Zacarias
Moussaoui, al-Qaeda topnotch, now in prison (The New York Times, February 9,
2003). Under the title (reminding us that) “Everybody has a mother,” Mous-
saoui’s brother offers the familiar psychological interpretation to the “causes of
(his brother’s) anger.” He also happens to be promoting a book he is finishing on
the subject. The abundance of profile stories of Muhammad Atta offered by the
press, disclose dubious scoops such as an interview with his father entitled “he
never had a kite” (Newsweek, September 25, 2001), psychological descriptions of
the “double life of a suicide pilot” as “the shy, caring, deadly fanatic” (Guardian,
September 23, 2001), and the familiar motive of “the seeds of rage,” suggesting an
ideological explanation.17
The symmetry between villain and victim, the strong element of arbitrary fate,
and the shifting responsibility to external sources, on the one hand, and the pro-
ject of getting acquainted with the terrorist’s personal biography, on the other, all
contribute to creating empathy between the reader/viewer and the story’s protag-
onist. The focus on psychological and environmental interpretations effectively
cut off the perpetrator from his or her action and, worse, from the suffering
caused. Moreover, these profile stories, usually reserved for the stars of popular
culture, gradually upgrade terrorists to a new status in the exhibitionist culture of
spectacle (Kellner 2003). The paparazzi-style pursuit of terrorists may be seen in
the attempts to interview anyone who knew them (recall interviews with Mullah
Omar’s personal driver, Newsweek, January 21, 2001), and in stories equating the
notorious fame of terrorists with that of other popular culture stars. One example
of the latter is the extensive coverage of the Hebron “invincible” football team,
in which six members became suicide bombers, causing a situation in which “the
team has started to lose” (Newsweek, July 7, 2002). The interlacing in the story’s
narrative of the engagement in popular sport and the engagement with terror–
from its being the best team, through its losing, and ending with the wish of a
father of one suicide bomber that “the Jihad soccer team will one day be born
again”—blurs the boundaries between the protagonists’ identity as football play-
ers, with whom it is easy to identify, and their identity as suicide bombers, with
whom it is more difficult. Described by the way they look (one has “a baby face,”
another has “brooding eyes”), their mobilization by a mosque called “Jihad,” their
participating in the Hammas terrorist movement, and their participation in a
football team (“squad” in the story) with the same name, there is no mention that
“Jihad” means “a sacred war,” and the translation of Shaheeds (suicide bombers)
90
THE PR OF TERROR
into “martyrs” (“the Jihad mosque became an factory of martyrs”) refers only to
the Muslim meaning of “saint” without the action involved.
Common to in-depths interviews with hidden terrorists (as in Newsweek’s fea-
ture “Muhammad’s Army”) or with their relatives (as in interviewing Muhammad
Atta’s father), or in the drawing up of psychological profiles with the help of pro-
fessionals, is looking at terrorists as disconnected from their acts, thus creating a
distance between the character responsible for terror and the suffering he causes.
In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman (1989) explains the
way in which all the moral scruples of Nazis carrying out orders during the holo-
caust were pushed aside by the distance created between the act—executed within
the framework of the bureaucratic system and facilitated by modern technology—
and the devastation it caused. This distancing cancels the moral meaning of the
killers’ actions and contributes to the erasing of the humanity of the victims by
their remaining invisible. We argue that the genre of interviewing, and other per-
sonalizing formats used—ones that lay terrorists on the psychologist’s couch, or
that venture into the field to talk to their families—are aimed at exposing their
fundamental humanity. These genres also lead readers and viewers to empathize
with the story’s heroes, creating a short circuit between the person we get to know
intimately and his/her responsibility for the suffering he/she caused and is plan-
ning to cause. In other words, positioning viewers vis à vis bin Laden, or likewise
protagonists, as having a face, and making them understand their motives and
their world view, disconnects terrorists in time and place from the acts they had
committed. It also neutralizes journalists’ capacity to play “devil’s advocate.” They
end up allowing their interviewees to create ambiguity regarding their responsibil-
ity for executing the atrocities which make them into sought after media stars.
Whereas Bauman points to the strategy of erasing the humanity of the victims
(to facilitate their being treated inhumanely), current television creates an oppo-
site problem by showing the human faces of the perpetrators of mass killings who
cannot be confronted with their crimes or their victims because journalists
relinquish their basic tools to do so. The fundamental conflict of interest that
exists between interviewer and interviewee, with subjects maneuvering between
a rhetoric of avoiding responsibility, directed at the channel’s target audiences,
and another rhetoric of “aleihoom,” disintermediating that audience directed to
their own fans.18 Thus, distancing reinforces the status of terrorists as a new kind
of celebrity of popular culture. In bin Laden we watch an authentic and charis-
matic visionary who, in spite of not taking any direct responsibility for
September 11, makes use of the opportunity to “balance” the picture by justifying
the mass killing and promising more. Appearing on CNN he can show his status
in the eye of the enemy to millions of potential fans, watching directly or from
the wings.
Finally, to return to the question of the paradox of media enthusiastically sup-
porting the government and the military at war (and accused of exaggerated
patriotism) that switch roles to undermine government policy by turning the
enemy into a super star. First, what is common to an embedded journalist and one
91
who chases terrorists is the sense of being there. Conveying to viewers the
authenticity of the experience has long overtaken ideals such as objectivity, accu-
racy, and responsibility. Second, the timing and the rhythm of covering war is
dictated by the government and the military. Stories of getting acquainted with
the persona of terrorists (in between attacks), however, are initiated by journal-
ists, who are (at least in part) in charge of the timing and the pace. Third,
pursuing terrorists provides journalists with an opportunity to prove that they are
not always patriotic. Once left on their own, they can return to their journalistic
role.19 It may also be the result of obeying the internal logic of popular exhibi-
tionist culture, which results in the treating of different subjects by similar
formats. Thus, as from “our” side the story of war and disaster is told as personal-
ized, human experience (tragic, heroic, or both), the coverage of terrorists is
also motivated by the search for heroes, villains, and victims. True, the terrorist
is seen from “our” perspective (as contestants or victims), but the enemy’s
courage, daring, and determination can be admired. And in the context of an
unfinished story, in which the scoring of points continues, it will always have
high ratings.
Notes
1 According to Kern, Just, and Norris (2003), the importance of the local angle in news
reporting on terrorism during the 1970s and the 1980s led to paying little attention in
the case of the American media to most of the terror attacks around the world. Citing
Weimann and Winn (1993) they reveal that between 1968–80 less than 20 percent of
terror attacks were reported by the three main American television networks. The
numbers declined further in the 1990s, when international terror attacks occurred less
frequently.
2 Thus in the case of the IRA (from the 1970s until the mid-1990s), the use of laws pro-
hibiting the interviewing of terrorists on media in Britain created a constant rift
between the government and media organizations (Wilson 1997); likewise, in the
Israeli case, interviewing Palestinians was legally prohibited until the beginning of the
Oslo process.
3 One case in point is the public criticism in Israel following a 72-hour long live broad-
cast of Israel’s public television channel in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks on
buses, carried out by the Hamas in March 1996. Academics and left-wing politicians
accused the channel of exacerbating the impact of the attacks, and playing into the
hands of the opposition to the Oslo peace process, both by the obsessive occupation
with the events and by the “whining” delivery style of its anchor.
4 The years in which this option is accessible in the New York Times Internet site.
5 In stories of journalists’ pursuit of terrorists, we did not include journalistic missions
aimed at exposing essential information for investigative reporting (such as the one
conducted by Daniel Pearl), concerned with raising a warning about environmental
risks.
6 Overall, the word “terror” appeared 301 times—156 between January 1, 1996 and
September 10, 2001, and 145 times between September 11, 2001 and August 31,
2003. The word “terrorist” appeared 250 times—76 between January 1, 1996 and Sep-
tember 10, 2001, and 174 between September 11, 2001 and August 31, 2003. In the
first period, only one item may be considered fitting for the category of the personal-
ization of terror. It is Jeffery Goldberg’s story of his voyage to Haqqania Madrasa (The
92
THE PR OF TERROR
New York Times, June 25, 2000), a militant Muslin seminary in Pakistan, in which he
interviewed future Taliban soldiers and leaders.
7 A recent example of serving terrorists’ causes is the Israeli media’s launching of a live
marathon following a suicide bomber’s attack in an Ultra Orthodox neighborhood in
Jerusalem on August 2003. In the attack’s aftermath, television could fatalistically
foretell Israelis that this is “the end of the Hudna (a reconciliation period between
Israel and the Palestinians),” and, we add, the victory of terror.
8 Whether Al-Jazeera’s allocating “so much airtime” to bin Laden, and making him into
a celebrity, is due as claimed by el-Nawawy and Iskandar (2002) to his promoting
advertising sales, or whether it is also the result of empathy for his cause, there is unan-
imous agreement that bin Laden is the channel’s star.
9 Tapes recorded by suicide bombers on the eve of their mission, designed for the
recruitment of new candidates, and for blocking the way for last minute regrets.
10 The basic claim that “terror” against occupation is legitimate, while terror against ide-
ology or for ideology (as in the bin Laden case) are not, can be found in the debate
over the definition of terror, in the US media and in Arabic countries such as Egypt,
Jordan, and Saudi Arabia (Haaretz, September 11, 2003). This distinction was
adopted also by the Washington Post for the labeling of members of the Palestinian
Hamas group as “militants” and members of al-Qaeda as “terrorists” (a distinction crit-
icized by pro-Israeli Media Watch camera.org). The explanation of the Washington
Post’s Ombudsman (September 21, 2003) for the differences was that “Hamas con-
ducts terrorism but also has territorial ambitions, is a nationalist movement and
conducts some social work. As far as we know, al-Qaeda exists only as a terrorist net-
work.”
11 Voiced by the President of the Media Research Center in Alexandria Va, this criticism
could be reinforced by bin Laden’s first statement in which he announces that “the
battle has moved inside America. We will work to continue this battle, God permit-
ting, until victory, or until we meet God.”
12 As Eric Sorenson, president of NSNBC, said sending out questions “takes out the ele-
ment of surprise, and rehearsed answers are not as honest as spontaneous ones.” In the
same spirit, Fox channel’s spokesman announced “the only way we would do it is if we
could have a sit down interview with bin Laden” (Los Angeles Times, October 18,
2001).
13 The claims against Alouni’s interview (for example, the insult from a governmental
source “he looked like a wimp,”) concentrated on his failure to make bin Laden
answer the crucial questions (The New York Times, December 12, 2001). Further,
Alouni’s extra deferential attitude may be evident in his repeatedly addressing bin
Laden with the differential “Sheikh.” A typical example of his representing bin
Laden’s interests might be seen in the following question: “al-Qaeda is facing now a
country that leads the world militarily, politically, technologically. Surely, the al-
Qaeda organization does not have the economic means that the United States has.
How can al-Qaeda defeat America militarily?”
14 Sometimes, an invitation is extended by the terrorists, as in the case of a Daily Tele-
graph reporter in Pakistan, who received a fax one week before the first anniversary of
September 11 on the attack, and was brought, eyes tied up, via a number of safe places,
to a flat in which he was introduced to a suitcase stuffed with al-Qaeda correspon-
dence. A few days later the source was arrested.
15 From a discourse perspective, Miller changes his footing (Goffman 1981) from claim-
ing authorship for his question to taking the role of animator in which he represents a
third party.
16 Johnson managed the scoop, he tells us, through the assistance of “a well-connected
intermediary,” asked to “help in connecting some fighters.” It is clear that in the com-
petition between the military and the media in pursuit of terrorists, the media wins.
93
For obvious reasons intermediaries for arranging interviews are easier to find than col-
laborators (i.e. intermediaries for arranging capture).
17 “In the streets where the terrorists came of age, many young Egyptians profess admir-
ation for America. But the seeds of rage are here too” (“Muhammad Atta’s
neighborhood,” Newsweek, December 16, 2001).
18 Recall Dan Rather’s interview with Saddam Hussein, heavily criticized by the govern-
ment, or Blitzer’s interview with bin Laden analyzed above.
19 This of course reminds us that interviews are based on the assumption of the inter-
viewee’s willingness to cooperate with the interviewer. Interviews with criminals are
unusually carried out in the law courts that have their methods for trying to extract
true answers from defendants.
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M. Kern, and M. Just (eds), Framing Terrorism: the News Media, the Government and the
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5
RESEARCHING
US MEDIA–STATE RELATIONS
AND TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY WARS 1
Piers Robinson
For those of us seeking to understand the relationship between the state and
media during wartime, the Iraq war is potentially a unique case. The unprece-
dented scale of domestic and international public opposition, the failure to
obtain unequivocal UN authorization and the distinctive justifications used to
“sell” the war, including the alleged WMD threat and humanitarian justifications
related to Saddam Hussein’s record of tyranny, created an ambiguous and contro-
versial political environment. In addition, the presence of 24-hour news, the
Internet and satellite broadcasting appeared to destabilize wartime media–state
relations. An important question raised for those who have attempted to assess
the relative balance of power between the US media and the state during
wartime is whether we have witnessed an empowered wartime media or, con-
versely, continued domination of the news agenda by official viewpoints.
With this question in mind, I start by setting out an overview of our empirical
and theoretical understanding of media–state relations during previous wars.
There are reasons for thinking why we may be witnessing a more powerful and
influential media, including the impact of real-time and 24-hour news, trans-
national media organizations (so-called “global” media) and the Internet as well as
post-Cold War geopolitical circumstances, but there are also many reasons to sug-
gest that the impact of such changes is far less than is often assumed to be the
case. Setting out the research imperatives necessary to test the thesis that there
has been a significant change in the balance of power between government and
media during wartime, I argue that in the absence of appropriate research and
substantial empirical evidence, we cannot yet claim that there has been a signifi-
cant change in the balance of power and influence between the US media and
the state during wartime.
96
U S M E D I A – S TAT E R E L AT I O N S
Manufacturing consent for war

An extensive literature on the media’s reporting of war highlights the consistency
between media agendas and the agendas of governments (see for example Glasgow
University Media Group 1985; Hallin 1986; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Bennett
1990; Bennett and Paletz 1994; Mermin 1999; Wolfsfeld 1997). This research
consistently suggests that when it comes to matters of national security and war,
media rarely report outside the bounds of what Daniel Hallin (1986) described as
elite-legitimated controversy. So, for example, in his seminal study of the Vietnam
War, The Uncensored War (1986), Hallin examined the widely held belief that the
news media played an oppositional role to official US policy. Contrary to orthodox
thinking, he found that critical reporting only surfaced after the Washington
political establishment became divided between the “hawks,” who believed vic-
tory should be achieved at all costs, and the “doves,” who believed the price of
victory was not worth paying. Moreover media rarely, if ever, reported outside the
bounds of this debate to argue that the war was fundamentally wrong or immoral.
Similarly, in relation to the post-Cold War 1991 Gulf War, Bennett and Paletz’s
edited collection Taken by Storm (1994) highlighted the failure of journalists ade-
quately to criticize official policy. In his summation chapter Paletz wrote:
Insufficient dedication to the freedom of the press, fear of provoking

government outrage, shared frames of reference with governing elites,
and the pursuit of sales and ratings are among the factors that help
explain the acquiescence to government curbs, no matter how reluctant,
of media executives.
(Paletz 1994: 284)
Five reasons are frequently put forward in the literature on media–state relations
for explaining media deference to the state in wartime: reliance upon govern-
ment information sources, Cold War ideology, the “rally round the flag” effect,
political flak, and the corporate nature of mainstream US news media. I will out-
line each in turn.
First, journalists rely overwhelmingly on government sources when construct-
ing the news (Hallin 1986: 63–70; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Bennett 1990:
109; Wolfsfeld 1997; Mermin 1999). The need to supply a steady and rapid flow
of “important” news stories, combined with the vast public relations apparatus of
government and powerful interests more broadly, means that journalists tend to
become heavily reliant on public officials when defining and framing the news
agenda.
Second, during the Cold War the ideology of anti-Communism acted as a
control mechanism by providing journalists with a template with which to
“understand” global events, as well as providing political elites with a powerful
rhetorical tool with which to criticize as unpatriotic anyone who questioned US
foreign policy (Hallin 1986: 8–58; Herman and Chomsky 1988: 29).
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PIERS ROBINSON
Third, owing to nationalism and the desire to “support our troops,” the so-
called “rally round the flag” effect (Mueller 1973) occurs during wartime. This
phenomenon can be understood to limit critical reporting through journalists’
and editors’ own patriotic response to military action as well as the desire among
media outlets to reflect the patriotism displayed by the public.
Fourth, when controversial material is aired it generates a disproportionate
degree of “flak” from individuals connected with powerful interests including gov-
ernment “spin doctors.” Such criticism serves to caution editors and journalists
against putting out news stories that are “too” controversial.
Fifth, the “size, ownership and profit orientation of mass media” (Herman and
Chomsky 1988: 3), and their shared “common interests . . . with other major cor-
porations, banks, and government” (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 14) creates a
clash of interest between the media’s supposed role as a watchdog of the govern-
ment and the interests of government and business elites (Bennett 1990: 109;
Herman and Chomsky 1988: 3, 14). Via institutional factors including strategic
interventions by owners of media conglomerates, recruitment processes that
select and reward journalists who see the world in a way congenial and relatively
unchallenging to elite interests, routine self-censorship on the part of journalists
and editors, and, perhaps most importantly, the internalization of a US elite ideo-
logical framework, news stories that run contrary to vested interests are, on
balance, less likely to surface than those consistent with the worldview of major
conglomerates.2 While the importance of economic factors for the shaping of
media output are sometimes downplayed or dismissed as conspiratorial, there does
exist remarkable proximity between US foreign policy objectives and US business
interests, as shown by Jonathan Mermin in his 1999 study of US media coverage
of post-Vietnam US military interventions:
One powerful interest that has a major stake in US foreign policy and
does have access to the news is business. But business, as a rule, has
found US foreign policy to be quite consistent with its interests. In the
Cold War, Washington supported anti-Communists against Commu-
nists—real and imagined—the anti-Communists being the side more
interested in economic engagement with the United States in terms
favourable to American business. In the post-Cold War era, a major
organizing principle of US foreign policy has been to secure investment
opportunities, market access, and oil for American business. The objec-
tives of US foreign policy therefore continue to match the interests of
American business.
(Mermin 1999: 28–9)
The relative explanatory weighting accorded to each of these factors in terms of

shaping wartime coverage is open to debate. There does, however, exist consider-
able agreement within the literature that all these factors play a role in shaping
media output both during times of war and, more generally, with respect to US
98
media coverage of international affairs.3 Also, the research discussed should not
be taken to suggest that media deference to the government in wartime is
absolute, only that, on balance, news media tend to reflect the government line
during war.
Wartime media–state relations in the twenty-first century

In recent years, with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and media outlets such as
CNN in the 1980s, substantial debate has emerged regarding the power of news
media to shape government decision-making in respect to international affairs—
the so-called “CNN effect” (see Robinson 2002). Two key lines of argument
have been put forward to support the thesis that media possess greater power and
independence during times of international crisis. These are technological
developments that, in general terms, appear to have challenged the government
dominance as news source and changed geopolitical circumstances surrounding
the end of the Cold War. Hence, in terms of the explanatory framework identi-
fied earlier, the continued applicability of the first two factors explaining
wartime media deference (i.e. reliance on government information sources and
Cold War ideology) have been brought into question. Of the other three factors
(rally round the flag, flak, and the corporate nature of US media) there is, of
course, little reason to believe these have substantially altered over recent years
in terms of increasing the autonomy and influence of media during international
crises.
Technological developments
At the forefront of debate during the 1990s was the apparent ascendancy of the
24-hour news channel and the associated proliferation of advanced news-
gathering equipment facilitating real-time television coverage,4 the rise of
transnational media organizations (global media) and the Internet. The net effect
of these technological developments, according to many analysts, was govern-
ment loss of control over the information environment and a news media that
was, at least potentially, more likely to be adversarial and “off-message” (e.g.
Annis 1991; Nye 1999; Rothkopf 1999; Shapiro 1999; Volkmer 1999; Deibert
2000; and Herrera 2002). The working assumption here was that media became
less dependent upon government information sources when defining and framing
the news agenda and more likely to include alternative viewpoints. For example,
Nye claimed that:
The free flow of broadcast information in open societies has always had
an impact on public opinion and the formulation of foreign policy. But
now the flow has increased in volume and shortened news cycles . . .
The so-called CNN effect makes it hard to keep items that might other-
wise warrant a lower priority off the top of the public agenda. Now, with
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the added interactivity of groups on the Internet, it will be harder than

ever to maintain a consistent agenda.
(Nye 1999: 26)
Specifically, with respect to the 24-hour news cycle, James Hoge claimed that
today’s pervasive media increase the pressure on politicians to respond promptly
to news accounts that by their immediacy are incomplete, without context and
sometimes wrong (Hoge 1994). In relation to real-time television coverage, Pre-
ston argued that:
Newsgathering technology (ever-smaller ENG [electronic news-

gathering] cameras, portable satellite dishes for sending back images . . .
and capacity for field editing) increased viewer engagement with . . . war
by enabling journalists . . . to film clandestinely in places that would other-
wise remain unpublicised; through the ability to send material quickly or
even live; and through the increase in volume of stories and footage
(Preston: 1996: 112)
The key assumption underpinning these claims was that the ability to report in
real-time, 24 hours a day enabled the media to report events without mediation
by government press briefers. With respect to the transnationalization of media
organizations, Brown argues that it “challenges the ability of states to control
information flows” (Brown 2003a: 88) and, according to Shaw (2000), this “diffu-
sion of information through the increasingly global media cannot be contained
within the bounds that even the most powerful state leaders would prefer” (Shaw
2000: 33). Volkmer (1999: 4–5) took this analysis one step further by arguing that
CNN International is actually facilitating the emergence of a global public
sphere. Finally, the Internet was argued by many to have both expanded the
availability of alternative information for journalists and the public and to have
empowered non-elite voices. For example, analyzing the David and Goliath
struggle between the indigenous Chiapas guerrilla army and the Mexican state,
Kellner claimed that “From the beginning, the peasants and guerrilla armies
struggling in Chiapas, Mexico used computer data bases, guerrilla radio, and
other forms of media to circulate news of their struggles and ideas” (Kellner 1998:
182). The problem with such claims, however, is that there are many reasons to
suppose that technological advances have had little impact on the range of
sources used and substantive viewpoints expressed in mainstream US media.
24-hour news and real time coverage

It is unclear that 24-hour news and real-time coverage provide any greater range
of views, depth of analysis or understanding than traditional media outlets. Much
of the content of 24-hour channels5 is in fact highly repetitive with the same
news segments being repeated on an hourly basis. Actual live coverage interrupts
100
this hourly cycle only when a significant event occurs at which the media are pre-
sent. So, for example, during the 2003 Iraq war the hourly bulletin cycle would
often be interrupted for live coverage of “US/UK” press briefings and statements
by leading political figures. Furthermore, as Thussu argued, the drive to deliver
audiences to advertisers in a fiercely competitive market can lead 24-hour news
“to sensationalization and trivialization of often complex stories and a temptation
to highlight the entertainment value of news” (Thussu 2003: 118). For example,
the fall of Baghdad to US forces was epitomized by live coverage of the statue of
Saddam Hussein being pulled to the ground by a group of Iraqi men. The event
was enthusiastically reported by some Western journalists through comparison
with the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. These comparisons
were, however, dubious for two reasons. First, the now seminal images generated
by coverage of the fall of Communism throughout Eastern Europe showed mas-
sive numbers of people protesting/celebrating as opposed to the several hundred
Iraqis seen pulling down the statue of Saddam in central Baghdad. Second, the
overthrow of the Communist regimes was via popular public protest, not armed
intervention by a foreign power. More significantly, the statue was pulled down
with practical help from US soldiers. Hence it is a matter of controversy whether
the pulling down of the statue was orchestrated by US soldiers. Certainly, sober
review of the footage shows that, beyond the several hundred Iraqi men working
with the US marines to pull down the statue, the surrounding area was sparsely
populated with Iraqi civilians who remained passive when the statue fell. More
generally live coverage of the fall of Baghdad was often at the expense of more
measured assessments regarding both Iraqi support for the US forces and the
actual degree of control that US forces had achieved. As we are now all too well
aware, the ability of US/UK forces to maintain even minimal levels of security
within Iraq has caused a sober reassessment among journalists and policy-makers
regarding initial claims of victory and liberation. In short, 24-hour news and real-
time reporting may create the impression of greater transparency, accuracy, and
diversity; but the superficial nature of such coverage can actually limit the overall
depth and quality of reporting.
Transnational (global) media

With respect to transnational or global media, the claim that these are either
affecting the ability of governments to control information or creating a global
public sphere has been predicated upon the assumptions that significant numbers
of US citizens are indeed utilizing such media, and that the content of these
media outlets actually reflects a truly global range of viewpoints. However, it is far
from clear the extent to which audiences have abandoned traditional terrestrial
(and national) based media in favor of transnational media outlets. As Carruthers
(2000: 202) argued, “some social theorists . . . point to the stubborn preference of
many audiences for national, regional or more local news.” More importantly, the
extent to which such outlets are genuinely “transnational” or “global” in terms of
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content is highly questionable. For example, Volkmer’s claim of an emerging

global public sphere is based mainly upon CNN International’s (CNNI) “World
report,” a bulletin that features reporters from around the world. This bulletin,
however, represents only one small part of CNNI’s6 overall output while CNN
broadcasts to US citizens retain a US-centric perspective (Wallis and Baran
1990; Thussu 2000). Hence Volkmer’s thesis would appear to be overstated. Also,
with respect to the 1999 Kosovo war, Thussu (2000: 345) found that CNN
“reported uncritically . . . [and] . . . tended to follow the news agenda set up by the
US military . . . [while] few alternative views were aired.” In short, Carruthers
would appear correct in arguing that “the content of the ‘globalized’ media
broadly reflects the interest, concerns, and values of elites, and generally of First
World elites” (Carruthers 2000: 202).
It is also worth noting here the continued vulnerability of “alternative” global
media, such as the Arab satellite television station Al-Jazeera to political flak (the
third factor used to explain media deference in war time). During the 2003 Iraq
war considerable flak was directed at Al-Jazeera as it frequently incurred criticism
from the US government for allegedly biased reporting. Interestingly, the New
York Stock Exchange withdrew Al-Jazeera’s accreditation soon after the war had
started, supposedly “as part of a general reorganization of space for media out-
lets.”7 So, while the presence of Al-Jazeera might on the one hand suggest the
creation of a greater pluralization of viewpoints in the global media milieu, the
channel is still vulnerable to punishment and flak when it is perceived to have
“over-stepped” the boundaries of “acceptable” reporting.
The Internet
While the Internet appears to facilitate a more plural media sphere, its impact in
terms of influencing both mainstream news coverage and pressure group mobiliza-
tion has been far from clear. In terms of influencing mainstream news coverage,
the extent to which on-line information sources have been integrated into
processes of news-gathering has received insufficient attention from empirically
based academic research8 and it might well be the case that journalists and editors
remain predisposed to rely upon what are perceived to be more “credible” sources
of information such as government officials and other elite voices. This is
arguably even more likely to be the case during wartime when misinformation
and propaganda on the World Wide Web is likely to be at a peak. In respect of
the mobilization of interest groups, there is reason and evidence to indicate that
the empowering potential of the Internet is far less than is often argued to be the
case. For example, with respect to the quality of on-line political expression (a
much vaunted component of arguments surrounding the positive impact of the
Internet on deliberative democracy), Wilhelm (2000: 98) found that:
The data support the conception of online political forums as facilitating

self-expression and monologue, without in large measure the “listening,”
102
responsiveness, and dialogue that would promote communicative action,

such as prioritising issues, negotiating differences, reaching argument, and
plotting a course of action to influence the political agenda . . . If a democ-
ratic discussion is defined as at least in part by the quality of the
conversation, then the newsgroups analysed in this study are not very
deliberative . . . Rather than listening to others, more times than not per-
sons opposed to a seed message used it to amplify their views.
(Wilhelm 2000: 98)
In terms of facilitating the mobilization of non-elite protest groups such as the

“Stop the War Coalition,” much research to date indicates that the Internet at
best serves only as an additional form of communication rather than as a revolu-
tionary tool of mobilization (see for example Froehling 1997; Cleaver 1998; Hill
and Hughes 1998; Pickerell 2000; and Romano 2002). Indeed, it is plausible that,
rather than strengthening grassroots activism, reliance on Internet communica-
tion might lead to less committed activists and ephemeral political protest.
Indeed, some of the latest research indicates that political mobilization via the
Internet is effective only in certain relatively limited circumstances and that
there exists little substitute for securing access to traditional mainstream media.9
The central problem here, often ignored in the literature, is that a proliferation of
Internet-based issue groups might simply contribute to the creation of a fractured
public sphere in which many issue areas are actively discussed but in which few
develop the necessary critical mass in order to start to affect both mainstream
broadcast media, public opinion and politicians. In sum, while many analysts
continue to make a great play of Internet era pressure group activity, such as the
anti-globalization movement and the anti-war movement (e.g. the US-based
Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the UK-based Stop the War Coalition),
little hard evidence is available to indicate these have been any more effective at
mobilization than protest groups from earlier eras such as the anti-apartheid
movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. The question remains as to whether the
Internet really has changed the power and influence of non-elite movements.
Overall then, there are many reasons to question the thesis that new technol-
ogy has increased either the diversity of sources and viewpoints in the news (let
alone the quality and depth of coverage) or the ability of protest movements to
influence mainstream media and political debate. If these claims regarding the
transformative power of new technology are to be substantiated, much more
research is necessary. In the first instance, with respect to the 2003 Iraq war,
Hallin’s conceptual spheres can be drawn upon in order to assess the extent to
which the different media outlets operated beyond the bounds of “elite legiti-
mated controversy” (Hallin 1986), such as debate over tactics, likelihood of
military victory, and the need for UN backing, into a “sphere of deviance”
(Hallin 1986) in which the fundamental legitimacy of the war was openly ques-
tioned. Important issues here surround the extent to which both traditional
mainstream media (such as ABC, CBS, and NBC) and new media (such as
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CNN) reported within the reference frames of the US government, focusing on

the humanitarian arguments in favor of war and the threat of WMDs; or, alterna-
tively, reflected the reference frames of anti-war opinion, focusing instead on
issues such as the alleged illegality or immorality of the action, as well as “hidden”
causes such as US geostrategic and economic motives for the war. As part of this
analysis it is also necessary to identify the extent to which US media drew upon
new media sources (for example Al-Jazeera and Internet sources) and how that
information was presented. If real-time, 24-hour news coverage and the Internet
have indeed significantly challenged the ability of governments to control infor-
mation flows, we would expect to observe greater plurality of viewpoints in the
new media outlets compared to traditional outlets and extensive use of new
media sources across all media outlets.
With respect to the Internet and protest movements, research is necessary to
establish the extent to which the US anti-war movement utilized the Internet rel-
ative to other forms of communication when both organizing protest and
expanding debate to a wider public audience. It is also important to analyze both
how, and to what extent, the anti-war movement utilized the Internet in order to
influence mainstream media coverage. Overall, it needs to be established whether
or not the Internet actually facilitated more effective communication between
activists, thereby enabling protest, and whether or not the anti-war movement
was able to utilize the Internet in order to secure adequate representation within
mainstream news media.
New media technology versus “spin”

Even if over time new communication technologies have increased the potential
power of media outlets, the increasingly professional government media manage-
ment techniques (Thrall 2000; Vickers 2000; Brown 2002, 2003a) might have
counteracted these technological developments with sufficient effectiveness to
maintain government dominance as a news source. Here the first factor, a
reliance on government information sources that is in part due to the “vast public
relations apparatus of government,” might have become even more powerful and
significant in terms of shaping the news.
It was during the Falklands conflict in 1981 that the British government
demonstrated the effectiveness of fostering sympathetic reporting by placing jour-
nalists alongside combatants. Learning in part from the British experience during
the Falklands, in the 1991 Gulf War the US military adopted the pool system
allowing selected journalists to front line units while other journalists were chan-
nelled toward the memorable set-piece press briefings. It was largely during these
briefings that the use of dramatic images of “smart” bombs and sanitized language
(such as the use of the terms “collateral damage” and “surgical strikes”) ensured
media coverage did not relay too much of the grim reality of war (see for example
Baudrillard 1991; Philo and McLaughlin 1993; and Bennett and Paletz 1994).
Since the 1999 Kosovo conflict, attempts to manage the information environ-
104
ment during wars and crises have accelerated. Coalition military operations in
Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq war have been accompanied by sus-
tained and highly organized attempts to influence media agendas by promoting
coverage of some issues rather than others and to influence the framing of stories
in ways that support the government’s cause. As Brown (2003a: 93) argued, at
least some of the impetus for these attempts during the 2002 war in Afghanistan
came from the UK government’s Director of Communications and Strategy, Alis-
tair Campbell:
[Campbell’s] solution was to create Coalition Information Centres

(CICs) in Washington, London and Islamabad that would coordinate
the release of information, attempt to control the news agenda and rebut
opposition claims in exactly the way that the Clinton–Blair ‘war room’
model operated in domestic politics.
Other activities inherent in the “war room” model include the use of press
releases, media appearances, press conferences, and speeches. In strategic terms,
these activities seek to encourage the development of common media frames over
time. In tactical terms they serve to minimize coverage of damaging or hostile
stories and to discredit oppositional counter-narratives. Some of the routine
consequences during the 2003 Gulf War of such attempts at “perception manage-
ment” would appear to include the repeated and premature announcements
concerning suspected WMD sites as the US/UK military advanced into Iraq,
over-optimistic announcements concerning a popular uprising against Saddam’s
forces in Basra and premature claims regarding the taking of the border town of
Umm Qasr during the first weeks of the conflict. A more dramatic and excep-
tional example of media-management was the recovery of the US soldier Jessica
Lynch that involved a military operation coordinated and exploited in order to
facilitate dramatic and positive news coverage. Ruthlessly exploited by the US
military at the time as a tale of daring heroism, press briefers at Central Com-
mand (Centcom) in Doha, Qatar, presented the rescue as occurring under hostile
conditions and exaggerated the circumstances under which Jessica Lynch was
captured to create the impression she had fought to the last bullet. In reality, as
Lynch herself has admitted, she did not fire a single shot during her capture and
she was in fact well cared for by Iraqi doctors and nurses.10
Overall, the jury is still out as to the extent to which the ascendancy of these
coordinated and sustained approaches to wartime media management have
counteracted the potential effects of new media technologies discussed earlier.
Accordingly, there is need to identify the key government information manage-
ment strategies and actual outputs (press briefings, etc.) over the course of
recent wars, including strategic attempts to develop common framings over time,
tactical activities designed to minimize damaging coverage and/or to discredit
counter-narratives, the techniques used to coordinate US and UK information
management strategies and the involvement of embedded journalists. Mapping
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of government information strategies and outputs would enable a unique and

unprecedented comparison of the relationship between government information
and media output. Framing analysis of war coverage, as outlined earlier, could be
combined with the analysis of media management strategies in order to provide a
profile of media–state power relations over the course of a conflict and to identify
the degree of autonomy maintained by the media in the face of government
information management strategies. Specifically, the extent to which media cov-
erage either followed government information strategies or, conversely, preceded,
and influenced them needs to be demonstrated empirically, allowing assessments
to be made regarding the balance of power between government and media at dif-
ferent points of a conflict and the degree of media influence (the so-called CNN
effect) upon policy formulation.11
Geopolitics and the “death” of ideology?

With the collapse of the USSR and the bipolar order, it was often assumed during
the 1990s that “journalists were freer not just to cover the stories they wanted but
to criticize US foreign policy as well” (Robinson 2002: 7; Entman 2000). With
respect to the explanatory framework set out earlier, the constraints that Cold
War ideology placed upon media coverage of international events appears to
many analysts to have become irrelevant in the post-Cold War era. Indeed, at
least during the early 1990s, many commentators argued that the “new humani-
tarian” wars fought in, for example, northern Iraq (1991) and Somalia (1992–3)
were driven by media coverage (the so-called CNN effect) operating in the
geopolitical vacuum created by the collapse of the Cold War anti-Communist
consensus (Hoge 1994; Mandelbaum 1994; and Entman 2000). While many of
these commentators decried the influence of media on foreign policy-making and
stressed the need for elite control of the foreign policy agenda, over the course of
the 1990s new norms of humanitarian intervention became reflected in a foreign
policy community more sensitive to the notion of humanitarian war. This in turn
reflected the internationalist and Wilsonian temperament of many US Demo-
crats. A similar change was observed within the British foreign policy-making
community as it reacted to proclamations of an ethical foreign policy by the Blair
government. By the end of the 1990s, with the NATO air war against Serbia, the
notion of humanitarian war was established among a large part of Western policy-
making elites.12 In short, if the early 1990s witnessed a more influential media
that helped to persuade policy-makers to engage in humanitarian intervention,
by the late 1990s the concept had become a policy tool that Western leaders
employed in order to justify armed intervention in the internal affairs of another
state. This was seen most clearly in the NATO air war against Serbia. Although
this was primarily an act of coercive diplomacy that had the unintended effect of
exacerbating a humanitarian crisis, it was promoted and justified to Western
publics, quite successfully, as a humanitarian war.13
With the events of September 11, 2001 and the Bush administration’s sub-
106
sequent declaration of a “war on terrorism” the geopolitical landscape has been

further, and dramatically, transformed. Humanitarian concerns have been, and
are likely to continue to be, secondary to US objectives aimed at containing and
eliminating the al-Qaeda network. This was seen during the war against
Afghanistan when the humanitarian crisis that occurred following US attacks
was clearly of secondary importance to the US goal of destroying the Taliban gov-
ernment and disrupting/destroying the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Perhaps of
greater significance, the “war on terrorism” frame provides journalists, particu-
larly in the US, with a template with which to understand global events and a
powerful rhetorical tool with which to justify a more aggressive and intervention-
ist foreign policy agenda. For example, this has already been seen during the
build-up to and war against Iraq. The US government worked hard to associate
Saddam Hussein with al-Qaeda in the eyes of the US public, even in the absence
of any firm evidence, while mainstream US media reported this claim uncritically
leaving some Americans actually unsure of the difference between Hussein and
bin Laden.14 In addition, the humanitarian war discourse of the 1990s has func-
tioned as a further legitimating device employed by both British and US political
elites when justifying military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. In particular the
British Prime Minister Tony Blair advocated war on grounds of both national
security owing to a perceived threat from Iraq’s WMD program and the claim that
regime change could be justified in humanitarian terms in order to save the Iraqi
people from Saddam Hussein. Importantly, however, as David Clark (former For-
eign Office Special Adviser) recently pointed out,15 such a claim is spurious
because the situation in Iraq did not meet the criteria (i.e. large-scale human suf-
fering that cannot be averted by other means) by which humanitarian war is
justified.16
Overall, it is tempting to conclude that the threat of Communism, which
helped create an ideological bond between journalists and policy-makers during
the Cold War, has been effectively replaced by the “war on terrorism,” combined
in some instances with a liberal “humanitarian” discourse that has created a con-
sensus between journalists and policy-making elites. Hence the second factor,
Cold War ideology, in our explanatory framework might still be just as relevant
today except that it has been replaced by the “war on terrorism.” Consequently,
ideological mechanisms remain very much in place, with the result that dissent
and criticism during the “war on terrorism” will possibly be just as muted as
during the Cold War.
This point notwithstanding, if scholars are to advance the thesis that the Cold
War’s ending has had a substantial impact on media–state relations, it would be
useful to apply the issues outlined here retrospectively to a consideration of ear-
lier conflicts and military interventions, such as the Vietnam War and US
involvement in central America during the 1980s. So doing would enable an
analysis of the degree of change and continuity in media–state relations, particu-
larly as they relate to the changing geopolitical circumstances and developments
in media technology.
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Conclusion: wartime media–state relations—change

or continuity?
While research has consistently demonstrated that the media have tended to
remain deferential to government positions during times of crisis and war, the
media have been, and continue to be, regularly attacked for being too critical of
wartime/crisis policies, often through claims that new media technology is affect-
ing the balance of power between media and state. For example, the US war in
Vietnam was fought when television ownership had become widespread among
the US public. Following the US defeat and withdrawal many sought to explain
military failure in terms of the “Vietnam syndrome,” whereby domestic popula-
tions were unable to tolerate casualties owing, at least in part, to graphic and
decontextualized television news coverage. Richard Nixon argued:
The Vietnam War was complicated by factors that never before occurred
in America’s conduct of a war . . . More than ever before, television
showed the terrible human suffering and sacrifice of war. Whatever the
intention behind such relentless and literal reporting of the war, the
result was a serious demoralization of the home front, raising the ques-
tion whether America would ever again be able to fight an enemy
abroad with unity and strength of purpose at home
(Nixon 1978: 350)
As we now know from Hallin’s (1986) Uncensored War, the notion of an anti-war
media during Vietnam is largely a myth. The same exists with respect to the
CNN effect of the 1990s. At the time of the interventions in Iraq (1991) and
Somalia (1992) the claim that the media were responsible for these “humanitar-
ian” wars was widespread throughout foreign policy and humanitarian circles.
Again, such claims were made in the context of an ongoing debate over the rise
of 24-hour global news media and changing geostrategic realities. And yet subse-
quent research has demonstrated that the CNN effect was largely exaggerated
and that the actual influence and power of mass media was far more circum-
scribed than suggested by widely held assumptions regarding the CNN effect
(Gowing 1994; Strobel 1997; and Robinson 2002). Substantive military inter-
vention, even during the 1990s, remained driven by geostrategic reasoning rather
than any kind of media pressure or CNN effect.
Such examples should be sobering for those who make claims of significant
change in media–state relations. So too should be the fact that only two of the five
factors put forward to explain media deference during war time—Cold War ideol-
ogy and media reliance on government sources—could be argued to have changed.
Even with respect to these factors, however, there are many reasons to suggest con-
tinuity rather than change. In particular, it seems likely that any empowering
effects of new media technology may well have been counteracted by reinforced
government media management strategies. Little change in the areas of political
108
flak, nationalism, and the corporate nature of the US news media suggests that the
media have “served the military rather well” (Carruthers 2000: 271–2), acting
now, as in previous wars, in support of US government war objectives.
Yet, as I have discussed, there remains a persistent discourse surrounding new
communication technology and the post-Cold War political environment, which
suggests that the contemporary media are more powerful and influential than
their predecessors. Perhaps more than a few academics and commentators are
guilty of wishful thinking, or at least engaging in research that is predicated upon
the assumption of change rather than continuity.17 There is need, then, to focus
more closely on the reasons that change continues to haunt our discussions of war
reporting, even when evidence suggests the contrary.
Notes
1 Thanks to the editors Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer, as well as Peter Goddard and
Marion Lloyd, for feedback on earlier drafts. Some of the material, in particular that
which identifies future research agendas, is drawn from an ESRC research grant pro-
posal, award reference RES-000-23-0551, developed by the author, Peter Goddard
(University of Liverpool) and Philip Taylor and Robin Brown (Institute of Communi-
cations, University of Leeds).
2 For useful introductions to the processes by which institutional factors limit critical
journalism see Klaehn (2002) and Herman (2000).
3 For a detailed review of the overlap between the claims of Herman and Chomsky
(1988) and other key scholars see E. Herring and P. Robinson (2003), “Too polemical
or too critical? Chomsky on the study of the news media and US foreign policy,” forum
on Chomsky, Review of International Studies vol. 29, no. 4: pp. 553–68.
4 The phrase “real-time” should be understood to refer both to the actual live reporting
of events and the use of “on the spot” footage obtained through the use of electronic
news gathering equipment (ENG) and other such portable newsgathering equipment.
This equipment allows journalists to report live or almost live without relying upon
government sources.
5 For example see US-based CNN, UK-based Sky News, and BBC News 24.
6 According to Volkmer (1999: 160) “World report” is run for 15 minutes daily as part
of the show International Hour, at 6.30 and 9.30 GMT Tuesday to Friday and has two
omnibus editions on a Sunday.
7 See “The untouchables,” The Guardian, March 31, 2003.
8 As a guide, to date I have reviewed well over 50 academic texts that analyze the
impact of new information communication technologies (NICTs) and have yet to find
an examination of the impact of online information sources upon news-gathering.
9 See, for example, Bruce Bimber (2003), Information and American Democracy, Cam-
bridge University Press: Cambridge.
10 For further details see “The war we never saw: the true face of war,” Channel 4, June 5,
2003, “The truth about Jessica,” The Guardian, Thursday, May 15, 2003, and “Lynch:
military played up rescue too much,” CNN, Saturday, November 8, 2003: downloaded
from http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/11/07/lynch.interview/index.html, download
date November 12, 2003.
11 Inferences developed from research would need to be triangulated with primary inter-
views with journalists, policy makers and press briefers, and secondary sources (such as
memoirs, public statements and academic accounts) in order to build up a thorough
picture of media–state relations during the war.
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12 See in particular the speech by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the Economic
Club of Chicago, Hilton Hotel, Chicago, USA, Thursday, April 22, 1999, available
online at www.fco.gov.uk
13 For further details on this case of intervention see Robinson 2002: pp. 93–110.
14 For opinion poll data on US beliefs in an al-Qaeda/Hussain link and Bush’s linking of
the two see “Hussein link to 9/11 lingers in many minds” by Dana Milbank and Clau-
dia Deane, Washington Post, Saturday, September 6, 2003, p. A01.
15 David Clark, “Iraq has wrecked our case for humanitarian wars,” The Guardian,
Monday, August 11, 2003.
16 For further reading on humanitarian war and intervention see O. Ramsbotham and
T. Woodhouse (1996) Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict, Cambridge:
Polity Press and Blackwell.
17 For further details on problems surrounding theorizing change and the tendency to
exaggerate media impact see Philip Hammond (2000) “Lessons of the first draft of his-
tory,” Media Culture and Society, vol. 22, pp. 847–51; Piers Robinson (2000) “Media
power and world politics: problems of research design,” Media, Culture and Society, vol.
22, no. 2, pp. 227–32; and Robin Brown (1998) “It’s got to make a difference, hasn’t
it?: communication technology and practice in world politics,” paper presented at the
British International Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex,
December 14–16, 1998.
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Part 2
BEARING WITNESS
6
WHEN WAR IS REDUCED
TO A PHOTOGRAPH
Barbie Zelizer1
Journalism’s images of war disturb. Among the most powerful visuals known to
humankind, they are haunted by the stubborn inevitability and proximity of
death. Combining the cool mechanics of the camera with the hot passions of
wartime, they offer visual statements about circumstances much of the world
prefers not to see: shattered bodies and mangled buildings, triumphant soldierly
gestures, hopes and broken spirits nestled inside devastation somehow too deep
for the camera to record. Journalism’s images of war both show what has been and
offer glimpses of what might be. And for those who have never experienced war
firsthand, journalism’s images of war provide what may be the only depiction of
what sadly has become one of the reigning circumstances of the contemporary
age.
But journalism’s images of war do not emerge from a vacuum. They are shaped
through a turn to the visual—a journalistic emphasis on images that typically
takes place during wartime. Crafted through a maze of practices and standards,
both explicit and implicit, by which photographers, photographic editors, news
editors, and journalists decide how war can be reduced to a photograph, journal-
ism’s images of war have come to represent an elaborated template for imagining
and assessing the wars of the twenty-first century. Such images reflect what the
camera sees by projecting onto that vision a set of broader assumptions about how
the world works. The ways in which this happens, however, raise questions about
the degree to which images, particularly photographs, are well suited to shaping
the public’s encounter with war.
When war is reduced to a photograph, the camera provides images that show far
more than just the scene at hand. Images that are composite, more schematic than
detailed, conventionalized, and simplified work particularly well in this regard.
Used as pegs not to specific events but to stories larger than can be told in a simple
news item, journalism’s images become a key tool for interpreting the war in ways
consonant with long-standing understandings about how war is supposed to be
waged—notions about patriotism, sacrifice, humanity, the nation-state, and fair-
ness that come as much from outside journalism as from within. War is presented
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as often heroic and reflective of broader aims associated with nationhood, clean
and at times antiseptic, and involving human sacrifice for a greater good. Whether
or not this actually reflects how war is waged is beyond the mission of journalism’s
images of war. For a range of visual cues, or familiar templates for using images,
helps journalists depict circumstances that are fraught with unpredictability,
stressful judgment, emotionalism, inconsistency, and high stakes, facilitating jour-
nalism’s depictions of war but not necessarily in ways that support the image’s
workings as a tool of news relay. Relying on particular images, cues, and themes
that have proven themselves over time, journalism’s images of war gravitate
toward the memorable—as established through frequently depicted, aesthetically
appealing, and familiar images—as much as toward the newsworthy. What does
this mean for the health of the body politic, which depends on images of war to
provide presumably reliable visual depictions of war-stricken zones?
When compared with times of peace, wartime often produces both more pic-
tures, more varied pictures, and pictures whose display is justified on a wide range
of attributes—such as memorability, drama, or vividness. The use of pictures
depends not so much on explicit and articulated standards but on informal strate-
gies among journalists about how best to use them (Zelizer 1993; Rosenstiel 2003;
Glaser 2003). As reporters, editors, photo-editors, and photographers, journalists
agree on a myriad of interpretive strategies—regarding who depicts the war, what
is depicted, how it is depicted, and in which ways—that are shaped against the
larger restrictions through which pictures can be displayed. In wartime, informal
strategies among journalists thereby shape the turn toward the visual, whereby it
is agreed, though not necessarily articulated, that photographs depict certain
aspects of the war but not all.
For only certain aspects of war are ever seen in the images of war. Lacking
depiction are those sides of war which do not fit the prevailing interpretive
assumptions about how war is to be waged. In most wars, there are few or no
images of human gore, one’s own war dead or POWs, military operations gone
badly, or the effect of one’s own war on civilians of the other side. In certain con-
flicts, such as those in which the West is involved, this is more pronounced than
in others. Lacking depiction too have been a range of conflicts that missed being
seen almost totally—wars in East Timor, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, and Zaire, to
name a few.
And yet wartime’s turn to the visual offers a way for news organizations to
accommodate the prominence of visual representation as a way of engaging with
war. The turn to the visual has a number of predictable attributes in war journal-
ism which have come to characterize our expectations of war as we begin the
twenty-first century. Examined here primarily in the US media and largely in
conjunction with the most reported wars of the past five years, the turn to the
visual nonetheless can be found in a far broader range of military conflicts and
geographic contexts, all of which have come to inhabit public depictions of the
contemporary era. In suggesting that journalists regularly gravitate toward certain
kinds of visual depictions in their visualization of recent wars, the turn to the
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visual raises questions about the ways in which images function in wartime. More
specifically, it queries the role played by visuals in relaying a strategically crafted
depiction of war and in undermining the maintenance of a healthy body politic.
The turn to the visual in war

How journalism depicts war has always been considered against a more compli-
cated set of assumptions about the ways in which images, particularly
photographs, work. Photography’s specific attributes—its materiality, ease of
access, frozen capture of time, an affective and often gestalt-driven view of the
world that is thought to bypass the intellect and communicate directly with the
emotions—highlight its power and durability. Photographs are thought to work
through a twinning of denotative and connotative force, by which the ability to
depict the world as “it is”—commonly associated with photographic verisimili-
tude, realism, indexicality, and referentiality—is matched with a symbolic power
to couch what is being depicted in a broader, generalizable frame that helps us
recognize the image as consonant with broader understandings of the world—typ-
ically associated with universality, generalizability, and symbolism (Hall 1974;
Sekula 1984). The two forces are rarely presumed to work equally in journalism,
where the former is privileged over the latter. Denotation and the truth-value of
the photograph, more than connotation, are thought to be critical, because jour-
nalism needs photographic realism to enhance its ability to vouch for events in
the real world. In reality, however, connotation is as important, if not more, than
denotation.
During the recent war in Iraq, for instance, the pictures of Saddam Hussein’s
statue being dismantled in April of 2003 in Baghdad’s Firdous Square (Delay
2003; Hicks 2003) were called by the Boston Globe a depiction of “the first feel-
good moment of the war” (Gilbert and Ryan 2003: D1) and appraised as a
referential depiction of the statue being brought down. They were also, however,
seen as images earmarking the beginning of revolution, in a manner long attrib-
uted to similar photographs from Eastern Europe from the 1950s onward. One
such well known photograph depicted the statue of Stalin being dismantled by
student protesters in Budapest of 1956 (reprinted in Swain 1992). Positioned in
the center of the page on some newspapers and atop the masthead on others, the
context surrounding the Baghdad photograph was as important in establishing its
importance as the sheer target of what it depicted. Furthermore, when later con-
textualized against wide-angle views of what then appeared to be a relatively
empty Firdous Square, populated by some 200 people who were mostly US troops
and journalists, that appeared the following day, accusations arose that the photo-
graph had been staged rather than simply shot at random (Lichfield 2003; Fisk
2003). Reports that the square was sealed off from the crowds, that foreign troops
(using a US armoured vehicle) pulled down the statue rather than local people,
that pro-American free Iraqi forces were brought into the square rather than a
naturally evolving crowd (Brown 2003) were all claims that helped establish the
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seemingly referential depiction as problematic and the historical parallel with

eastern Europe as erroneous. Connotation was everything.
Turns to the visual like this one in relaying war news have been historically
complicated, for they occur against the backdrop of a professional inattention to
images. For most journalists, news images have always taken a backseat to words.
Since the photograph’s inception in the mid-1800s, pictures have long been seen
as the fluff of journalism, the stuff that illustrates but is adjunct to verbal descrip-
tion. Even today, with an array of imaging technologies like moving pictures,
television, cable, and the interactive displays of the Internet, there still remain
insufficient standards for how to use an image in news, where to put an image,
whether to credit an image, how to title an image, or how to connect an image
with the text at its side (Zelizer 1995). It is no surprise that journalists find them-
selves depending on a repertoire of informal cues by which they decide what to
depict and in which way.
And yet, it is to images that journalism turns in times of war. There are three
main attributes that characterize the turn to the visual in wartime, each of which
caters to a news image’s memorability:
1 There are more images in wartime than in times of peace.

2 Images function more in wartime like non-journalistic modes of visual repre-
sentation than in times of peace.
3 Images gravitate more in wartime toward familiar depictions of the past than
in times of peace.
War and the frequency of images

The bursting of wartime journalism with images should raise no eyebrows, for
such has been the case since the earliest displays of news images. Images have
always taken over the spaces available to them when war rears its head, in ratios
disproportionate to how journalists cover the world in more peaceful times. No
surprise, then, that photography helps establish the truth claims of journalists
seeking to provide authoritative accounts of the war. As prizewinning photog-
rapher Don McCullin said of his photographs of the wartorn regions of Vietnam
and Lebanon, “Many people ask me ‘why do you take these pictures?’ . . . It’s not a
case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’; it’s a case of ‘I’ve been there’”
(McCullin 1987: 11). Displaying a similar sentiment, Dorothea Lange hung the
following words of Francis Bacon on her darkroom door: “The contemplation of
things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion,
is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention” (quoted in Lyons
1966: 67).
Such has long been the aspiration though not always the practice. Images of war
extend from a tradition in which artists in the early years of the illustrated press
“had little compunction about distorting the real facts of the event,” whose battles
they rarely saw (Voss 1994: 136). The photographic images of the Crimean War
118
were not much better, generally portraying British triumphs, placid views far from
the frontlines, and circumstances in which everything looked “ship-shape and
everyone happy” (Knightley 1975: 15). The US Civil War brought with it a stark
realism associated with photography and moved away from the romanticized tenor
of drawings, introducing what came to be known as the “first living room war”
(Goldberg 1991: 20) and couching war’s representation in terms of realist dis-
course and authenticity rather than imagination and interpretation. World War II
was documented by more photographers than any previous military conflict, and
the rapid transmission of their depictions of battlefields by wire helped make the
war-news reader during the 1940s “far closer to events on the battlefield than his
[sic] grandfather, regardless of the actual distance he might be removed from active
fighting” (Mathews 1957: 193). A peculiarly autonomous sense about the process
of capturing a scene through photographs existed in these pre-television times. As
World War II photographer Margaret Bourke-White said of a shot she made of a
dead family killed in a German air raid, “a protecting screen draws itself across my
mind and makes it possible to consider focus and light values and the techniques of
photography, in as impersonal a way as though I were making an abstract camera
composition” (cited in Goldberg 1986: 245).
The introduction in later wars of more sophisticated imaging technologies—in
particular, the moving image and its evolving technologies of documentary, tele-
vision, cable, and digitalization—raised questions as to whether or not
photographs would continue to matter in war’s visualization. Accounts of news-
gathering practices widely held that the Korean War was the first covered by
television, that the Vietnam War introduced graphic images of war, that the Gulf
War of 1991 advanced cable images 24 hours a day, and that the 2003 war in Iraq
embraced broadband Internet and its associated digital devices—websites con-
taining live video, photography collections, audio reports, animated weaponry
displays, and interactive maps—that offered a “more intimate and multi-faceted
view of the war than . . . possible ever before” (Harmon 2003: C4). Through it all,
the still photograph persisted as a viable mode of recording, even though funda-
mental questions lingered regarding its use.
In each war, photographic depiction flourished, though it depended on what
the military and political forces, and sometimes editors, allowed the public to see.
During the Spanish American War, the Journal put out as many as 40 editions in
one day, much of which were characterized by a “lavish use of photographs and
illustrations” (Moeller 1989: 68). The photographs of Larry Burrows during the
Vietnam War earned him the title of “the greatest war photographer there has
ever been” (Hopkinson cited in Knightley 1975: 408), despite the fact that his
much-publicized doubts about the role of the photographer and the war itself
were at odds with his capacity to jump into settings and take photographs with-
out hesitation. The photographs of Eddie Adams, Ron Haeberle, and Malcolm
Browne produced still shots far more memorable than the corresponding nightly
television footage, with Haeberle’s images of the massacre at My Lei displayed as
still visuals on television.
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BARBIE ZELIZER
Certain wars fell short of photographic centrality. Depiction of the Falklands

War totaled a meager 200 individual photographic shots, mostly cleansed por-
trayals of antiseptic warfare and virtually no human corpses, creating an “illusion
of a clean war” (Taylor 1991: 112–13), while the Gulf War of 1991 was shaped
through the less than satisfying visuals of cable television, where television cam-
eras stood still as viewers watched a shaky setting accommodate an incoming
SCUD missile, and helmeted television reporters hopped in front of live cameras
as they tried to dodge the firing around them (Zelizer 1992). At the side of such
video footage, photographs were “censored into invisibility, void of images of real
violence and suffering” (Robins 1993: 325), and when they did appear—such as a
much-discussed shot of an Iraqi soldier immolated in his vehicle published in the
Observer of London—US editors refused to publish them.
Yet by more recent wars, wavering decisions over what kinds of images to pub-
lish made way for a more frequent and prominent display of images. While
conflicts in both Africa and Asia generated little world interest because in one
view the “bone-thin men behind barbed wire in the Balkans, on the doorstep of
the West, resonate[d] more deeply . . . than the many horrors of Asia and Africa”
(Lane 1992: 27), pictures nonetheless appeared. Africa, in particular conflicts in
Rwanda and Burundi, persisted in the public imagination as a “dark continent,
where nothing happens except coups, massacres, famines, disease and drought”
(Douglas 1994: 15). The Balkan violence of the 1990s was so unevenly visualized
that it paradoxically earned both the status of “Europe’s first television war” (Mar-
shall 1994: A16) and the name of “the war that can’t be seen” (Cohen 1994: E4),
whose stories and pictures were “lost in the fog of second-hand reporting” and
whose journalists “were unable to get there” (Rohde 1995: A1). At the same
time, observers claimed that the stream of photographs depicting people who
looked like “one’s neighbors” were responsible for generating support for the war
(Douglas 1994: 15).
Following the events of September 11, newspapers and newsmagazines raised
the number of photographs by, in some cases, twice the usual number of images
published (Zelizer 2002). This continued to be the case in the two wars that fol-
lowed—Afghanistan and Iraq. The war in Afghanistan was visualized through
images that implied a certain romanticized nostalgia for a reclaimed civilization,
with shots of newly unveiled women or women appearing for the first time in
public places (Nalkur 2002), liberated crowds, and breathtaking colorful land-
scapes topping the coverage. During the 2003 war in Iraq, a turn to the visual
involved newspapers turning over whole pages and sections to images that were
larger, bolder, more colorful, and displayed prominently. Likened by Tom
Brokaw to “drinking from a fire hydrant” and by Dan Rather to a “literal flood of
live pictures from the battlefield” (quoted in Hilbrand and Shister 2003: A1,
A20), early images of Iraq were plentiful across the media. During the first few
months of the invasion, an informal count of the images appearing in the New
York Times revealed that the Times displayed two to two and a half times the
number of photographs than that displayed before the war—40 or 50 images
120
rather than 20. Newspapers featured double-page photographic spreads and

quarter-, half-, and full-page photographs; television networks displayed galleries
of still photographs to background music while tracking the experiences of
single war photographers as part of their nightly line-up. Photographic margina-
lia cluttered news organizations’ websites, offering updated visual digests of that
day’s events on the battlefield. In each war, then, the message seemed clear:
photographs matter.
But how do photographs matter? On the face of things, the move toward more
visual relays fits what the news is supposed to do in wartime—give the public
more information when more information is needed. But often images instead
provide what is already known, familiar, and sensical. During the war in Iraq, for
instance, one New York Times article showed not one but three pictures of Iraqis
uncovering the graves of their relatives (pictures appended to Fisher 2003: A10).
A different image focused on the horror on the face of an American service-
woman, as she watched Al-Jazeera images of captured and killed soldiers which
significantly were not shown, forcing audiences to supply the context against
which to explain the image (“An American servicewoman watched images from
Al-Jazeera . . . ,” 2003: B6). The Philadelphia Inquirer published a full page spread
of five images under the joint title “Portraits of war: conflict, capitulation.” The
captions appended to each picture were broad and lacking in discreet detail, as in
“Iraqis welcome members of Britain’s Second Royal Tank Regiment,” with no
names, no definite location, and no time in which the photograph had been
taken (pictures appended to “Portraits of war” 2003: A21). In a setting in which
every column-inch is precious, all of this is worth considering. While it is gener-
ally agreed that more photographs appear than in peacetime, more images of
wartime do not necessarily mean more information about war.
War and the aesthetic appeal of images

The turn to the visual is exemplified by images that look less like typical news
relays and more like non-journalistic images. War images are typically bigger,
bolder, more colorful, more memorable, more dramatic, prettier, shocking, and
more aesthetically pleasing or noteworthy than the relays received otherwise.
What they are not necessarily is newsworthy.
The impulse toward aesthetic, dramatic, pleasing, or shocking images has long
been part of photography’s practice in journalism and exemplified by images that
typically win prizes and generate professional acclaim, like Eddie Adams’ shot of a
streetside execution of a Vietcong soldier by the chief of the South Vietnamese
police (Adams 1968). The aesthetic for war images, however, has itself changed,
as over time war has tended to be depicted in changing aesthetic patterns. In
Peter Howe’s words,
the first war photographers really didn’t photograph war at all. Because
of the bulk of their equipment and the length of time it took to make an
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exposure, they were limited to battleground landscapes, posed pictures

of fighters, simulated combat, and portraits of soldiers prior to battle.
(Howe 2002: 14)
Early emphasis on distant battlefields, exemplified in conflicts like the Spanish

American War, gave way by the time of the Korean War to large numbers of close-
ups of individual soldiers. Along the way, differing degrees of attention were paid
to pictures of wartime suffering, deaths of soldiers and civilians, and broad land-
scapes. Parts of the aesthetic cycled irregularly over time: Vietnam displayed a
return to printing studio portraits of the dead, as favored during the Spanish
American War (Moeller 1989); pastoral landscapes, seen in early shots during the
Spanish American War of the 1890s, re-emerged in areas known for breathtaking
physical terrain, like the war in Afghanistan in 2001. The degree of comprehen-
siveness embodied by images also wavered, as certain wars tended to accommodate
a more wide-ranging repertoire of photographs than in earlier wars, such as World
War I, while others signaled a move backward in clamping down on the display of
certain targets of depiction associated with wartime, as in the Falklands War.
The aesthetic draw of the image also generates numerous examples of shifting
the target of photographic representation so as to secure a “better” picture. Con-
nected here is a long tradition of altering photographic images—dramatizing a
look of menace by blackening skin or altering the position of figures and struc-
tures so as to enhance overall composition. The decision in March 2004, for
instance, to delete clearly visible body parts in UK newspaper pictures of the
bombings in Madrid (Luckhurst 2004) exemplified the underside of the urge to
publish only those pictures that fit aesthetic expectations.
At the same time, accommodating the aesthetic draw of an image produces
images that are not always clear or focused, as one might expect from a news
photograph. In the recent war in Iraq, one newspaper ran a story titled “As sand-
storm rages, Iraqis seized” and displayed an AP photograph of Iraqis being
detained (Bouju 2003: 3). While the photograph’s caption noted that the deten-
tion was taking place “in the glare of Humvee headlights,” it did not clarify that
the headlights’ glare obscured the detainees from the news audience’s vision; nor
did that ill vision stop the newspaper from printing the photograph as the largest,
most prominent image on the page.
In the years since color photographs became a part of mainstream news, color
becomes a central way of signaling aesthetic appeal. Photographs of the war of
Afghanistan in particular played to color, from the vividness of the fabrics
swathing the dispossessed women and children to the breathtaking landscapes
pitching voluminous mountain-caps against bright blue skies. No wonder, then,
that readers’ letters proclaimed the photographs of Afghanistan in positive
superlative terms: one reader to the Los Angles Times proclaimed the photographs
of Afghanistan “not sensational or sentimental, just beautiful. (They get) right in
the middle of things and shoot at the precise moment when reality unfolds.
Nothing in (the) images is mere background” (Coonradt 2001: B12). Another
122
noted that the photographs of Afghani children were “a glorious testament to the
timeless beauty of innocence and to the common admiration of this human con-
dition among Earth’s inhabitants” (Takase 2001: A12). At a time in which the
incursion into Afghanistan was only a month or so under way and thousands of
refugees had already gone homeless and hungry while others had lost their lives
in brutal battles, the laudation of photography’s aesthetic appeal gives pause to
the image’s role in documenting the conflict.
During the war in Iraq, color remained at the forefront of the photograph’s aes-
thetic appeal. The Chicago Tribune featured a front-page image of the back profile
of a soldier outlined against an amorphous orange background, making it appear
as if he were disappearing into an unidentifiable abyss (DiNuzzo 2003). As the
US forces moved into Basra in March of 2003, The New York Times featured a
half-page portrayal of a woman carrying potable water (“Hauling water” 2003:
B1). The picture, striking for that same peculiar orange haze that was typical of
many images from the region owing to the impact of dense sand in the air, was
significantly lacking in definitive detail: the Times mentioned nothing about
where precisely the photograph was taken other than on the outskirts of Basra,
nothing about the women other than that they carried potable water, and noth-
ing about what lurked behind the orange haze.
In fact, the orange haze appeared to be the striking reason for choosing the
photograph and others like it. On a day in which accompanying news stories doc-
umented attacks against Iranian opposition groups in Iraq, exchanges of fire in
Mosul, and the plundering of the Iraqi National Museum, this artistic choice to
lead the section on the war displaced an informationally rich one. In the words of
the Chicago Tribune’s art critic:
If you have the capacity to dazzle in newsprint, you make pictures to

take advantage of it [and] color rescues [these photographs]. It is bright,
upbeat, conveying an atmosphere of Operation Happy Trails even when
the content of the shots is dark, treating death.
In this sense, “eye-popping colour draws us from the truth” (Artner 2003: 4). As
news, then, the aesthetic appeal of images works against the information that
such depictions can provide.
At times, the aesthetic appeal of war images turns too to explicitly non-
journalistic modes of visual representation. One article in the Philadelphia Inquirer
in March of 2003 about the false surrender of Iraqi troops was illustrated by a
reprint of the Goya painting, The Third of May 1808, in which he depicted the
execution of Madrid residents at the hands of Napoleonic forces (pictures
appended to Lubrano 2003: C1). With the decision to include it came another
decision not to include a photograph that depicted more directly what was hap-
pening in Iraq, suggesting that the image’s aestheticization works too against its
newsworthiness in wartime.
123
BARBIE ZELIZER
War and the familiarity of images

Journalism’s images of war offer pictures that are consonant with already existing
notions of what wartime is. As media critic Frank Rich said of coverage of the
recent war in Iraq, the public knew what was coming: “Iraqis are the better seen-
than-heard dress extras in this drama, alternately pictured as sobbing, snarling or
cheering” (Rich 2003: section 2: 15). While such displays suit editors’ desire to
keep newspapers “family friendly” and offset their fears of an advertiser backlash,
news photography nonetheless offers what becomes a default visual setting for
many of the contested and conflicted wars of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies. The turn to the visual, then, offers a turn to familiar images that couche
war’s representation in already resonant ways. As one column in the Chicago Tri-
bune phrased it, “it’s as though all wars become, at some level, the same war; all
reaction that of a common humanity” (Leroux 2003; section 2: 1).
The interpretive assumptions guiding the display of pictures thus often have to
do with images that withstand the test of time. Journalists rely on photographs to
offer aspects of war that words cannot, and often they accomplish this by weaving
memorable scenes from the past into their pictures of the present. Images of past
wars offer a fertile repository from which journalists can seek cues on how to do
their work, for recycling familiar images has journalists often following standards
that are not particularly newsworthy and upset or possibly undermine the jour-
nalistic value of their coverage. With photographs, then, historical precedent
offers an accessible context for wars in need of definition. For journalists, this
makes sense: in times of war, earlier wars in other times and places offer a quick
way to decide how to use photographs.
Thus, Robert Capa’s iconic tribute to Republican Spain, hailed as a death-in-
action shot which depicted a soldier of the Spanish Civil War at the moment of
his impact from a bullet (Capa 1936), in fact thematically recycled an image
taken at the siege of Verdun in 1916 during World War I. That earlier
shot, taken from film footage by an anonymous cameraman, showed a French
officer being shot to death as he led a counter-attack straight into the field of a
German machine-gun (pictured in Stepan 2000). Reminiscent of a long-
standing tradition in which soldiers ran directly into the field of fire, the
photograph not only portrayed the trench warfare of Verdun but became
emblematic of the collision of “nineteenth century notions of courage” with
“modern reality” (Stepan 2000: 30).
Problematic, however, are the decisions about what constitutes news that
ensue. In that journalists only have so many column-inches and minutes in
which to present their notions about how the world works, each decision to
incorporate the past is accompanied by one to incorporate the present to a lesser
degree. In other words, war coverage often hinges on a vehicle that works against
the grain of “good” journalism yet adheres precisely to the grain of “good”
memory work. For instance, depicting September 11 (Franklin 2001) and the war
in Afghanistan (Chenelly 2001) through images that recalled a World War II
124
photograph of the flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi (Rosenthal 1945) relays

little of the circumstances of the later wars, though the parallel does instantiate
the messages of heroism, patriotism, human sacrifice, and the importance of the
nation-state that accompanied the earlier photograph. Additionally, the act of
hoisting the flag, the traditional symbol of victory, earlier depicted as achievable
through a backdrop of anonymity, “clean” warfare, and group effort, moves on
into caricatures, advertisements, and popular culture, as seen in one caricature of
the 2003 war in Iraq (McCoy 2003), suggesting that even if the associations are
irrelevant to the later wars, the use of the image as parallel depictions establishes
a connection that lasts.
Moreover, journalism’s journey to the past in wartime is uncharted territory.
There are no standards, no guidelines, no explicit directives about what in the
past best works in the present, for whom, and to which ends. Simply stated, who
is to say which past makes sense? Should the 2003 war in Iraq be seen against the
first Gulf War, Somalia, or Vietnam? And yet, journalists look to the past, in all of
its forms, as one way to reinstate the normal. This means that wars not necessar-
ily alike can receive a similar visual treatment in the news simply because the
form of the war’s coverage is rendered similar. The past thus intrudes into the pre-
sent of news photographs by acting as a carrier for symbolism and connotative
force. Bringing systematic messages about what matters, this involves a slew of
recycled associations that link new wars with familiar experiences of patriotism,
civic pride, heroic sacrifice, and the durability of the nation-state. Photographs
are used to drive these associations home. Thus, connecting backward in time is
signified by a visual trajectory of journalism’s images that extend across wars in
different times and places.
The depiction of war over time gravitates in clear directions. Often journalism’s
images of war are clear even before they are presented as news. Memorable, dra-
matic, and symbolic, they cut and depict events in a way that helps the public not
only make sense of them but also remember them in the years that follow. War
images capture the essence of war in a way that illustrates some vivid emotion or
bring home what appear to be fundamental truths. In one media critic’s view, the
“heroic, often unrepresentative images” of war are useful in that they “deliberately
recall [other] photographs and famous cinematic sequences” (Kakutani 2003: E1,
E5). Much of the power of depicting new wars thus comes from earlier times.
There are three ways in which journalists cue a linkage between an image of
war and the past—through words, through parallel pictures, and through substi-
tutional depictions (Zelizer 1998).
Functioning as carriers of meaning that direct interpretations of the images at
their side (Barthes 1977, 1981; Hall 1974), words offer a way to connect what is
depicted with the intention by which it is shown. The parallel between a con-
temporary war and a war of earlier times is here enunciated primarily in words
and only secondarily in the image itself. Articulation is generally found in the
words surrounding the photograph—captions, titles, headlines, and accompany-
ing bodies of text—that guide audiences in the image’s interpretation. Using
125
BARBIE ZELIZER
words as directed cues for interpretation is built into the ways in which journalists
create familiar standards for describing war to the public. Calling East Timor
“Indonesia’s Tiananmen” (“The Tiananmen in East Timor,” 1992: A20) or
“another Cambodia” (Kondrake 1979) explains complicated wars through associ-
ation. In a column titled “The real echoes from Vietnam” alongside an image of
Saigon, Newsweek correspondent Jonathan Alter addressed the circumstances of
war-torn Iraq in 2003 by discussing the implications of having “a moment early
last week [when] it felt like 1967” (Alter 2003: 41). Some images are contextual-
ized against an unspecific past, couched in broad terms, such as a shot from The
Economist—depicting weeping women in Bosnia—that was entitled “Out of the
past” with no details that identified the shot as contemporary or tracked which
past was being referenced (“Weeping women” 1991). Other times the past is
invoked more specifically, as when The New York Times asked “Does the world
still recognize a holocaust?’ in an article about a 1993 execution of Muslims in
the Balkans (pictures appended to Darnton 1993). Other parallels are struck
through recalling the circumstances of a photograph’s taking, as in likening the
image of Mohammad Aldura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy shot to death in the
midst of a battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians during the Intifada of
2000 (Abu-Rahma 2000), and, once again, Eddie Adams’ iconic shot (Adams
1968) of the shooting of a Vietcong soldier by the South Vietnamese Chief of
Police in 1968 (Roskis 2000). Parallels are also shaped by region or locality. Con-
flicts in Burundi were labeled as “the next Rwanda” (Gillett and des Forges
1994), while battles in Russia and Moldova were called “the next Bosnia” (“The
next Bosnia” 1992: 43). On March 31, 2003, in its first issue after the recent war
in Iraq began, Time magazine titled its cover photograph “Gulf War II.” In each
case, the implication that earlier wars could offer an appropriate backdrop against
which to interpret contemporary battles sets up an associative framework by
which the more recent wars are seen through the filter of the earlier ones. The use
of words as guides, then, pushes audiences to a position by which they are
required to engage with the war that came before while dealing with the more
recent military conflict. As Time put it, “the shock of recognition is acute . . .
Surely these pictures . . . come from another time” (Walsh 1995: 46–7).
A second way of cueing the past through images is by simply repeating the the-
matic portrayal of earlier wars, visually marking the past but offering no verbal
cues. Ranging from the predictable—the heroic gestures of soldiers—to the
grotesque—stark depictions of human corpses, journalism’s images of war rework
recognizable and familiar themes of representation in visually depicting new
wars. Pictures are used as parallels in ways that mark the associations surrounding
certain wars as antecedents to later ones. The Tianenmen Square shot of a man
stopping a cordon of Chinese tanks in June 1989 with nothing more than a shop-
ping bag symbolized individual courage standing firm before the armed might of
the state (Widener 1989), but it also recalled a 1968 shot of a plumber in Prague,
who, on coming face to face with the Soviet tanks about to overrun the Czech
city, stood in front of the tank, tore open his shirt, and shouted at the tank com-
126
mander to shoot him (Bielik 1968). A 1987 dpa (Deutsche Presse-Agentur)

image of the beginnings of the first Intifada in Israel—in which a crew of kaffiyaed
men and boys, led by a flag-bearer carrying the Palestinian flag, was sprawled
across a Nablus plaza readying themselves to throw rocks (“The Intifada”
1987)—was likened to the Delacroix painting Liberty Leads the People, which
depicted a storming crowd bearing forward a flag during the French Revolution
(Stepan 2000: 158–9). Malcolm Browne’s much-celebrated image of a Buddhist
monk immolating himself in the streets of Saigon of 1963 to protest the Vietnam
war (Browne 1963) resurfaced in photographs of a Kurdish teenage girl, Necla
Kanteper, who set herself on fire in 1999 in the London streets following the cap-
ture of the Kurdish guerrilla chief Abdallah Ocalan (picture appended to Gillan
1999: 3), and of an Indian national, Mandeep Singh Sodhi, who set himself on
fire in 2000 in front of the state legislature to protest police harassment (“India
Suicide” 2000); each symbolized human sacrifice for a greater good. Robert
Capa’s shot of a dead German soldier falling into a building from an outside bal-
cony, that appeared in Life on May 14, 1945 (Capa 1945), was echoed in
numerous shots from Iraq in 2003 that emblemized the same visual trope of the
faceless, anonymous, bloodless death of the enemy soldier (i.e. Hill 2003). A
World War II image taken by W. Eugene Smith of a US GI holding a fly-covered
baby removed from a cave filled with hundreds of corpses (Smith 1944; Figure
6.1)—hailed by Life magazine as one of the score of photographs that “people
most readily remember” (“Moments remembered” 1960: 91)—was recycled into a
similar shot taken in Beirut during the city’s onslaught during the mid-1980s
(Faddoud 1985) and later into a much-publicized photograph of a US soldier
holding an Iraqi child (Sagolj 2003; Figure 6.2), where it was slated by the Detroit
Free Press already in 2003 as an image that would be “embedded in history”
(Hinds 2003: H1).
A third kind of stopover in the past employs an image of previous wars that is
both articulated and visible. This kind of image implies the most direct connec-
tion between different wars, in that it directly substitutes photographs of recent
wars with earlier war photographs. These acts of substitutional representation
extend a broader disjunction, often evident in news, between the place of the
news-text and the place of the image at its side. In this regard, images of earlier
wars reappear as direct visual cues to more recent events. Pictures are used either
as partial substitution, when pictures of the past are positioned alongside images
of the war being covered, or as total substitution, when pictures of the past are
used in place of any image of the war being covered. In both cases, the editorial
decision to use a photograph of the past takes away column-inches from the war
being covered. Such visual substitutions bring back a wide range of wars from the
past and, in cases of partial substitution, they establish a definitive visual corollary
between the war of then and the war of now. Following September 11, the
Philadelphia Inquirer displayed a pair of images—one of which depicted the col-
lapsed World Trade Center towers, the other of which showed the 1941 assault
on Pearl Harbor—which drew a visual parallel between the two events despite
127
BARBIE ZELIZER
Figure 6.1 A US GI holds a fly-covered baby, photograph by W. Eugene Smith, first

published in Life, August 28, 1944 (courtesy of Getty Images)
Figure 6.2 US marine doctor with Iraqi girl, photograph by Damir Sagolj, April 2003
(courtesy of Reuters)
128
the fact that other historical parallels with other events might have been more
suitable (pictures appended to Infield 2001: A11; discussed in Zelizer 2002). A
Time column on the so-called victory in Afghanistan was accompanied by two
photographs—one of Afghanistan and one of Somalia (pictures appended to
Krauthammer 2001: 60–1). A Boston Globe article about the toppling of the
statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003 was illustrated with additional
photographs depicting other seemingly similar moments from earlier points in
time—the razing of the Berlin Wall, the lone protester in Tienanmen Square, and
workers jumping off a statue of Lenin in Riga before Latvia seceded from the
Soviet Union (pictures appended to Gilbert and Ryan 2003: D1). The New York
Times ran one essay entitled “Watching Iraq, and Seeing Vietnam,” in which pic-
tures of Saigon and Baghdad were positioned side by side (Whitney 2003: section
4: 1; Figure 6.3) and another in which pictures of dead soldiers in the streets of
Baghdad and Mogadishu were lined up side by side alongside the suggestion that
the image would help turn the tide against the later war as it had done in the ear-
lier one (Kifner 2003 section 4: 1). Other times the photograph of the past
completely displaces the contemporary photograph. A New York Times piece
about civilian casualties, written at the onset of the war in Iraq in 2003, was illus-
trated by one image of dead civilians in Kosovo in 1999 and two photographs of
structural devastation in Kosovo in 1999 and Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001, but no
image at all of what was then already transpiring in Iraq (Eviatar 2003: D7, D9).
A Time article republished a picture of a Kurdish refugee fleeing Iraqi persecution
Figure 6.3 “Watching Iraq, and Seeing Vietnam,” The New York Times, November 9,
2003 (courtesy of The New York Times)
129
BARBIE ZELIZER
in 1991 as a bridge between one article about Saddam Hussein in 2003 and
another querying the US betrayal of Iraqis during the earlier Gulf War (picture
appended to McGeary 2003: 57), the picture offering a visual bridge by which the
more recent article could be understood. An article about urban warfare in Bagh-
dad during the war in Iraq positioned a drawing of what soldiers in the street
would look like alongside a photograph of a tank unit patrolling Mogadishu,
Somalia, ten years earlier (“A nation at war” 2003: B12). Newsweek featured an
image of Saigon in a column on Iraq (Alter 2003: 41). In all of these cases, the
distance between the war of today and that of earlier wars is collapsed via its
visual representation. The image of then substitutes for the image of today.
When war is reduced to a photograph

What does the turn to the visual in wartime tell us? Wartime reportage involves
making quick decisions under fraught circumstances. In that regard, the availabil-
ity of cues—whether they have to do with frequency, aesthetic appeal, or
familiarity—help reporters, photographers, photo-editors, and news editors make
judgments about which photographs should depict a given circumstance of war.
All of this matters because it is not the photograph’s referentiality—its ability to
present the world as is—that endures in journalism’s turn to the visual. Despite
the fact that photographers and journalists have long stipulated that the referen-
tial force matters in news photographs, it is the photograph’s symbolic or
connotative force—its ability to contextualize the discrete details of a setting in a
broader frame—that facilitates the durability and memorability of a news image.
Given the lack of standardization about how to use photographs, the marginaliza-
tion of photography as an autonomous mode of news relay, and the importance of
informal cues in directing journalistic practice, the turn to the visual makes sense
as a way of directing the engagement with news photographs. Such cues are often
not the best, most complete, or most representative mode of depiction, so that
what is seen in war is often not what is depicted in its photographs.
This means that journalism’s images of war provide a strategically narrowed way
of visualizing the battlefield. When a news photograph is deemed “memorable,”
there is reason to believe that modes of appraisal other than newsworthiness are
being invoked. Journalism’s images force the public to see war but in a way that
only partly reflects the war being depicted. Coverage, then, takes its cue from a
turn to the visual that offers war’s core visual representation in the news, regardless
of how well it does so as part of journalism’s own role in documenting war.
The ramifications of this are disturbing. Lost in the depictions tracked here are
the important visual aspects of each individual war and the socio-political differ-
ences that differentiate wars from each other. Pictures in this sense are supported
by their own lack of standardized usage in news, where they often are used to
shape public consensus precisely because the standards for regulating their use are
uneven. Is it any surprise, then, that images facilitate the accomplishment of
political and military ends, mobilizing public support for strategic action in
130
wartime? With the turn to the visual serving up the material by which this is
accomplished, there is need to think more critically about what such ends suggest
for the viability of a healthy and contested public sphere.
The ends that are at stake are numerous and varied. One might only think
about the pictures not seen—of the recent war in Afghanistan and, at the time of
writing, the ongoing war in Iraq. The fact that in times of war, journalism shifts to
a mode of photographic relay that proceeds basically without directives other
than informal impulses toward frequency, aesthetic appeal, and familiarity allows
for unusual, even faulty news judgment. It allows for pictures of the memorable,
frequent, dramatic, aesthetically appealing, powerful, and familiar over the news-
worthy, and it encourages pictures in a way that facilitates faulty comparisons
across events. Most important, it allows journalists to strike parallels between
wars for no better reason than the surrounding mandates for interpreting them
resemble each other. Those faulty comparisons are problematic. How alike are
the wars positioned here as visual parallels? They are not very alike at all. Yet
depicting new wars in ways that link them with old practices of depiction forces a
spectator position on the public that may have less to do with the war itself and
more to do with the parallel being struck. The public sees many pictures of war,
but what it sees is not necessarily what it needs to see. Seen are shards of wartime
presented in a way that forces certain public responses and mutes questions about
the ultimate value of both the depictions and the parallels being displayed, for
whom and to which ends.
When war is reduced to a photograph, then, its usage depends on journalism
being less journalistic than it needs to be. What clearer note is needed to signal
the dangers that photographs pose to the maintenance of a healthy body politic
in wartime?
Notes
1 Thanks to Lauren Feldman and Bethany Klein for collecting photographs studied for
this chapter. Parts of the chapter were presented at the Shorenstein Center on the
Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, University of Southern Cali-
fornia, the Conference on the Media at War at the University of California at
Berkeley, Middle Tennessee State University, the New Hampshire Humanities Coun-
cil, the New School University, Grand Valley State University, and Wabash College.
Special thanks to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania and to Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, where I was a fellow
during the spring of 2004, for technical help in completing this chapter.
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1995, p. A1.
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135
7
THE PERSIAN GULF TV WAR
REVISITED
Douglas Kellner
The 1991 war against Iraq was one of the first televised events of the global village
in which the entire world watched a military spectacle unfold via international
satellite and cable networks.1 In retrospect, the Bush administration and the Pen-
tagon carried out one of the most successful public relations campaigns in the
history of modern politics in its use of the media to mobilize support for the war.
The mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere tended to be a compli-
ant vehicle for the government strategy to manipulate the public, imperiling
democracy which requires informed citizens, checks, and balances against exces-
sive government power, and a free and vigorous critical media (see Kellner 1990,
1992, and 2001). Indeed, if the media do not adequately inform citizens, provide a
check against excessive government power and corruption, and adequately debate
the key issues of the day, democracy is undermined.
Moreover, the US media, especially CNN, completely dominated global cover-
age of the event. CNN had cameras and reporters in Baghdad throughout the
war, a large crew in Israel, and live coverage of all US military and government
press conferences. Thus its images, discourses, and material tended to shape
global coverage of the event. This meant that the Bush administration and the
Pentagon were able to control the flow of representations and framing of events,
and thus to manage the global media spectacle of Gulf War I.2
In this chapter, I first discuss the production of the text of the “crisis in the
Gulf” and then “the Gulf War.” This will involve analysis of disinformation and
propaganda campaigns by the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and their
allies, as well as dissection of the constraints produced by the so-called pool
system. I also indicate how the political economy of the media in the United
States facilitated the manufacturing of consent for US government policies.
Then I critically engage the meanings embedded in the text of the war against
Iraq and the reception of the text/event by the audience. The latter process will
take on the question of why the Gulf War was popular with its audiences and how
the Bush administration and the Pentagon marshaled public support for the war.
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T H E P E R S I A N G U L F T V WA R R E V I S I T E D
Disinformation and propaganda

The 1991 Gulf War can be read as a text produced by the Bush administration,
the Pentagon, and the media that propagated images and discourse of the crisis
and then the war to mobilize consent and support for the US military interven-
tion. Analysis of the text of the “crisis in the Gulf ” indicates that from the
beginning the mainstream news institutions followed the lines of the Bush
administration and the Pentagon.3 Mainstream media in the US are commercial
media subject to intense competition for audiences and profits. Consequently,
mainstream television, newspapers, and news magazines do not want to alienate
consumers, and thus are extremely cautious in going against public opinion and
the official government line. The mainstream media also favor official govern-
ment sources for their stories, especially in times of crisis. Thus, they tend to be
conduits for US government policies and actions, though there are significant
exceptions (see Kellner 1990).
In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in early August 1990, the US
government began immediately first to build consensus for the US military inter-
vention and then to promote a military solution to the crisis, and the mainstream
media were compliant accomplices. When the Bush administration sent a mas-
sive troop deployment to the region, the mainstream media applauded these
actions and became a conduit for mobilizing support for US policy. For weeks, few
dissenting voices were heard in the mainstream media, and television reports,
commentary, and discussion strongly privileged a military solution to the crisis,
serving as a propaganda vehicle for the US military and national security appara-
tus that was facing severe budget cutbacks on the very eve of the invasion. No
significant television debate took place over the dangerous consequences of the
massive US military response to the Iraqi invasion, or over the interests and poli-
cies that the military intervention served. Critics of US policy were largely absent
from the mainstream media coverage of the crisis, and little analysis was pre-
sented which departed from issues presented by the Bush administration.
The Bush administration controlled the media discourse in part through disin-
formation and propaganda and in part by means of control of the press via the
pool system. A military pool system was set up which restricted media access to
soldiers and the battlefield; members representing different media like the press,
radio, and television were organized into “pools” and taken to chosen sites. They
were accompanied at all times by military personnel, called “minders,” who
restricted their access and tightly controlled their movements. The reports were
then sent to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where a Joint Information Bureau censored
the reports that then became common material available to those media outlets
that had joined the pool. This was the tightest control over the press in any war
in US history and assured that positive images and reporting of the war would
take place.4
In the early days of “the crisis of the Gulf,” the Bush administration carried
through a highly successful disinformation campaign by means of their control
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
and manipulation of sources that legitimated the US military deployment in

Saudi Arabia on August 8, 1990. During the first days of the crisis, the US gov-
ernment constantly claimed that the Iraqis were mobilizing troops on the border
of Saudi Arabia, poised to invade the oil-rich kingdom. This was sheer disinfor-
mation and later studies revealed that Iraq had no intention of invading Saudi
Arabia and did not have large numbers of troops on the Saudi border in a threat-
ening posture.5
The disinformation campaign that legitimated the US sending troops to Saudi
Arabia began working through the Washington Post on August 7, 1990, the same
day Bush announced that he was sending US troops to Saudi Arabia. In a front
page story by Patrick Tyler, the Post claimed that in a previous day’s meeting
between the US chargé d’affairs, Joseph Wilson, and Iraqi President Saddam Hus-
sein, the Iraqi leader was highly belligerent, claiming that Kuwait was part of
Iraq, that no negotiation was possible, that he would invade Saudi Arabia if they
cut off the oil pipes which delivered Iraqi oil across Saudi territory to the Gulf,
and that American blood would flow in the sand if the US sent troops to the
region.
A later transcript of the Wilson–Hussein meeting revealed, however, that Hus-
sein was cordial, indicated a willingness to negotiate, insisted that he had no
intention of invading Saudi Arabia, and opened the doors for a diplomatic solu-
tion to the crisis. The Post story was taken up by the television networks, wire
services, and press, producing an image that there was no possibility of a diplo-
matic solution and that decisive action was needed to protect Saudi Arabia from
the aggressive Iraqis. Such a story line legitimated the sending of US troops to the
Gulf and provided a perfect justification for Bush’s intervention in the region.
Editorial columns in the Washington Post the same day supported the imminent
Bush administration deployment. Mary McGrory published a column titled “The
beast of Baghdad,” which also assumed that Iraq was set to invade Saudi Arabia
and which called upon Bush to bomb Baghdad! Precisely the same line appeared
in an opinion editorial piece by the Post’s associate editor and chief foreign corre-
spondent Jim Hoagland who kicked in with a column: “Force Hussein to
withdraw” (p. A19). As certain as McGrory of Iraq’s imminent invasion of Saudi
Arabia, Hoagland opened by proclaiming that “Saddam Hussein has gone to war
to gain control of the oil fields of Kuwait and ultimately of Saudi Arabia. The
United States must now use convincing military force against the Iraqi dictator to
save the oil fields and to preserve American influence in the Middle East.”
According to Hoagland, Saddam Hussein “respects only force and will respond to
nothing else.”
The rest of the article consisted of false analysis, questionable analogies, and
bellicose banality. Hoagland claimed that the “Iraqi dictator’s base of support is
too narrow and too shaky to withstand a sharp, telling blow.” Yet some six weeks
of the most intense bombing in history were unable to dislodge Hussein whose
support, or staying power, was obviously much stronger than Hoagland could
imagine. Hoagland also believed that “he [Hussein] is so hated at home that his
138
defeat, even by foreign forces, will be greeted as deliverance by his own nation
and by much of the Arab world.” As it turned out, both Iraq and the Arab world
were deeply divided over Hussein and the sweeping generalities that Hoagland
proclaimed were totally off the mark.6
Thus, the Bush administration and Washington Post disinformation and propa-
ganda concerning the Iraqis’ readiness to invade Saudi Arabia worked effectively
to shape media discourse and public perception of the crisis and to legitimate
Bush’s sending US troops to Saudi Arabia. In particular, Patrick Tyler’s front-page
story concerning Hussein’s meeting with Joe Wilson and Iraq’s alleged refusal to
negotiate a solution or leave Kuwait provided the crucial media frame through
which debate over the advisability of sending US troops to Saudi Arabia was dis-
cussed.7 On August 7, in a PBS McNeil–Lehrer discussion of the proper US
response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, co-anchor Judy Woodruff stated: “Iraq’s
leader Saddam Hussein was quoted today [in the Post story—D.K.] as saying the
invasion of Kuwait was irreversible and permanent.” Later on in the same show,
former National Security Adviser (and Iran/Contra felon) Robert McFarlane
quoted the story as evidence that Hussein was not going to leave Kuwait, and that
therefore US military intervention in Saudi Arabia was necessary. And in a dis-
cussion with Arab-American leaders as to whether a US military intervention was
justified, Woodruff interjected: “the US chargé in Baghdad did have a two-hour
meeting with Saddam Hussein yesterday which by all accounts was very unsatis-
factory as Saddam Hussein insisted that he was going to stay in Kuwait and made
what were reported to be veiled threats against other nations in the area”—all dis-
information that Bush administration officials fed to the Post, which was then
disseminated by other mainstream media.
In his early morning television speech on August 8, which announced and
defended sending US troops to Saudi Arabia, Bush claimed that “the Saudi gov-
ernment requested our help, and I responded to that request by ordering US air
and ground forces to deploy to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” This was false as
accounts of the Saudi–US negotiations later indicated that the United States
pressured the Saudis to allow US military intervention into their country (Wood-
ward 1991: 241ff; and Salinger and Laurent 1991: 110ff). Bush repeated the
dubious claim that “Iraq has massed an enormous war machine on the Saudi
border,” and his administration emphasized this theme in discussion with the
media, which obediently reproduced the argument. At 9:24 a.m. on August 8, for
instance, Bob Zelnick, ABC’s Pentagon correspondent, dutifully reported that
the Pentagon informed him that Iraqi troop presence had doubled since the inva-
sion of Kuwait, that there were now more than 200,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait
with a large force poised to invade Saudi Arabia.
Yet it is not at all certain how many troops Iraq actually deployed in Kuwait
during the first weeks of the crisis. All pre-invasion reports produced by the Bush
administration indicated that Iraq had amassed over 100,000 troops on the
border of Kuwait. Initial reports during the first few days after the invasion sug-
gested that Iraq actually had between 80,000 and 100,000 troops in Kuwait, more
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
than enough for an occupation, as the Bush administration liked to point out and
as the mainstream media diligently reported; once the US forces were on their
way to Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi forces allegedly doubled and reports claimed that
there were at least 100,000 Iraqi troops amassed on the border of Saudi Arabia.
But these figures invariably came from Bush administration or Pentagon sources,
and sources critical of the US claims concerning the number of Iraqi troops
deployed revealed a quite different figure.
St Petersburg Times reporter Jean Heller published two stories (November 30
and January 6) suggesting that satellite photographs indicated far fewer Iraqi
troops in Kuwait than the Bush administration claimed (the January 6 story was
republished in In These Times, February 27, 1991: 1–2). Heller’s suspicions were
roused when she saw a Newsweek “Periscope” item that ABC’s “Prime time live”
had never used several satellite photographs of occupied Kuwait City and south-
ern Kuwait taken in early September. Purchased by ABC from the Soviet
commercial satellite agency Soyez-Karta, the photographs were expected to
reveal the presence of a massive Iraqi troop deployment in Kuwait, but failed to
disclose anything near the number of troops claimed by the Bush administration.
ABC declined to use them and Heller got her newspaper to purchase the satellite
photographs of Kuwait from August 8 and September 13 and of Saudi Arabia
from September 11. Two satellite experts who had formerly worked for the US
government failed to find evidence of the alleged build-up. “‘The Pentagon kept
saying the bad guys were there, but we don’t see anything to indicate an Iraqi
force in Kuwait of even 20 percent the size the administration claimed,’ said Peter
Zimmerman, who served with the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
during the Reagan administration” (Heller 1991: 2).
Both satellite photographs taken on August 8 and September 13 showed a sand
cover on the roads, suggesting that there were few Iraqi troops on the Saudi
border where the Bush administration claimed that they were massed, threaten-
ing to invade Saudi Arabia. Pictures of the main Kuwaiti airport showed no Iraqi
planes in sight, though large numbers of US planes were visible in Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon refused to comment on the satellite photographs, but to sugges-
tions advanced by ABC (which refused to show the photographs) that the
pictures were not high enough quality to detect the Iraqi troops, Heller responded
that the photograph of the north of Saudi Arabia showed all the roads swept
clean of sand and clearly depicted the US troop build-up in the area. By Septem-
ber, the Pentagon was claiming that there were 265,000 Iraqi troops and 2,200
tanks deployed in Kuwait which posed a threat to Saudi Arabia. But the photo-
graphs reveal nowhere near this number and, so far, the US government has
refused to release its satellite photographs.
Interestingly, Bob Woodward (1991) noted that the Saudis had sent scouts
across the border into Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion to see if they could detect
the Iraqi troops that the United States claimed were massed for a possible inva-
sion of their country. “The scouts had come back reporting nothing. There was
no trace of the Iraqi troops heading toward the kingdom” (Woodward 1991:
140
258–9). Soon after, the US team arrived with photographs of the Iraqi troops
allegedly massed on the Saudi border, and General Norman Schwarzkopf
explained to the Saudis that the Iraqis had sent small command-and-control
units ahead of the mass of troops, which would explain why the Saudi scouts
failed to see them (Woodward 1991: 268). Former CIA officer Ralph McGehee
told journalist Joel Bleifuss: “There has been no hesitation in the past to use doc-
tored satellite photographs to support the policy position that the US wants
supported” (In These Times, September 19, 1990: 5). Indeed, Emery (1991)
reported that King Hussein of Jordan was also sent pictures of tanks moving along
roads near the Saudi/Kuwaiti border which had been shown to the Saudis, and
that King Hussein claimed that the Saudis had “pressed the panic button” when
they saw the photographs. King Hussein was skeptical and “argued that if Saddam
Hussein had wanted to invade the Saudis, he would have moved immediately,
when the only thing between him and the Saudi capital was a tiny and
untested—if expensively equipped—Saudi army” (Emery 1991: 25).
This was how the disinformation campaign worked to legitimate US deploy-
ment of troops in Saudi Arabia: high Bush administration officials called in
journalists who would serve as conduits for stories that Iraq refused to negotiate a
withdrawal from Kuwait and that they had troops stationed on the borders of
Saudi Arabia, threatening to invade the oil-rich kingdom. The Pentagon and
Bush administrations also released information at press conferences concerning
the Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s unwillingness to negotiate, and these
“official” pronouncements supplemented the unofficial briefings of reporters. In
turn, editorial writers and commentators on television networks took up these
claims which they used to bolster arguments concerning why it was necessary for
the US to send troops to Saudi Arabia.
The Hill and Knowlton propaganda campaign

Hence, a successful disinformation campaign was undertaken by the Bush admin-
istration and Pentagon to legitimate sending US troops to Saudi Arabia.
Beginning in early October, a sustained propaganda campaign was underway that
legitimated the US use of military power to force Iraq out of Kuwait. This propa-
ganda offensive involved demonization of the Iraqis for their “rape of Kuwait”
and the demonization of Saddam Hussein as “another Hitler” and the incarna-
tion of evil.8 This campaign was inspired by a British campaign during World
War I, repeated by the US when it entered the war, on the “rape of Belgium”
which stigmatized the Germans as rapists and murderers of innocent children—
charges later proven to be false.
The demonization of Hussein and the Iraqis was important because if they
were absolutely evil and a threat on a par with Hitler and the Nazis, no negotia-
tion could be possible and a diplomatic solution to the crisis was excluded. To
help stigmatize the Iraqis, a Kuwaiti government group financed a propaganda
campaign, undertaken by the US public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, which
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
invented Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, such as the killing of premature babies who
were allegedly taken out of incubators and left to die on the floor. In October
1990 a tearful teenage girl testified to the House of Representatives Human
Rights Caucus that she had seen Iraqi soldiers remove 15 babies from incubators
and leave them to die on the floor of the hospital. The girl’s identity was not
revealed, supposedly to protect her family from reprisals. This story helped mobi-
lize support for US military action, much as Bush’s Willie Horton advertisements
had helped him win the presidency by playing on primal emotions. Bush
mentioned the story six times in one month and eight times in 44 days; Vice-
President Dan Quayle referred to it frequently, as did General Norman
Schwarzkopf and other military spokespersons. Seven US senators cited the story
in speeches supporting the January 12 resolution authorizing war.
In a January 6, 1992, opinion editorial piece in The New York Times, John
MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, revealed that the unidentified
congressional witness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. The
girl had been brought to Congress by Hill and Knowlton, which had coached her
and helped organize the congressional human rights hearings. In addition, Craig
Fuller, Bush’s former chief of staff when he was Vice-President and a Bush loyalist,
was president of Hill and Knowlton and was involved with the PR campaign, as
were several other former officials for the Reagan administration who had close
relations with the Bush administration.
Thus, the Kuwaiti government developed a propaganda campaign to manipu-
late the American people into accepting the Gulf War and the Bush administration
used this campaign to promote their goals. Hill and Knowlton organized a photo-
graph exhibition of Iraqi atrocities displayed at the United Nations and the US
Congress and this was widely shown on television. They also assisted Kuwaiti refu-
gees in telling stories of torture, lobbied Congress, and prepared video and print
material for the media.
On January 17, 1992, ABC’s “20/20” disclosed that a “doctor,” who testified that
he had “buried fourteen newborn babies that had been taken from their incubators
by the soldiers,” was also lying. The “doctor” was actually a dentist and later admit-
ted to ABC that he had never examined the babies and had no way of knowing
how they had died. The same was true of Amnesty International which published
a report based on this testimony. (Amnesty International later retracted the
report, which had been cited frequently by Bush and other members of his admin-
istration.) ABC also disclosed that Hill and Knowlton had commissioned a “focus
group” survey which brought groups of people together to find out what stirred or
angered them. The focus group responded strongly to the Iraqi baby atrocity sto-
ries, and so Hill and Knowlton featured them in its PR campaigns for the Free
Kuwait group.
In addition to carrying out a massive propaganda campaign, the US govern-
ment also instituted a sustained effort to control information and images through
the pool system (see above) and few of the US broadcasting networks sought out
critical or alternative views. Few significant anti-war voices were heard in the
142
mainstream media during the first months of the troop build-up in Saudi Arabia.
A study by the media watchdog group FAIR reported that, during the first five
months of television coverage of the crisis, ABC devoted only 0.7 percent of its
Gulf coverage to opposition to the military build-up. CBS allowed 0.8 percent,
while NBC devoted 1.5 percent, or 13.3 minutes for all stories about protests,
anti-war organizations, conscientious objectors, and religious dissenters. Conse-
quently, of the 2,855 minutes of television coverage of the crisis from August 8 to
January 3, FAIR found that only 29 minutes, or roughly 1 percent, dealt with
popular opposition to the US military intervention in the Gulf.9
The small amount of images of anti-war demonstrators and opinion that
appeared in the mainstream media during the crisis in the Gulf often juxtaposed
anti-American demonstrations in Arab countries that frequently burned US flags
with images of US demonstrations. Such a juxtaposition coded anti-war demon-
strators as Arabs and as irrational opponents of US policies. US demonstrators
were portrayed as an unruly mob, as long-haired outsiders; their discourse was
rarely cited and coverage focused instead on the chanting of slogans, or images of
marching crowds, with media voice-overs supplying the context and interpreta-
tion. Major newspapers and newsmagazines also failed to cover the burgeoning
new anti-war movement. Thus, just as the media symbolically constructed a neg-
ative image in the 1960s of anti-war protesters as irrational, anti-American, and
unruly, so too did the networks present the emerging anti-war movement of the
1990s in predominantly negative frames.
Not only was the discourse of the anti-war movement ignored, but also “none
of the foreign policy experts associated with the peace movement—such as
Edward Said, Noam Chomsky or the scholars of the Institute for Policy Studies—
appeared on any nightly news program” (FAIR press release, January 1991). A
Times-Mirror poll, however, that was recorded in September 1990 and January
1991 discovered “pluralities of the public saying they wished to hear more about
the views of Americans who oppose sending forces to the Gulf” (Special Times-
Mirror News Interest Index, January 31, 1991). Furthermore, soldiers who were
alarmed at their deployment in the Saudi desert and objected to the primitive
living conditions there were silenced, in part by Pentagon restrictions on press
coverage and in part by a press corps unwilling to search for dissenting opinions.
And yet on the eve of the war, more than 50 percent of the American public
opposed a military solution to the crisis. Perhaps images of families being sepa-
rated and young troops being sent to the Saudi desert produced a negative
response to the possibility of a war in the region that could take many US lives.
Quite possibly, despite the lack of critical discourse on the media, many individu-
als could still think for themselves and produce anti-war opinions against the
grain of the dominant pro-military solution government and media discourse.
And maybe the memory of Vietnam and US military misadventures produced
apprehensions over a war in the Persian Gulf. But the disinformation and propa-
ganda campaigns were successful in that they persuaded the majority of nations in
the UN and the US Congress to support a declaration legitimating the use of
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. And once the war began, the Bush administra-
tion was quickly able to mobilize support for its positions.
The media propaganda war

When the US began military action against Iraq on January 16, 1991, the main-
stream media became a conduit for Bush administration and Pentagon policies
and rarely allowed criticism of its actions, disinformation, and mishaps during the
war. Television served primarily as a propaganda apparatus for the multinational
forces arrayed against the Iraqis and as a cheerleader for their every victory.
Anchors like Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC went to Saudi Arabia
and, along with the network correspondents there, seemed to totally identify with
the military point of view. Whenever peace proposals were floated by the Iraqis,
Arab states, or the Soviet Union, the networks quickly shot them down and pre-
sented the Bush administration and Pentagon positions on every aspect of the
war (see note 8).
The media framed the war as an exciting narrative, providing a nightly mini-
series with a dramatic conflict, action, and adventure, danger to allied troops and
civilians, evil perpetuated by villainous Iraqis, and heroics performed by Ameri-
can military planners, technology, and troops. Both CBS and ABC used the logo
“Showdown in the Gulf” during the opening hours of the war, and CBS contin-
ued to utilize the logo throughout the war, coding the event as a battle between
good and evil. Indeed, the Gulf War was presented as a war movie with begin-
ning, middle, and end. The dramatic bombing of Baghdad during the opening
night and exciting Scud wars of the next days enthralled a large television audi-
ence and the following weeks provided plenty of excitement, ups and downs,
surprises, and complex plot devices. The threats of chemical weapons, terrorism,
and a bloody Iraqi ground offensive seemed to produce great fear in the television
audiences and helped to mobilize support against the villainous Iraqis. The
ground war in particular produced a surge of dramatic action and a quick resolu-
tion and happy ending to the war (at least for those rooting for the US-led
coalition).
Television also presented the war visually with dramatic techno-images, play-
ing repeatedly the videos of hi-tech precision bombing and the aerial war over
Baghdad and the Patriot/Scud wars over Saudi Arabia and Israel. The effects of
the war on American families was a constant theme, and patriotism and support
for the troops was a constant refrain of the commentators. The military released
videotapes of hi-tech precision bombing which were replayed repeatedly, similar
to replays of heroics in a sports event. Indeed, sports metaphors were constantly
used and the pro-war demonstrators who chanted “USA! USA!” rooted for the
American side as sports fans, as if the Gulf War were the Super Bowl of wars. The
military and media kept daily tally of the score of Iraqi tanks and equipment elim-
inated, though the sanitized war coverage contained no “body count” figures and
images of wounded or dead soldiers were strictly forbidden. The winnability and
144
justification for the war were stressed and the narrative was oriented toward a suc-
cessful conclusion that was presented as a stunning victory.
It was obviously in the television networks’ interests to attract the audience to
their programming, and competition revolved around presenting the most patri-
otic, exciting, and compelling coverage. To properly explicate this dimension of
the text of the Gulf War, one needs to focus on the production of the text within
the framework of the political economy of commercial television. First, the
sources of the news on the mainstream media were generally limited to the Bush
administration and the military. This was partly the result of the pool system that
restricted media access to the theater of battle and that exercised censorship over
every image and report filed. Yet the networks themselves also restricted the
range of voices that appeared. A survey by FAIR of the television coverage of the
first two weeks of the war revealed that of the 878 news sources used by the three
major commercial networks, only 1.5 percent were identified as anti-war protest-
ers—roughly equivalent to the amount of people asked to comment on how the
Gulf War disrupted their travel plans. In the 42 nightly news broadcasts, only one
leader of a peace organization was interviewed, while seven Super Bowl players
were asked their views of the war.10
On the other hand, in report after report, television portrayed pro-war rallies,
yellow ribbons, and the wave of patriotism apparently sweeping the country. The
networks also personalized the US troops and their families, thus bonding the
public to the troops in the desert, helping manufacture support for the US mili-
tary policies. In these ways, the audience was mobilized to support every move of
the Bush administration and the Pentagon and, as the war went well and rela-
tively fast, the country was swept along in a victory euphoria, as if it was winning
the Super Bowl of wars and was thus number one in the world. Such imagery and
discourse helped create support for a war that barely 50 percent of the public and
Congress desired on the eve of Bush’s bombing of Baghdad.
Furthermore, the audience was terrorized into support for the US troops by a
series of propaganda campaigns, masterfully orchestrated by the Bush administra-
tion and the Pentagon. Early in the crisis, reports were leaked that Iraqi chemical
weapons were being brought to the field of battle, and throughout the war there
were many reports of the threat of Iraqi chemical weapons. In addition, there were
almost daily reports on the threats of terrorism manipulated by the Iraqis. When
the Iraqis paraded US POWs on television, there were claims that they were tor-
turing coalition troops. Such reports created a mass hysteria in sectors of the
audience, which were positively bonding with the troops. Moreover, after the Iraqi
Scud attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia, there were reports of thousands of people
buying gas masks and vignettes of families producing sealed rooms in their home in
the case of chemical attack. Obviously, such hysteria helped mobilize people
against the Iraqis and make them desire their military defeat and punishment.
On the whole, television and the mainstream media arguably served as propa-
ganda arms for US government policy. The media endlessly repeated Bush
administration “big lies,” such as its alleged efforts to negotiate a settlement with
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
the Iraqis when it was actively undermining the possibility of a diplomatic settle-
ment. And the media repeated every propaganda line of the day, amplifying Bush
administration claims concerning alleged torture and mistreatment of US POWs
(later revealed to be highly exaggerated), that an Iraqi infant formula milk fac-
tory destroyed by US bombing was really a military installation producing
chemical/biological weapons, that a civilian sleeping shelter was really a military
command and control center, or that Iraqi “environmental terrorism” was respon-
sible for the Persian Gulf oil spill and other ecological devastation.11
The US mainstream media projected the image of the war most desired by the
Pentagon and the Bush administration; i.e. that it was fighting an eminently
clean and successful hi-tech war. From the beginning, the bombing of Iraq was
portrayed as efficient and humane, targeting only military facilities. Over and
over, despite pictures from Iraq that revealed the contrary, the Pentagon and the
Bush administration stressed the accuracy of their bombing strategies and the oft-
repeated images of the precision bombs, with video cameras built into their
heads, presented an image of pinpoint accurate bombing. Likewise, the frequent
pictures of Patriot missiles apparently knocking out Iraqi Scud missiles created
the impressions of a highly effective hi-tech war. Later, the Pentagon itself admit-
ted that only 7 percent of the bombs used were so-called “smart bombs” and
admitted that over 70 percent of its munitions missed their targets, but the domi-
nant images of a hi-tech war presented an impression of a highly efficient
technowar. It was also later revealed that a large percentage of US casualties
resulted from “friendly fire,” from the bombing of one’s own troops.
The lack of significant critical voices in the mainstream media during the crisis
in the Gulf and then the Gulf War also can be explained by reflection on the
political economy of the media and the system of media production in the United
States. The broadcast media are afraid to go against a perceived popular consen-
sus, to alienate people, and to take unpopular stands because they are afraid of
losing audience shares and thus profits. Because US military actions have charac-
teristically been supported by the majority of the public, at least in their early
stages, television is extremely reluctant to criticize what might turn out to be
popular military actions.12
The broadcast media also characteristically rely on a narrow range of estab-
lished and safe commentators and are not likely to reach out to new and
controversial voices in a period of national crisis. The media generally wait until
a major political figure or established “expert” speaks against a specific policy and
that view gains a certain credibility as marked by opinion polls or publication in
“respected” newspapers or journals. Unfortunately, the crisis of democracy in the
United States is such that the Democratic party has largely supported the conser-
vative policies of the past decades and the party leaders are extremely cautious
and slow to criticize foreign policy actions, especially potentially popular military
actions. The crisis of liberalism is so deep in the US that establishment liberals
are afraid of being called “wimps” or “soft” on foreign aggression, and thus often
support policies that their better instincts should lead them to oppose.
146
Warrior nation
The result of the propaganda blitz and war hysteria was a warrior nation that turned
many in the television public into fanatic supporters of the Bush administration war
policy. The pro-war consensus was mobilized through a variety of ways in which the
public identified with the troops. Television presented direct images of the troops to
the public through “desert dispatches” that produced very sympathetic images of
young American men and women “in harm’s way” and serving their country. Tele-
vision news segments on families of the troops also provided mechanisms of
identification, especially because many of the troops were reservists, forced to leave
their jobs and families, making them sympathetic objects of empathy and identifi-
cation for those able to envisage themselves in a similar situation. There were also
frequent television news stories on how church groups, schools, and others adopted
US troops in Saudi Arabia as pen pals, thus more intimately binding those at home
to the soldiers abroad. People were also bound to troops through rituals of display of
yellow ribbons, chanting and waving flags in pro-war demonstrations, and entering
into various pro-war support groups.
The media generated support for the war, first, by upbeat appraisals of US suc-
cesses and then by demonizing the Iraqis that made people fervently want a
coalition victory. Initial support was won for the war effort through the media-
generated euphoria that the war would be over quickly, with a decisive and easy
victory for the US-led coalition. Then, the audience got into the drama of the
war through experiencing the excitement of the Scud wars and the thrills of
technowar war with its laser-guided bombs and missiles and videotapes of its suc-
cesses. The POW issue, the oil spills and fires, and intense propaganda campaigns
by both sides also involved the audience in the highly emotional experience of a
television war. The drama of the war was genuinely exciting and the public
immersed itself in the sights, sounds, and language of war.
The media images of the hi-tech precision bombing, (seeming) victories of
Patriot over Scud missiles, bombing of Iraq, and military hardware and troops
helped to mobilize positive feelings for the US military effort in much of the audi-
ence. Military language helped normalize the war, propaganda and disinformation
campaigns mobilized pro-war discourse, and the negative images and discourses
against the Iraqis helped mobilize hatred against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Polls
during the first weeks of the war revealed growing support for the war effort, dis-
playing a widespread propensity to believe whatever the media and military were
saying. A Times-Mirror survey of January 31, 1991, indicated that 78 percent of
the public believed that the military was basically telling the truth, not hiding
anything embarrassing about its conduct of the war, and providing all of the
information it prudently could. Seventy-two percent called the press coverage
objective and 61 percent called it for the most part accurate. Eight out of ten said
the press did an excellent job. Fifty percent claimed to be addicted to television
watching and said that they could not stop watching coverage of the war. Fifty-
eight percent of adults under 30 called themselves “war news addicts” and
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
21 percent of these “addicts” said they had trouble concentrating on their jobs or
normal activities, while 18 percent said they were suffering from insomnia.
It was, however, the total media and social environment that was most respon-
sible for mobilizing support for the US war policies. From morning to evening,
the nation was bombarded with images of military experts, vignettes of soldiers at
home and abroad, military families, former POWs, and others associated with the
military. Military figures, images, and discourse dominated the morning talk
shows, the network news, discussion programs, and the 24-hour-a-day CNN
war coverage, as well as saturation coverage on C-Span and many other cable
networks. On home satellite dishes, the channels were saturated with live trans-
missions concerning the war, as the networks prepared or presented their reports
from the field, and one satellite transponder provided hours per day of live mili-
tary pool footage from Saudi Arabia for use by the networks—propaganda
provided by the military free of charge. Television news pre-empted regular pro-
grams for weeks. The result was a militarization of consciousness and an
environment dominated by military images and discourses.
Some concluding reflections

The analysis in the last sections suggested how the US corporate media helped
mobilize support for the Gulf War. After the successful ground war, Bush’s
approval ratings shot up to a high of 90 percent. But more detailed analysis of poll
data indicated that there was not the seemingly overwhelming bipartisan support.
Solop and Wonders’ (1991) review of published poll data indicated that those
most supportive of President Bush and his war policies were Republican white
males who had conservative attitudes. Females, blacks, liberals, and Democrats
were less supportive. Moreover, the study by Eveland, McLeod, and Signorielli
(1994), based on interviews during and after the war revealed that there was less
overall support for the war than would be expected given the degree and type of
media coverage relating to public opinion about the war. Both during and after
the war, more than 50 percent of the respondents said they were “neutral” or dis-
agreed with the statements in the “I support the war” scale. In addition, during
the war only 6.6 percent of the respondents said that they strongly agreed with
statements describing support for the war; this figure fell to 2.8 percent in the
survey conducted one year later (Eveland, McLeod, and Signorelli 1994).13
Although saturation television coverage was strongly propagandistic and
seemed to help mobilize audience support for the war, continued coverage of tur-
moil in the region, especially images of the suffering of the Kurds and other Iraqis
at the end of the war, soured segments of the audience on the war and perhaps on
military intervention, which did not seem to have achieved the promised positive
results. Thus, ultimately, the media may have contributed to turning large por-
tions of the public against military solutions to the problems of the Middle East
and elsewhere in the world. It may be that the nightly images of the soldiers in
the desert and then the images after the war of continued suffering and turmoil
148
might have raised questions concerning the wisdom of US military intervention.

In addition, the fact that the war was experienced by much of the audience as a
dramatic spectacle meant that it could be soon forgotten and overwhelmed by
Hollywood, television, and other subsequent spectacles of the culture industry. By
the summer of 1992, Bush’s presidency was in serious trouble and, as it turned out,
patriotic images and discourse from the war were unable to save him in the 1992
election. Revelations of the positive and supportive Reagan/Bush policies before
the war toward Iraq suggested that Bush and his cohorts had constantly miscalcu-
lated in providing aid and diplomatic support to the Iraqi regime from the early
1980s to the eve of the invasion of Kuwait (see Friedman 1993).
In 1992, in a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times, Murray Waas docu-
mented how George Bush himself actively promoted US trade with Iraq and
helped block attempts to criticize Iraq or impose sanctions on it from the Reagan
administration until weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Classified docu-
ments show that Bush, first as Vice President and then as President, intervened
repeatedly over a period of almost a decade to obtain special assistance for
Saddam Hussein—financial aid as well as access to hi-tech equipment that was
critical to Iraq’s quest for nuclear and chemical arms. In Waas’ summary:
In June 1984 Vice President Bush telephoned the president of the

Export-Import Bank to urge approval of a $500 million loan guarantee
for Iraq to build an oil pipeline. Ex-Im, which had been reluctant,
approved.
In February 1987 Vice President Bush telephoned the Ex-Im president
to press for $200 million in loan guarantees. Economists warned the
bank that Iraq could not repay the loans, but the bank approved the
guarantees.
In March 1987 the Commerce Department approved export licenses
for shipment to Iraq of dual-use technology, useful for scientific or mili-
tary purposes. Over the next few years exports of this kind totaled $600
million, and much of the equipment may have gone into aerial spying
and other military uses.
In August 1988 a cease-fire ended the Iran–Iraq war. But the Ameri-
can tilt toward Iraq continued. Some intelligence was being provided as
late as May 1990.
In 1989 Bush, now President, signed a national security order direct-
ing government agencies to improve ties with Iraq.
In October 1989 Secretary of State James A. Baker telephoned Secre-
tary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter and urged him to approve $1 billion
in new loan guarantees to Iraq despite fears that the credits were being
misused. In November Yeutter approved the guarantees.
In January 1990 President Bush signed an executive order finding that
it would not be “in the national interest” for the Ex-Im Bank to stop
loan guarantees to Iraq.
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
In April and again in June 1990 the Commerce Department proposed

restrictions on hi-technology exports to Iraq. An interagency group
chaired by Robert M. Gates, then Deputy National Security Adviser to
Bush, rejected the proposals.
In July 1990 the Senate voted overwhelmingly to cut off loan guaran-
tees to Iraq because of Saddam’s human rights violations, including the
gassing of a Kurdish village. The administration condemned the vote.
On July 31, 1990, with 100,000 Iraqi troops massed at the Kuwait
border, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly went to Capitol Hill and
testified against ending loan guarantees to Iraq.
On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.14
Moreover, the fact that Saddam Hussein continued to rule with an iron fist in
Iraq and that his neighbors continued to feel threatened after the Gulf War raised
questions as to the success of Bush senior’s policy and whether the war really
accomplished any significant long-term goals, other than temporarily boosting
Bush’s ratings in the polls and producing a positive image of the US military after
the shame of defeat in Vietnam. In the chaotic aftermath of the Gulf War in
which the US failed to intervene to helped the uprising against Hussein’s regime
and in the light of his reassertion of his power and domination, the extreme
hyperbole of the construction of Saddam Hussein and his regime as absolute evil
to some extent backfired since the Evil One was not removed from power in the
aftermath of the war. Although Bush urged the Iraqis to overthrow Hussein, once
the US declared an end to the fighting and Iraqi rebels rebelled against Hussein’s
regime, the US remained on the sidelines. General Schwarzkopf himself stated in
a PBS television interview on March 27, 1991, that he had preferred to continue
fighting to “annihilate” completely the Iraqi military which was violently sup-
pressing the insurgent forces against Hussein as Schwarzkopf spoke. The
continuation of Saddam Hussein in power, the destructive environmental effects
of the war, the so-called Gulf War syndrome that has disabled over 160,0000 US
troops, the need for Bush junior to “finish the job,” and the current chaos and
instability of Iraq reveal Gulf War I to have been in retrospect a Pandora’s box of
evils that produced a brief euphoric high with a long hangover.15
Consequently, saturation television coverage of dramatic political events is a
two-edged sword: it might shape public opinion into supporting the US interven-
tion, as it obviously did during the Gulf War. But repeated images of a drawn-out
stalemate, or images of death and destruction in a fighting war, or representations
of protracted suffering as long-term effects of the war, could be turned against the
political group and its leaders who produced such destruction. The very ubiquity
of the broadcasting media and now the Internet, and the central role of the media
in contemporary politics, renders media spectacle a complex and unpredictable
political force (Kellner 2003a). Lust for pictures to attract audiences led the net-
works into a race to get into Iraq and to interview its leaders and to show its
people. Images of continual and increased suffering of the Iraqi people and others
150
in the area as a result of US military interventions in the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars
have helped produce negative images of the US throughout the world and might
ultimately lead people to see that war is no way to solve political conflict, and
that it produces overwhelming destruction, suffering, and death.
Hence, a multiperspectival approach that captures different aspects of a com-
plex phenomenon like mainstream media coverage of US interventions in the
Middle East should also analyze the contradictions of audience reception of the
media texts and potentially contradictory images and effects, as well as analyzing
media texts and their conservative, systems-maintenance functions. Although
my analysis has focused primarily on the ways that US media coverage of the
1991 Gulf War supported the policies of the Bush administration and the Penta-
gon, analysis of the reception by audiences of the multiple Middle East crises, the
Gulf War, and its aftermath might have ultimately helped undermine Bush senior
and the conservative hegemony of the Reagan/Bush senior years, contributing to
the latter’s defeat in 1992. Perhaps Bush senior went overboard in demonizing
Hussein, and his regime’s continued rule of Iraq served to rob Bush senior of
claims of genuine victory. Likewise, although Bush junior’s administration
appeared to have won a smashing military triumph in the 2003 war against Iraq,
its consequences and aftermath could undo the regime of the son, as the contra-
dictory aftermath of Gulf War I helped to undo the presidency of the father (see
Kellner 2004).
In any case, the effects of television and the mainstream media are contradic-
tory and may have unintended consequences. While in the spring of 1991, the
Gulf War constituted a tremendous victory for the Bush administration and the
Pentagon, the event did not save Bush senior’s presidency and eventually raised
questions as to whether he was really an effective president. Its short-term effects
in temporarily boosting Bush senior’s popularity and the sudden shift in public
opinion concerning the war and Bush also point to the fickleness of audiences in a
media-saturated society, who soon forget the big events of the previous year.16
And yet the woefully one-sided coverage of the Gulf crisis and war by the
mainstream media calls attention once again to the need for alternative media to
provide essential information on complex events like the Gulf War. During the
war, those of us who opposed it got information from computer databases, such as
PeaceNet, or progressive publications like The Nation, In These Times, The Village
Voice, and Z Magazine. Locally, in addition to holding teach-ins at universities,
critics of the war attempted to make use of public access television and radio to
criticize the Bush administration’s war policy and refusal to negotiate a diplo-
matic solution. Democratizing our media system will require a revitalization of
public television, an increased role for public access television, the eventual
development of a public satellite system, and the production of progressive com-
puter databases, websites, list-serves, and weblogs (Kellner 1990 and 1995).
Because politics are more and more acted out on media screens, without the
reconstruction of television and the mass media, the prospects for democratiza-
tion of US society and polity are dim.
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DOUGLAS KELLNER
Notes
1 In this chapter, I draw on my book The Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner 1992), and later
studies of the event in Kellner 1995 and Best and Kellner 2001.
2 Following the publication of my Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner 1992), I was invited all
over the world to lecture on the event and interviewed officials from British, French,
Belgium, German, Finnish, Swedish, and many other state television networks; all of
the people I interviewed affirmed that CNN tended to control the media flow and
frames in depiction of the war. Things were quite different, however, in the 2003 war
on Iraq that had many Arab television networks present in Iraq, as well as many Euro-
pean and other global networks that framed the event quite differently from the US
networks.
3 By the “mainstream media” in the United States, I mean the major national television
networks, including ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and CBS; the national weekly news
magazines Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report; and national newspapers
such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington
Post. These mainstream media are corporate media, owned by an ever-shrinking and
more powerful number of transnational corporations. See the contrast between main-
stream and alternative media that I develop in Kellner 1990 and the analysis of
corporate media in Kellner 2003a.
4 Following the example of British censorship of the press during the Falkland Islands/
Malvinas war, the US tightly controlled press access during the Grenada foray and
instituted the pool system during the Panama invasion; for detailed analysis of how it
worked during the Gulf War, see Kellner 1992: pp. 80ff.
5 See the discussion below and Kellner 1992, pp. 17ff for documentation of this claim.
6 Hoagland’s remarkable misreading of Iraq was duplicated by the Bush administration’s
neo-conservatives who claimed prior to the US/UK war against Iraq in 2003 that Iraqis
would welcome their “liberators” with open arms and that the US would easily be able
to reconstruct the country and lead it to democracy (see Kellner 2004).
7 Through computer data base searches, I discovered how this story was taken up by the
television networks and most major newspapers, and was used in many later sum-
maries of the story to explain why Bush had to send US troops to Saudi Arabia; see the
documentation in Kellner 1992.
8 A study undertaken by the Gannett foundation indicated that there were over 1,170
articles linking Hussein with Hitler (LaMay et al. 1991, p. 42). This comparison obvi-
ously presupposes a false analogy in terms of the military threat to the region and the
world from the Iraqi army—whose threat was hyped up from the beginning. Iraq’s 17
million population can hardly compare with Germany’s 70 million and its military was
significantly less threatening than Hitler’s military machine, which was the most pow-
erful in the world in the 1930s. Nor could Iraq, which depends on oil for over 95
percent of its exports, be compared with an industrial powerhouse like Germany. It is
also inappropriate to compare a major imperialist superpower with a regional power,
Iraq, that itself is the product of colonization.
It might also be noted how the Bush administration and media personalized the
crisis, equating Iraq with its leader. Whereas in coverage of the 8-year war between
Iran and Iraq, in which the US covertly supported Iraq, references were to “Baghdad”
and “Iraq,” during the Gulf crisis and war it was usually “Saddam Hussein” who was
referred to as the actor and source of all evil (I am grateful to Richard Keeble for this
insight.)
9 FAIR, press release, January 1991.
10 Cited in Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, March 20, 1991, p. 5.
11 In fact, allied bombing was also responsible for much of the ecological damage; see the
documentation in Kellner 1992 and Clark 1992.
152
12 There was also organized right-wing pressure against networks or mainstream publica-
tions that criticized the Bush administration or the Pentagon; such pressure was
increased in the Afghanistan and 2003 Iraq war, so that during these events the US
broadcasting media were even less critical of the second Bush administration and Pen-
tagon (see Kellner 2003b).
13 Muller documented that within a month and a half after the Iraqi surrender only a
small majority of 52 percent believed that the US intervention was largely or totally
successful and that, by June 1991, the number fell by another 8 percent (1994, p. 277).
Other polls which tracked public opinion between the end of the war and summer
1991 showed declines of 14 percent and 19 percent in support for the proposition that
the war had been worth fighting (Mueller 1993, p. 214).
14 See Murray Waas, Los Angeles Times (May 7, 1992). Another Los Angeles Times story
by Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz, “Bush tied to ’86 bid to give Iraq military
advice,” described how: “As Vice President during the Ronald Reagan administration,
George Bush acted as an intermediary in sending strategic military advice to Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein at a critical point in the Iran–Iraq war, according to sources
and classified documents.” A recent book by Chambers Johnson The Sorrows of Empire
(2004: 223ff) documents how the CIA helped install Saddam Hussein into power,
provided military assistance to Iraq during the 1980s war with Iran, and provided loans
and material that enabled him to develop his weapons programs, including chemical
and biological weapons.
15 On the Gulf War syndrome, see Hersh 1998. See also Phil Hirschkorn and Richard
Roth, “Gulf War veterans suing companies for chemical exports” (CNN, January 17,
2003) who report: “About 209,000 Gulf War veterans have filed claims with the Vet-
erans administration, and 161,000 of them are receiving disability payments.”
16 David Halberstam claimed that the Gulf War “was a war without real resonance . . .
when it was over, it was over, leaving remarkably little trace” (2001, pp. 16). In some
ways, this may be true domestically, but it helped create resentment of US military
power that had resonance in enraging Jihadist forces who have targeted the US with
terrorism attacks, and it also failed to eliminate the regime of Saddam Hussein,
tempting the second Bush administration into what is now appearing as a major
disaster.
References
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York: Routledge and Guilford Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1989) Necessary Illusions, Boston: South End Press.
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Washington: Maisonneuve.
Emery, Michael (1991) “How Mr Bush got his war: deceptions, double-standards and dis-
information,” Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine pamphlet series; originally published in
the Village Voice, March 5, 1991, pp. 22–7.
Eveland, W., McLeod, E., and Signorielli, N. (1994) “Conflict and public opinion: rallying
effects in the Gulf War,” Journalism Quarterly, 1994, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 20–31.
Friedman, Alan (1993) Spider’s Web, New York: Bantam Books.
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York: Scribner.
Heller, Jean (1991) In These Times, February 27: 1–2.
Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam (1988) Manufacturing Consent, New York: Pantheon.
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Hersh, Seymour (1998) Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: the War between Amer-
ica’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Johnson, Chalmers (2004) The Sorrows of Empire, New York: Metropolitan Books.
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Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture, London and New York: Routledge.
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burgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 199–226.
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154
8
TRIBALISM AND TRIBULATION
Media constructions of “African savagery” and
“Western humanitarianism” in the 1990s
Susan L. Carruthers
Africa and/as “a problem from hell”

For Western news organizations the scramble from Africa began many years ago,
with bureaus closed and permanent staff slashed in favor of cheaper local
stringers. From this landscape of neglect—a continent routinely overlooked all
bar its southern tip—Rwanda and Somalia stand out as sites of intense (if also
belated and short-lived) Western media coverage in the 1990s. True, there were
brief flurries of attention to famine in Sudan, “warlordism” and grotesque carni-
vals of carnage in Sierra Leone and Liberia, to the violent re-emergence of the
Congo from Zaire, and the forcible break-up of refugee camps along Rwanda’s
borders in 1996. But nothing matched the density of cameras and volume of com-
mentary afforded the Western interventions to “Restore Hope” in Somalia
(1992–3), and to bandage the aftermath of Rwanda’s genocide (1994). Moreover,
both episodes have had a lingering afterlife in western Europe and North Amer-
ica. Since September 11, 2001, US commentators have turned to these troubled
expeditions for a variety of object lessons—whether they seek to expatiate on the
dangers of such missions’ premature termination (Somalia) or delayed dispatch
(Rwanda). Indeed, the former is frequently identified as an explanation, if not an
excuse, for the latter.
Rwanda’s neglected genocide thus figures prominently in the Pulitzer-winning
A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power’s highly publicized indictment of America’s
failure to put its “never again” utterances on genocide into practice (Power 2002).
In liberal critiques of this kind, Rwanda, as icon of indifference to human suffering
on an epic scale, is emblematic of the immorality of “isolationism,” with the US
débâcle in Somalia explaining (if only in part) America’s refusal to act in timely
fashion in Rwanda. But since 9/11, the meaning of Mogadishu—where “hope”
expired in a ferocious fire-fight between US Rangers and Somali militia—has also
been incorporated into a larger explanatory scheme that attempts both to account
for al-Qaeda’s attacks and to legitimate the ways in which the Bush administration
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SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
has chosen to wage its pre-emptive and retaliatory “war on terror.” In recent
months, the failed UNOSOM mission has haunted accounts not only of how
Rwandan lives were subsequently squandered but also how America rendered itself
vulnerable through its undignified scurry from Somalia (Cain 2003). Refusing to
sustain even limited casualties in the interests of nation-building in Africa, Amer-
ica found itself losing over 2,000 lives on home soil. These two phenomena were
not unconnected, or so the new received wisdom goes—one fount of which may
be traced to Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden’s bestseller from which Ridley Scott
dramatically reconstructed Hollywood’s “Battle of Mog” (Bowden 2002). Where
the book intimates, the movie more boldly underscores chains of connection
between the horn of Africa and the Twin Towers, between Aidid and bin Laden,
implying that the premature US pull-out inspired those seeking to spook a timor-
ous Uncle Sam (Bowden 2002: 428; Carruthers 2003: 178–9).
This lesson in the perils of pusillanimity now underpins the Bush administra-
tion’s public account of how terrorists are emboldened—not, as some critics of
US global policy might have it, by the arrogance of American power wielded
overwhelmingly and unilaterally, but rather by the sole superpower’s squeamish-
ness when it comes to incurring casualties. Hence cut-and-run must be replaced
with “shock and awe.” Reading from a script that might have been ghosted by
Bowden, President Bush bolstered his September 7, 2003, call for $87 billion to
prosecute the “war on terror” by summoning the spectre of another scuttle—this
time from Baghdad rather than Mogadishu: “We have learned that terrorist
attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception
of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage
the enemy where he lives and plans” (Bush 2003). Present in all but name, Soma-
lia is clearly the case in point as Bush seeks to animate American energies for
combating another “problem from hell.” Rwanda and Somalia are not, then, fin-
ished stories safely laid to rest in the files and photographic archives—to the
extent that the past ever is beyond retrieval by hungry hunters for serviceable
lessons or salutary warnings.
This chapter concentrates on journalism from the first half of the 1990s. More
particularly, it examines appraisals of media coverage offered from a range of acad-
emic and other vantage points (Livingston and Eachus 1995; Murison 1996; Wall
1997; Philo et al. 1998; Livingston and Eachus 1999). These critiques fall into
two broad camps: one focused on the conditions under which the West “inter-
venes”; the other on the inadequacies of what the media offers as knowledge
about Africa. In this division of labor (somewhat schematically overdrawn here),
media studies, NGO activists, and international relations scholars tend to
concentrate on Western policy processes and outcomes, while Africanists,
anthropologists, and political geographers deconstruct the poverty of media
imagery and analysis of complex crises. Juxtaposing these two distinct scholarly
mappings of the terrain, I propose an alternative, more bi-focal, lens through
which to view media representations of Africa and their wider significance for
identity politics and practical policy alike.
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Recent revisitations of Rwanda and Somalia, sketched on a thumbnail above,

are germane to the broader argument advanced here: that more must be done to
place “the West” and “Africa” in the same analytic frame, to make explicit what
often remains (as in Bush’s September 2003 speech) only intimated.1 In other
words, this chapter suggests how, in writing Africa so largely out of global news
while simultaneously attenuating itself from the deep roots of ostensibly localized
anarchy, tribalism, or state implosion, the West continually constitutes itself in
unacknowledged relation to Africa. As Bush’s version of terrorists’ emboldening
suggests, sub-Saharan Africa continues to feed the West’s subconscious, providing
a mythic (often biblically-inflected) imaginary for the nature and location of
good and evil, hence enabling identities to be fashioned around the profound
polarity of “Western civilization” and “African barbarism.” If Europe “is literally
the creation of the Third World,” as Frantz Fanon asserted, then Africa surely
looms large in the production of the West, whose material and mental dependen-
cies on Africa are often denied and/or projected as unidirectional needs and
claims made by “them” of “us” (Fanon 1967: 81). Exploring this obfuscated mutu-
ality may help us better understand both the character of the West—particularly
its self-proclaimed “humanitarian interventions”—and the global underpinnings
of ruptured social relations in Africa.
Media reporting and intervention: the

“CNN effect” considered
Two distinct bodies of work, overlapping at their margins, have explored Western
media depictions of African implosion (state failure, “ethnic violence,” famine,
and genocide). This section explores the variety of positions falling within the
first broad church, concerned primarily with the West rather than Africa. Here
the focus rests on relationships between media and policy elites—and between
media and aroused Western publics—in trying to fathom the conditions under
which the “international community” acts, whether in Africa or elsewhere.
Much of this debate has centred around the so-called CNN effect (or “curve”), a
coinage of the early 1990s that sought to capture the impact of real-time tele-
vision images on foreign-policy processes. Sparked by media attentiveness to the
Kurdish crisis that immediately followed the 1991 Gulf War, various commenta-
tors probed whether the emergence of 24-hour global news channels has effected
a revolution in foreign policy-making (at the state and multilateral levels), and of
cosmopolitan consciousness across state boundaries (Gowing 1994; Shaw 1994,
1996; Neuman 1996; Strobel 1997; Robinson 1999, 2001, 2002). Africa is at
once prominent in, yet only incidental to, this dissection of media power—cen-
tred on the potency of televised imagery—which transposes many Vietnam-era
concerns onto the ostensibly new post-Cold War era of “humanitarian interven-
tion.” In other words, at stake in the CNN effect debate is an adjudication of
media capacity to interrupt the smooth course of policy deliberation and, for
better or ill, inject emotion and empathy into decision-makers’ calculus.
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SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
In a sense, where the media might force Western policy-makers to intervene is

immaterial as much of the debate treats “intervention” as an effect of different
variables “pushing” and “pulling,” largely abstracted from specificities of context.
That said, Africa nevertheless provides proponents with their paradigmatic case
of the CNN effect: Somalia. By this account, Operation “Restore Hope” was gal-
vanized by real-time images of wide-eyed Somali children whose distended bellies
offered a rebuke to complacent, well-upholstered Westerners. Guilt-stricken
American citizens thus prodded the Bush administration into an international-
ized relief mission, launched—under the television cameras’ intense, and
somewhat discombobulating, gaze—in December 1992 as US SEALs stormed
ashore the beaches of Mogadishu (Sharkey 1993; Keenan 1994: 142–3, 147;
Stech 1994). Equally, however, elucidators of the “effect” postulate that tele-
vision’s mobilization of emotions is short-term and shallow: “fickle” in the
preferred epithet of Nik Gowing (Gowing 1994). CNN may exert a near instan-
taneous “agenda-setting effect” but since its ability to do so rests on manipulation
of public sentimentality, it fails to generate sustained support for prolonged and
costly interventions of the kind its coverage seems designed to elicit. Hence as
soon as CNN starts to relay images of Western casualties incurred in the name of
restoring hope (or “providing comfort,” or delivering “infinite justice”) public
support collapses, and policy-makers face equally irresistible pressures to pull
troops out precipitately. Somalia appears to crystallize this dynamic, as the opera-
tion was apparently terminated in October 1993 in direct response to images
screened in America of “bloated corpses of US soldiers being dragged through the
dusty streets of Mogadishu,” and “more shocking still . . . of a soldier with rope
tied around his ankles and his arms, splayed in the sign of the crucifix” (Pilking-
ton 1993). These images, according to a number of Clinton staffers (including
National Security Adviser Anthony Lake), generated an immediate announce-
ment of the mission’s termination, leaving one Congressman to conclude that
“pictures of starving children, not policy objectives, got us into Somalia in 1992.
Pictures of US casualties, not the completion of our objectives, led us to exit
Somalia” (Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996: 46; Gowing 1994: 67).
At least three parties have exhibited a keen interest in dissecting the potency
of global media and their putative power to mobilize responses to distant suffer-
ing: policy elites, students of “humanitarian intervention,” and media scholars.
Policy elites, ruffled by the emergence of 24-hour news channels that seemingly
corrode the autonomy of executive processes, have intervened in a well-
publicized debate carried on both in and about the media. Some are keen to deny
that news organizations do more than effect a superficial disarrangement of prior-
ities, mandating (at most) intensified “spinning,” but rather more attest the
distorting impact of new global media in mobilizing transnational publics in ways
that detrimentally compress response times, at worst rendering foreign policy
decision-making “epiphenomenal to news decision making” (Livingston and
Eachus 1995: 415). Most famously, Realist eminence grise and architect of Cold
War containment, George Kennan, ruminated in The New York Times on tele-
158
vision images’ denial of space “for what have traditionally been regarded as the
responsible deliberative organs of our government, in both the executive and leg-
islative branches” (Kennan 1993). His criticism explicitly rejected any notion
that this development might be technologically determined: a function of short-
ened news-cycles and real-time footage that are the necessary stocks-in-trade of
global news channels. Rather, Kennan and others (including the former UK
Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd) have lambasted what they see as
declining journalistic abidance by professional codes of objectivity and neutral-
ism in favor of a crusading approach, simultaneously adversarial and advocatory: a
lamentable “do something” journalism that has flourished as post-Cold War con-
flicts—in which the West ostensibly has no particular stake—have proliferated
(Seib 1998: 44–5).
The critique of media “power without responsibility” is well-worn, dusting
down old charges against American journalists in Vietnam of abandoning objec-
tivity, espousing anti-war partisanship, and showing rather too much graphic
footage of what modern weapons do to human flesh to permit the war’s sagacious
managers to prosecute it to a successful conclusion (Hallin 1989). While many
reporters (Halberstam 1972; Arnett 1995; and others) have disputed the accusa-
tion of back-stabbing, some nevertheless endorse the notion that unvarnished
reportage did indeed play a determining role in undermining popular support for
the war in Vietnam—but by “showing it as it was” rather than through actively
oppositional reporting (Carruthers 2000: 112). In a similar fashion, some of those
who have found themselves the more recent target of attacks on “do something”
journalism have been keen to corroborate a CNN effect of sorts, while investing
it with humanitarian potential and hence with a different moral valence than
those who identify a “curve” they are keen to decry. Former BBC reporter and MP
Martin Bell, for instance, has made a number of interventions on behalf of a
“journalism of attachment” that takes specific aim at Hurd’s revulsion for “real-
time” television: “The mandarins’ objection is not just to the power but to the
impertinence of the upstart medium, which challenges their monopoly of
wisdom, and rushes in where the pinstripes fear to tread” (Bell 1995: 137–8,
1997, 1998).
A more laudatory reading of the CNN effect, in at least its initial catalytic
phase, unites such journalists with many advocates of “humanitarian inter-
vention”: a second group (including both non-governmental organization
workers and international relations scholars) that has been attentive to media
reporting of “distant crises” (Rotberg and Weiss 1996; Shaw 1996; Ignatieff 1998;
Wheeler 2000). Here again, the specificities of conflict in Africa—the character
and consequences of UN interventions—have often been less salient than broad
claims about the emergence of a “global civil society” that mitigates the reluc-
tance of states to contravene the principle of sovereign inviolability when
confronted with instances of grave humanitarian disaster in foreign locales
(Clarke 2002: 94–5; Shaw 1996). For some, television is to be congratulated for
constituting “macropublics of hundreds of millions of citizens . . . nurturing public
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controversies beyond the boundaries of the nation-state” (J. Keane 1996: 172–3).
Both the immediacy and indelibility of images of human suffering lead to a con-
traction of sympathies confined to local kinship communities, while expanding
our capacity for empathy with “distant suffering” wherever it occurs. According
to civil society optimists, such as John Keane, however questionable some forms
of media fascination with violence may be, television’s focus on human distress
nevertheless “contains a hidden, potentially civilizing dialectic” (1996: 172–3,
182–3; Boltanski 1999).
Those who credit television with enhancing Westerners’ eagerness for “saving
strangers” find both encouraging and dispiriting evidence in Africa (Wheeler
2000). To the extent that Operation “Restore Hope” was animated by this new
cross-border solidarity with human suffering, and insofar as the benevolence of its
intentions is accepted, then Somalia may offer some cause for optimism. But the
disastrously conflicted character of the mission, which quickly “crept” from a mil-
itarized food assistance operation to a manhunt for General Aidid in which all
Somalis were treated as potential enemies, squeezed public enthusiasm for the
deployment in the US and beyond (Dowden 1995: 93; Stech 1994). Hence wea-
ried or confused would-be humanitarians were all too susceptible to images of
“their” casualties being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, seizing upon
the shocking images aired in early October 2003 as decisive evidence that it was
time for US troops to depart. Moreover, the disaffection engendered by a mission
that palpably destroyed hope directly contributed to US failure to intervene in
order to prevent a thoroughly foreseeable genocide in Rwanda in April/May
1994. After the stunning events of October 2003, purportedly the “worst day” of
Clinton’s life (at least pre-Lewinsky), post-Vietnam aversion to “quagmires” was
compounded by fear of another “Mog” (Gowing 1994: 67; Dauber 2001). The
most immediate manifestation of this hybrid “Vietmalia syndrome” was Presiden-
tial Decision Directive no. 25, which established restrictive criteria governing,
and indeed tightly circumscribing, any future US intervention overseas (Shat-
tuck 1996: 173). Accordingly, when Rwanda’s genocide began in April
1994—after months of well-documented preparatory propaganda and planning—
Clinton’s response involved a scrupulous avoidance of the descriptor “genocide”
(which would have mandated an international response), and a steadfast desire to
station US troops as far from the site of slaughter as possible (Destexhe 1995;
Prunier 1997).
During the genocide’s initial phase, the UN’s chief concern was to rescue its
own (predominantly white) personnel, and effect as speedy an exit from Rwanda
as possible. Many journalists—to the extent that they had hitherto populated the
“boringly” placid country—followed suit (Hilsum 1995). Six weeks of killing of
the most intimate face-to-face variety, went largely unreported, or certainly
barely televised, by Western media (Lorch 1995; Livingston and Eachus 1999).
Live satellite broadcasting facilities were not established in the border town of
Kigali until late May (Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996: 64). By then the story had
moved on—or at any rate a second story had emerged which became confused in
160
much press reporting with the insufficiently told story of genocide: namely, a mas-
sive exodus of refugees, fleeing the anarchic compound of genocide and civil war,
as the Rwandan Patriotic Front advanced into the country from Ugandan exile to
replace the government of assassinated President Habyarimana. Latching onto a
now-familiar icon of wounded innocence—the refugee—the international media
began to cover this story intensively, focusing on the relief operations of various
NGOs in establishing a city-sized encampment at Goma, and the onset of a
deadly cholera epidemic among its rapidly swelling population (Rosenblatt
1996). At this point, Washington announced a contribution to the UN’s relief
effort, arguably impelled by images of humanity in extremis that cried out for
action (Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996: 65).
Given this dilatory response on the part of both media and policy-makers who
preferred to extract their bodies from harm’s way and avert their gaze from geno-
cide, advocates of “intervention” question how television’s affective properties
can be enhanced such that quickly animated sympathies and salvific impulses do
not wither prematurely, or collapse into self-protectionism at the first sign of
humanitarianism claiming “our” lives while trying to save “theirs” (Girardet
1995; Rotberg and Weiss 1996). Where some take issue with the calibre of West-
ern reporting—its ready recourse to visual and verbal cliché—others critique the
patchiness as well as the paucity of coverage. While certain “emergencies”
become constituted as media spectacles (as the Rwandan post-genocide relief
operation did) others, sometimes just as costly to human life, unfold unobserved.
Why, for example, was a devastating famine in Sudan during 1992, which claimed
more lives than its counterpart in Somalia during the same period, almost wholly
ignored (Livingston 1996; Natsios 1996)? Why is media attention to distant dis-
tress so selective and so short-lived? Do news organizations wrongly presume
indifference, apathy, or “compassion fatigue” on the part of their consumers
(Moeller 1999)? How far do, or should, humanitarians’ and journalists’ agendas
converge?
Communications scholars share an interest in at least some of these same ques-
tions, albeit with a different—and less practical—stake in the answers. Media
research has long concerned itself (in a certain branch, at least) with mapping
the multivalent flows of influence between media, state, and audience; and with
questions of how news is selected, filtered, and framed. Over the past decade, sev-
eral scholars have devoted themselves to a more systematic analysis of the CNN
effect than the frequently impressionistic formulations of those often holding an
immediate, personal investment in asserting that new(s) media either do, or
emphatically do not, lead policy-making. In order to dissect the purportedly
“pushing” and “pulling” properties of real-time news, analysts have not only scru-
tinized apparent instances of the effect’s efficacy (Somalia, in particular, but also
Rwanda, former Yugoslavia and the 1991 Kurdish crisis) but have also examined
why CNN fails to cover many similarly “meretricious” instances of grave human-
itarian catastrophe around the world. In so doing, scholars have sought to dispel
an often implicit assumption of CNN-effect proponents: that the news media
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SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
now supplant more conventional intelligence or diplomatic channels of emer-

gency “early warning.”
But they have gone considerably further, finding little to substantiate a “strong
CNN-effect” thesis (Gowing 1994; Livingston and Eachus 1995; Livingston
1996; Robinson 2002). Taking Somalia as the paradigm to be unpicked, several
critics have contested both parts of the equation that pictures got “us” in and out
of that imbroglio. In one of the most detailed studies of the multi-level interac-
tions between policy-makers (in and beyond the US government) and media,
Steven Livingston and Todd Eachus argue compellingly that journalists’ atten-
tion to Somalia was focused by the advocacy efforts of US government officials
and aid workers, whose persistence finally convinced reluctant news organiza-
tions to commit resources to the story once an estimated 300,000 to 500,000
Somalis had already died of famine by mid-1992 (Livingston and Eachus 1995:
417). Earlier Red Cross attempts to organize press briefings and tours in the
autumn of 1991 had been notably unsuccessful (Gassman 1995: 155). Real-time
news media—roving the world for sensational stories (as they are sometimes
imagined to do)—certainly could not be credited with forcing Somalia’s famine
to the top of the policy-making agenda. On the contrary, serious and sustained
media reportage began only after the Bush administration had committed itself to
a militarized relief operation: a decision which Livingston and Eachus attribute to
a more conventional piece of diplomatic traffic in the form of a telegram dis-
patched by the US ambassador to Kenya, to which the president was perhaps
particularly susceptible having visited a US CARE shelter in Sudan in the mid-
1980s (Livingston and Eachus 1995: 425–6; Natsios 1996: 163–8).
Scholars continue to debate the precise determinants of Bush’s decision to
mount Operation “Restore Hope”: the admixture of altruism and aggrandizement
that may have prompted Bush to anticipate lingering benefits from being seen to
“do something,” with the luxury of leaving extrication entirely to his successor. At
any rate, although the question is only sometimes reduced to one-dimensional
causative terms, few would claim that television pictures “caused” the interven-
tion (Robinson 2001). The cameras’ massed presence in Mogadishu was much
more an effect of militarization than the reverse. As several commentators point
out, “Restore Hope” was nothing if not an event orchestrated for media consump-
tion—but in which discordant elements soon overwhelmed an increasingly
conductorless score (Keenan 1994; Stech 1994). When things fell apart, with the
US-led forces engaged in a reciprocally brutal game of tag with Somali “warlords,”
most journalists exited the country, just as they would do in Rwanda some months
later. From a peak of 600—to observe the SEALs’ arrival—the press corps dwin-
dled to a mere half dozen, none of them American (Pilkington 1993). So,
whatever impact the infamous images of October 1993 made, it is worth noting
that they were neither relayed in real-time nor were they the product of express
journalistic intent to challenge the operation. The footage of brutalized Rangers to
which so much has been imputed was in fact shot by a Somali driver, bequeathed a
Hi-8 camcorder by the departing Reuters crew after three colleagues were beaten
162
to death by enraged Somalis in the aftermath of a US helicopter attack in July

2003 (Lyman 1995: 126).
Did the image of the “crucified” Ranger, however acquired and with whatever
delay between recording and transmission, destroy “Hope”? This remains a more
complex case to determine. Arguably not, however. According to some well-
informed accounts, a decision to withdraw was already on the cards if not yet
publicly announced. In a sense, the pictures may have provided the pretext for
termination. The final pull-out, it is sometimes noted, did not in fact occur for
several months, begging questions as to whether a more resolute presidency could
have weathered the immediate storm over the October episode had it been
minded to continue an operation for which there remained residual US public
support (Gowing 1994: 69; Natsios 1996, 163; Stech 1994: 244). For many such
scholars, then, the conclusion to be drawn is that policy-makers retain primacy
over the policy process—susceptible to the “push” of potent imagery only during
moments of irresolution, and even then often responding to televisual prompting
in superficial ways, making what Gowing calls “pseudo-responses” to media-
generated crises (Gowing 1994).
Ancient hatreds, modern humanitarians

Media scholars generally heed the content of this coverage only insofar as certain
policy outcomes may hypothetically be more likely in response to specific framing
practices. Piers Robinson, for example, proposes that “empathy framed coverage,”
which “tends to focus on the suffering of individuals, identifying them as victims
in need of ‘outside’ help,” may be more likely to generate (inter)governmental
action than “distance framing” that “tends to minimize pressure for intervention”
by emphasizing the roots of catastrophe in “ancient ethnic hatreds” (Robinson
2001: 943). Attention to how African news is reported forms a segue from the first
group of analysts to the second: a point of intersecting interest in news media char-
acterization of events in Africa, and its practical consequences. But where the
former discuss the affective properties of content (as trigger of/inhibitor to West-
ern intervention), the latter elucidate the descriptive and analytic purchase of
Western media tropes. Commonly, such scholars lament the failure of journalists
to offer adequately informed and nuanced accounts of African crises (Myers, Klak
and Koehl 1996; Wall 1997; McNulty 1999; Fair and Parks 2001; Pottier 2002). In
particular, many Africanists take issue with Western media’s unthinking elevation
of “tribalism” to explanatory primacy in accounting for warlordism in Somalia and
genocide in Rwanda. Not only does this ethnocentrism (or indeed racism) omit
the West’s own implication in the roots of African state failure, economic collapse,
and societal disintegration but it also has profound consequences for what types of
action—or inaction—become thinkable in response. For some the problem is that
ethnicized explanations mandate Western neglect of situations attributed to
endemic animosities; for others that such flimsy conceits legitimize self-interested
interventions with unavoidably injurious consequences.
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SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
If Somalia forms “exhibit A” in the CNN effect debate then Rwanda provides
a more pressing point of concern for Africanists anxious to deconstruct the
impoverishment of Western news analysis. Nowhere did the ready resort to
“ancient ethnic hatreds” more powerfully pre-script coverage than in Rwanda.
The genocide of 1994 was reduced to a simple tale of Hutu slaughtering their
Tutsi neighbors: the latest iteration of an ongoing cycle of bloodletting since time
immemorial (Murison 1996; Myers, Klak, and Koehl 1996; Wall 1997; McNulty
1999). This prevailing narrative assigned clear-cut moral and ethnic identities to
Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators. Violence may have been reported as “black-
on-black” but media-made morality was etched in black and white: good Tutsi,
evil Hutu. Paradoxically, however, in their eagerness to maintain these categories
and to affirm the purity of refugee victimhood, many journalists reporting the
post-genocide exodus into Tanzania and Zaire failed to appreciate that those fill-
ing the camps around Rwanda’s borders included several thousand who had
enacted the genocide—not, as reporting often implied, an indistinguishable mass
of “innocents” fleeing in fright (de Waal 1994: 25; F. Keane 1996: 186). Concen-
trating on the “big story” of Western humanitarianism, the selfless altruism of
relief workers, and the spareness of human suffering at its most raw and seemingly
undifferentiated, much reportage failed to note how the camps became havens for
the exiled interahamwe militia, which would (in time) form a serious challenge to
the new RPF regime (de Waal 1998; Fair and Parks 2001). Rather, refugees were
required to serve as mute totems: “Good people to whom bad things happen,” as
one journalist later characterized the role (Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996: 64).
As a corrective to such ill-informed, inaccurate or downright tendentious
accounts, many Africanists have sought to dismantle the attribution of violence
to “ethnic hatreds”—whether with reference to Rwanda’s genocide, the anarchic
conditions of Somalia, the marauding gangs of machete-wielding child soldiers in
Liberia, Sierra Leone, or other locations in what Madeleine Albright dismissively
denoted as the “hopeless continent.” Such scholars (and advocates of a more self-
reflective humanitarianism) stress the constructedness of social identities in
Africa, as elsewhere, together with the complex local and global determinants of
violence that give the lie to any suggestion that tribalism underlies African crises.
Some question, with regard to Rwanda’s genocide, whether Hutu and Tutsi con-
stitute distinct ethnicities at all (Mamdani 1996; McNulty 1999). All, however,
share an understanding of ethnicity’s potency as a manipulable resource—a rich
and renewable seam of energy to be mined—in struggles over power and privi-
lege, representation, and resources. In the words of Johan Pottier:
Rwanda’s bloodbath was not tribal. Rather it was a distinctly modern

tragedy, a degenerated class conflict minutely prepared and callously
executed . . .
The power of shamelessly twisted ethnic argument for the sake of class
privilege was demonstrated most shockingly in the blatant imaginings
about history that galvanized Rwanda’s “Hutu Power” extremists. These
164
extremists killed Rwanda’s Tutsi and sent their bodies “back to Ethiopia”
via the Nyabarongo and Akagera rivers. The imagined origins of “the
Tutsi”, along with their (poorly understood) migrations and conquest of
Rwanda, were evoked by power-crazed Hutu politicians to instill “ethnic
hatred” in the very people they themselves oppressed: the victims of
oppression were spurred on to kill a minority group which the oppressors
had labelled the “real enemy”.
(Pottier 2002: 9)
The point here is more profound than that an intense barrage of hate propa-
ganda—transmitted largely by radio—primed Rwanda’s genocide, turning
neighbours into killers (Chrétien 1995; F. Keane 1996; Kirschke 1996; Des Forges
1999). While analyses of radio’s role may say something significant about how
genocide is organized, and how dispersed the locus of responsibility (with broad-
casters included among those subsequently indicted for crimes against humanity at
Arusha), they do not necessarily suffice to dislodge “ethnic hatred” from its
explanatory pedestal. What is required, Pottier and others suggest, is an account
that does more than substitute “manufactured” hatreds for “authentic” (and sup-
posedly ancient) ones, leaving matters at that (Appadurai 1998). As Jan
Nederveen Pieterse puts it “Ethnicity, although generally considered a cause of
conflict, is not an explanation but rather that which is to be explained. The termi-
nology of ethnicity is part of the conflict and cannot serve as the language of
analysis” (1997: 71).
What constitutes sufficient explanation—and which interests are inflected
through the idiom of ethnicity—will be returned to later. Since most media
deliver only stories saturated in essentialism, several commentators probe the roots
of this explanatory impoverishment. Why do Western journalists so routinely “get
Africa wrong”? Should this be put down to narrowly professional shortcomings
within news organizations or ascribed to media’s broader ideological situatedness?
For some critics, the answer lies primarily in the long-term erosion of foreign news
services, which has hit Africa particularly severely since agency staffers and perma-
nent correspondents were already so over-stretched and thinly spread. As a result
of this depletion of accumulated knowledge, more news organizations rely—at
least for crisis coverage—on “parachute” journalism: star reporters simply airlifted
into and out of the latest location of humanitarian disaster (Pedelty 1995). Wholly
ignorant of local conditions, and harried by over-abundant deadlines (with rolling
news increasing journalists’ on-camera airtime and correspondingly diminishing
their opportunities for off-camera investigation), these parachutists predictably
plunder a stock of well-worn clichés, stereotypes, and pre-scripted storylines: of
African tribalism, implacable enmities, unspeakable evil, maniacs with machetes,
and benefactors in blue berets.
In journalists’ telling, this reliance on certain easily grasped conventions arises
less because it conserves their time than because it fails to make a drain on ours:
with Western audiences conceived as intolerant of complexity, especially in
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places of which they know, and care, rather little (Behr 1992). Hence CNN’s
insistence that Rwanda’s genocide could not have been covered while it unfolded
in April/May 1994, as that would have required simultaneous coverage alongside
Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as South African premier. Rather, it had to
appear sequentially—after the massed press corps moved from Johannesburg to
Kigali en route “home” (without which coincidence, by implication, the refugee
situation might have received considerably less attention). Why not both simul-
taneously? “[S]howing two African topics at the same time . . . might confuse
their audience”: viewers presumed incapable of grasping that “good news” from
Africa might unfold synchronously with something conforming to the more
familiar catastrophic mold (Gassman 1995: 157). Similarly, journalists are often
wont to attribute their eagerness to establish clear-cut points of identification for
sympathy and targets for blame to a deficiency in viewers’ ability to grasp com-
plexity, or a deficit in public patience to fathom it. Circumstances not being
obligingly simple but attention-spans being so truncated, journalists must neces-
sarily reach for stock characterizations. Hence the concentration in
post-genocide Rwanda on the figure of the refugee: a late twentieth-century icon
of innocence—as long, of course, as refugees remain encamped at Goma and not
Sangatte (“over there” and not, like the fin de siècle hate figure—the “bogus
asylum seeker”—making more pressing claims on/of us “over here”).
According to Pottier, journalists’ ignorance also renders them susceptible to
manipulation by African elites eager to promote their own particularist versions
of contemporary events, together with an appropriately (re)configured account of
history (2002). But perhaps this “tainting” is a less significant phenomenon
(since rather few journalists seriously trouble to seek out indigenous sources, and
some insist on their skepticism toward “native informants” (Meisler 1992)) than
journalists’ embeddedness within particular cultural, political, and economic
matrices which endlessly replenish the reservoir from which easy “ethnic” expla-
nations are retrieved, while filtering out alternative accounts. After all,
journalists who reflect retrospectively on their African days tend not to do much
better a job of explaining the deep roots of the continent’s crises, however much
remission from deadlines they may enjoy for rumination. Hence in journalistic
memoirs such as Scott Peterson’s Me Against My Brother, “Heart of Darkness”
motifs are just as evident as in more instantaneous analyses (and equally of a
piece with the tropology of Hollywood’s imperial “rescue fantasies,” such as the
recent Bruce Willis vehicle, Tears of the Sun). Whether, then, in news reports,
movies, memoirs, or travelogue, Africa remains cast as a continent of epic odyssey
and spiritual quest—a place that has “always known violence and war”—result-
ing in epiphanic but invariably bathetic lessons about humanity, and the capacity
for evil lurking in all of us (Peterson 2001: xiii). “[I]n Africa,” Peterson muses
with an audacity that would surely be inconceivable applied to any continent
other than Africa, “there is a Jungian balance between remarkable good and
intense evil. But it may be more of a Manichean battle between the forces of light
and dark, because as worthy of spiritual celebration as the good may be, the
166
degree of evil is also extraordinary” (2001: xiv). His account of Somalis’ bloodlust
as a function of these “ancient nomadic warriors” having been catapulted “by
default into a new era” could have been lifted straight from accounts of Kenya’s
Mau Mau “emergency” in the 1950s, which similarly explained Kikuyu “atavism”
as a crisis of modernization as backward tribes struggled with, and against, the dis-
ruptive impact of “progress” on ossified traditions and irrational beliefs (Peterson
2001: 6; Carruthers 1995: 128–93).
To note the persistence of egregious Othering in Western constructions of
Africa is not to highlight anything either new or neglected (Hawk 1992; Ned-
erveen Pieterse 1992). Africa—as dark continent—has long functioned as foil to
the West’s virtuous self-conception as cradle of civilization and progenitor of the
Enlightenment. Too often, however, emphasis is placed on correcting Western
“misperceptions” of Africa. Crucially, we need to go beyond a dissection of these
enduring Western figurations, probing the ideological work of the identity-
practices involved. How does the West constitute itself in relational terms to
Africa? What politics are enabled by construing “evil” as a qaat-chewing warlord,
a kleptocrat outfitted in leopard-skin, an ululating child toting an AK-47?2 What
functions, in other words, do particular representations of Africa perform for “us”?
If decontextualization and excessive ethnicization in news reporting result more
from media’s structural position within a particular set of power relations than
from narrowly procedural shortcomings, then making sense of how Africa is—and
is not—covered requires an account of news-media’s role in simultaneously nor-
malizing and obscuring the current global order. The task is thus to make visible
the ways in which news-media efface the systemic underpinnings of local crises
such that the West effectively “disappears” from reporting on the roots of African
“failure,” while Western virtuousness is affirmed as the civilized correlative to bar-
barism (Salter 2002).
Conclusion: an intervention on “intervention”

Clearly this is a larger undertaking than the conclusion of an essay can accom-
plish, yet a necessary step beyond much of the literature that deals with media
reporting, African crises, and Western intervention. Indeed, the argument
advanced here is that the very language of “intervention” constitutes a barrier to
understanding the constitutive role that Africa plays in the West’s self-
conception, and the profound part that the West plays in Africa’s predicament.
This is not, however, a position commonly espoused. For many liberal commen-
tators, the problem is rather that accounts emphasizing the endemic character of
“ethnic violence” too easily generate neglect of grave humanitarian need, and a
resolute skepticism over the virtues and value of intervention. If conflict is repre-
sented as irremediable—embedded in the genetic make-up of tribes—then wary
Westerners may well believe that their interpositions could at best but mitigate
the aftermath of violent tribalism. Peacekeeping forces might conceivably
hold aroused ethnic enmities in abeyance, but unless they remain permanently
167
SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
present such situations will always threaten to collapse back into barbarism. So,
why “go there” when intervention promises to be protracted, or, if temporary,
then recurrently required to staunch the inevitable reanimation of murderous
passions? For liberals of this stripe, the issue is how to build support for sustained
overseas commitments, and for timely interventions that do not simply exacer-
bate dependence, corruption, autocracy, or population displacement (de Waal
1998). The proposed solution is a media that builds support for militant human
rights interventionism, cultivating Western willingness to expend blood and
treasure in the name of human solidarity—an agenda that facilitated liberal
enthusiasm for “humanitarian bombing” of Serbia during NATO’s Kosovo cam-
paign, recently leading some (notably Michael Ignatieff) into highly supportive
postures toward the “liberationist” pretensions of current US foreign policy
(Kaldor 1999; Ignatieff 2000, 2003; Wheeler 2000).
For some on the left, on the other hand, the trouble with Western journalism is
that it legitimizes intervention too readily. Mel McNulty, for example, argues that
“Misinterpretation of these crises [in Rwanda and Zaire] as ethnically-driven
facilitated Western interventionary responses, the rationale for which may be
summarized as ‘they are mad, we are sane, we must save them from themselves,’
and served, whether deliberately or accidentally, to make a bad situation worse”
(1999: 268). She goes on to impute a fair degree of deliberation to the West,
which while making a show of its charity being imposed upon, calculatedly threw
a “cloak of humanitarian concern” over an intervention that served “military-
strategic interests” in the Great Lakes region (McNulty 1999: 268). The precise
nature of these interests—and the extent to which they may be ascribed to others
besides the French (whose Opération Turquoise was widely criticized as an inter-
vention on behalf of the génocidaires)—remains unclear, however.
What, then, is the character of this interventionism? Does not a concentration
on sporadic, short-term militarized operations, which may be fairly readily attrib-
uted to specific national neocolonial agendas, obscure the wider and more
enduring role of Western institutions in establishing, maintaining, and adjusting
the global neoliberal framework within which Africa is deeply embedded? “Inter-
vention”—whether invoked by its advocates or its detractors—perpetuates an
assumption that the West’s typical posture toward Africa is one of either benign
or malign neglect, punctuated by brief intrusions of intense activity, altruistic or
self-interested depending on the interpreter’s perspective (Feher 2000; Chandler
2002). Missing here is more than acknowledgment of the deep colonial backstory.
After all, several accounts (including contemporaneous media reports) have
inserted Belgian imperial “divide and rule” tactics into their analyses of Rwanda’s
genocide: with the consolidation of antagonistic ethnicities attributed to Belgian
machinations in instituting a kipende system that crystallized ethnic difference
(giving it both documentary shape and somatic form), and materially privileging
the minority Tutsi population.
Excavation of the colonial roots of current crises is undoubtedly necessary. But
historical correctives must not occlude the constant influence in (and over)
168
Africa of Western institutions, whose structural violence is displaced and implic-

itly disavowed by fetishizing the grotesquery of African barbarism. Emphasizing
colonial distortions—in the absence of an account of contemporary, and con-
stant, Western involvement in Africa—may serve to suggest that wholesale
influence ended with the onset of formal independence. Hence the widespread
assumption that Africa is not just a “hopeless” continent but also “forgotten”—
so disastrously under-performing, so riddled with corruption and conflict as to
have been shut out from, and left behind by, the unstoppable forces of globaliza-
tion. Yet while these “invisible” influences may frequently drop from our line of
vision, institutions at the heart of the global neo-liberal project have not
dropped Africa from theirs. Africa has certainly not been immune from the dis-
locating processes of “accumulation by dispossession” that characterize the “new
imperialism” as outlined by David Harvey (Harvey 2003). How often, though, is
Rwanda’s genocide linked to the consequences of a catastrophic collapse of
world coffee prices (triggered by Washington’s intransigence) that “sentenced
many poor to unprecedented levels of despair, making them vulnerable to
manipulation by politicians in search of extreme solutions to their country’s (and
their own) growing insecurity” (Pottier 2002: 21)? More generally, local struggles
over resources—which may become similarly “ethnicized”—must be understood
as occurring within larger frameworks of global markets, IMF interventions,
international arms trading, and crossborder cultural circuits: hence, as Paul
Richards has shown, the exposure of child soldiers in Sierra Leone to Stallone
videos and Western news media, both of which influenced the performative
dimensions of their military tactics (Richards 1996). By heeding such phenom-
ena we may begin to insert the West into accounts of Africa’s predicament, and
Africa into our understandings of how the West sustains more than merely its
humane self-conception.
Notes
1 “The West” is a problematic descriptor on at least two counts. The geographic catch-
all implies a degree of homogeneity that fails to capture the diversity of the region so
labeled, while implying grid coordinates that do not fully map the location of the
global north. These qualifications notwithstanding, a dispersed but powerful entity,
“the West,” continues to use that self-descriptor, and to construe itself in “civiliza-
tional” terms under this banner. I use it here (henceforth without quotation marks) as
both a shorthand convenience but also to invoke—and critique—that self-
conception. Similarly, “Western media” functions as an abbreviation for mainstream
English language journalism of primarily the United States and United Kingdom (and
their respective “global” news organizations), which of course also homogenizes the
variety of opinion and outlets to be found in both states and beyond.
2 Take, for example, the following passage from William Shawcross’ Deliver Us from
Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict, which, while critical of
the corruption and confusion surrounding certain UN interventions, reserves a partic-
ular vernacular of opprobrium for its African “devils”: “The Nigerian presidential
Gulfstream was furnished in dictator-chic style, with beige leather seats, gold-plated
seat buckles and other fittings, and gold taps in the lavatory . . . There was a small VIP
169
SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
section at the front of the plane where Annan sat, a large television screen before him.
I wondered how many really bad people had sat in that seat” (Shawcross 2000, p. 271).
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9
HUMANIZING WAR
The Balkans and beyond
Philip Hammond
A notable feature of the propaganda surrounding the war on terrorism has been
the tendency of coalition leaders to fall back on what Michael Ignatieff calls the
“dominant moral vocabulary” of the 1990s (The New York Times, February 5,
2002): the discourse of humanitarianism and human rights. Washington report-
edly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring advertising and public relations
consultants to “humanise the war” in Afghanistan (Channel 4 News,
November 6, 2001), though the results were bizarre. President George W. Bush
invited American children to donate a dollar to the Red Cross while his airforce
deliberately bombed the organization’s facilities in Kabul and Kandahar; and
Afghan children had trouble distinguishing the aid packages from the cluster
bombs, both dropped by US planes. By the time the invasion of Iraq started in
March 2003 political leaders seemed to have all but forgotten about searching for
WMD, let alone combating international terrorism, instead promising to “liber-
ate” the Iraqi people. It is as if the war on terrorism cannot be justified on its own
terms, and has to be invested with some higher “moral” purpose in the form of
humanitarianism or upholding human rights.
This adoption of humanitarian rhetoric by the Bush administration has dis-
mayed many former enthusiasts of ethical interventionism. In Europe, criticism is
tinged with anti-Americanism and distaste for the Republican Party, as in Timo-
thy Garton Ash’s concern that “the association with Bush’s America is tarnishing
[the] liberal internationalist project” (Guardian, September 19, 2002). Yet there
are similar worries in the US. Richard Falk, for example, laments a fall from the
“golden age” of the 1990s: since 9/11, humanitarianism has been used to provide
“a cover for imperial objectives,” offering “post hoc rationalizations for uses of
force otherwise difficult to reconcile with international law” (Nation, July 14,
2003). David Rieff is also bothered by the cynical instrumentalism with which
humanitarianism is treated, noting that Secretary of State Colin Powell described
NGOs in Afghanistan as “an important part of our combat team” (2002: 236).
More broadly, having advocated military intervention in the Balkans throughout
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the 1990s, Rieff is now worried that talk of humanitarianism provides an auto-
matic justification which elides the human costs of war (Rief 2002: 284). Yet
while many critics have challenged the high-flown moral claims made about the
war on terrorism, the possibility of a more benign imperial relationship between
the Great Powers and weaker states is usually still assumed.
The discourse of humanitarianism and human rights was promoted throughout
the 1990s by journalists and commentators as an organizing principle for a post-
Cold War world order (Herman and Peterson 2002), nowhere more conspicuously
than in media coverage of the former Yugoslavia. As they sought to encourage
Western intervention in Bosnia, reporters and intellectuals developed the “moral
vocabulary” which was later given an official stamp of approval by NATO during
the 1999 Kosovo conflict, and which has since been used as a standby justification
for intervention anywhere from Afghanistan to Liberia. This chapter looks back at
the pre-9/11 “golden age” and suggests that those who now complain that US
imperialism is destroying international order should reflect on how 1990s humani-
tarianism and human rightsism did the same. The moralistic media consensus
which developed in favor of intervention in the Balkans was premised on the
notion that Western action to uphold human rights should override established
principles of international law, particularly that of non-interference in the inter-
nal affairs of sovereign states. This development has been driven by the felt need of
Western societies to discover some new moral purpose in the post-Cold War
world, despite the disastrous consequences of intervention for those on the receiv-
ing end of their benevolence.
The doctrine of “illegal but moral” intervention

Many assessments of the Kosovo war concede that—as an unprovoked attack
unauthorized by the UN—NATO bombing was illegal. It is widely maintained,
however, that war was nonetheless morally justified. The arguments made to sup-
port this are: that bombing was a last resort, launched only after diplomatic
efforts to resolve the conflict between the Yugoslav government and ethnic-
Albanian separatists had failed; and that NATO had to act because of both the
severity of the actual emergency and in order to avert an even worse catastrophe.
On the first count, the Independent International Commission on Kosovo
(whose members included Falk and Ignatieff) concluded that while “the inter-
vention was . . . not legal,” it was “legitimate because it was unavoidable:
diplomatic options had been exhausted” (IICK 2000: 289). Regarding the
second point, a post-war enquiry by the British parliamentary Foreign Affairs
Committee argued that while the bombing may have been of “dubious legality,”
it was “justified on moral grounds” because there was a “humanitarian emergency
. . . before NATO intervened, and . . . a humanitarian catastrophe would have
occurred . . . if intervention had not taken place” (UKFAC 2000). Similar argu-
ments were made by Prime Minister Tony Blair during the bombing in a major
speech setting out a new “doctrine of the international community” (April 23,
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PHILIP HAMMOND
1999). Their continued repetition is a remarkable illustration of the propaganda

role played by the mainstream Western media in reporting Kosovo.
Contrary to what some still claim, there was no real diplomatic effort to resolve
the Kosovo crisis. The closest the Western powers came to an attempt at media-
tion was the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE)
Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), which monitored a ceasefire in 1998–9.
The intervention of the OSCE was never likely to resolve the crisis, since it
encouraged secessionist Kosovo Albanians to believe that internationalizing the
conflict was their best strategy. The ceasefire was also inherently flawed because it
was entirely one-sided, restricting the Yugoslav security forces but allowing the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to “get organised, to consolidate and grow,” in
the words of KLA commander Agim Ceku (Moral Combat: NATO at War, BBC2,
March 12, 2000). Furthermore, the powerful Western countries who seemed to be
backing the mission were actually subverting it. America’s hawkish Secretary of
State, Madeleine Albright, chose William Walker as head of the mission, a diplo-
mat with a history of excusing US-approved atrocities in central America
(Johnstone 2002: 239). As KVM monitor Roland Keith later observed, Walker
was “part of the American diplomatic policy . . . which had vilified Slobodan
Milosevic, demonised the Serbian administration and generally was providing
diplomatic support to . . . the KLA leadership” (Moral Combat, March 12, 2000).
Walker’s key contribution was his reaction to an alleged massacre at the village
of Racak on January 15, 1999. He was shown around 40 dead bodies, which the
KLA claimed were civilian victims of a Serbian atrocity. Without waiting for any
investigation of the incident, Walker called US Balkans envoy Richard Hol-
brooke and NATO commander General Wesley Clarke by cellphone from the
scene, and declared to the world’s media that the Serbs had committed a “crime
against humanity” and an “unspeakable atrocity.” Questions were immediately
raised about the incident in the German and French press, offering quite a differ-
ent interpretation. The Yugoslav authorities had announced in advance that
there would be an operation in Racak in response to recent KLA killings in the
area, and invited OSCE monitors and Western journalists to observe it. Having
visited the scene and viewed footage of the operation taken by a local Associated
Press television crew, some European journalists suggested the dead may have
been KLA guerrillas killed in a fight with Yugoslav forces. The UK and US
media, however, proved unwilling to ask any questions whatsoever about the
incident. Renaud Girard, one of the French reporters who contested the official
version of the “Racak massacre,” was rounded on by Anglo-American journalists
who complained: “You’re killing our story.”1
The orchestrated outcry over Racak led directly to the Rambouillet “negotia-
tions” the following month. The talks, brokered by the NATO powers, presented
an ultimatum to Yugoslavia: sign a preordained “agreement” or face bombing.
The idea was to get the Kosovo Albanian delegation to sign, but make the terms
so unacceptable to the Serbs that they would refuse, thereby precipitating bomb-
ing. As State Department spokesman James Rubin later explained, the aim was
176
“to create clarity . . . as to which side was the cause of the problem . . . and that
meant the Kosovar Albanians agreeing to the package and the Serbs not agreeing
to the package” (Moral Combat, March 12, 2000). Embarrassingly, the ethnic
Albanians initially refused to sign up, since the agreement did not offer full inde-
pendence for Kosovo; whereas the Yugoslav side accepted the political
agreement, though arguing that it should be implemented by UN rather than
NATO troops. Since the “negotiations” were designed to produce exactly the
opposite outcome, the terms were changed in order to make them impossible for
Yugoslavia to accept: Kosovo’s future as part of Serbia was left uncertain, a
NATO force was insisted on, and an appendix was inserted giving NATO troops
unrestricted access to the whole of Yugoslavia, including territorial waters and
airspace, and immunity from local law. At the talks, British Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook openly invited the ethnic Albanian delegation to sign so that
airstrikes could be carried out (BBC Ceefax, February 21, 1999).
At least some journalists were fully aware of America’s intentions at Rambouil-
let: a senior State Department official told them that “the bar was set too high for
the Serbs to comply” because “they need some bombing” (Kenney 1999). Yet no-
one saw fit to report this deliberate provocation of war, instead maintaining that
Yugoslavia had been offered what NATO’s then Secretary General, Javier Solana,
called a “balanced and fair peace agreement.” Most British journalists proved
incapable of describing the Rambouillet process accurately until months after the
war ended, when it no longer mattered. It was not until March 2000 that the
BBC’s up-to-the-minute online news service reported that the negotiations had
been “designed to fail” (Mason 2000). Even as the Rambouillet talks were under-
way, Western states were using the OSCE mission as cover for their own
intelligence operations. Predictably, this too was not reported until a year later,
when the US Central Intelligence Agency admitted its agents had been among
the OSCE monitors, “developing ties with the KLA and giving American mili-
tary training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian
police” (Sunday Times, March 12, 2000). Far from being “exhausted,” diplomacy
had not been attempted. Rather, there was a public show of diplomacy which
provided a pretext for war.
In a speech a year after the bombing, NATO Secretary General Lord George
Robertson asked “was the intervention in Kosovo moral?” He suggested that “the
only possible answer is ‘yes,’” because “By March of 1999, Serb oppression had
driven almost 400,000 people from their homes.” According to Robertson, “this
was ethnic cleansing—plain and simple”: “before the air campaign . . . the atroc-
ities being committed by Serb forces against the Albanians were organized,
systematic, and dictated by a centrally directed strategy” (Robertson 2000).
Robertson’s claims rest on a narrative developed during the war by NATO pro-
pagandists and compliant journalists which entails an extreme distortion of
events.
It is true that the conflict had created around 400,000 refugees and “internally
displaced persons” during the year preceding the bombing, although by March
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PHILIP HAMMOND
1999 many had returned home “in places where there is no violence, and es-
pecially where KVM has a continuing presence” (UNHCR 1999a). In contrast to
Robertson’s retrospective assertion that “this was ethnic cleansing—plain and
simple,” contemporaneous assessments suggested different reasons for the flight of
refugees, including “clashes between Government security forces and the KLA,
kidnappings, street violence and, more recently, military exercises by the
Yugoslav army” (UNHCR 1999a). German Foreign Ministry reports in early
1999 stated that:
explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifi-

able . . . actions of the security forces [are] not directed against the
Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the mili-
tary opponent and its actual or alleged supporters.2
The refugees included around 55,000 who fled to other parts of Serbia or to Mon-
tenegro (UNHCR 1999b), the vast majority of whom were undoubtedly Kosovo
Serbs. Particularly since the start of the one-sided ceasefire, the main cause of vio-
lence was KLA activity. Just before the bombing the US Committee for Refugees
(1999) reported: “Kosovo Liberation Army . . . attacks aimed at trying to ‘cleanse’
Kosovo of its ethnic Serb civilian population.” UNHCR said, “Over 90 mixed
villages in Kosovo have now been emptied of Serb inhabitants and other Serbs
continue leaving, either to be displaced in other parts of Kosovo or fleeing into
central Serbia.” The Yugoslav Red Cross estimates there are more than 30,000
non-Albanian displaced currently in need of assistance in Kosovo, most of whom
are Serb.
At the time, even NATO privately acknowledged the real cause of continuing
conflict. According to minutes of the North Atlantic Council, the KLA was “the
main initiator of the violence,” and had “launched what appears to be a deliber-
ate campaign of provocation” (Moral Combat, March 12, 2000). This was at the
very moment when Western intelligence agencies and private US military train-
ing companies were providing assistance to the KLA.
NATO did not go to war because of “systematic” atrocities and large numbers
of refugees. Rather, NATO promised that the bombing would prevent a refugee
crisis. On the first day of the war, James Rubin insisted that if NATO had not
acted, “you would have had hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border.”
The following day Blair declared: “fail to act now . . . and we would have to deal
with . . . hundreds of thousands of refugees” (BBC, March 25, 26, 1999). It was
only after the bombing began, and hundreds of thousands did indeed flee, that
the war was quickly re-presented as a response to the refugee crisis. As a senior
NATO official later explained: “Following the fiasco of the lightning strikes, the
refugees provided us with a new objective for the war” (Le Nouvel Observateur,
July 1, 1999). This was possible because journalists proved quite willing to reverse
the chronology of events to claim: “This is why NATO went to war—so the
refugees could come back to Kosovo” (BBC, June 16, 1999).
178
This was when the claims about “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” became
important: it had to be maintained that the huge refugee exodus from Kosovo was
due to a premeditated campaign of atrocities which the Serbs would have carried
out regardless of whether NATO intervened. Bang on cue, documents outlining a
secret Serbian plan for “ethnic cleansing”—codenamed Operation Horseshoe—
were revealed by Germany’s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, on April 6, 1999.
After the war, German Brigadier General Heinz Loquai, a former OSCE adviser,
exposed the supposed blueprint for genocide as a fake concocted by the German
intelligence services (Sunday Times, April 2, 2000). At the time, however, the
theme of “genocide in Kosovo” was taken up with enthusiasm by the media.
Every UK news organization discovered “echoes of the Holocaust” (Sun, April 1,
1999), relishing each atrocity story. In an article which her own newspaper, the
Guardian, did not publish until after the war, Audrey Gillan recounted in the
London Review of Books (May 27, 1999) how UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond
spoke to the press of bodies being desecrated, eyes being shot out. The
way he talked it sounded as if there had been at least a hundred murders
and dozens of rapes. When I pressed him on the rapes, asking him to be
more precise, he reduced it a bit and said he had heard that five or six
teenage girls had been raped and murdered. He had not spoken to any
witnesses.
Gillan went on to describe how a BBC reporter then “reeled off what Ron Red-
mond had said, using the words ‘hundreds,’ ‘rape,’ and ‘murder’ in the same
breath.” It would be extraordinary if no crimes or atrocities were committed in
Kosovo, since it was engulfed by civil war as well as under NATO bombardment.
The suggestion of exceptional “genocidal” violence, however, was simply West-
ern propaganda designed to justify the further violence of NATO bombing.
Media hysteria fed off wild official statements estimating the death toll in
Kosovo at anything from 10,000 to 100,000 or higher. However, post-war forensic
investigations have so far failed to corroborate such numbers. By February 2003,
after more than three years of investigations, a total of 4,019 bodies had been
found, according to the UN’s Kosovo Office of Missing Persons and Forensics. In
addition, there are 164 people who the UN classifies as missing “considered
dead,” plus around 800 bodies exhumed from sites in Serbia where they had
apparently been concealed during the war. This would bring the total to around
5,000, although it should also be borne in mind that these numbers do not distin-
guish between civilians and soldiers, nor between Albanians and Serbs. More
bodies will probably be found, but in 2003 the UN suggested that a “generous
estimate for the mortal remains still unaccounted for and to be recovered during
this year in Kosovo, would be between 500 and 700.”3 There were many tragic
deaths, but there was not a new Holocaust.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the belief persists that Kosovo was a
successful and “moral” war. Hence in 2003 many of those who opposed war with
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PHILIP HAMMOND
Iraq were at pains to emphasize their prior support for NATO bombing. “We sup-
ported the war in Kosovo,” announced the Independent in an anti-war editorial
(February 7, 2003), and the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland criticized the build-up
to war while writing that “US power can sometimes be a force for good in the
world: that’s why I supported the Kosovo campaign” (February 5). Repelled by
Bush, liberal commentators demanded more of the moralizing that had justified
the Kosovo campaign. Johann Hari, for example, wrote that:
We do not need Bush’s dangerous arguments about “pre-emptive action”

to justify this war. Nor do we need to have the smoking gun of [weapons
of mass destruction]. All we need are the humanitarian arguments we
used during the Kosovo conflict.
(The Independent, January 10, 2003)
Similarly, James Rubin suggested that: “if Tony Blair had been the explainer of
the rationale for war in Iraq . . . as opposed to some of the comments coming out
of the Pentagon, we’d be in much better shape in terms of global public opinion”
(Iraq: A Just War?, Channel 4, February 28, 2003).
Yet while the propaganda for war with Iraq was undoubtedly clumsy, it was no
more inept than in Kosovo, which also featured bogus diplomacy and dodgy doc-
uments. In 1999 the propaganda tended to be taken at face value because many
journalists and commentators were predisposed to welcome war. It fitted the
“moral” worldview which developed in the 1990s, epitomized by Western percep-
tions of the former Yugoslavia.
Reinventing the West in the Balkans

The various explanations of the break-up of Yugoslavia offered in news reports
reflected and informed broader debates over the 1990s about how the West
should respond. Journalists were among the foremost advocates of “moral”
responses to the Yugoslav crisis, often challenging other explanations and poli-
cies. Yet beneath the apparent differences there was considerable agreement. The
debate about the Balkans was also a debate about the West’s self-image, and
revealed more about how Western elites were attempting to reinvent themselves
for the post-Cold War era than about events on the ground.
Early reporting tended to view the crisis as a continuation of the recent fall of
Communism in eastern Europe. A 1991 survey of US coverage noted that much
reporting “persisted in inaccurately forcing the Yugoslavian civil war into a black-
and-white Cold War framework” (Kavran 1991). The Los Angeles Times (July 8,
1991) described the secession of Croatia as “a battle between hard-line commu-
nists and free-market democrats,” for example; and the Independent (July 4, 1991)
explained that Serbia was one of the “last redoubts” of Communism and totalitar-
ianism, whereas Slovenia and Croatia, both “Westernised and prosperous,”
represented “democracy.” If the “breakaway” republics were Westernized democ-
180
racies struggling to escape Communist tyranny, then it made sense for Western
governments to offer support, as local politicians were quick to recognize. Croat-
ian President Franjo Tudjman, for example, was angling for international backing
when he described the conflict as “the same that has been going on in Eastern
Europe for the past three years: democracy against communism” (European,
August 18, 1991).
Yet Western triumphalism following the Cold War was short lived: the unity of
the West could no longer be taken for granted in the absence of the Soviet
enemy, and the sense of cohesion and purpose which the old politics of Left and
Right had given to domestic politics was now lost. In 1991 Croatia’s historic ally
Germany led the European Community in recognizing Slovenian and Croatian
independence, effectively challenging US policy. In 1992 America sought to re-
establish its leadership, pushing for recognition of Bosnian independence in a
reversal of its previous support for the integrity of the Yugoslav federation. In
both Croatia and Bosnia, as had been predicted, the result was bitter civil war.
While the relatively painless secession of Slovenia may have looked like another
former Communist nation making a transition to democracy, these protracted
and bloody conflicts demanded a different explanation. An influential essay by
Samuel Huntington recast the East/West division as a “clash of civilisations,”
arguing that “the Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ide-
ology as the most significant dividing line in Europe.” The world was riven by
civilizational “fault lines,” one of which ran “almost exactly along the line now
separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia.” Those on the wrong
side—Orthodox Christians and Muslims, in the case of Yugoslavia—were “much
less likely to develop stable democratic political systems” (1993: 30–1). Again
this was a theme taken up by local leaders, Tudjman suggesting that Serbs and
Croats were “not just different peoples but different civilisations” (European,
August 18, 1991), and Slovenian minister Petar Tancig contrasting the “violent
and crooked oriental-bizantine heritage” of Serbia and Montenegro with the
“more humble and diligent Western-catholic tradition” of Slovenia and Croatia
(quoted in Johnstone 2002: 137). Media coverage echoed these ideas. Peter Jenk-
ins wrote, for example, that “There were two Europes for many centuries before
the Cold War was thought of: Western Christendom, Catholic and baroque, and
Eastern Orthodox Europe which, in the Balkans, merged into the Ottoman
Empire and the world of Islam” (The Independent, November 12, 1992). This per-
spective suggested that Yugoslavia was torn by “ethnic” conflicts which had a
long history, but that some ethnic groups were close to, if not part of, the West.
Other proponents of “ethnic” explanations for Yugoslavia’s break-up, however,
made no such distinctions. Robert Kaplan’s (1994) development of Huntington’s
idea drew the division, not between different civilizations, but between the civil-
ized world and various zones of anarchy: “places where the Western Enlighten-
ment has not penetrated,” which are populated by “re-primitivized man” and
under constant threat of “cultural and racial war.” This was the spirit in which
the Telegraph’s Defence Editor, John Keegan (1993: xi), argued that:
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PHILIP HAMMOND
The horrors of the war in Yugoslavia, as incomprehensible as they are

revolting to the civilised mind, defy explanation in conventional mili-
tary terms. The pattern of local hatreds they reveal are unfamiliar to
anyone but the professional anthropologists who take the warfare of
tribal and marginal peoples as their subject of study . . . Most intelligent
newspaper readers . . . will be struck by the parallels to be drawn with
the behaviour of pre-state peoples . . .
Descriptions of the war as an inexplicable outbreak of tribal antagonisms drew on a

tradition of Western writing about the Balkans as an inherently unstable region of
“ancient passions and intractable hatreds” (Kaplan quoted in Hansen 1998: 132).
All these explanations of the conflict in Yugoslavia offered a self-flattering
view of the West—as a beacon of democracy and civilization—and portrayed
Yugoslavs, particularly the Serbs, as barbarians. However, many argued that the
view of the Balkans as characterized by “ancient ethnic hatreds” provided a con-
venient excuse for Western governments. Indeed, President Bill Clinton was
reputedly deterred from taking decisive military intervention in Bosnia by his
reading of Kaplan’s work. BBC correspondent Allan Little suggests that the con-
sensus about Bosnia was:
That the Balkan tribes had been killing each other for centuries and
that there was nothing that could be done. It was nobody’s fault. It was
just, somehow, the nature of the region. It was a lie that Western
governments at that time liked. It got the Western world off the hook.
(Little 2001)
There is not such a straightforward correlation between “tribal” explanations and

a non-interventionist stance as this suggests, but Western policy was certainly
incoherent and leaders no doubt felt reluctant to commit themselves to politi-
cally risky military action. It is not true, of course, that Western governments did
nothing: in addition to their decisive diplomatic support for secessionists, they
imposed sanctions on the Serbs, gave covert military support to Croats and Bosn-
ian Muslims, and sent “peacekeeping” troops. Yet many journalists—most,
according to Little—wanted the West to go further, calling for tough military
action. Another BBC correspondent, Martin Bell, coined the phrase “journalism
of attachment” for a new style of reporting which would “not stand neutrally
between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor” (Bell
1998: 16). In the US, an analogous argument in favor of “advocacy journalism”
was made by high-profile reporters such as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (Ric-
chiardi 1996).
Where “tribal” explanations seemed to suggest that all sides were as bad as
each other, advocacy journalists wanted to apportion blame; where proponents of
Balkanism talked of the war’s complex historical roots, they maintained the con-
flict was easy to understand. For Amanpour it was “black and white . . . there was
182
a clear aggressor and clear victim” (quoted in Ricchiardi 1996). For Little, the
war was “very simple and straightforward”: it happened because “Milosevic was a
megalomaniac dictator” (Guardian, January 6, 2003). If events did not fit this
simplistic framework, they were distorted or disregarded. Western journalists con-
sistently downplayed or ignored attacks by Croats and Bosnian Muslims, so that
Serbian attacks appeared to be evidence of a one-sided war of aggression. Nik
Gowing (1994: 35) points out, for example, that the Croat siege of Mostar was
“virtually unreported,” despite suffering at least as bad as the plight of Sarajevo.
Indeed, when Western politicians, journalists, and celebrities came to visit the
siege of Sarajevo they invariably saw only the Muslim-held centre of the city, and
ignored the Serb-populated areas. Although Sarajevo was a supposedly demilita-
rized “safe area,” Bosnian government forces in the city were accused by UN
General Francis Briquemont of provoking the Bosnian Serbs “on a daily basis”
(quoted in Binder 1994–5: 73). This pattern was repeated elsewhere, such as at
Gorazde, where an April 1994 NATO airstrike against Bosnian Serbs was pre-
sented as a response to the Serbian assault on the town, in which thousands were
said to have been killed or wounded. It later transpired that the attack—deliber-
ately provoked by Bosnian Muslim forces from within the “safe area”—caused
“closer to 200 than 2,000 casualties,” mostly soldiers, and that the extent of the
fighting had been exaggerated by UN officials. General Sir Michael Rose revealed
that the visible destruction of the town had largely resulted, not from the Serbian
shelling, but from previous Bosnian Muslim attacks which had driven 12,500
Serbs from the area (Bogdanich and Lettmayer 2000).
Through a selective and one-sided style of journalism which Gowing (1997:
25–6) has called the “secret shame” of the media in Bosnia, the war was portrayed
as a simple battle of Good versus Evil. As senior BBC correspondent John Simp-
son (1998: 444–5) subsequently wrote: “a climate was created in which it was
very hard to understand what was really going on, because everything came to be
seen through the filter of the Holocaust.” The Serbs were depicted as Nazis com-
mitting genocide against innocent Bosnian Muslim civilians. Reporters even
discovered Nazi-style “death camps” in Bosnia in 1992—though typically they
noticed only the Serb camps, when according to the Red Cross in autumn 1992
the Bosnian Muslims actually had more camps (12 compared to eight), with
nearly as many detainees (1,061 compared to 1,203) (Johnstone 2002: 71). The
equation between Serbs and Nazis which reporters—and the PR firm employed
by the Bosnian government, Ruder Finn—attempted to create in the public mind
invoked moral absolutes in a way that resonated powerfully with contemporary
sensibilities. Mick Hume (1997: 18) suggests that the war thereby provided “a
twisted sort of therapy, through which foreign reporters [could] discover some
sense of purpose—first for themselves, and then for their audience back home,” as
journalists undertook a “moral mission on behalf of a demoralised society.” As
Ignatieff (2003: 42) admits: “The Western need for noble victims and happy end-
ings suggests that we are more interested in ourselves than we are in the places,
like Bosnia, that we take up as causes.”
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PHILIP HAMMOND
Advocacy journalists provided a valuable service for Western politicians, elab-

orating the “moral vocabulary” through which leaders could articulate a sense of
purpose and mission. As former President Ronald Reagan noted in a 1992 speech,
the end of the Cold War had “robbed much of the West of its uplifting, common
purpose” (Sunday Times, December 6, 1992). The solution he offered—speaking
on the day his successor, George Bush senior, was sending the Marines to Somalia
on a “humanitarian” mission—was “a humanitarian velvet glove backed by a
steel fist of military force.” Among Reagan’s specific proposals were a new role for
NATO and “sharply focused bombing” of the Serbs. When NATO leaders pro-
posed something similar in 1999, they used the same moralistic rhetoric which
had been developed by advocacy journalists in Bosnia. Blair, for example, in an
echo of Bell’s “journalism of attachment,” described the Kosovo bombing as “a
battle between good and evil; between civilization and barbarity; between
democracy and dictatorship” (Sunday Telegraph, April 4, 1999).
As noted above, the moral arguments of advocacy journalists were often
pitched against “tribal” explanations of the conflict, chiefly because these were
thought to hinder the clear identification of human rights abusers necessary for
decisive intervention, but also because the most vociferous advocates of interven-
tion were liberal, left-of-centre writers, for whom talk of backward Balkan tribes
smacked of essentialism. While thousands of Islamic fighters came from abroad to
support Alija Izetbegovic’s Muslim state—including Mujihadeen veterans of
America’s proxy war in Afghanistan (O’Neill 2003)—Western reporters and
intellectuals celebrated Bosnia as a model of multiculturalism and tolerance. As
Hansen (1998: 172) suggests, Bosnia was understood as an “ideal Western self”—
a romanticized embodiment of the values which the West was supposed to
represent. Westerners projected onto Bosnia their own notions of “multicultural-
ism,” variously understood to be an American or European ideal. Rieff, for
example, went to Bosnia in search of the “‘Americanization’ of the European
future,” convinced that the US is “the most successful multicultural society in
history” and that “Western European countries are becoming multiracial and
multiethnic” (1995: 35, 10). For Europeans, who considered themselves already
multicultural, “Bosnia became a ‘little Europe’ which must be saved from the evils
of nationalism” (Johnstone 2000: 143–4).
Bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 was justified in the same terms. In a series of
speeches Clinton explained that “it’s about our values” (March 23, 1999), making
it clear that these were “moral values” (May 31) and “American values” (June 1).
Robin Cook described the conflict as a battle between “two Europes competing for
the soul of our continent.” Yugoslavia represented “the race ideology that blighted
our continent under the fascists,” while NATO’s vision of “the modern Europe”
was of “a continent in which the rights of all its citizens are respected, regardless of
their ethnic identity” (Guardian, May 5, 1999). Yet the professed multiculturalism
of Western societies was less evident in the mass expulsions and deportations of
ethnic Albanian refugees from NATO countries in the year following the conflict,
accompanied in Britain by a media panic over “bogus asylum-seekers.” And
184
although Blair declared at the end of the war that “we intend to start building [the]
new Europe in Kosovo” (June 10), neither is multiculturalism much in evidence in
Kosovo itself, where most of the non-Albanian population have been violently
driven out. By October 2001, the OSCE reported that, since NATO’s victory in
June 1999, there had been more than 5,000 terrorist attacks, over 1,000 murders
and more than 1,000 abductions.4
As in Bosnia, amid all the talk of tolerance, the Serbs were demonized, some-
times in the crudest terms. In the Telegraph Patrick Bishop suggested that “‘Serb’ is
a synonym for ‘barbarian’” (March 26, 1999), while Steve Crawshaw wrote in the
New Statesman (May 31, 1999) that “millions of Serbs” were “liars on a grand scale”
who had “gone mad.” The Independent’s Marcus Tanner (May 11, 1999) asked: “Do
Albanians look like Serbs?”
No . . . The Serbs often have black or dark brown hair and are generally
darker and more heavily built than Albanians. Their appearance is fairly
typical of southern Slavs. By contrast, the Kosovars look Celtic to a
British eye. They have curly hair, which is often blonde or rust coloured,
and their skin tends to be very pale and covered in freckles. Their eyes are
often green or blue and their build is much more slender than that of the
Serbs. They have longer heads. It is not surprising that they look so differ-
ent as they belong to different races that have very rarely intermarried.
Tanner’s clumsy attempt at racial typology was clearly intended to make Kosovo
Albanians more appealing to white British readers while portraying the Serbs as
suspiciously thick-set and swarthy. Even more bluntly, the Sun (April 14, 1999)
described the Serbs as “animals,” who were “an affront to humanity,” and urged
that they be “shot like wild dogs.” As a study commissioned by the Holocaust
Educational Trust noted: “the utilization of anti-Slav stereotypes during the
Kosovo crisis arguably evoked the use of similar stereotypes . . . during the Nazi
era,” when the German media portrayed the Serbs as subhuman (Cica 2001).
Such imagery was also employed during the Bosnian war, when, for example, the
Independent’s leader-page cartoon depicted Bosnian Serbs as apes in combat gear
(May 29, 1992).
Despite the apparent differences between exponents of “tribal” explanations
and advocates of “ethical” intervention to uphold human rights, all sides in the
debate assume the superiority of the West—whether this is understood in civiliza-
tional or moral terms. As Ignatieff (2000: 213) notes:
While the language of the nation is particularistic—dividing human

beings into us and them—human rights is universal. In theory, it will
not lend itself to dividing human beings into higher and lower, superior
and inferior, civilized and barbarian. Yet something very like a distinc-
tion between superior and inferior has been at work in the demonization
of human rights violators.
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PHILIP HAMMOND
Ignatieff warns against “an absolutist frame of mind which, in defining all human
rights violators as barbarians, legitimizes barbarism” (Ignatieff 2000: 213), but
seems to have adopted just such a mindset himself, arguing that “force and the
threat of it are usually the only language tyrants, human rights abusers and terror-
ists ever understand” (The New York Times, September 7, 2003).
Dulce et decorum est?

Advocacy journalists and others campaigning for “moral” intervention in Bosnia
presented themselves as critics of their governments. Many saw NATO’s bombing
of the Bosnian Serbs as “too little, too late” to reverse the West’s failure to inter-
vene with sufficient force, and even the Kosovo war did not go far enough for
some. Rieff (1999: 10) bemoans the “limited” and “hesitant” character of the 1999
bombing, for example, while Ignatieff (2000: 215, 213) criticizes the contempo-
rary view of war as a “surgical scalpel,” advising that we should instead see it as a
“bloodstained sword” and resolve that “when the sword is raised, it must be used to
strike decisively.” It may seem odd that those most preoccupied with morals and
ethics should express such bloodthirsty sentiments. It is not just that moral self-
righteousness leads to demands for violence. Humanitarian intervention has also
failed to resolve the underlying problem it was attempting to address.
When advocacy journalists and committed intellectuals went to Bosnia in
search of a cause, they hoped to offset the lack of moral purpose and cohesion in
their own societies. The aspiration was that human rights might “fill the morality
gap” (Klug 1997). Yet although episodes of NATO bombing and some high-
minded rhetoric may temporarily alleviate the problem, the television spectacle
of “virtual war” does not engage wider public enthusiasm or allegiance. Ignatieff
worries that “commitment is intense but also shallow”; Rieff complains that the
public regarded the Kosovo war with “indifference” and lethargy (quoted in
Chandler 2003). Their suggested remedy is for governments to work harder to
persuade people of the need to sacrifice lives for human rights goals. If war seems
cost-free, the arguments about its moral necessity will not be properly had out.
Hence Rieff’s dissatisfaction with “humanitarian” justifications for intervention
as too glib: failing to emphasize “the horror of what such an intervention will
involve, assuming it is justified, is the gravest mystification” (2002: 284, original
emphasis). Better to be explicit about the destruction and killing and persuade
the public of its necessity. Similarly, Mary Kaldor (2000: 61) is critical of the
attempt in Kosovo “to wage war without risking casualties.” Instead, she urges a
“readiness to die for humanity,” though she graciously adds that this dying need
not take place “in an unlimited way.”
Yet there are no other terms in which advocates of intervention can make
their case other than the moral vocabulary of human rights: they simply have no
other political project. The result is that, despite some unhappiness with Bush’s
appropriation of their rhetoric, they are beginning to do for the war on terrorism
what they did in the Balkans: denouncing the West’s moral failings while pushing
186
for ever-greater interference in other countries in the name of human rights. Falk
complains that:
the Bush administration has been doing its best to wreck world order as
it had been evolving, and . . . part of the wreckage is the abandonment
of legal restraints on the use of international force, the heart and soul of
the UN Charter.
(Nation, July 14, 2003)
Yet if anyone wrecked the UN system it was the advocates of “human rights inter-
vention” who put the West’s moral duty to intervene above the principle of
sovereign equality. Ignatieff argues that upholding sovereign equality means
“defending tyranny and terror” (The New York Times, September 7, 2003): this was
the complaint of ethical interventionists throughout Falk’s “golden age” of humani-
tarian intervention. It was what led many, including Falk himself, to approve the
Kosovo bombing as “illegal but moral.” The alternatives for the future, Ignatieff
suggests, are leaving the UN Charter as “an alibi for dictators and tyrants” and let-
ting the US go its own way, or reforming the UN so it will more readily use force “to
defend human rights” multilaterally (The New York Times, September 7, 2003.). Or
as Todd Gitlin (2003) puts it: “not empire, but human rights with guns.”
Between those who advocate military force to promote human rights, and
those who seek to legitimize a limitless war on terrorism with humanitarian
rhetoric, we face an uninviting choice. It may be easy to see through the cynical
justifications of the “war on terrorism,” but the underlying consensus in favor of
“moral” intervention still needs to be challenged.
Notes
1 Renaud Girard, interview with Diana Johnstone, January 25, 2000.
2 This and other similar German government documents are posted at emperors-
clothes.com/articles/german/Germany.html
3 UNMIK Office of Missing Persons and Forensics, press release, February 3, 2003
(www.unmikonline.org/press/2003/pressr/pr917.htm)
4 See www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/minorities/
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Ethics, London: Routledge, pp. 15–22.
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Bogdanich, George and Martin Lettmayer (2000) Yugoslavia: the Avoidable War, documen-
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Chandler, David (2003) “Culture wars and international intervention: an “inside/out”
view of the decline of the national interest,” unpublished paper.
Cica, Natasha (2001) Truth, Myth or Genocide?, research paper, London: Holocaust Educa-
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PHILIP HAMMOND
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Ignatieff, Michael (2000) Virtual War, New York: Metropolitan Books.
Ignatieff, Michael (2003) Empire Lite, London: Vintage.
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(http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_682000/682877.stm)
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189
10
PRISONERS OF NEWS VALUES?
Journalists, professionalism, and
identification in times of war
Howard Tumber
The battle for information and the contest over the winning of public opinion is
a feature common to all conflicts. Attempts by the US government and the mili-
tary to control and manage news during the invasion phase of the 2003 Iraq
conflict involved a number of different measures and procedures. Using familiar
techniques of censorship, misinformation, obfuscation, and psychological opera-
tions to varying degrees, the US was able to frustrate journalists and news
organizations in their search for information. But it is the process of embedding
journalists with military units that is the subject of discussion here and its impli-
cations for the future reporting of conflict.
The embedding of reporters within the military was a key event of the commu-
nications set-up of the 2003 conflict. Unlike the Falklands conflict in 1982 when
journalists were “embedded”1 with the British Task force almost by accident,
during the war in Iraq there was a deliberate plan set out by the US Department of
Defense in consultation with news organizations for journalists to be “situated”
within various parts of the military. The thinking behind this “innovation” had
been developing for some time. Ever since the Vietnam War, governments and the
military had experimented with different methods of “controlling” and “manag-
ing” the media. The information policy adopted by the British Government and
the military during the Falklands conflict was poorly organized and lacked plan-
ning. There was an absence of agreed procedure or criteria, no centralized system
of control, and no coordination between departments (see Morrison and Tumber
1988: 189–90). But whatever impromptu measures the British introduced at the
time, together with post hoc justifications, were clearly based on the myth of Viet-
nam, that somehow the media and television in particular were to blame for the
US losing the war. US defense officials, using the experience gained during the
Falklands conflict, have since tried various measures—pooling arrangements,
stationing reporters in military units—in different operations over the last 20
years. Embedding in various guises has been used before, both in World War II and
Vietnam, and in a limited way in more recent times in Haiti in 1994, Somalia in
190
P R I S O N E R S O F N E W S VA L U E S ?
1992–5, and Bosnia in 1995 (see Porch 2002). The protests by news organizations
following the lack of media access operating in Gulf War I and the restrictions
experienced in recent conflicts in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 led the
Pentagon to reassess the reporting rules for the current conflict (see Tumber and
Palmer 2004).
The embedding process in Gulf War II was planned well in advance of the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003. A number of briefings took place in Washington
between Pentagon officials and news organizations to discuss the process and
journalists began attending military training courses in November 2003.2
Falklands War as precedent

To understand some of the occupational problems experienced by the journalists
embedded with the military during Gulf War II it is helpful to revisit some aspects
of the reporting of the Falklands conflict. On April 2, 1982, Argentinian forces
invaded the Falklands Islands, a group of small islands held under British sover-
eignty but territorially disputed by the Argentine government. On April 3 the
United Nations Security Council called for an end of hostilities, the withdrawal
of Argentinian troops, and the peaceful resolution of the dispute. The British
Government, supported by parliament, proposed to send a Task Force of British
ships to the Falklands. On April 5 the first ships began to sail. Naturally the
media began to clamour for places aboard the Task Force and the scramble to gain
a berth extended to the international media as well as the British. In the event
only 30 media personnel (including journalists, broadcasters, photographer
camera operatives, sound people, and engineers) all representing British news
organizations were allowed to go. No members of the foreign media were given
access (see Morrison and Tumber 1988).3 The British media assigned to the Task
Force included a number of “veteran” correspondents but also some young and
relatively inexperienced journalists.
The Falklands conflict was an excellent “bell jar” not only for examining the
“performance” of the journalists who accompanied the British military in
their “liberation” of the islands, but also for assessing ideas of objectivity and
impartiality.
For the journalists in the Falklands, their future was structurally entwined with
that of the troops. Matters that became important to the troops also mattered to
the journalists, including contact with families back home. The result was that
journalists not only shared the moods of the troops through collective experi-
ence, but also began to identify with them by being part of the whole exercise.
Consequently, although some of the journalists disagreed with the decision to
send the Task Force to the South Atlantic, once it seemed that conflict was
inevitable, they felt an affinity with the troops, a mutual determination to see the
venture through to the end (Morrison and Tumber 1988: 97).
For example, one of the Task Force journalists, Patrick Bishop, then of the
Observer newspaper commented shortly after the end of the conflict:
191
H O WA R D T U M B E R
The situation was that you were a propagandist; and that’s how it turned
out. So there wasn’t any need to put pressure on anyone to write gung-
ho copy because everyone was doing it without any stimulus from the
military. And that’s how most of the reporters felt. They were all very
patriotic and “positive” about the whole thing. So the military didn’t
have to lean on them.
(cited in Morrison and Tumber 1988: 98)
Among the journalists in the Falklands a shift took place in the values that ques-
tioned the virtue of remaining untouched and unmoved toward those they lived
with. There was simply no escaping the military’s embrace. As Mick Seamark,
then of the Daily Mirror, and another of the journalists accompanying the mili-
tary, commented shortly after he returned to the UK:
On this occasion you were always part of it. You couldn’t get off, you
couldn’t say at the end of one day: “Let’s go and have a drink some-
where, away from the story.” You were part of the story in that sense.
The journalists certainly began to feel that they belonged.
This belonging began to change the journalists’ language. As David Norris, then
of the Daily Mail, relayed on his return from the Falklands: “I found I was refer-
ring to ‘us’ collectively when we were on shore” (cited in Morrison and Tumber
1988: 98). Even Gareth Parry, of the liberal Guardian, mentioned that, with the
approach of danger, his attitude changed from originally saying “British” to (after
a few weeks) “us” or “we.”
What in effect happened was that the process of involvement and identifica-
tion by the journalists had little to do with their individual private views and
feelings about the conflict or the attitudes of their news organizations. The
dynamics of the situation were so strong that they overwhelmed all this. As
Morrison and Tumber suggested:
What was happening to the journalists was that their professional need
to cover a story in a detached way was slowly being swamped by the very
real, human need to belong, to be safe. The comradeship and closeness
demonstrated by the troops, which the journalists so admired, were not
just the random product that any occupational association throws up,
but the response to having to work closely together especially during
military exercises and having to solve tasks as a group. At the same time
the enclosed world of a group of men (and all the media personnel were
men as were most of the military) living together means that the need for
emotional expression, fulfillment, and release, the talking over of wor-
ries, fears or any of a myriad small problems which beset individuals,
192
became totally restricted to colleagues, thus giving a remarkable close-

ness in relationships.
(Morrison and Tumber 1988: 99)
The evidence of this emotional embrace by the journalists was clear in the com-
ments made by the journalists after they returned to Britain. For example, Robert
McGowan, then of the Daily Express, reflected:
I think you’ll find that most of the journalists made lifelong friends with
some of the units. I certainly have. What is more, if the setting is very
dangerous, time spent in close proximity to others who are sharing the
same experiences submerges the individual’s personal characteristics.
The other person becomes “you”: he knows what you are going through.
There is a transparency to feelings and relationships not commonly
found in civilian settings.
In the Falklands conflict, the difficulties the journalists faced in performing their
own professional duties obliged them to make allies of the military, driving them
further into cooperation. For the journalists there was no escape from the mili-
tary’s embrace. There was no possible chance of physically distancing themselves
or of gaining psychological respite by returning to a hotel to write their stories. As
Morrison and Tumber described:
The journalists not only merely observed their subjects, but lived their
lives and shared their experiences, and those experiences were of such
emotional intensity that the form of prose which journalists use to take
the reader into that experience—the “I was there” form—provided not
only a window for the reader, but also a door for partiality irrespective of
any desire to remain the detached professional outsider.
(Morrison and Tumber 1988: 95–6)
The experience of the correspondents during the Falklands raises a number of

issues about the responsibilities of journalists in times of conflict. News values,
which serve journalism as an occupation well in peacetime or amid some other
country’s war, do not necessarily serve the individual journalist well in the midst
of his/her own country’s war. When correspondents are “embedded” among their
own country’s military, their (journalism’s) professional values of impartiality and
objectivity can look wrong or misplaced.
It is much easier for producers and editors, situated miles away, to hold on to
the central idea of objectivity, even as their colleagues in the field find the con-
cept less easy to grasp. Of all the journalists in the Falklands, the broadcasters
most successfully retained their independence. This was partly because the prin-
ciples of “balance” and “impartiality” were more firmly entrenched within that
193
medium than in print journalism. In addition these journalists were better able to
weather pressure toward partiality because, compared with the press, they were
more regularly in touch with their home offices (see Morrison and Tumber 1988:
102–3, 105).
For the journalists in the Falklands, events conspired to make them totally
involved and, although analytically impartiality and objectivity are not regarded
as the same, for practical purposes, given the dynamics of the situation, to lose
impartiality in those circumstances was journalistically to lose objectivity. “Only
by remaining completely impartial and unmoved by events would it have been
possible to hold a totally objective account” (Morrison and Tumber 1988: 104).
For these journalists the entire experience had brought them to understand the
nature and purpose of the campaign, the behavior of the military, and the con-
duct of the war, as participants rather than observers. The journalists had entered
a different, closed world and their values shifted with them.
Revisiting the Falklands some 20 years later, the comparisons with the experi-
ences of the journalists “embedded”4 with military forces during the 2003
invasion of Iraq are compelling.
Embedded in 2003
Keith Harrison, of the Wolverhampton (UK) Express and Star, reporting from
Umm Qasr, the southern port in Iraq, in 2003 admitted to the quickness of the
socialization process. His account provided a feel of his and other correspondents’
experiences:
It’s been less than a week, but already the experiences of the war have
had a startling effect on everyone taking part—and those reporting on
it. In our combat kit, we look and sound like soldiers, which is a tribute
to the Army’s embedding system, in which journalists are trained and
attached to military units for the duration of a campaign. We answer to
the Commanding Officer, we follow orders, we share the rations, we eat
where the soldiers eat and we sleep where they sleep. The Royal Logistic
Corps—where they go, we go. The military language that first seemed
like talk from another world is now our mother tongue. Terms like
“sitrep” (situation report) and “be advised” have not so much crept into
our language as carried out a military coup. Place is now location. Car is
always vehicle. Pardon has become “say again.” ETD, ETA, and IAD—
estimated time of arrival/departure and immediate action drill—are now
used almost constantly as we communicate with the soldiers and officers
of the RLC. We know that dobhi is laundry, gash is rubbish and “chogie”
is an affectionate term for the local workers. We say ablutions, not toi-
lets, and put up with flies, food and facilities that we would have sniffed
at just three short weeks ago. Sniffing at the toilets today would be
extremely unwise. The novelty of the American MRE (Meals Ready to
194
Eat or Meals Rejected by Everyone) has long since worn off, but at least
we’re now experts in heating the food with the chemical packs involved.
We’re becoming indoctrinated and recognise the sights and sounds of
army life instantly. We’ve endured no fewer than 30 air raids since war
began. Many have been false alarms—others have carried the chilling
threat: “Incoming ballistic missile! Take cover! Missile in air!” . . . Hours
earlier, when we left our US base, we were given lengthy and frankly dis-
concerting farewells from those staying behind in reserve. As our vehicle
was being prepared, TV pictures showed an Iraqi bunker being blown to
smithereens at close range by a US tank and I found myself cheering
along like a bloodthirsty Dallas cowboy.
(Harrison 2003)
It is hardly surprising then that the reports and language used by the journalists
embedded with the troops would echo these developing attachments.
Some of the “unilaterals”5 believed that it became complicated for the embed-
ded reporters to report uncompromisingly on the actions of their units. “Once
you bond with these guys, once reporters have come to like these guys, they’re
not going to report how horrible anybody can be in war, how they were laughing
as they shot people” (broadcast network correspondent cited in Cook 2003).
Jeff Gralnick, a journalist with experience in Vietnam warned of the dangers
facing the embedded reporters and likened them to the fate of hostages with their
captors:
But that is not, as we know, why you’ve opted to be embedded. Not for
combat. Not that. You’re all going over to report. Truth. Honesty. The
real story. But that is going to be difficult because once you get into a
unit, you are going to be co-opted. It is not a purposeful thing, it will just
happen. It’s a little like the Stockholm Syndrome.
You will fall in with a bunch of grunts, experience and share their
hardships and fears and then you will feel for them and care about them.
You will wind up loving them and hating their officers and commanders
and the administration that put them (and you) in harm’s way. Ernie
Pyle loved his grunts; Jack Laurance and Michael Herr loved theirs; and
I loved mine. And as we all know, love blinds and in blinding it will alter
the reporting you thought you were going to do. Trust me. It happens,
and it will happen no matter how much you guard against it.
Remember also, you are not being embedded because that sweet old
Pentagon wants to be nice. You are being embedded so you can be con-
trolled and in a way isolated.
Once you’re in the field, all those officers and commanders you now
hate, because you love your grunts, you will hate even more because they
will have total control over where you can go, what you can see and what
you can do. Vietnam was easier, we came and went—serial embedees—
195
essentially uncontrolled which made for a great deal of reporting the

Pentagon would rather have buried. And this embedding plan, which is
being adopted now like war summer camp, has been put together by guys,
now senior officers, who were burned or felt burned by the press as juniors
35 or so years ago. Fool me once . . .
(Gralnick 2003)
Gralnick also warned of the need to remember that the experience of reporting as
an embedded reporter was only one small part of the jigsaw:
One more thing to remember. War is a macro kind of thing. Units in the
field and their grunts are the micro parts of it. So if you are in the field
with a unit where bad things happen, you are seeing only what is around
you. Nothing else. You have no idea how the war is going, only how
your war is going, so never turn what you have in front of you into some-
thing that ends with cosmic conclusion about the war and policy
themselves. Many of us 35 years or so ago—hawk reporters or dove—did
just that and many of us regret it to this day.
(Gralnick 2003)
For some of the journalists the socialization process had begun some four months
earlier (in November 2003) when they attended one of a series of Pentagon-held
week-long training seminars for journalists at a Marine Corps base in Quantico,
Virginia.6 The seminar provoked the journalists into assessing their relationship
with the military and even made news itself. The issue that arose was how to
ensure “separation.”
Upon arrival at the camp, journalists received military issue equipment such as
backpacks, helmets, flak-jackets, and NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits,
which they then used in training exercises (DeFoore 2003). According to Wash-
ington Times staff photographer Gerald Herbert “at first they enjoyed getting their
hands on the new ‘toys’” (cited in DeFoore 2003) but a few of the journalists
quickly realized the dangers of donning all the military gear.
DeFoore outlined the story:
After a demonstration on weaponry, one of the participating photogra-

phers took a picture of UPI reporter Pam Hess wearing full battle fatigues
and holding an M-16 while a marine at her side gave instructions. When
the picture ran in The International Herald Tribune the next day, some
boot campers began to worry about how they were being perceived by the
outside world. Some feared the picture would fuel suspicions that Ameri-
can journalists are working in concert with the American military, a
danger made all the more real by the murder of Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl last year in Pakistan.
(DeFoore 2003)
196
Spencer Platt, Getty News staff photographer, an attendee at the training camp,
commented:
I don’t think in any sense we should wear anything that confuses us as

members of the military, this is a new war and journalists are targets. If
the concept gets out there that we’re working for the military, it’s going
to make our jobs much more difficult.
(cited in DeFoore 2003)
DeFoore continues the story,
On the final night of boot camp the journalists learned they were about
to become the subjects in a massive photo-op organized by the military.
The thought of marching five miles in full gear with still and TV cam-
eras documenting their every move spooked many of the journalists
there. So before the big event, many decided to present themselves in
more of an independent light when the time came for their pictures to
be taken.
(DeFoore 2003)
Gerald Herbert, a Washington Times staff photographer and another attendee, was
concerned about the implications:
All of a sudden the media were trying to spin the media. That question
was nagging me all week long and came to a head that day: at what
point are we observing and at what point are we participating? Some of
the journalists used white tape and black markers to designate them-
selves as press, while others wore jeans and one guy even drew a peace
symbol on his shirt. In the back of your mind you’re wondering how
much is too cosy and when do you become your subject. It’s a very diffi-
cult line and it’s still something people are trying to sort out. How much
do you assimilate into [the military’s] mode and how much do you main-
tain a profile of visual separation?
(cited in DeFoore 2003)
It is evident that the possibilities of identification can begin outside of the

“action” phase of any conflict. Some news organizations (and journalists groups)
are becoming increasingly aware and concerned about issues of physical safety
and psychological welfare and are paying for their reporters to attend specialist
courses outside of the military sphere. The special ones conducted by the military
in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq clearly helped to initiate a social-
ization process. These courses only lasted a few days and it was easy for journalists
to escape from their embrace but it is clear that early signs of identification began.
Jules Crittenden a reporter for the Boston Herald embedded with the US
197
Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, had previously covered other conflicts. For him
“action is an attractive flame”:
As for us, the reporters, action is why we came. No news is no news.

There are some earnest souls here with a sense of indignation, but a lot
of those I’ve met are what my network affiliate pal called the “war
tourists.” Ours is a business that takes us where intense things are hap-
pening, and calls on us to try to convey that intensity. The execution of
that task is a drug that can become a meaning unto itself. Here, in other
foreign assignments and back in the States, I have been privileged to
enter the intimate places of people’s lives, when they are stripped bare
by adversity. Most of what we write ends up in the recycling bin, to be
pulped for another news cycle, but I’ll be content to exit life knowing
that I was able to see something of what this world can be like and share
a little of it with others.
(Crittenden 2003)
Crittenden admitted though that the
combat was rarely more than moderate for us. It offered us the thrill of
close brushes with death, but it was the Iraqis who did all the dying
when A Company, “The Assassins,” rolled up in their tanks flying the
Jolly Roger flag.
(Crittenden 2003)
The following comments from Crittenden indicated both his closeness to the
troops and his praise for those reporters trying to remain independent:
But it is beginning to look like A Company is almost out of the action,

with others due to step in. My job here recording the lives of these sol-
diers at war is nearly done, and it will be time to say goodbye. There is
the question of whether I can hop a ride with whoever gets sent to finish
the regime in Tikrit. There is the question of going there independently.
God bless those reporters who will, but that is expected to be very hos-
tile territory where the chances of being killed will be high. Receiving
fire is one thing, but depending on the good will of bandits and
mujahideen, at the risk of ending up like one of those crumpled bodies
by the side of the road, is unappealing. Several independent reporters
I’ve spoken to say they won’t do it. I’m sure others will.
(Crittenden 2003)
For Crittenden the intimacy extended to receiving souvenirs of Saddam Hussein’s

palaces. Here he related an exchange with a US Colonel:
198
“You gotta love this. This is like Patton in that German palace at the
end of World War II,” said Lt. Col. Philip de Camp, commander of the
4/64 Armor battalion, with a big toothy grin. He was sitting in one of
Saddam’s chairs, with one of Saddam’s gold-plated AK-47s in front of
him on one of Saddam’s big conference tables strewn with American
military maps and other articles of a warfighting battalion’s business.
De Camp handed me one of the battalion’s battle coins, with the
“Tuskers” elephant head emblem on it and the motto “We Pierce.”
“You earned it,” de Camp said.
(Crittenden 2003)
Crittenden went on to romanticize his experience with the troops:
I’ll walk away with other souvenirs. The rare privilege of becoming close
to a good group of soldiers and riding with them into battle. The names
and faces of all those soldiers and everything we shared in a little more
than a month. The experience of riding with a conquering army into the
capital of my nation’s enemy, into that enemy’s own yard. The memory
of this strange tour of Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization. Too bad
civilization grew up and left home. We missed all the old ruins but saw a
lot of new ones.
(Crittenden 2003)
For some of the reporters, like their predecessors in the Falklands, their experi-
ences living alongside the military were reflected in their copy. Chris Ayres of the
Times recognized his emotions and the impossibility of remaining detached. In
writing about Marines shooting Iraqis who failed to stop at a checkpoint, he
wrote:
To the Marines—and to me—there was nothing gung-ho about it. It was

simply survival. Of course, I was hardly objective: as a journalist embed-
ded with a frontline artillery unit, my chances of avoiding death at the
hands of suicide bombers were directly linked to the Marines’ ability to
kill the enemy.
(cited in Mangan 2003)
In both the Falklands conflict and in Gulf War II the journalists’ adoption of mil-
itary jargon, however strenuously they sought to excise it from their vocabulary,
indicates how efficiently they were being assimilated.7 As war progressed in Iraq,
some correspondents became very involved.
The story of Sanjay Gupta is an interesting one in the context of the journalist
at war. Gupta, a CNN medical correspondent, received a brief to deal with chem-
ical weapons stories. But he was then invited to travel with a mobile military unit
known as the “Devil Docs” and, as the only trained neurosurgeon among a group
199
of military doctors, there were times when he was pressed into medical action. He
worked on a number of patients, not only US military but also a two-year-old
Iraqi boy and an Iraqi soldier (Huff 2003; see also Bauder 2003).
Gupta outlined his position: “I knew I was going into a place where people
were going to be injured, I didn’t volunteer for this. I made it quite clear my mis-
sion was journalism not medicine” (cited in Huff 2003). But as he later said:
Today, one of the other doctors said they were flying someone in with a
significant head wound, “would you mind taking a look?” he said. Sure
enough it was a penetrating wound to the brain. I knew this person was
not going to survive a flight to Kuwait.
(cited in Huff 2003)
Compare Gupta’s position with the hypothetical one posed in a discussion held
in 1989 and raised again by Amitai Etzioni on his website during Gulf War II (see
Etzioni 2003). “In a future war involving US soldiers, what would a television
reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was travelling were
about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit?” The question involved a
hypothetical conflict between the north Kosanese and the US supported south
Kosanese. Both Peter Jennings, the ABC anchor, and Mike Wallace, correspon-
dent of 60 Minutes, responded that getting ambush footage for the evening news
would take priority over warning the US troops.
At first, though, Jennings responded that “if he was with a north Kosanese unit
that came upon Americans, I think I personally would do what I could do to warn
the Americans.” Wallace countered that other reporters, including himself,
“would regard it simply as another story that they are there to cover. I’m a little
bit at a loss to understand why, because you (Jennings) are an American, you
would not have covered that story” (cited in Etzioni 2003). When Wallace was
asked “Don’t you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you can to
save the lives of soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of reporting fact?” he
responded: “No, you don’t have a higher duty . . . you’re a reporter.” This argu-
ment convinced Jennings, who conceded, saying “I think he’s right too, I
chickened out” (Etzioni 2003).
Wallace was apparently mystified when Brent Sowcroft, the former National
Security Adviser, argued in relation to the hypothetical, that “you’re Americans
first, and you’re journalists second.”
In contrast to Wallace, Gupta’s position became that of a participant. In his
case he had his “other” professional values to fall back on. His Hippocratic oath
and medical professional values enabled him to participate with a “clear” con-
science. His decision was “automatic” and did not involve a deliberation or
“professional” dilemma. Other journalists did not have “an other” to fall back on
unless it is some wider moral and ethical cultural system.
200
Observing or participating?
The idea of objectivity can be regarded in two distinct ways. In the first instance,
objectivity is conceptualized as an impossible goal. “Objective reporting” is asso-
ciated with ways of gathering news (knowledge about places, people, and events)
and conveying them in a detached, impersonal way free of value judgments. Nev-
ertheless, the act of reporting itself places limitations (such as space, time, and
pertinence) on the ability to report the whole known truth. It follows, therefore,
that the necessity of selection and the hierarchical organization of a story, sug-
gests more of a subjective rather than objective outcome (Bovee 1999: 114–16,
121; Bourdieu 1996: 21). In addition, the structural environment of the institu-
tions of reporting is also restricted by economic and political factors that lead to a
subjective outcome (Schudson 1978). In the second instance, objectivity is used
as a strategic ritual, allowing for the defense of the profession (Tuchman 1972;
Bovee 1999: 123–4). The procedures of the verification of facts, the separating of
“facts” from “analysis,” the presenting of conflicting possibilities and supporting
evidence, the judicious use of quotation marks, the structuring of information in
an appropriate sequence and the criterion of common sense in assessing news
content, while enabling the claim to objectivity (which functions as a shield from
criticism), do not guarantee objectivity. Instead, they only allow an operational
view of objectivity (Tuchman 1972: 662–79; see also Tumber and Prentoulis
2003).
Objectivity is a prized status within journalism. The institutionalized and thus
professional phase of journalism started with the elevation of objectivity to the
dominant ideology within the profession (Trice 1993: 60). Objectivity became the
foundation for the social responsibility claims of the journalistic identity. In war
corresponding the principles of detachment are a key element in the social
construction or formation of identity. But it is here that problems emerge. Cor-
respondents face criticism in two ways. By following the tradition of detached
reporting, journalists are censured or condemned for their dispassionate stance
often in the form of accusations of a lack of patriotism and for eschewing the per-
ceived national interest. At the same time the “journalism of attachment,” the
human, emotional face of war corresponding, has been criticized for opening the
door to mistaken accounts of the conflicts, and for being “self-righteous” and “mor-
alizing” (Ward 1998; McLaughlin 2002: 166–8; Tumber and Prentoulis 2003).
The conditions of detachment are also important because they are a facilitator
of objectivity, and it is in this regard that governments and military practices
attempt to ensure that the “objective” coverage of stories is often restricted or
negated during international conflicts.
In the Falklands and Iraq a clear clash occurred between two competing senti-
ments. On the one hand the journalists carried the occupational ideology of
impartiality and objectivity while the military rucksacks on their backs symboli-
cally carried more than the single source of their provision: in effect, where did
their commitments lie—to traditions of journalistic practice or to those who
201
could and did protect them, the military? (See Morrison and Tumber 1988;
Tumber and Palmer 2004.)
In Gulf War II the conditions for the journalists were different from those during
the Falklands and the nationalities of the correspondents were not restricted as
they had been during the Falklands. But elements of the situation were very similar.
To repeat the question posed by Gerald Herbert of the Washington Times; “at
what point are we observing and at what point are we participating?”
Are the acknowledgments of their predicaments by journalists during the Falk-
lands and Ayres in Gulf War II “admissions of irrevocably compromised
journalistic integrity, or evidence of a degree of self awareness that others respon-
sible for covering the conflict might do well to emulate?” (Mangan 2003).
In conflict situations like the Falklands and Gulf War II, journalists enter a
realm of professional uncertainty. The values that “normally” ensure a “protective
distance give way to affinity values born of proximity.” Journalists become emo-
tionally involved with the troops with whom they are located—and want “their”
side to win.8
Few people can stand aside in the face of anguish and suffering, especially when
those who need help have been companions, hosts, and mentors. In the Falklands
conflict, Max Hastings, who had already covered 11 wars, understood the ambi-
guities of the war reporter’s role; and resolved the tension between observer and
participant by openly deciding, at least on one occasion deliberately, to assist the
efforts of the Task Force by his writing. There was no self-delusion on Hastings’
part about what this meant in terms of standard journalistic practice (Morrison
and Tumber 1988: 113). Hastings, on his own admission, was partial in his
approach in that he made a conscious decision not to report anything detrimental
to the war effort, but such partiality did not exclude him from being objective.
Writing about the Falklands conflict, Morrison and Tumber suggested that a
reasonably well-defined role (in this case) within British journalism—the partici-
patory journalist—had evolved. Furthermore, in certain circumstances the
participant is likely to be more critical than their erstwhile “objective” colleague,
the observer.9 The journalist as observer works within a system of news values
placing and judging events providing for a degree of predictability in news selec-
tion. The journalist as observer, therefore, is more secure and is protected by the
accredited acceptance of understandings of the profession and news organizations
than the participant, who, while not operating entirely outside such values—
must still “make” the news—intercedes with their own individual personal
judgment of events related to emotions unconnected to journalism itself. An
extra dimension is added to the news gathering process which in extreme cases
leaves the participant vulnerable to challenge. The responsibility for the story or
story selection, therefore, is for the participant a greater individual act than it is
for the observer where it is dispersed among collective values. Thus the partici-
pant, having dismissed a story not on the grounds of newsworthiness, but from
personal values, sees the accepted story as their own property. Because of the
exclusivity of the story, the personalized decision, the direct emotional as opposed
202
to occupational connectedness, the journalist cannot withdraw behind the blinds

of news values and news expectations to defend his story, but confronts it as a
moral or emotional commitment (Morrison and Tumber 1988: 130).
The problem for the participant journalists, wedded to the events around
them, is how to respond when events force a choice between professional com-
mitment and participatory loyalties. For the journalists in the Falklands,
freed as prisoners of news values, the deliberate allowing of affection to

influence operations, there is no reason to assume that the witnessing of
disasters would have resulted in a linear move to the position of “analyt-
ical observer.” The very affection which formed the basis of sympathetic
reporting could equally have formed the basis for outright critical
onslaught at the slaughter of men with whom they identified. Thus,
rather than move back into the traditional camp, the participant role
may simply have been extended to include righteous wrath.
In these situations as Morrison and Tumber argued:
The participant, governed by emotions of a different kind from those of

the observer, is potentially the much more uncontrollable of the two
types. Having already overturned accepted news judgment to pursue
feelings of their own, the participant is free to move their affections
where they will. Thus, whilst the observer would not overlook a military
setback, their reports would still be bound by the developed options of
“impartiality and objectivity” and constrained by efforts at fairness. Not
so, however, the participant with their loosened attachment to such
values. The very feelings that prohibited copy reflecting badly on the
troops could easily move to expose weakness, incompetence, or the mere
fact that the war was unwinnable, all done in the name of the men
whom he so fondly regarded and with whom affinity is felt. From such
feelings the crusader is made.
This last point is crucial for the US Defense Department officials and military
who were instrumental in the planning and implementation of the embedding
process. If military success is achieved then the dangers of having to deal with
“uncontrollable” participant journalists are minimized. It is on this basis that
future planning and honing of the embedding process is ongoing by Pentagon
officials (see Tumber and Palmer 2004, ch. 4). But for news organizations and the
public the dangers of embedding are all too evident. The enmeshing and identifi-
cation of journalists within the military can lead to problems in the integrity of
the information supplied. For the observer, being a “prisoner of news values”
bound by the rules and procedures of an occupation, ensures a protective safety.
203
The problem is to maintain those values in a social world (the military) where
the plausibility structure supporting those values remains sufficiently intact.
For the large news organizations operating in Gulf War II, unlike the situation
during the Falklands conflict, the potential problem of identification arising from
the embedding process was mitigated through the presence of their other “unilat-
eral” journalists working in the region and other reporters stationed at the media
center at Centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar. This allowed for alternative sto-
ries and perspectives about the war in addition to those from correspondents
embedded with military units. The problems for the “unilateral” journalists were
the physical dangers they encountered not only from Iraqi attack but also from
so-called “friendly fire.”10 The portents for news coverage of future wars and con-
flicts are not good. Governments and military will plan more embedding formats
with all the associated risks for “objective” reporting, increase warnings to non-
embedded journalists about their safety, and continue the usual policies of
censorship, misinformation, and delay in confirmation of events. For the future,
the struggle for news organizations will be in resisting these increasing pressures
and, for journalists, a continuation of the current reassessment about the nature
of witnessing, truth, and objectivity.
Notes
1 Embedded was not a term used during the Falklands conflict. Because the organization
of the placing of reporters on board the Task Force ships was done quickly and haphaz-
ardly, little thought was given to the process, and hence its naming, by military and
defense officials.
2 For details see Tumber and Palmer 2004.
3 The study involved interviewing all the journalists who sailed with the task force to
cover the war (see Morrison and Tumber 1988).
4 Approximately 500+ journalists were “embedded” with the military during the 2003
war in Iraq. The United States Government allowed journalists to accompany forces
in the field, on ships, and at departure airfields.
5 The term given to those reporters not “embedded” with the military.
6 Over 50 members of various news organizations attended the course which included
staged hostile environment scenarios and instruction on chemical weapons protection
(DeFoore 2003, see also Tumber 2002).
7 In Gulf War II some journalists “escaped” from the “embedding process” and left their
units. In some cases it was a difficult decision because news organizations were pre-
vented from sending in replacements (the no substitute rule). Toward the end of the
war the numbers leaving their units increased considerably.
8 Hollywood often portrays the journalist as making an emotional choice. In the feature
film Under Fire, Nick Nolte playing the part of a photojournalist on assignment in
Nicaragua for an American news organization is asked by one of the Sandinistas,
“Whose side are you on?” “I don’t take sides, I take pictures” is his response. Later in
the film his “objective” stance changes to partisanship when he agrees to help the
“rebels” by faking a photograph purporting to show that the dead rebel leader is still
alive (Tumber 1997).
9 The “participant” role has been discussed further in the context of the “journalism of
attachment” see Tumber 1997 and 2002; Carruthers 2000, p. 240; McLaughlin 2002,
p. 166; Seib 2002, p. 68; Tumber and Prentoulis 2003, p. 225.
204
10 For details of incidents and subsequent investigations see News Safety Institute 2003;
Tumber and Palmer 2004, ch. 3.
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April 3.
Bourdieu, P. (1996) On Television and Journalism, London: Pluto.
Bovee, W.G. (1999) Discovering Journalism, Westport, CN, and London: Greenwood Press.
Carruthers, S.L. (2002) The Media at War, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Cook, J. (2003) “Military, media meet off battlefield to debate war coverage,” www.chicago
tribune.com August 18.
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DeFoore, J. (2003) “Photo-news access vs. independence: thoughts on media boot camp,”
www.pdonline.com March 26.
Etzioni, A. (2003) “Reporters first, Americans second?” www.Amitai-notes.com March 21.
Gralnick, J. (2003) “Lessons to survive by,” www.Tvweek.com March 21.
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April 7, p. 5.
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Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
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ILR Press.
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emotional literacy,” in D.K. Thussu and D. Freedman (eds), War and the Media,
London: Sage.
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Zinsmeister, K. (2003) “Different worlds,” Nationalreview.com April 7.
205
11
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND?
The non-reporting of small wars
and insurgencies
Prasun Sonwalkar
Recent developments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, or older conflicts

in Northern Ireland, Catalonia, and Kashmir, have been popular “news pegs” for
media academics and journalists alike. But there is something striking about this
calendar of conflict: these seem to be the only conflicts that are deemed worthy of
sustained coverage by the news superpowers based in the West. There is a distinct
sense of these being “our” wars, because “we” are interested or involved, while
“their” wars—the numerous wars and conflicts that are taking place right at this
moment in much of the developing world involving much violence and terror-
ism—do not really matter much. As Weimann and Winn concluded after
analyzing conflict data involving hundreds of groups and over 5,000 events
between 1968 and 1986, “less than one-third of all terrorist events are actually
reported” (1993: 71).
This chapter attempts two things: one, by focusing on the many wars and con-
flicts that the media routinely render invisible, it makes a case for greater media
and scholarly attention to this vast unreported world; and two, it presents a case
study located in India where the conflict in Kashmir is routinely privileged in the
discourse of the English-language national press, but the host of insurgencies and
conflicts in India’s northeast, involving much violence and terrorism, are rou-
tinely neglected. Using the case study, I show how dominant socio-cultural values
contribute to the marginalization of wars and conflicts involving minorities in
news discourse, even if they involve much violence and terrorism. This seems to
be evident not only along the more familiar West–Rest dimension but also within
multicultural nations such as India.
At the very basic level, the trope of “war and media” or “conflict and media” is
predicated on a “presence” in media content. This takes the form of analyses of
state-centric reportage, how specific wars were covered by specific national media
systems, propaganda, military–media relationship, psychological operations,
human rights perspectives, or changes in professional practices (embedded jour-
nalists), among others. This chapter seeks to present a contrary view by exploring
206
O U T O F S I G H T, O U T O F M I N D ?
the nether world of “absence” of news in media content about most wars and con-
flicts within and across nations. There is much that can be mined by effecting a
shift from “presence” to “absence.”
The thesis of “symbolic annihilation” that was hitherto viewed in terms of the
marginalization of news about women (Tuchman 1972) and other minorities can
also be applied to the coverage of wars and conflicts that involve swathes of pop-
ulation in the developing world. There are countless wars and conflicts raging
across Africa, Asia, and elsewhere that figure only in small print in research sta-
tistics of think tanks or when citizens of Western countries fall victims there. The
selectivity evident in scholarship and media content, preferring wars and con-
flicts involving Western powers, has obvious implications in an increasingly
interconnected world, where the movement of humans, material, and money
across continents to finance terror is no longer a difficult proposition—as the
events of September 11 showed. The need to bring most—if not all—wars and
conflicts into the international public sphere has never been more important
than now. One can no longer be sure where or when a terrorist will strike, and
why. The distinction between “our” terrorists and “their” terrorists can scarcely be
maintained any longer.
At least in theoretical terms, the value of human lives lost in wars in Africa or
Asia and elsewhere cannot be lower than those lost on September 11. The
absence of news, or according low priority to the many “invisible” wars and con-
flicts, means that they do not figure in the public agenda, within national public
spheres, or at the international level. The media is a key factor in conflict resolu-
tion efforts, but one first needs to be aware of something before public opinion is
created and authorities compelled to “do something.” As Wolfsfeld observed:
“The very fact that policy makers and citizens are encouraged to think about
some challenges rather than others is, by itself, likely to affect the allocation of
public resources and how people relate to the political world” (1997: 13).
Selectivity is built into the processes and dynamics of news production. This
is evident at various levels: when the Western media routinely ignore wars and
conflicts in the developing world, and also within national settings when elite-
controlled media systems, equally routinely, ignore conflicts involving minorities.
Violence and terrorism have long been privileged as key news values, but they
remain hostage to the defining news value of cultural proximity. Wars and con-
flicts are not intrinsically newsworthy; they need to be culturally proximate
enough to become news, in international as well as national settings. Even a high
degree of violence as part of serious conflicts may not always qualify as news if it
does not involve the “right” perpetrators or victims in the “right” geographies of
culture. For every conflict that is well covered or analyzed, there are countless
that remain unreported, ignored, or marginalized. It is nonetheless true that con-
flicts in the developing world may figure intermittently on the international
media’s radar, and more often within national settings, but there still remain
scores of wars and conflicts that do not make it to the news columns or television
bulletins even within national settings.
207
P R A S U N S O N WA L K A R
Journalists are invariably drawn from the “national mainstream” and circularly
cater to this section of society and its value system. Thus, events and issues that
do not fall within the paradigm of interest to this section are unlikely to be con-
sidered by journalists as newsworthy. Even if wars and conflicts involving the
“other” meet the “most salient, operational news value of violence” (Hall 1981:
237), they may still not resonate in the media. Journalists breathe the same dom-
inant socio-cultural air of the “national mainstream,” and this cannot but
influence their work, notwithstanding the demands and claims of being profes-
sional, objective, or ethical in their routines.
The fact remains that, despite the real and stated commitments to multi-
culturalism in democratic societies, at the grassroots level, the existence of a
socio-cultural binary of “us” and “them” or “we” and “they” is very much a reality
and can scarcely be denied. This is true not only in Western societies but also
within multicultural countries such as India. But this socio-cultural binary is not
a given; it is created historically during processes of nation formation when
majorities and minorities are manufactured. The binary also shifts according to
focus, locale, and perspective (Shils 1975; Elliott 1986; Elias 1994), and deeply
influences news production. I argue that at its most fundamental level, news must
essentially be about us, and that even though the contours and constituents of
“us” usually remain amorphous, journalists always have a clear conception of
what will interest “us.” As Alistair Hetherington, former editor of the Guardian,
put it, the instinctual news value of most journalists simply is: “Does it interest
me?” (1985: 8).
In communications research, race has been the prime node through which
“othering” in news discourse is examined. Several studies have highlighted the
way reporting, particularly in tabloids, panders to racial prejudices and attitudes.
Racism has become so commonsensical that it has almost become banal, to use
Billig’s term (1995). As Hall argued, there is a racist “common sense” that per-
vades British society: “Since (like gender) race appears to be ‘given’ by Nature,
racism is one of the most profoundly ‘naturalized of existing ideologies’”
(1990: 9). The non-white sections of population come to be routinely seen as the
“they” of British society; a position that is so ingrained as to be unquestionable.
Announcing a special series on British Islam, soon after September 11, the
Guardian asked in a full-page insertion with a veil in the background: “How much
do we know about them?” The paper obviously did not feel the need to identify
who it considered to be the “we” and “them.” The question precluded the possi-
bility that British Muslims might also be its readers.
Hartley (1992) analyzed a similar situation with regard to the representation of
Aboriginals in Australia, and he suggested that journalistic strategies of inclusion
and exclusion had become so ingrained and naturalized that they had become part
of the “common sense” or what Shils (1975) calls the “central value system” of a
society. In India, a similar situation is evident in relation to “caste.” The domina-
tion of the upper caste or Brahminical order of things, or the events and issues
involving the Hindi-speaking people, is so pervasive as to make it commonsensical
208
and natural.
Another node of “othering” is at the level of nation, which is also a selective
project. The discourse of nations and nationalism is premised on several assump-
tions about common myths and historical memories, a common, mass culture,
a historic territory, common legal rights, and duties of members, etc. The
“we”/“they” dynamic is central to nation formation and in the case of young
nations, to nation building. It assumes a version of hegemony by which one view
of society is made to appear as the “natural” order of things, beyond rational ques-
tioning, which may completely delegitimize or even obliterate alternative
versions. As Nag observed:
Nations have always been concerned about “us” against “them.” Nations
are obsessed with “self” and discriminate the “other.” The construction
of the national self has always been only vis-à-vis the “other.” The basis
of such construction is differentiation. The “self” consisted of people
who share common cultural characteristics and such commonalities
could be measured only by contrasting against those who do not.
(Nag 2001)
Nossek referred to the socio-cultural binary, but in a discussion about the cover-
age of foreign political violence:
[When] political violence is reported and covered, there is already a

prior definition by the journalist of the event as some kind of political
violence—say, war, terrorism or a violent demonstration—that predates
the reporter’s own professional definition. Thus, professional norms
become secondary to the national identity of the correspondent cover-
ing the story for the newspaper. The definition requires the journalist to
decide instantly whether or not it is our war or theirs, our terrorism or
theirs, etc. The definition, and the immediate stance adopted as a result,
will influence whether the event is selected as news and the way it is
covered.
(Nossek forthcoming; emphasis added)
But this binary may well be conceptually applied within national settings, where
journalists decide instantly whether events and issues, and also wars and conflicts,
are “ours” or “theirs.” Applying the binary to this Indian case study, I demonstrate
how prolonged insurgencies in the northeastern part of the country do not always
qualify as news while similar events and issues in Kashmir are routinely privileged
in the discourse of the English-language national press based in New Delhi. The
focus here is less on the better-known Kashmir conflict than on the weakly res-
onating insurgencies in the ethnic cauldron of India’s northeast.
I first present an overview of lesser known wars and conflicts across the globe
and then outline some basic characteristics of the Indian press and emphasize its
209
centrality in modern India. The subsequent section looks at key features of the
two conflict zones. Then interviews with senior Indian journalists reveal the
salience of the binary and the differences and disjunctures in their perceptions
toward the two conflict zones. Both bear similarities in terms of the nature and
intensity of violence, secessionist goals, foreign involvement, use of sophisticated
arms, degree of local alienation, challenge to the nation-state, etc. In other
words, Kashmir and the northeast demonstrate “comparable message potential”
(Entman 1991: 9) for news coverage. The account is also based on my experience
of covering the northeast conflicts and Kashmir for The Times of India and other
publications over a decade.
Invisible wars and conflicts

Evidence suggests that a veritable “third world war” may well be going on in the
developing world. According to Scherrer, “warfare and mass violence is not going
on between East and West, nor between North and South, but occurring at this
very moment inside some 60 states in four continents” (1999: 53). Since 1945,
more than 250 major wars have taken place, mostly in the developing world, and
very few of them were inter-state conflicts. According to the Stockholm Inter-
national Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), of the 57 major armed conflicts in 45
countries during 1990–2001, only three were inter-state: Iraq–Kuwait, India–Pak-
istan and Eritrea–Ethiopia; the rest were internal wars and conflicts over territory
or resources.
Scherrer’s study reveals a rich menu into which analysts of ethnicity and
nationalism can tap: underneath the structure of most nation-states there is an
“extraordinary multitude of between 6,500 and 10,000 nations, nationalities, and
peoples as ethnic entities of diverse size” (1999: 54). His “Register of violent con-
flicts, 1985–94” lists 102 examples. Over half a century, Gurr (1993) has been
tracking the careers of as many as 300 politically active ethnic and religious
groups engaged in conflict. According to Conflict Barometer 2002, as many as 173
violent political conflicts were carried out during the year: “Ongoing political
conflicts of 2002 are most frequently carried out on the conflict issues of national
power, territory and autonomy” (HIIK 2002: 5).
Ethno-national wars and conflicts are considered “among the most important
security problems in the world today” (Brown 2001: xi). According to Chenoy,
“Ethnic and religious conflicts threaten to tear apart more societies today than
any other issue” (2002). These involve many “nations without states”—or
“Trojan nationalisms” (Appadurai 1996: 165)—and their struggles to win state-
hood, autonomy, self-determination, etc. From the state’s viewpoint, these are
branded as ‘insurgency,’” “separatism,” or “secessionism,” a terminology also
reflected in the dictum that “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” At
the international level, the careers of only a few such ongoing conflicts figure in
the media on a consistent basis, though not all resonate to the same degree. The
usual suspects are Northern Ireland, the Basque separatism in Spain and Catalo-
210
nia, Kashmir, Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka or conflicts in the Middle East. How-
ever, they constitute but a fraction of the number of ongoing conflicts, given that
an overwhelming majority of the 189 members of the United Nations are non-
homogenous and internally diverse nation-states, and that many face conflict
situations in various forms.
The power geometry of international relations ensures that conflicts involving
major actors such as the United States, western European states, or NATO are
extensively covered by the news superpowers based in the West. But the situation
is different in relation to the large number of ongoing conflicts in the developing
world; many of them now involve challengers with an international reach. In
Britain, the only media focus on “invisible” conflicts is the Channel 4 series,
Unreported World, though it does not deal only with conflicts and routinely
records low viewership owing to its late night telecast.
The international media largely ignored the tinderbox situation in Afghanistan
when the Taliban took over in 1996, but provided blanket coverage only after Sep-
tember 11 happened. The Western media woke up to realities in Afghanistan only
when “we” were attacked. Until then, only a few journalists such as Robert Fisk
reported on the depredations of the fundamentalist regime in a country that had
already been ravaged by the Soviet occupation. By late 2003, in another example of
Western news superpowers pursuing the foreign policy of their governments, atten-
tion quickly shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, amid pious declarations that this
time the West would not “let Afghanistan down.” Except for stray news,
Afghanistan had soon ceased to be a story in much of the Western media.
Centrality of the press in India

In this chapter, the focus is on the Indian press, and in particular, the influential
New Delhi-based English-language press that is considered India’s “national
press.” It occupies a privileged position in the country’s mammoth press industry,
partly because it was the language of the colonial rulers, and because English con-
tinues to be the language of communication of the government and of the most
influential sections of Indian society. As early as 1954, Windmiller observed that
“India’s English language press is the only national press and it is paramount in
the world of Indian journalism” (1954: 315).
As Smith observed, by 1947—when India became independent—the press had
matured in the acid bath of the freedom struggle: India “had already acquired a
sophisticated press, experienced in agitation, but also knowledgeable in the arts
of the government” (1980: 159). Gandhi and Nehru considered a free press to be
crucial to the success of India’s tryst with democracy.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the privately-owned print media
reflects India’s kaleidoscopic diversity, and “offers a product line that is dizzying in
its diverse array of languages, ownership structures, and topics” (Viswanath and
Karan 2000: 92). As Jeffrey observed, “No other country—indeed no other
continent—in the world has a newspaper industry as complex and highly
211
developed as India’s” (1993: 2004). It is competitive and pluralist and is not

dominated by any single group or ideology; India is also the biggest market for
English-language publications outside Britain and the US (Sonwalkar 2002).
Newspapers are published in over 100 languages, including in English and 18
major official languages (each spoken by millions), 81 other languages/dialects
and some foreign languages.
The English-language press based in New Delhi “[identifies] itself with the fears
and anxieties of the Indian state” (Mudgal 1995: 78), but it is also credited with
playing “a stabilizing role in national politics, promoting national integration and
secular values, avoiding extremes and sticking to the middle path” (Joshi 2002).
It reflects the opinion of influential readership and plays an agenda-setting role; it
“delineates the priorities of the country and conditions the expectations of the
most powerful segments of the Indian population: the political, intellectual and
business elite” (Haque and Narag 1983: 35).
English-language newspapers are published from several metropolitan centres
but some “stand out as India’s quality press” (Viswanath and Karan 2000):
• The Times of India (established 1838)

• The Statesman (1875)
• The Hindu (1878)
• Hindustan Times (1924)
• Indian Express (1932).
According to industry estimates, these newspapers account for over 60 percent of

the overall circulation of English-language newspapers in the country. Reports
published in these newspapers often figure in parliamentary debates and influence
policy positions and politics. They co-exist with a vibrant English-language finan-
cial press, and mass circulation English-language magazines such as India Today,
Outlook, Filmfare, etc. devoted to news and current affairs, entertainment, and
lifestyle. Journalists and editors working in the English-language press are the most
known across the country. New Delhi is the hotbed of political journalism, where
“the media is more pervasive than anywhere else in the country” (Jha 1992: 145).
Conundrum of Indian conflicts

Since India’s independence, secessionist demands have been raised in three areas:
Punjab, Kashmir, and the northeast states. The demand for “Khalistan” for the
majority Sikhs of Punjab hogged national and international headlines during the
1980s, but by the early 1990s the Indian state had militarily and politically neu-
tralized the insurgency. But the might of the state continues to be challenged in
Kashmir and the northeast where the idea of secession retains much local
valence. Three wars have been fought since 1947 in which Kashmir has been a
direct or indirect factor, two between India and Pakistan in 1947–9 and 1965,
and one between India and China in 1962. The 1962 war was fought mainly in
212
the northeast when the Red Army overran the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh
and entered Assam, before pulling back.
Kashmir and the northeast figure prominently in India’s official list of “prob-
lem areas” (UMHA 2003). Kashmir is part of the federal state that is officially
called “Jammu and Kashmir,” while the northeast region is a conglomeration of
seven states: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura, Nagaland,
and Meghalaya. The state of Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority
province, and by the logic of British India’s partition in 1947 into Hindu-
majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, it should have become part of the
Islamic state of Pakistan. But Kashmir’s former Hindu ruler opted to join India in
the face of invasion by Pakistani troops immediately after independence, and
modern democratic India has since tenaciously held on to the picturesque valley
as the prime symbol of its commitment to secularism. Its presence in India is also
sought to serve as a symbol of assurance that a Muslim-majority province can
thrive in a Hindu-majority India, which anyway has more than twice as many
Muslims as in Pakistan.
The Kashmir conflict involves two of the largest religious communities in
South Asia: Hindu and Muslim, who have a mixed history of close interaction
and attrition over the years. Their issues dominate mainstream public discourse
in India. Kashmir has been the most contentious issue between India and Pak-
istan. As Bose (1999) observed,
Both countries have chosen to make possession of Kashmir central to the

raison d’etre of their respective national existences—“secular” national-
ism in the case of India, Muslim nationalism in the case of Pakistan. The
result of this competition are maximalist, zero-sum claims to Kashmir
which are fundamentally irreconcilable with each other.
Both sides hold on to their respective positions with equal tenacity. Among the
factors driving India’s position is the not unrealistic apprehension that
Kashmir’s exit from the Indian Union would set off powerful centrifugal
forces in other parts of the country. [The] stakes for both states involve
far more than territorial claims: the question of control of Kashmir goes
to the very basis of the state-building enterprise in South Asia.
(Ganguly 1996)
Unlike the Hindu–Muslim–Aryan dynamics that underpin the Kashmir conflict,

the northeast is inhabited by a melting pot of tribes of Mongoloid and other
ethnic stock, many of whom have converted to Christianity or retain animist
faith. It also has a large non-tribal population that shares many of the anxieties
and insecurities of tribes vis-à-vis the vast Hindu–Muslim dominated Indian
mainstream. The region is culturally and ethnically closer to neighbouring
southeast Asia than to south Asia. The seven states in the region have been in
213
Table 11.1 Northeast insurgency casualties, 1992–2001
Civilians Security forces Militants
Assam 2,459 611 1,371

Arunachal P. 31 9 31
Mizoram 6 13 1
Nagaland 603 235 882
Tripura 2,082 296 255
Meghalaya 63 50 27
Manipur 1,371 649 830
Total 6,615 1,863 3,397
Source: Ajay Sahni, “Survey of conflicts and resolution in India’s northeast,” in Faultlines, vol. 12.
the grip of more than one form of conflict: secessionist insurgency, separatism
within India, struggles for local autonomy, inter-, and intra-tribal clashes, locals
versus “outsiders,” locals versus immigrant Muslims from Bangladesh, language
tussles, boundary clashes among the seven states, etc. The recent calendar of
casualties in the region runs into thousands (see Table 11.1).
The conflicts are played out within the overall context of the region’s histori-
cally tenuous links with mainland India. Its people bear a deep sense of alienation
from the rest of the country; the feeling is strong that “India,” “New Delhi,” and
the “Central Government” are solely interested in the region for its tea, oil, and
other natural resources. Until 1972, it was India’s External Affairs Ministry that
administered two of the region’s seven states, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.
A key fact central to the “otherness” of the region is that British rule spread there
nearly a hundred years after the British had subjugated the rest of India which
had implications for its participation in the freedom struggle and subsequent inte-
gration in modern India.
Owing to prolonged unrest, the northeast is often referred to as “India’s Ulster”
or as a potential “East Timor” (Dutt 1999). At least 50,000 people have been
killed in insurgent violence since 1947, of whom 25,000 alone perished in vio-
lence linked to the Naga insurgency, which is as old as the Kashmir conflict.
Since World War II—when Kohima (capital of Nagaland) and Imphal (capital of
Manipur) were prominent theaters of battle between the Allied powers and the
Japanese—“the political scene in north-east India . . . has never been placid”
(Singh 1987: 22). Tribes were apprehensive of the vast Hindu–Muslim popula-
tion in the rest of India, and they had heard that Hindus revere the cow, that
they would ban cow slaughter and deprive them of their food: beef. The sense of
“otherness” was constructed at various levels, including religious, ethnic, and cul-
tural (including culinary).
In human geographical terms, the region is literally peripheral to the project of
modern India (see Figure 11.1). Less than one percent of the northeast’s boundary
is contiguous with mainland India, while the remaining 99 percent form India’s
international borders with China, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Bhutan. Kashmir
214
Figure 11.1 Kashmir and northeast conflict zones in India (courtesy of Indo-Asian News
Service)
and the northeast are located at opposite ends of the Himalayan range. The north-
east covers a land area of 255,037 square km (approximately the combined size of
the United Kingdom and Ireland). The northeast’s political representation is 24 in
the lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha: the House of the People) that has 545
members.
The “otherness” of the northeast is acknowledged in Indian public discourse.
The Constitution recognizes that the region is “special” and needs statutory
215
protection; a clutch of laws and regulations has been enacted for the purpose, and
new states were created to meet tribal aspirations. But as the Planning Commis-
sion, a federal government department, puts it: “The Northeast tends to be seen
as a distant outpost, some kind of land’s end” (1997: 2). Federal civil servants are
loathe to serve in the region.
On the other hand, Kashmir has an evocative resonance in the mists and
myths of early Hinduism; it is also widely known for its pacific brand of Islam:
Sufism. Unlike the northeast, Kashmir has inspired much poetry and Bollywood
themes over the years. The low status of the northeast is driven by an “absence of
cultural and psychological integration with the mainstream” (Datta 2000). In
mainland India, inhabitants from the northeast with Mongoloid features are
viewed as strangers or foreigners. As Horam (1988: 64) observed: “As soon as a
Naga crosses north-east India and ventures westwards, he is mistaken for a Thai,
Cambodian, Chinese or Japanese and treated as a foreigner . . . Even Indians fail
to recognize them as Indians.”
The region’s “otherness” invokes themes such as civilized (mainstream)–
barbaric (northeast), developed–undeveloped, cultured–uncultured, etc. The
pejorative attitude toward tribes is ingrained in the mainstream psyche domi-
nated by the Hindu–Muslim dynamic. The situation is not dissimilar to what
Hartman and Husband observed in the British context; that there are elements in
the British cultural tradition that are derogatory to non-whites (1981: 274). Most
conflicts in the northeast involve tribes who have close knowledge of the difficult
hilly terrain and are known for their fierce martial prowess.
Modern India’s determination to preserve territorial boundaries inherited at the
time of independence prompted the state to deploy the army, air force, and other
security forces in the northeast in large numbers. Owing to prolonged unrest, sev-
eral laws have been enacted, many dubbed “draconian” by human rights groups.
Violations of human rights during counter-insurgency operations often worsen
the ground situation but, as journalists admit during interviews, they are hardly
deemed worthy of reporting in the newsrooms in New Delhi. Issues and events in
Kashmir or other areas that involve or affect the Hindu–Muslim problematic con-
tinue to be privileged in news discourse.
Journalists on Kashmir and northeast India

Wide-ranging disjunctures in the perceptions of journalists toward Kashmir and
the northeast emerged in the interviews conducted for this study. Part of a wider
study to highlight and explain differences in the resonances of the two conflict
zones in the Indian national press, the responses were noteworthy for two reasons:
there was a remarkable unanimity among journalists that the northeast region had
a low status in the news agenda, and the terminology of the socio-cultural binary
(“we” and “they”) was clearly reflected. None of them said they were prejudiced
toward the region and its peoples, but even while stating that conflicts in the
region were “serious” and that they deserved more attention, they admitted that
216
there was a strong feeling in newsrooms that “there is no interest among readers;
somehow the region, its peoples and issues do not seem to matter to us” (YV).
DD, a journalist and human rights activist working in Nagaland, said:
Some time ago, we wanted to release a document, Where Peacekeepers

Have Declared War, detailing events in Nagaland and Manipur as part of
the army’s counter-insurgency operations. We organized a press confer-
ence at the Press Club of India in New Delhi. More than 40 people
turned up, including seniors of the rank of assistant editors and associate
editors, but the next day not a line appeared in the papers. The national
press is not interested in the Naga issue.
According to YV, the instinctual feeling about the northeast among journalists is
that “whatever happens there, somehow does not affect us and our readers.”
Kashmir, on the other hand, is routinely seen as “something that deeply affects
us” (VVPS). Journalists see tribes in the northeast as “primitive,” which carries
the implication that the non-tribal section of India’s population is “modern.”
DAT, a New Delhi-based special correspondent of The Times of India, was not
even aware if the paper had a correspondent in the northeast, because he did not
remember the last time the paper had any report from the area (it was later dis-
covered that the paper did have a correspondent there).
DPS said he often had to struggle to get his northeast-related stories published
in his paper. His seniors would ask: “Who is bothered, why do you bother?” He
said he once had to explain to his colleagues that “Kuki” was not a biscuit but
the name of a major tribe of Manipur, where hundreds of people had been killed
in clashes with Nagas. Indian culture, he said, was still largely considered Aryan
culture while the Mongoloids of the northeast were considered alien. He would
like to see the region covered extensively, like Kashmir, but he said he felt help-
less owing to “complete lack of interest” among his seniors and colleagues.
Three journalists explained how the low status of tribes and the northeast
region is part of the cultural air in which they operate:
Right from an early age, we are not made aware of our country’s ethnic
diversity. We only know of Bengalis in eastern India, nothing beyond.
Most of us will not be able to tell a Naga from a Mizo. The attitude
towards the tribes is that they are a necessary evil, so all we have to do is
to hold on to them and their territory by force. The feeling is that we are
superior—the concept of Aryan supremacy. The image is that people
there drink, eat all kinds of meat, they are amoral Christians who
believe in polygamy and who fight bitterly. In sum, it is a society we
don’t need to know much about. The Indian army is there; give them
two slaps and they will be quiet.
(NM)
217
Prejudices are very deep even among highly paid officers. The attitude is
that they are jungle people, and the same is the attitude among media
men. There is discrimination by rulers, ministers, bureaucrats, and intel-
ligence agencies. My colleague wanted to go to the northeast for his
honeymoon; he became a major target of ridicule in our newsroom. The
northeast holds no appeal; also, it is too distant. It is remote to me cul-
turally, I do not relate to their languages, culture, or race. They are all
chinks.
(VVPS)
The northeast’s low status is fed into the sub-conscious right from child-
hood in north India. In folktales, at least in eastern Uttar Pradesh where
I come from, it is portrayed as a region of women from where one never
comes back, or as a region that is not worth going to. On the other
hand, Kashmir has the opposite place. It is a place that everyone aspires
to visit before dying. So when something happens or goes wrong there,
the people are disturbed. The poetry of great [Hindi] poets such as
Dinkar or Pant resonates with Kashmir imagery. Kashmir is considered
the crown, the most important part of the body. The northeast too has
the same importance, but there is no awareness of this.
(RBR)
The responses underline the importance of “cultural proximity” within nation-

states. The media do not function in a socio-cultural vacuum. Media images of a
particular section of society or region cannot be very different from the general
(dominant) values prevalent in society. The pejorative attitude toward the north-
east and its tribes affects the coverage of all events and issues, including those
involving much violence and terrorism. As the responses indicate, a particular
ethnicity (Aryan), language (Hindi) and region (north and central India) come
to be routinely privileged in the news discourse of the national press. They also
reiterate the low status of tribes who are traditionally seen as lying outside the
fold of the Hindu caste system. As DD remarked, “such perceptions among jour-
nalists amounts to news apartheid. This is not talked about. They won’t even
accept that there is underlying racism in this.”
SC said prejudices about the region and its people affected coverage of insurgen-
cies. Human rights abuses, if they occur elsewhere and involve people from groups
considered “mainstream” would trigger sustained coverage over days, but invari-
ably go unreported and unnoticed when they occur in the northeast. As he said:
It is difficult to interest colleagues in northeast news. It is a battle. The

over-riding view undoubtedly is Delhi-centric; it is the perspective of
north and central India. The northeast suffers in this environment, even
if there is violence there. For 20 years we had no one (correspondent) in
the northeast. Sometimes the correspondent from Calcutta or Patna
218
used to cover it. Due to its complexity, the attitude of newspapers is: this
is a beehive, why should we put our hands in it, why should we bother?
We don’t know, we don’t cover.
In such an environment, on the rare occasions that news from the region is pub-
lished, it is invariably marked by errors: incorrect names of state capitals or names
of important tribal politicians/actors or incorrect mention of constitutional provi-
sions for the region. According to AJP, “among journalists, there is no stake in
the northeast. They often go wrong on facts; worse, nobody notices it.”
The Kashmir conflict, with its relatively simpler Hindu–Muslim–Pakistan
dimension, is considered “sexy” (DAT) to cover and ensures prominent exposure
to journalist output. The conflicts in the northeast are numerous and complex; it
is impossible to report them without basic knowledge about the kaleidoscope of
tribes, religions, languages, and the plethora of constitutional and legal provisions
for the region. News reporting demands that events are conveyed in a simple and
easy to understand manner, which may preclude lengthy explanations. As HC, a
veteran journalist who covered the northeast in the 1950s, remarked, journalists
like to take the easy route by ignoring complex events and issues.
ZA, former northeast correspondent on The Times of India, hinted at an Orien-
talist frame that governed coverage of the region:
The general attitude in newsrooms towards northeast developments is

one of apathy. Since many are from states other than the northeast, they
don’t relate to developments there, and prefer to ignore the region. How-
ever, when it comes to what’s called juicy, sexy or exotic stories, they are
displayed prominently. For example, when I did a story on the matriar-
chal Khasi society in Meghalaya coming under pressure, it was not only
used as a front-page story, it was also reproduced in The New York Times
and the International Herald Tribune. One has to sell his northeast stories
harder in the newsroom than stories from other regions.
The northeast has better chances of figuring on the radar of the national press if
news reports are seen as “juicy, sexy, or exotic” by the Indian mainstream. There
is clearly no reason to believe that the notion of Orientalism is confined only to
the West–Middle East dimension. As the interview responses indicate, this sense
of the “other” can also be constructed within the Orient.
The routine non-coverage or low coverage of the northeast in the national
press adds to the local sense of ennui in the region. AB, editor of an Assamese
daily, said:
There is a complete alienation from the system. It is a chaotic situation.

Secret killings are adding to the problems. The young are attracted to
the rebels because they have seen the judiciary, national press, parlia-
ment; they have all failed. They choose to remain silent on our issues,
219
when so many get killed. They do not play the role they should; they are
responsible for this chaotic situation here. The rulers and the intellectu-
als based in New Delhi have no time for us; nobody bothers. The Delhi
press also supports them. At least write some facts. At least reflect 50
percent of the situation here. Now not even five percent is reflected in
the Delhi press. There is no democratic reaction in other parts of the
country to events happening here, because no news from here is pub-
lished. They don’t know, so they don’t react, so no pressure is put on the
government. Assam is seen as distant, as a forest area, as if people here
are not civilised or cultured.
Journalists interviewed in the northeast cited several instances of major events

involving much violence and killing going unreported in the national press; they
even questioned the idea that the New Delhi-based press should be considered
“national” in any sense of the term. One rebel sympathiser told me in some frus-
tration that even when groups resort to terrorism to force authorities in New
Delhi to take notice of sometimes legitimate grievances, there is no reaction or
resonance because it goes underreported in the national press.
Insurgents often change tactics by targeting the minority Hindi-speaking
people in Assam, which leads to much concern and action in New Delhi. Hindi is
India’s national language, and New Delhi is located in what is called the “Hindi
heartland” or the “Hindi belt” of north and central India—it has the largest
representation in the Indian parliament. The attacks on Hindi-speaking people
attract media coverage—the latest was the killing of over 50 Hindi-speaking
people in Assam in November 2003—because they amount to an attack on “us,”
as perceived by journalists. But other incidents of violence and terrorism usually
go unreported since they do not involve the “right” people or the “right” geogra-
phies of culture.
Conclusion
If acts of violence and terrorism were so irresistibly newsworthy, as the interlock-
ing discourses of violence/terrorism/conflict and the media suggest, the host of
insurgencies in northeast India should have resonated at least as much as the
single insurgency based in Kashmir, if not more. Violence and terrorism have
been long privileged in the production of news, while the trope of the margins
has been mostly confined to the politics of representation. Research has rarely
examined the non-coverage of events and issues involving the minorities or the
margins. This gap assumes more salience owing to the fact that the movement of
men, material, and money to finance terror knows no national borders, as events
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey show. If news discourse is seen as being by the
elite, for the elite, and of the elite, the exclusion of minorities’ life situations is
likely to be institutionalized in newsrooms.
As the example of northeast India shows, even when insurgent outfits resort to
220
terror to attract the attention of authorities to sometimes legitimate causes, their

activities may not resonate in the media. Not only are most events involving vio-
lence and terrorism in the region not covered, but also, when they are, they
invariably lack historical and political contexts. Within multicultural national
settings, the key variable in the sustained coverage of wars and conflicts is the
socio-cultural environment in which journalists operate. Reifying this in the form
of the “we”–“they” binary, I suggest that only those conflicts that involve or affect
the “we” are likely to be accorded sustained media attention; those affecting or
involving the “they” are unlikely to figure in news discourse.
A conflict has to be consonant with the socio-cultural background of journalists
for it to be deemed newsworthy. An event of terrorism or violence is first subject to
the question: who is involved or who is affected? Thus, contrary to Gans’ con-
tention that during their professional work journalists “leave their conscious
personal values at home” (1980: 182), I suggest that war and conflict reporting is a
matter of constant tension between journalists’ socio-cultural background and
professional norms such as objectivity, impartiality, and fairness. As some intervie-
wees stated, tribes in the northeast are not “people like us” or that they “do not
share our way of life.” As American journalist John Phillip Santos said, “The over-
arching challenge is to rid our journalism of any vestige of an ‘us and them’
attitude, of an unspoken regard of any community as ‘others’” (Allan 2001: 257).
The northeast insurgencies are among the many invisible conflicts raging at
this moment across the world. In an age of globalization of terror, such selectivity
of news reporting can have serious implications. Professionals and media scholars
need to devise ways to focus on such invisible wars and conflicts without jeopar-
dizing commercial compulsions. Readers and television viewers need to be made
aware of the many potential sources that can bring war and terror home.
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12
THE BATTLEFIELD IS
THE MEDIA
War reporting and the formation of national
identity in Australia—from Belmont to Baghdad
Michael Bromley
In memoriam: 28 Australian journalists and newsworkers killed in

combat situations, 1900–20031
The invasion of Iraq by the so-called “coalition of the willing,” led by the USA in
March and April 2003 was arguably the most reported military conflict in history.
More than 3,000 correspondents, ranging from backpack journalists working
alone with wireless digital equipment to television anchors and their production
crews, were assigned to cover events across the Middle East. Such intensity of
focus on limited military action which, unlike the “total war” experiences of most
of the twentieth century, involved non-combatant Western domestic populations
only indirectly, had been building since at least the Vietnam War, reaching a pre-
vious historical peak during the earlier Gulf conflict of 1991 (Tiffen 1992b: 44).
This reflected two apparently contradictory long-term general trends. On the one
hand, those holding power were made more accountable to the public, and the
capacity to call them to account has increased exponentially (Tiffen 1992a:
118–19). Part of this was exhibited in the extent to which public life was shaped
by the routines, rituals, demands, and expectations of journalism (Blumler and
Gurevitch 1996: 127–8). As a consequence, individual journalists were less easily
controlled; for example, the appointment of official war correspondents, particu-
larly during the World Wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45, and the censorship
inherent in the system, foundered on the work of journalists like Wilfred
Burchett, whose eye-witness account of the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima
in 1945 was unsanctioned by Pacific Command, and James Cameron, who
angered the British government by reporting the brutality of Republic of Korea
forces during the Korean War in the 1950s.
Parallel to this growing claim to a freedom to report, the ethos and means of
public communication diffused far more widely and deeply in society (Hartley
224
T H E B AT T L E F I E L D I S T H E M E D I A
2000: 41). Thus, the myths, images, and ideas of war were shaped for the past 150
years by both highly professionalized, technocratic journalists and the accounts
captured in letters, diaries, photographs, etc. of ordinary people (McCrum 2001).
On the other hand, the management of public communication (“spin”) gave rise
to the notion of “the public relations state” (Deacon and Golding 1994: 5–6).
States and the military tried especially to curtail journalists’ freedoms in and
around combat zones, and to neutralize the inquisitive, perhaps even mischie-
vous, roving reporter, exemplified by the logistical and psychological controls
exerted on British correspondents during the Falklands War in 1982 (Morrison
and Tumber 1988). A system of “pooling” enforced by the US in and around the
Gulf in 1991 contributed decisively to the ways in which combat was presented
in the media. Moreover, the professionalization of the military worked to elimi-
nate unofficial first-hand combatants’ accounts, although not always successfully
(McCrum 2001).2 As a result, how wars are reported became a highly contested
extension of the military action, and possibly even of greater importance than
much of the combat itself, presenting “an increasingly important second front”
(Tiffen 1992b: 44, 55).
Australia’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq resonates with many of
these broader issues. Australians (originating in white, European colonization
and settlement) fashioned a sense of national identity through participation in
war around the foundation of the State at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Reporting and recollecting war were crucial to this project. The deployment of
military personnel in 2003, therefore, had enormous potential symbolic signifi-
cance, and the main mechanism for realizing this potential was the way in which
Australia’s journalists recorded events for the public at home. This juxtaposition
of combat and the reporting of combat helped unravel the conundrum of Aus-
tralia’s minimum military contribution to the “coalition,” and how that was
massaged into a major international intervention.
Australia and the “coalition”

Australia’s military participation in the invasion of Iraq was a “token” effort
(Broinowski 2003: 2): the total presence—navy, air force and army together—in
all of the Middle East was never more than 2,100 out of 300,000–400,000 coali-
tion troops.3 At least one in eight Australian forces had already been withdrawn
by mid-May, and most were back in Australia a month later (Fickling 2003a).4
The “war” was over as far as Australia was concerned when the Prime Minister,
John Howard, provided ritual closure to Operation Falconer, attending street
parades of returning military personnel in Sydney and Perth on June 18 and 20,
and the Chief of the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) was delivering vale-
dictories to the episode—even though both American and British troops were
still dying in Baghdad and Basra.5
The size of the Australian military intervention in Iraq was matched by its
ethereal quality. Possibly up to a third of the Australian personnel were drawn
225
MICHAEL BROMLEY
from the highly secretive, so-called special forces (Defence Ministry 2003;
Marcus 2003). At the outset, Howard insisted that Australia would send no
infantry or other types of “ground troops.” This reflected a more general shift to a
higher reliance on secretive special forces in the ADF, their numbers having dou-
bled in the five years to 2000 (Ferguson 2003), making Australia’s army more
specialist and less citizen-based. “In modern warfare,” Howard said in a radio
interview, “a lot more can be achieved with highly mobile technologically profi-
cient but small numbers of troops” (Radio 4BC 2003). At the same time,
Australian politics have also become more controlled and secretive, and increas-
ingly reliant on media management (Phillips 2003).6 As a consequence,
according to the former diplomat Alison Broinowski (2003: 10–11), Australians
were “confused” and “unclear” about the country’s involvement in the invasion
of Iraq. In September, 67 percent of 1,200 people surveyed for an Australian news-
paper poll believed that the government had misled them on the issue of Iraq’s
possession of WMD (a key argument in support of the invasion), and 36 percent
felt that the deception was deliberate (ABC Online 2003b). Furthermore, during
the actual fighting in Iraq, the Australian government and military maintained
an almost total silence on operational matters.
The role of journalists in interrogating Australia’s participation in this military
conflict might have been expected to assume a particular importance, then. As
The Australian’s media commentator pointed out
if journalism is the first brush stroke of history we ought to do our

damnedest to get it right—and that means very deliberately not taking
the word of governments or their agencies such as the military at face
value.
(Day 2003—emphasis in original)
Many Australian journalists complained that they were prevented from doing
their jobs by military and civilian officials who imposed stringent restrictions on
reporting (Cohen 2003; Mottram 2003). An Australian parliamentary analysis
agreed that “Australians [were likely to] receive an overwhelming amount of
information from American sources . . . but little information about Australia’s
contribution to the conflict” (Miskin, Rayner, and Lalic 2003).
The role of journalism and the media

The Australian media assigned about 60 journalists and crew to the invasion.
Of these, perhaps fewer than a third actually spent time in Iraq before May 1
(Crikey.com 2003). Paul McGeough (2003), working for the Fairfax chain of
newspapers, made a contested claim to being the only Australian reporter (one
of between 150 and 250 foreign correspondents) to cover the entire conflict
from Baghdad. Only four reporters were “embedded” with fighting units (out of
226
about 600 journalists so accredited by the US military). About twice as many

were located in the expensively-constructed Central Command media centre
near Doha, Qatar, where 700 were accredited and many complained bitterly of
the deficiencies of the briefings (Media Watch 2003a). Even in this climate,
Australian military secretiveness seemed to be excessive (Callinan 2003). On
March 31, David Marr, presenting ABC Television’s Media Watch program
(2003b), claimed, “there have been no reports from Australian forces in action.
None.” The program produced what were claimed to be the notes made by an
Australian journalist during a media call with ADF pilots and crew on
March 25:
Journalist: How many pilots have we got up there?

Pilot: A few.
Journalist: How many missions have you flown so far?
Pilot: Enough.
Journalist: Are you doing air attacks or flying in a support role?
Pilot: Both.
Journalist: Can you expand on that?
Pilot: No.
(Media Watch 2003e)
A majority of Australian correspondents and their news crews were actually scat-
tered elsewhere in the Middle East—“distant from the action . . . milling about”
(Wright 2003). The most prolific sources of information on Australia’s involve-
ment in Iraq were said to be the military briefings taking place in the Australian
federal capital, Canberra. The popular Australian perspective on the invasion of
Iraq is likely to have been impacted, therefore, not just by the media per se
(Keeble 1997), but by the media operating at a considerable distance from any
direct experience of Australian participation (a dimension perhaps captured in
Nicholson’s cartoon—see Figure 12.1).
The invasion of Iraq appeared to many Australians to be no more than a “sym-
bolic war,” therefore (George Munster Forum 2003). In this way, it was fought in
the Australian media as much as, if not in some ways more than, on the ground.
As international tension mounted early in 2003, a former editor-in-chief of the
Sydney Morning Herald newspaper identified the media and journalism as equally
culpable with politics for widespread public cynicism and disbelief, which could
be countered only by journalism based on “moral courage” (Bowman 2003). Yet
the media seemed predisposed to only one view of the conflict. Roy Greenslade’s
(2003) revelation that all 175 newspapers owned by the global media proprietor
Rupert Murdoch, including seven of the 12 national and metro dailies in Aus-
tralia, espoused editorially his personal support for the invasion of Iraq, was
widely cited in Australia (Jackson 2003a).
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MICHAEL BROMLEY
Figure 12.1 “So this is what war is really like!” Nicholson cartoon for The Australian,
March 20, 2003 (courtesy of the artist)
The Australian media

Australia’s media are arguably the most oligopolized in the Western world (Pilger
2002; Simms 2002). They are predominantly owned by three corporations, Mur-
doch’s News Limited, Fairfax, and Kerry Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting
Limited (PBL). This hyper-concentration of ownership and control has been
associated with forms of tabloidization, curtailing the capacity of Australian
newspaper journalism to provide “an accurate, timely, high quality, engaging,
unbiased and uninterested [sic] flow of information and ideas” Hilmer (2001).
Overseas reporting appears to have been particularly affected by this. Peter Man-
ning, a former director of news and current affairs at the Channel 7 television
network, has complained of a failure to consistently report international events,
and of a lack of analytical depth in such journalism (The Media Report 2001),
while the Sydney Morning Herald journalist and former foreign correspondent,
Christopher Kremmer, noted in October 2002 the reliance placed by the Aus-
tralian media on overseas media to supply them with foreign news (George
Munster Forum 2002). From 1990, particularly in television, the emphasis in
international coverage has been on “soft” stories (Putnis 1996: 2). Quantifiable
declines in foreign correspondence have been difficult to demonstrate, although
van Druten (2003: 1, 41–50, 56, 64–5) traced the reduction of the ABC’s staffing
in Europe over a decade from eight correspondents and two producers to four cor-
respondents, and from December 2003, to three correspondents.
228
Newspapers
In 2000 News Limited controlled 68 percent of major daily newspaper circula-
tions, nearly 60 percent of Saturday papers sold, more than three-quarters of
Sunday paper sales, almost half of the market in suburban weekly newspapers,
and nearly a quarter of the regional press. Fairfax newspapers accounted for 21.5
percent of the major daily sales, more than a quarter of Saturday circulations,
nearly a quarter of Sunday sales, 18 percent of the suburban press, and 15 percent
of regional papers. Only three other companies (APN News and Media and Rural
Press with 30 percent and 15 percent respectively of regional sales, and West
Australian Newspaper Holdings with about 10 percent of both the metro daily
and suburban markets) have significant press holdings, which in total amount to
sales of no more than about 1.35 million of about 13 million newspapers sold
(2–3 million national and metropolitan dailies, 620,000 regional dailies, 3.5 mil-
lion Sundays, and 6.4 million suburban titles). Although concentration of
ownership and control has been a feature of the Australian press since the second
decade of the twentieth century, the trend accelerated markedly after the mid-
1980s. Between 1987 and 2000 News Limited alone closed ten newspapers (Lewis
2001: 101–6).
Television
PBL runs Channel 9, Australia’s largest national television network, with more
than a 30 percent share of the free-to-air audience, and nearly a quarter of all
television audiences. PBL also operates three metropolitan and one regional tele-
vision licenses (Cassar 2003). Australian television is dominated by three
free-to-air commercial services which in mid-April 2003 accounted for 77.4 per-
cent of prime time audiences, and more than two-thirds of all viewing (source:
OzTAM in Jackson 2003c). Channel 7 (controlled by Kerry Stokes) and Chan-
nel 10 (the Canadian conglomerate CanWest) each has about a quarter of the
free-to-air audience and a fifth of all television audiences. PBL and News Limited
share equally a half stake in the main paid-for television supplier, Foxtel, and PBL
has a 33 percent share of News’ subscription service, Sky News (Given 2000:
43–5; Cassar 2003). In 2003, pay-TV had about 13 percent of the 24-hour view-
ing audience (Murphy 2003b). The ABC, based on the BBC model, and the
Special Broadcasting Service, a public service oriented multicultural and multi-
lingual broadcaster introduced in 1980, share about a fifth of prime-time
television audiences (16 percent and 4 percent respectively), and 17 percent of
the 24-hour audience. This situation has provoked some to ask whether public
service television in Australia is “an endangered species” (Jacka 2000).
Eighty percent of Australians get their news from television, and more from
the Channel 9 network than any other source (Flew 2002: 177). Editions of
National Nine News regularly head the ratings (with audiences of around 2 mil-
lion), and the 60 Minutes current affairs program is routinely in the top 10.
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MICHAEL BROMLEY
Nevertheless, since the late 1980s there has been “a major and potentially cata-
strophic decline in network news and current affairs audiences” (Turner 2001:
56). These shows have been positioned as commercial “flagship formats” built on
prioritizing the credibility of personality presenters rather than investments in
news gathering, and on tabloidization (Turner 2000: 91–2). All the same, there is
evidence that crises (such as the invasion of Iraq) temporarily boost ABC news
viewing (Tiffen 1991: 10–11; Jackson 2003c).
Radio
The main owners control more than three-quarters of radio broadcasting over
250 commercial stations (Miller and Turner 2002: 145). Austereo, the largest
commercial radio broadcaster in Australia operating two national networks each
with five stations, is also the biggest outside the US (see www.austereo.com.au).
The British newspaper and broadcast company, DMGT, has 63 radio stations in
Australia (see www.dmgt.co.uk), while the Australian Radio Network (12 sta-
tions) is part of APN (see www.apn.com.au). All three have various partnership
arrangements with the US Clear Channel company. The conglomerates have
been heavily criticized for cutting costs, cutting jobs, and cutting news to the
extent of sacrificing “public interest objectives [such] as plurality, diversity and
competition [which are essential] in order to ensure a free, vigorous and indepen-
dent media sector” (IRB 1999). Music formats predominate, but “talkback” radio
has considerable currency: journalists and news producers rank it among the four
most important news and current affairs services—in part because it is viewed as
“a broader litmus test of community opinion” (Pearson and Brand 2001).
Attempts to dismantle the ABC’s radio news and current affairs service failed in
the late 1990s (Miller and Turner 2002: 144). In 2003 ABC operated a range of
about 50 national, regional, and local stations, including Radio National and
NewsRadio (Dunn 2001).
Magazines
The five largest magazine publishers control more than 80 percent of audited
sales; the top two alone nearly 70 percent. PBL, through its subsidiary Australian
Consolidated Press, has 45 titles with sales of more than 53 million—nearly 50
percent of the market. Stokes’ Pacific Publications (9 titles) accounts for 21.5
percent. The smallest of the “big five,” Murdoch Magazines (3 titles) has a 2.4
percent share (Jackson 2003e).
In sum, the mainstream Australian mediascape amounts to a carve-up, favor-
ing a small coterie of commercial operators. Griffen-Foley (2003) in particular
has traced a close, at times corrupt, relationship between Australian politicians
and the country’s powerful patrician commercial media. This situation has been
characterized by a general, and perhaps unsurprising, lack of journalistic indepen-
dence, or editorial vigor—the modest supposed exceptions being a brief, and
230
ultimately largely unsuccessful, attempt between the late 1960s and the mid-
1970s to assert “professional standards of integrity” over the growing partisanship
and self-interestedness of the less than a handful of key media proprietors, and a
more vigorous pursuit of “the Fourth Estate role of the news media” between 1980
and the mid-1990s (see also Schultz 1998: 195–229). Of all the media, newspa-
pers seem to exercise the most influence on public views of politics with
television some way behind, and talkback radio a further distance off. Surveying
so-called Middle Australia, Pusey (2003: 127–32) concluded that media audi-
ences were more or less polarized between those who valued a critical,
independent Fourth Estate operating in the public realm, and those who turned
to the media for projections of their own social prejudices, resentments, and pri-
vate anxieties. Responding to suggestions that politicians had lied to justify the
invasion of Iraq, a British correspondent wrote that Australians preferred “to con-
centrate on their desire for good times” (Fickling 2003b).
Journalism’s performance during the Iraq invasion

These factors suggest at least a partial dissolution of the traditional role of jour-
nalism in Australia from primarily agenda-setting into a “smiling profession”
(Hartley 1992: 119–39; Hartley 2000: 44–5). Yet journalists have generally found
it difficult to acknowledge that they share a “common moral nexus” with not only
a public whose access to and controls over social communication have increased
but also with the now ubiquitous public relations industry (Hargreaves 2003:
204). To mainstream journalists, PR is a duplicitous way of, at best, wrapping the
truth in a “bodyguard of lies,” at worst, brutalizing through propaganda (Rampton
and Stauber 2003). In this context, the invasion of Iraq could be couched in
terms of a PR exercise pursued by the government (Spearritt 2003)—even “a pro-
paganda game” (Pilger 2003), in which military misinformation tactics were
cynically deployed (Media Watch 2003i). Set against the backdrop of an oligopoly
of commercial media ownerships with a uniform ideological agenda, the State’s
news management strategies, and governmental and military impediments to
information gathering, journalists were constrained to privilege only one, jingois-
tic version of events, predominantly “channelling and echoing . . . the official
viewpoint” (Borman cited in Franklin 2003). Only three of the 12 national and
metropolitan daily newspapers (the West Australian, Canberra Times and Sydney
Morning Herald) countenanced any opposition editorially to the invasion (Media
Watch 2003d).
That charge had been leveled at the commercial media during the previous
US-led invasion of Iraq in 1991, in which Australian forces had also participated
(Tiffen 1992a: 114). Indeed, in this regard, the events of 2003 were something of
a re-run of those of 12 years before. On both occasions accusations of bias—in
these instances against the coalition—were made against the ABC, too (Tiffen
1991; Uechtritz 2003a, 2003b). Perhaps having learnt from their experiences in
1991, the media seemed less inclined to sanitize armed conflict, however, by
231
MICHAEL BROMLEY
masking human suffering—at least to the extent that the Australian government
felt that media coverage in 2003 had dwelt too much on “the awfulness of the
war” (Dodson 2003b). One commentator observed that “nearly non-stop live
television of a kind never seen before” was delivering “footage . . . of the battle for
Iraq [which] is so pore-close, graphic and in-spite-of-yourself compelling it has
been dubbed ‘war porn’” (Jackson 2003b). Events in 2003, no less and possibly
more, than in 1991, were subjected to “saturation coverage”—from SMS text
news messages supplied to mobile phones by Channel 9 to the post-war recollec-
tions of The (Melbourne) Age newspaper’s journalistic team published as a colour
supplement. In the first four days of fighting, Channel 9 aired 56 hours of cover-
age, and the ABC 41 hours (Agenda 2003; Media Watch 2003c). Several
newspapers published special editions, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, for one, even
temporarily resurrecting its otherwise defunct afternoon edition (Meade and
Brook 2003).
Viewerships for television news reportedly rose immediately on the afternoon
of March 20 by between 22 percent (ABC) and 196 percent (SBS) over the pre-
vious week. Channels 9 and 7 posted 64 percent and 58 percent rises respectively,
although their prime time evening newscasts had more modest increases of 12–13
percent. SBS’s evening bulletin audiences rose by 15 percent and 30 percent and
those for the morning shows the following day (Sunrise on Channel 7 and Today
on Channel 9) by 30 percent combined. However, the stations began to return to
their normal schedules after the first week of fighting, and most of the gains were
lost, except by the ABC (Murphy 2003a). Tens of thousands of extra copies of
the major newspapers were printed during the opening days of the conflict, but it
was difficult to determine whether these captured additional readers: over the 12-
month audit period including March and April, readerships remained mostly
static (Jackson 2003d). By early April, 62 percent of a sample of the Australian
population surveyed felt that there had been too much media coverage, and only
3 percent that there had been too little (Dodson 2003b).
Debates about the quantity of journalism are almost inextricably tied, however,
to both assessments of the quality of journalism and to the technologies of news.
Tiffen (1992a: 139) makes the point that the earlier military action in Iraq repre-
sented something of a turning-point in these respects in Australia as the ADF
had not been in combat since the Vietnam War. Satellite communications, allied
to intense market competition, among other factors, made feasible in 1991 on-
demand “real time” broadcasting from multiple locations and sources. The same
combination of factors which enhanced journalists’ capacities to monitor govern-
ments also increased the cost advantages of relying on generic, pre-packaged
internationally syndicated feeds, however. The system of “pooling” enforced by
the US in 1991 angered many journalists, and excluded all those from Australia
(Tiffen 1992a: 117ff; Miskin, Rayner, and Lalic 2003). Similar anxieties were
expressed about the system of embedding journalists with US military units in
2003, and the role of the Doha media centre, which Australian correspondents
nicknamed Operation Mushrooms because they suspected that its real purpose
232
was to keep them in the dark (Callinan 2003). Australian journalists working
outside closely accredited assignments (known colloquially as “unilaterals”) were
far more numerical—and more vulnerable in what was described as a conflict that
was of greater danger to journalists than it was to soldiers (Byrne 2003). The
camera operator Paul Moran, working for the ABC, was killed on March 23 in
northern Iraq in a bomb attack. News Limited’s correspondent Ian McPhedran
was later expelled from Baghdad by the Iraqis. McGeough reflected that the Pen-
tagon, too, did not “like the foreign press being in Baghdad. They spoke about us
quite contemptuously as ‘the independents’” (The Media Report 2003).
These factors appear to be constitutive of a longer-term trend evident in Aus-
tralian journalism, in which reporting from the field, especially overseas, has been
in decline in favor of informed analysis and comment, often originated domesti-
cally and produced locally (Tiffen 1992a: 119, 139). Notwithstanding general
continuing developments in these areas (notably, but not exclusively, digitiza-
tion), it may be conjectured that as far as Australian journalism was concerned,
the changes apparent in 2003, compared to 1991, were fewer, and less significant,
than those which Tiffen noted occurred between 1965 and 1991. Both the scope
and scale of journalism produced in March and April 2003 are far too great to
sample comprehensively with any degree of reliability at this temporal proximity.
Nevertheless, some aspects of the coverage may be gauged from a more or less
impressionistic snapshot analysis of the main newspapers, television, and radio.
Television not only made extensive use of satellite-based communications
(notably the videophone) for “live” reporting feeds, wholesale news exchanges,
and studio links (Jenkins 2003; Wilson 2003), but also broadcast direct and some-
times uninterrupted the output of a variety of American and British news
organizations, such as the BBC, ITN, Sky, PBS, NBC, and CNN, piggybacking
on the greater US and UK news investments. Australian news organizations also
made considerable use of the Internet, trawling the Web chiefly to check on what
other media around the world were publishing and broadcasting (Vermeer 2003).
The reporting of the relatively small number of Australian journalists in the field
was thus heavily supplemented by material emanating from the far larger corps of
American and British journalists and crews assigned to the story worldwide, but
captured and/or edited locally. At the same time, ABC’s Lateline program particu-
larly, but not exclusively, utilized satellite links for extended studio-based analyses
and commentaries. Media demand for expert domestic input was at times “almost
unquenchable” with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian
National University holding briefings daily for the first 16 days of the conflict and
more intermittently thereafter. “We were essentially shaping the news,” said the
organizer (Hull 2003). In this way, major international events were substantively
domesticated.
Even so, the demand for actuality of Australian involvement on the ground
was so great that it offered the Defence Ministry opportunities to “spin” mislead-
ing coverage. SBS, Channel 7 and Channel 10, as well as the Daily Telegraph,
reproduced Ministry images of Australian commandos “deep behind enemy lines”
233
MICHAEL BROMLEY
(Channel 7), which turned out to have been from a photo-shoot staged during
preparations three days before the invasion began (Media Watch 2003f). Such
duplicity was occasionally matched by the media themselves: Media Watch
(2003g) reported that the Channel 7 current affairs show Today Tonight edited
stock footage from Iraq with a report by correspondent David Richardson to pur-
port to show him having penetrated “into the unknown” when he had merely
walked ten metres into the demilitarized zone on the Kuwaiti border. Later both
the Daily Telegraph and the weekly news magazine Bulletin held to the story that
an American flag wrapped by US Marines around a statue of Saddam Hussein in
Baghdad had been recovered from the debris of the Pentagon following the ter-
rorist attack of 9/11, when it had been purchased for $9 US from the US Senate
gift shop (Media Watch 2003j, 2003k).
Tabloidization
Debates about both the processes and effects of tabloidization have been a feature
of and around the Australian media for about 20 years (see Turner 2001). A
sample of the presentation of the opening days of the conflict in a number of
newspapers provides a sense of how the Australian press negotiated the chal-
lenges of engaging their audiences. On March 21 (the first full day of the invasion
in Australian time), the tabloid-sized, but otherwise “serious,” Australian Financial
Review wrapped its usual Monday–Friday five-column, type-dominated front page
with a poster “lift-off” showing gun-carrying troops silhouetted against a fiery
orange and yellow sky. The main headline was simply “WAR.” The tabloid Daily
Telegraph, identifying for its readers the “MOMENT THE WAR BEGAN,” pub-
lished a similar poster front page of a photograph of a missile exploding over
Baghdad above the headline “GET SADDAM.” On March 23, the tabloid Bris-
bane Sunday Mail used a double-page poster wrap around the newspaper to carry a
picture of the presidential palace in Baghdad erupting in flames “as cruise missiles
find their target with deadly accuracy.” The headline was “AWESTRUCK.” The
following day, in a “SPECIAL WAR EDITION” the front page of the broadsheet
Australian was dominated by a half-page photograph of a British marine firing a
guided missile at an Iraqi position. The rest of the page was taken up by text, and
the main headline was a more sober “IRAQ FIGHTS BACK.” In Broinowski’s
view (2003: 111–12), however, the otherwise measured Australian approached
the invasion with a surprising degree of zealotry. Other News Limited papers
offered readers facilities for sending messages to “our troops”: the Brisbane
Courier-Mail’s service remained available on the paper’s website in early October
(www.couriermail.news.com.au). On the other hand, tabloidization also provided
occasional relief from the chorus: on the day the rest of the press reported the
attack on Baghdad, the main story in the Northern Territory News in Darwin was
“Topless woman attacks picnic” (Media Watch 2003h).
The use of “our” (usually in conjunction with “troops”) was commonplace in
television, especially on Channels 7 and 10. The ABC’s Geoff Thompson apolo-
234
gized for using “we” while reporting on US forces (Meade and Brook 2003). The
executive producer of Channel 9’s Sunday program acknowledged that “News
judgments may occasionally have been skewed by the desire to support ‘our
troops’” (Rice 2003: 12). Giving the news a distinctive Australian slant was taken
to be a high priority in television—even at SBS. Iraq’s time zone meant that
many events were better scheduled for the lighter morning news shows, however.
Substantial numbers of Australians used pay-TV services, with BBC World,
CNBC, Sky News, CNN, and Fox News audience levels doubling or more
(Matthew 2003). Giving Australian journalism a “distinction” grade, Rice (2003:
12) nevertheless indicated the traps into which television coverage could—and
sometimes did—fall:
What passes for reportage is more often live-action commentary over

near-raw footage, interspersed by dubious military claims and unsourced
rumours. We’re hypnotized by fuzzy images of armoured columns racing
across the desert; by green-hued firefights that deliver plenty of muzzle-
flash but no blood; by video-phone links that promise reality but deliver
a strangely disconnected view of the war. If the purpose of journalism is
to give context, then this is its antithesis.
The way in which the invasion was handled by the ABC’s major networked radio
news program AM raised the most visible debate. The Communications Minister
Richard Alston (2003a) produced a 68-point document detailing complaints
against the program which included allegations of exaggeration, “gratuitous
barbs,” jumping to negative conclusions, mockery, dismissiveness, trivialization,
cynicism, put-downs, “putting the boot in,” taking sides, “immature and irrelevant
abuse,” “unreasonableness, scoffing, making furious attacks,” sarcasm, derision,
vitriol, contempt, and using “strong and pejorative” language—all directed against
the US and the coalition. The corporation’s head of news and current affairs had
referred to the military as “lying bastards” during an international conference
eight months previously (Alston 2003b). The Media, Entertainment, and Arts
Alliance, which includes the Australian Journalists’ Association, condemned
Alston for trying to influence news coverage (ABC Online 2003a). An internal
inquiry by the ABC, while admitting that in two instances AM reports had been
sarcastic and “excessive,” generally cleared the program of bias. “Overall, I believe
our coverage of the conflict was balanced and delivered in a professional manner
upholding the standards of objective journalism,” the ABC’s managing director
said (News.com.au 2003).
War correspondence and Australian identity

On March 27, the regional daily Gold Coast Bulletin devoted its front page to a
single orange-hued photograph of out-of-focus and unidentifiable soldiers, with
the headline “Diggers in hand-to-hand combat.” Readers were referred to a hazy
235
MICHAEL BROMLEY
account on page 7 supposedly of Australian SAS troops in combat. The term

“digger,” meaning a soldier, was applied to members of the Australian New
Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) of World War I. A mythology surrounding the
ANZACs arose out of the landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey on
April 25, 1915, which “helped to provide Australians with a new sense of identity
and their place in the world” (ANZAC Commemoration Committee 2003). A
military blunder which claimed thousands of lives, the landings were seen as a
proving-ground for “the ideals of courage and sacrifice and the principles of mate-
ship that distinguish and unite all Australians” (Veterans Support and Advocacy
Service 2003). This interpretation remains current chiefly through the annual
commemoration of Anzac Day as “Australia’s sacred day.” The term “digger” draws
on a conceptualization of the typical Australian as a bushman (a native-born pas-
toral worker in the physically huge and often environmentally hostile and isolated
hinterland), which was “embalmed as a national myth” during the closing decades
of the nineteenth century, and transferred to Australia’s citizen-soldiers in World
War I (Ward 1958: 196, 212–20). “The Anzacs . . . were portrayed as belonging to
a new, vigorous race from the Great South Land, grown strong through genera-
tions of combat with the Australian bush” (Gerster 1987: 2).
Mediation was crucial to the process through, initially, the reporting of war,
and subsequently the remembrance of war in photographs, memorials, fiction,
painting, poetry, art, ephemera, public lectures, and both oral and written histo-
ries, and in determining the connections with the bushman image, and the
establishment of the Federal State of Australia in 1901 and of Australian identity
(Gerster 1987; Vidal nd). Journalists were key figures in creating war narratives;
not only reporting from the battlefields, but also collecting and shaping the recol-
lections of soldiers, producing histories, and fictionalizing accounts of war.
the stories we have told each other about Australians at war are power-
ful and resonant. They endure in the national mind. And they were, in
the main, first told by war correspondents.
There is no permanent archive or exhibition in any Australian institu-
tion which does justice to the extraordinary record of this distinguished
band of Australians whose contribution to understanding our history
goes far beyond their dispatches from the front.
. . . Few other countries can boast news men and women of such
renown who have involved themselves in reporting war to the world and
have, at the same time, exerted such a singular influence on their own
country’s political, cultural and literary traditions.
(Rees 2002)
While this tradition can be traced back at least to the work of A.B. “Banjo”
Paterson, a notable devotee and promoter of the bush who reported on the Boer
War for two Australian newspapers (Gerster 1987: 17–18), two journalists stand
out in this regard. C.E.W. Bean, as Australia’s first official war correspondent,
236
accompanied the ANZACs to Gallipoli. Following the evacuation, he compiled

The Anzac Book from soldiers’ writings and illustrations. He later supervised the
publication of The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, writing six
volumes himself, and he was instrumental in the establishment of the national
war memorial in Canberra. Bean is widely credited with having created the
ANZAC “digger” myth (see The Media Report 2002). George Johnston, a corre-
spondent during World War II, helped construct a similar, linked, if somewhat
weaker, mythology around the Australian defence along the Kokoda Trail in New
Guinea through not only his reporting but also his non-fictional Australia at War
(1942) and his novel My Brother Jack (Sekuless 1999: 91–3). This novel was not
published until 1964; it was almost immediately made into a television drama
series by the ABC, by which time Anzac Day was beginning to look like an
anachronism. In the 1960s, Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year was
intended to demonstrate “the essential hollowness of the Anzac Day maunder-
ings”: one of its main characters dismissed the commemoration as “a great
meaningless booze-up” (Stewart 2001; Henderson 2002). Starting with the 75th
anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in 1990, however, successive Australian
governments have consciously revalidated the ANZAC myth (Kirk 2000).
During the referendum on republican status in 1999, one monarchist govern-
ment minister invoked “the Crown which was with us at Gallipoli, the Crown
which was with us at Kokoda” (Zin and Campbell 1999). When in 2001 Aus-
tralia celebrated the centenary of its federation, attempts were made to cement
strong links with the “digger” myth (Irving 2001). The government commis-
sioned an eight-part television series, Australians at War, shown on ABC, and the
Channel 10 television network broadcast a remade serialization of My Son Jack.
In 2002 and 2003 two new popular accounts of The Spirit of Kokoda and The Spirit
of the Digger written by the former journalist Patrick Lindsay were published. This
version of the Anzac myth has not been uncontested, however: it has been
denounced as “an historical hypocrisy” in its affirmation of a sectarian (white,
European) racist construct (Clark 2002). Nevertheless, by April 2003 a revised
“contemporary meaning of the Anzac legend” seemed to have emerged (Hender-
son 2003). In many respects, this reflected the original, pre-ANZAC orientation
of Australians, when in 1901 “Newspaper reports [from the Boer War] of heroism,
danger, and loyalty captured the imagination . . . in a manner that the federation
issue never could” (Fitzgerald 2002: 34). Military adventures overseas, it has been
argued, have tended to galvanize Australians as politics at home have not
(Reynolds 1999: 180–2). Given these circumstances, Australian journalists have
been made aware of the critical importance of adopting “the appropriate emo-
tional tone and orientation of war reporting” (Tiffen 1992b: 47).
Conclusion
Since the 1990s politicians have contested the right to lay claim to “the Aus-
tralian legend with its working-class roots in egalitarianism, mateship, the fair go
237
MICHAEL BROMLEY
and practical improvisation” embedded in the ANZAC myth (Kelly 2003). In

April 2003, trying to counteract opposition to Australia’s participation in the
invasion of Iraq, Howard again appealed to this collective memory. As one of
Australia’s leading political journalists observed, “The focus is purely the love and
pride Australian have for the military men and women who have in the past cre-
ated the Anzac spirit, the Gallipoli legend and, more than anything else, framed
our national identity” (Dodson 2003a). Journalism and the media appear to have
been crucial in substantiating this. For example, tracing the performance of New
Zealand television in recording and interpreting the 85th anniversary of Gal-
lipoli, Hoar (2000) found a privileging of traditional versions of the story, of
continuity in constructions of national identity, of evocative imagery, and of an
emotional style of presentation.
This suggests that the cooptation of journalism, including war reporting, on
behalf of the imagined nation of “diggers,” and the historical and cultural power
ascribed to such “first brush stokes of history,” may have done more to shape rep-
resentations of Australian involvement in the invasion of Iraq than even the
muscle of media moguls, or the media management practices of government
alone. If that is so, then the importance of the Australian military effort lay not in
its meagre material presence but in its symbolic aura, and the ways in which jour-
nalism and the media could be relied on to invoke and evoke in response the
myth of the “digger” as a potentially universal rallying-point for Australians.
Notes
1 Figure published by the CEW Bean Foundation.
2 During the invasion of Iraq weblogs were used by some military personnel to post
public communication on the worldwide web, and more utilized email for private cor-
respondence. Because of the sheer volume of the material, this chapter does not
address either blogs or websites.
3 Accurate statistics on military deployments in and around Iraq in 2003 were notori-
ously difficult to come by. The Australian government always used the word “about” as
a qualifier. The figures used here are the most reliable available, but should still be
approached with caution. See the Defence Ministry (2003) Web pages devoted to
Operation Falconer.
4 Estimates varied from 70 Australian troops on the ground in Iraq to 800 stationed in
the region in August 2003 (see Banham 2003).
5 Australian news workers also continued to die. At the beginning of July the Aus-
tralian sound recordist for the US television network NBC, Jeremy Little, was
wounded in a grenade attack in Fallujah. He died in hospital in Germany just over a
week later (The Mercury, 2003).
6 Marr and Wilkinson (2003) trace the censorship, secrecy, and misinformation origi-
nating with the Australian government associated with the so-called Children
Overboard affair in 2001.
238
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Turner, G. (2000) “Television news and current affairs: ‘Welcome to Frontline’” in
G. Turner and S. Cunningham (eds), The Australian TV Book, St Leonards, NSW:
Allen and Unwin, pp. 89–102.
Turner, G. (2001) “Sold out: recent shifts in television news and current affairs in Aus-
tralia,” in M. Bromley (ed.), No News is Bad News: Radio, Television and the Public,
Harlow: Longman, pp. 46–58.
Uechtritz, M. (2003a) “On balance, ABC news coverage is not biased,” The Australian
Media (June 5–11), p. 7.
Uechtritz, M. (2003b) “Complaints, Minister?,” The Walkley Magazine, vol. 22, p. 5.
Van Druten, R. (2003) “Neo-fire fighter: a new profile for the international news corre-
spondent,” BA (Hons) thesis, Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology.
Vermeer, T. (2003) untitled talk, Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, Univer-
sity of Technology Sydney (April 4), transcript posted at http://acij.uts.edu.au/
seminars/2003vermeer.html accessed October 5, 2003.
Veterans Support and Advocacy Service (2003), posted at www.ausvets.com.au/tradi-
tion.htm accessed June 12, 2003.
Vidal, G. (nd) “War, seen through photographs darkly: visual traces and interpretive possi-
bilities in the photographic representation of Gallipoli,” posted at www.arts.monash
.edu.au/history/events/genidwar/papers/callister.html accessed May 14, 2003.
Ward, R. (1958) The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, P. (2003) “Ingenuity that delivers pictures on demand,” The Australian Media
(April 3–9), p. 6.
Wright, T. (2003) “Fog of war,” The Bulletin, vol. 121, no. 13) posted at http://bulletin.
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The Guardian (November 6), posted at www.guardian.co.uk accessed October 9, 2003.
243
Part 3
REPO RTING THE IRAQ WAR

13
MILITARIZED JOURNALISM
Framing dissent in the Persian Gulf wars
Stephen D. Reese
War has become an increasingly common tool of US national policy. Rather than
Congressionally declared states of war periodically punctuating otherwise harmo-
nious periods of peace, military conflict has become a condition of modern life.
Now the National Security Strategy of the United States has formalized the case
for pre-emptive unilateral military action, a policy of great significance for inter-
national relations. This plan, advocated for years by neo-conservatives who
ascended to key positions in the latest Bush administration, was put into practice
most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even contemplated with respect to
Iran and Syria. Advocating overwhelming US world military superiority to pre-
vent the emergence of rivals follows in line with other administration steps away
from multilateral international agreements on arms control, the environment,
and other issues. This unilateralism of military force is rationalized by its archi-
tects as “power that can be trusted” (e.g., Armstrong 2002). Although anti-war
voices have been at work, American military action has taken place largely
against a backdrop of public support, or at least acquiescence. To understand how
this support is developed and sustained we look to the relationships among the
military, state, and media.
At a basic operational level, many analysts have looked at specific media cen-
sorship, public relations, and other manipulatory actions taken by military and
administration officials in shaping media coverage. At a broader systemic level,
others have considered how the ideological leadership of the media serves the
interest of the US “empire.” It is helpful, however, to combine these insights to
examine from a sociological perspective specifically how news organizations enter
into routinized relationships with military and other newsmakers, and how news
of conflict is placed into particular frames of reference, which serve to anchor war
in familiar cultural terms. These “routinized frames” are revealed through the
recurring combination of visual and verbal elements within media coverage,
showing what organizing principles are at work in the decisions of news managers
and news sources. In this way, we may better see how the media perform their
jobs in communicating news of war, national policy, and public debate over it.
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STEPHEN D. REESE
US media performance in this arena becomes ever more crucial given the coun-
try’s lone super-power status, and the administration’s decision to act alone if
need be in wielding military force. Of course, the attacks of 9/11 in New York and
Washington launched a new “war on terrorism,” a loaded and elastic frame used
to help justify and fast-track the new unilateralist foreign policy. Patriotic post
9/11 television news graphics provided short-hand labels describing how “Amer-
ica strikes back” quickly mutating into “America’s new war,” with that “war”
invoked as a main justification for the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. That is
why implying the dubious connection of Saddam Hussein to those attacks was so
strategically important in justifying military action against him. To the extent
they can help examine such claims and facilitate reasoned discussion of these
policies, the American news media have major implications for the rest of the
world.
Chapter purpose
In this chapter I return to the Desert Shield/Desert Storm operation in the Persian
Gulf War of 1990/1991 (Gulf War I) and consider how specific frames within news
coverage at the local level create an implicitly pro-policy position, delegitimating,
and marginalizing dissent.1 The structured routines of newswork give rise to cer-
tain predictable ways of making sense of military conflict, particularly in the public
debate that follows. We need to understand coverage of front-line conflict, but a
broader “war at home” takes place away from the scene of actual combat as the
government tries to build support for the policy behind it and policy opponents
attempt to mount their challenges. These two processes are carried out in large
part via the media. Although most analysis of the news media in wartime has
focused on the front-line war, these actions are connected to and color the cover-
age of the domestic front. Thus it is important to consider how these two wars are
organized for public consumption by the news media, how one feeds the other, and
how that coverage works to advance or prevent a healthy public debate.
I focus here specifically on a local television news station as a lens into how
coverage of the conflict in 1991, even far away from the front-line, created a no-
win situation for the anti-war position. In Gulf I, the local community was an
important site of public debate, including rallies for and against the war and the
ubiquitous yellow ribbons. Although the national debate and network level
media drew much of the scholarly analysis, people found support for and gave
voice to their opinions in local schools, churches, and locally organized political
speech. Furthermore, local television showed the commercial imperative of audi-
ence appeal writ large, which highlighted the processing by which news converts
military action into an audience-friendly story line. Of course, this happened at
the national level too, but within a single community the news organization’s
decision-making in connection to specific events, relationships with sources, and
the resulting coverage can be easily explored. Entertainment values too make this
analysis even more relevant. In the recent 2003 war in Iraq, stories such as the
248
M I L I TA R I Z E D J O U R N A L I S M
“Rescue of Private Jessica Lynch” were packaged for cross-platform promotion in

news, talk-shows, magazines, and books, becoming stories that were mutually
beneficial to both the military for its image management and to news organiza-
tions seeking drama for audience appeal.2
Some of the more telling examples of framing in local news coverage show the
powerful ideological domestication of dissent when military logic is combined
with cultural patriotism—a phenomenon just as relevant to understanding the
more recent war in Iraq (or Gulf War II).3 I have defined “frames” as “organizing
principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symboli-
cally to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese 2001: 11). Taking this
sociological approach involves examining the responses of newsworkers, media
texts, and cultural context to determine how these principles manifest them-
selves in issue discourse. In my analysis here, a close look at language in news
reports shows how concepts and cultural elements are linked together into
frames, which are significant in shaping the “definition of the situation” and sub-
sequent audience understandings. Thus, in reviewing this case in one community,
we can see how military logic reaches far beyond the front lines to color the
entire public discourse.
Military logic: from Gulf War I to the war on terrorism

War does not stand alone, but becomes interpreted within local idioms, commu-
nity structures, national myths, and routine journalistic frames for making sense
of the world. There was an “illusory” quality to Gulf War I, which others have
examined in detail (Gerbner 1992; Graubard 1992; Kellner 1992; Smith 1992).
To understand this illusion requires that we focus on how it emerged from the
routine workings of the press. In Stuart Hall’s terms, the media’s power lies not in
transmitting unchallenged government propaganda but in rooting those defini-
tions in culture, drawing from it and reinforcing consensual norms, adding to
their “taken for granted” quality in a “spiral of amplification” (Hall et al. 1978).
“The troops,” for example, became an irresistible underpinning to the Gulf War I
conflict, especially given that news organizations needed a human face and a
mythical story line that appealed to commercial values and community interest.
This helped to integrate the logic of military conflict into the society, making it
difficult to separate out the merits of the larger policy which became hopelessly
woven into the larger story. Embedded journalists in Gulf War II highlighted
even further the human US and UK face of troops, to add to the face of leader-
ship more narrowly available in Gulf War I in the persons in particular of
Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. To the extent that military
logic became the prevailing way of making sense of world relationships, a large
part of public debate was limited. The naturalization of the military option was
advanced when familiar cultural myths were invoked, as the tendency to set
deadlines for enemies like Saddam, which encouraged likening the president to
actor Gary Cooper in the movie High Noon.
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STEPHEN D. REESE
The strength of military logic in the broader conflicts of recent years, particu-
larly post 9/11, is undeniable. Since Gulf War I, the more formalized conflict of
armies from that war has been supplanted by asymmetric warfare, yet with the
same premises and approaches applied to this more fluid conflict in which the
“enemy” does not agree to play by the rules of traditional combat. The “war on
terrorism” frame for this new condition carries in its terminology a traditional
Defense Department solution, which, although it may be partly accurate, over-
shadows other interventions in this jointly sociological, economic, political, and
religious issue. (The “war on drugs” worked similarly, privileging military and law
enforcement solutions to an issue that was also a public health matter. The two
became linked when government officials argued that using illegal drugs helped
provide revenue for terrorists.) Military logic becomes mapped onto every other
discussion, becoming the dominant organizing principle and short-circuiting
debate. The success of military action as a policy response may, as a result, be said
to be determined through criteria of the military’s own choosing.
The dominance of this military logic frame was aptly illustrated in President
Bush’s famous photo-op jet landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln last
May 2003 off the coast of San Diego. Changing out of his flight suit, he addressed
the cameras with a banner behind him, “Mission accomplished.” The clear mes-
sage was that in the military completing its major combat operations, the
president’s national mission had been effectively completed too—one being con-
flated with the other in this mediated imagery and symbolism. Though the
military branch was an instrument of national political policy, the president wear-
ing a flight suit visually overrode this distinction.4 The power of this “war on
terrorism” and its associated “axis of evil” was further illustrated by the fact that
the majority of Americans were reported to hold Saddam Hussein responsible for
the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, even though no evidence supported such a
link. He was also implicitly linked by his inclusion in the “axis,” against which
the war on terrorism was arrayed. As mentioned earlier, this framing cast a pre-
emptive strike national policy into a self-defense context, making it more
intuitively palatable to most Americans.
The routines of newswork draw attention to the structured ways that journal-
ists enter into relationships to obtain desirable goals (Shoemaker and Reese
1996). In front-line coverage these routines are often clearly delineated; military
officials desire positive accounts of their activities, to “get their story out,” and to
simply accommodate the demands of the many news organizations seeking access
to the story. Systems are developed to meet those needs. Journalists, of course,
want the most exciting material possible that will be of interest to their organiza-
tions and audiences. The Vietnam-era memory of these relationships, particularly
among military officers of that generation, is adversarial, with journalists “not on
the team.” The more typical modern characterization of this relationship is sym-
biotic, and a perceived anti-military attitude risks a journalist being excluded
from interview opportunities and other desired access. These routine structures
impose their own logic, working against alternative frameworks of interpretation.
250
In the case of war reporting, they contribute to what Kellner (1992) called the
“militarization of consciousness.” Law enforcement and military institutions are
particularly important agents of social control in society and act as “primary
definers,” on which journalists have come to rely heavily for sources or news. Hall
et al. (1978) argue that the media stand in structured subordination to these insti-
tutions which in the case of the military, is able to exert great definitional
power—not only on its own realm but also in a way that carries over into others.
The post-Vietnam image of the military emerged with damage but was gradu-
ally rehabilitated both in the political and wider cultural spheres (Baritz 1985).
President Reagan’s policies emphasized a greater ideological justification for using
the military and a willingness to deploy it in tune-up conflicts like Grenada. In
popular culture, movies such as Rambo and Missing in Action carried a revisionist
version of Vietnam history, advancing the notion that the military was under-
mined by spineless politicians and forced to fight with “one hand tied behind its
back.” As the Rambo character said at the end of First Blood, “I did what I had to
do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win!” President Nixon had been able to
distract attention from the unpopular southeast Asia policy by focusing public
attention on the prisoners of war issue, a matter in which there was much more
fervent and exploitative strategic government gamesmanship than evidence
(apart from Chuck Norris movies) for POWs still behind enemy lines (Franklin
1992). With the advent of Gulf War I, national officials were able to draw on this
restored image of American forces to engage public support. The potency of this
focus was seen in its power to invert one post-Vietnam principle of military
policy. Before Gulf War I, officers like Colin Powell advocated building public
support before any large-scale commitment of troops; paradoxically, however, the
US administration showed that by committing the troops they could engage the
public. Once significant forces had been deployed in Saudi Arabia and a January
deadline set (“showdown”) for Hussein to leave Kuwait, the “support the troops”
motif exploited a powerful cultural value, which found its way into news framing.
They, the troops, engaged support precisely because they were there, effectively
obliterating any challenge to the policy that got them there.
Framing dissent: Gulf War I

Through two major frames a coherent body of local coverage emerged implicitly
supportive of the government’s policy, which I label “conflict” and “consensus.”
Dissent was managed through the conflict frame by pitting two non-equivalent
sides against each other: anti-policy and pro-troops. This frame, rooted in the
news routine of “balance,” ostensibly protected the reporter from charges of bias
but worked against the dissenting position by contrasting it against the pro-
troops, “patriotic” side. Local news, and particularly television, strove to adopt
the voice of the community and be its supportive advocate. The consensus frame
led reporters to emphasize community solidarity.5
The quotations below were all taken from transcripts of news stories broadcast
251
STEPHEN D. REESE
by KVUE-TV, which at the time was the ratings leader in Austin, Texas. Inter-
views were conducted with station producers and reporters, and raw footage of
several community public demonstrations was also examined. Anchor introduc-
tions to stories were emphasized because these lead-ins displayed the most
obvious encapsulation of the frame by compressing the essence of the story into a
few attention-getting words.
Conflict
In 1991, a variety of public protests and demonstrations were going on through-
out the community. Once the January 15, 1991, deadline for Saddam Hussein set
by President George Bush (Bush senior) arrived, public opposition to the con-
flict was framed to domesticate its focus. The language in news reports clearly
worked to downwardly adjust perceptions of anti-war protest strength. Indeed,
anti-war protest was probably more vocal in this relatively liberal city, making
the framing job perhaps more clearly necessary. (My italics are added below for
emphasis.)
January 16
Reporter: (on anti-war protest at the University of Texas) . . . Protestors out-
numbered those supporting the war by 2 to 1, but supporters say that’s only
because the anti-war folks are more vocal.
January 17
Anchor: . . . Even though anti-war protesters outnumbered Bush supporters two to
one, conservatives say they are tired of staying silent.
January 17
Reporter: Anti-war protesters have demonstrated almost continuously since yester-
day evening and conservatives felt it was time to defend themselves.
Other references upgraded the pro-policy position, treating it respectfully.
January 16
Anchor: There are many, many Austin residents who support President Bush’s
decision to bomb Iraq and they say they want to be heard. They plan a
candle-light vigil in Waterloo Park tonight.
January 20
Anchor: . . . In the beginning pro-war forces were relatively quiet, now they are
gaining in momentum . . . [after shots of rally, in conclusion] . . . Later the pro-
252
war group was confronted by those opposed to the US presence in the Per-
sian Gulf region.
January 17
Anchor: A stark contrast tonight to the overwhelming crowds that have gathered
recently to protest the war. Tonight about 30 people stood by in City Park
. . . a quiet candlelight vigil to support President Bush. They were small in
number but their feelings were just as strong . . . Those in attendance had to
dodge rain showers, but that didn’t dampen their spirits.
Other reports presented a less positive view of dissenters, calling attention to dis-
ruptions, minimizing their strength, and challenging their symbolism.
January 17
Anchor: At the State Capitol today, anti-war protesters were anything but peaceful.
January 19
Anchor: Police and war protesters had estimated that a peace rally at the State
Capitol this afternoon would reach some 20,000. Instead 1,500 to 2,300
showed up, far short of the anticipated crowd.
January 26
Anchor: . . . Anti-war protesters carried flag-draped caskets symbolizing war dead
. . . But [notes the anchor] so far, US military officials say one American ser-
viceman has been killed in combat.
This attempt by the anchor to “correct” the symbolism of the protesters, which
presumably referenced deaths on both sides, implicitly restricted war dead to
American casualties.
Station officials reported that audience complaints often made them sensitive
to airing footage of protest, arguing that it allowed them to “consider all sides.”
One producer said, “The people who supported the troops were a kind of silent
majority.” Thus, in this case the opposing sides became the anti-war position, on
the one hand, and the “support the troops” position, on the other—not an anti-
policy and pro-policy side. Examining the linguistic composition of these frames
shows how strongly intertwined the “pro-troops” position and the related stance
of “get behind the president” became in coverage.
January 23
Anchor: 150 demonstrators supporting the war effort demonstrated at the Univer-
sity of Texas and listened to people speak about patriotism. As a counterpoint,
253
STEPHEN D. REESE
these five protesters at the State Capitol are all who are on hand for a war
protest that began on the 15th.
In a story from an area public school, the reporter even overtly made a point to
separate policy and troops before implicitly joining them again.
January 16
Reporter: [about school kids’ reaction] . . . In the meantime the students are fol-
lowing through on their commitment to support not the war itself but rather
the Americans in the Middle East fighting for peace.
This distinction between troops and policy is further eroded, with local officials
adding their voice of support—again implicitly joining the two.
January 23
Anchor: Austin County Commissioners came out in support of American men
and women serving in the Middle East and against the actions of Saddam.
Most reports of public expression continued to focus on the “pro-troops” position

and families.
January 23
Reporter: . . . There are others who say they don’t necessarily want to fight in a
war either but will do whatever it takes to protect their country’s interests.
January 17
Anchor: . . . The peace protests are hard for families whose loved ones are in the
Persian Gulf. One military wife says she can handle the stress and anxiety of
knowing her husband is in the thick of things, but it’s harder when she’s con-
fronted by scenes of angry protesters demonstrating against the war.
Woman: There are lots of families hanging on to every word that the news is
putting out and I think it’s really destructive to them.
January 17
Anchor: . . . The anti-war sentiment is unsettling for families whose loved ones
are involved in Operation Desert Storm and for those who back President
Bush’s decision to go to war.
Later reporting further served to reinforce this clear pitting of the anti-policy
stance against the pro-troops/patriotism position in a binary opposition.
254
January 19
Anchor [over shots of protesters]: People converge on the State Capitol shouting
their pleas for peace while a patriotic group of small town residents sing their
support for American soldiers at war.
January 24
Anchor [over video of veterans rally]: The US must show 100 percent support for
our troops in the Middle East. That’s the message from veterans who say they
are upset over the number of anti-war protests. They say it sends a bad mes-
sage to the troops in the Middle East, that we don’t support them.
January 24
Wife of serviceman: It’s time for all Americans to unite behind the young men and
women who are serving their country.
Anchor: . . . Many are upset over the number of anti-war protests and say they
should stop.
Of course, in the aftermath of 9/11, patriotism took on new significance in the

culture, but looking back on this reporting reveals how actively local reporters
worked to link patriotism with the troops, especially in the highlighting of com-
munity patriotic rallies.
January 19
Reporter [over pictures of flag-waving rally in adjoining town]: They are the
images of Americana . . . The pictures of heartfelt pride and support for sol-
diers in the Middle East. The war in the Middle East has revived patriotism
here.
January 20
Anchor: As the battlefield gets more intense, more Americans are working to
show their support for the troops who are under attack in Saudi Arabia.
The distortion of “balance”

A closer look at one particular story showed how a stronger anti-war protest was
neutralized by its juxtaposition with a pro-troops, “patriotic” activity—following
the “objectivity” routine in creating what could be considered a “false balance,”
given the disparity of 10 to 1 in attendance at the two events. This story was aired
on January 17, based on events at the University of Texas. The final story was
examined against the original raw footage.
255
STEPHEN D. REESE
Reporter: On one side of the UT campus, several hundred people who are opposed
to the war carried on a protest that began last night.
Anti-war speaker: During the war in Vietnam we lost over 58,000 young Ameri-
can lives.
Pro-war speaker: The legacy of Vietnam will die with this conflict.
Reporter: A few feet away supporters of the President held their own rally.
Same person: Because Iraq is not Vietnam.
Reporter: It was smaller but feelings ran just as strong.
Chanting males: USA, USA.
Student: How many troops do they have compared to ours?
Reporter: With two groups so close together there was inevitably conflict.
Students: [unintelligible argument]
Student: The sheep can preach the virtues of vegetarianism until hell freezes over,
but the wolf isn’t listening. You’ve got to deal with people in a language
they’re capable of understanding and Saddam Hussein only understands
violence.
The reporter moved from this bi-polar pairing of positions to reach and conclude
with a consensual, but ultimately “pro-troops,” and therefore “pro-policy,”
theme.
Reporter: Some who came here were motivated by a deeper feeling, a sense of
commitment. [Said over shots of anthem and flag to a woman who has a
brother in the Gulf.]
Woman: When your family’s over there all you know is to support them.
Reporter: Students raised during a time of peace are now debating their genera-
tion’s war [over shots of signs, peace signs]. Some of the slogans have
changed, some haven’t. But the emotions raised by patriotism and violence
[Saddam Hussein’s?] run just as strong.
Thus, again the anti-war position was pitted against the high ground of those
with a “deeper commitment.” Indeed, opposing the war was tantamount to
opposing the woman interviewed and her family. But this framing was part of a
routine package that made it possible for news organizations to handle protest
stories easily and with a minimum of audience complaint. Reporters were not
expected to have expertise in the policy issues. They were able to present the
“form” of balance as an easily followed format, which would then yield a consen-
sual “patriotic” middle ground.
Consensus
The “support the troops” concept became a crucial element in the conflict and
consensus frames and a way to manage public dissent over government policy.
Particularly with regard to local television, Kaniss (1991) argued that, given the
256
nature of the large and fragmented audiences, stations are driven to find unifying
symbols and themes, such as sports franchises, which help to promote a sense of
community solidarity.6 Thus, the “support the troops” message was tailor-made for
news coverage seeking to restore a community threatened by the divisive disputes
over war policy. Frames derive their power in large part because they are internal-
ized “organizing principles” that news workers can apply routinely. Interviews
with station reporters showed how this occurred for the pro-troops element. As
one admitted:
Look, almost everyone had strong feelings about the war . . . not like
they were “pro-war” but that everyone backed the troops. They wanted
the troops not to get hurt over there. No one wanted them hurt. I have
to admit maybe I was too close to the story. I had relatives—close rela-
tives—over there fighting.
“The troops” became the nation’s home-town team, indeed the consensual glue
used by reporters to symbolically hold the community together, especially when
trying to frame expressions of conflicting public opinion.
January 22
Anchor: . . . Although both sides of the war issue are still battling back and forth,
one thing seems to hold the factions together: support for the men and
women in Saudi Arabia . . . [Referring later to flag sales] Although everyone
may not choose to show their support in the same way, at least for some,
the support for the troops is there no matter what the belief about the war
itself.
January 22
Anchor: . . . People may be divided about how they feel about US involvement in
the Middle East, but one feeling seems to be shared by everyone: support for
the troops who are over there now.
News routines show that not all stories require balanced voices. According to
Hallin (1986), those stories that deal with subjects within either the sphere of
deviance or sphere of consensus are by their nature not ones that require even
treatment. Those, however, within the “sphere of legitimate controversy” do.
Thus, as a consensual story, “support the troops” stories came to no longer require
balance, as in this report on efforts at a local school.
January 23
Anchor: . . . Those who support the American forces in the Persian Gulf War are
trying to make themselves more visible . . . Among other things, the students
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STEPHEN D. REESE
signed a huge Happy Valentine’s card to be sent to the troops and passed out
yellow ribbons.
Of course, there was no shortage of stories from the community and surrounding
areas that served to exemplify traditional values: placement of yellow ribbons, ral-
lies, flag-flying, and veterans meetings. Even the veterans themselves were
processed through the consensus frame to eliminate any troubling qualms about
war in general. As one veteran was quoted as saying:
January 16
“War produces dead bodies. Let’s hope this one’s over quickly. War is
hell . . . it’s just you can’t describe it.”
The reporter, given this threatening notion of war’s consequences, quickly reas-
sured the audience:
Despite the knowledge of how horrible war can be, for every ounce of fear
among members of this group, there’s still a ton of patriotism . . . These men
have been there . . . They know first hand the turmoil, the desperation of
war . . . But all are very proud tonight and holding their heads up high.
With military success, the pro-troops element soon morphed into the “heroes of
Desert Storm,” a label that continued linking the troops to the policy. A
reporter’s January 18 story glorified local Bergstrom Air Force Base reconnais-
sance pilots as the “unsung heroes of the war.” The characterization suggests one
who embarks on a worthy undertaking, so it is difficult to celebrate the heroes
without also endorsing the mission on which they were sent. This theme was a
valuable resource for routine story construction by providing an easily con-
structed story-line, drama, and meaning to the conflict.
In this chapter I have largely centered my attention on how war and its public
debate were handled within a specific geographical community. The routinized
structure of media/military relationships rooted conflict in frames of reference
that held audience appeal and accessible cultural meaning. Coverage of this con-
flict as seen in the first Gulf War was closely related to coverage of dissent at
home within an overall military logic, finding particular expression in support for
“the troops.” During the interval between this Gulf conflict and that which fol-
lowed, the local community was superseded in many ways by global public
communities, which had implications for public support for military action.
Conflict and dissent in the global community: Gulf War II

In the years since Gulf War I, the previously-existent community focus in news
was increasingly intertwined with the changing patterns of news and its changing
258
audiences. With greater competition among US cable news networks, and the
more forceful patriotic voice of Fox News, national news became more closely
aligned with the commercial imperatives of local television. Indeed, the trauma
of 9/11 drove news to appeal to the same sense of one community in the name of
national solidarity that was typical of local news. This had an impact on the
extent to which conflicts were easily framed within military logic and dissent was
marginalized. The local/national, “vertical” frames of reference came into
increasing tension with more globalized, multi-level “horizontal” orientations of
world news gathering. Global communities, if not supplanting local ones, cer-
tainly added an important layer to the public sphere. The current Bush
administration took an active role in framing national policy very explicitly in
the shape of the “war on terrorism” and the “axis of evil.” These perspectives
became more pointed and publicly resonant than the vague, negatively conno-
tated sense of a “new world order,” employed by the earlier Bush administration
in Gulf War I. But they were also more open to contestation. How might we com-
pare the potential for framing dissent, as we reflect on differences between Gulf
War I and Gulf War II? Although it is difficult to visualize a public sphere pro-
jected globally, some suggestive anecdotal outlines emerge in the way that world
publics react and interact through the media.
In many respects, a globalized public opinion came of age following the attacks
of 9/11 and the subsequent US efforts to engage militarily in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Public protests around the world on February 15, 2003, were a particular
watershed event, which created a boundary-spanning anti-war movement acting
in its various locations but in a simultaneous global arena, supported by transmis-
sion of global news and other communication (from email to CNN, weblogs,
news sites, etc.). The national media continued to cater to the parochial views of
their officials and mass audience, and local media were still limited to covering
locally based public protest actions. Global elites, however, increasingly took into
account world opinion, driven by alternative sources of information to any spe-
cific locally based channels. Dissent was not so easily marginalized in this more
diffused media environment.
The new ability of citizens to mount a globally coordinated expression of
opposition produced corresponding political consequences. Thus, compared to
the first Gulf War of 1990 and 1991, the US administration had much greater
difficulty operating free of constraint in implementing what amounted to a pre-
emptive strike national security policy in the 2003 Iraq invasion (it is, of course,
true that the international community was more unified behind Gulf War I). An
anti-war public in many countries made it politically treacherous for national
leaders to support the Bush administration. Media and public opinion, particu-
larly as seen recently in Europe, were less apt to follow government policy.
Forging multilateral agreement for a unilateral policy came with greater difficulty
in a world with global communication supporting different dimensions of public
opinion, and where the purported rationale for policy was subjected to world
scrutiny, helping expose disconnects between surface discourse and underlying
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STEPHEN D. REESE
strategic motives. The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television news organization, for

example, was increasingly in position in Palestinian territory, Afghanistan, and
Iraq to show the aftermath of bombing and the resulting effects on civilian popu-
lations (e.g., el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2002). Compared to the relatively more
sanitized view of Gulf War I, CNN was joined by a host of international 24-hour
news channels and many other news sources on the scene to show the wider
“reality” of war.
Certainly, the military will continue to work to control access to the battlefield
and manage the coverage that results. The US and British defense officials’ plans
to incorporate some 600 reporters within individual military units clearly gave
greater access to the battlefield than was ever provided in the tightly restricted
journalistic environment of Gulf War I. In retrospect, this “embedding” of assign-
ing journalists to military units was a brilliant strategy—from the standpoint of
the military. These attached reporters were inevitably drawn into the perspective
of the soldiers with whom they traveled, and the dramatic, if often blurred and
grainy, images from the scene gave a vivid impression from the point of view of
the troops. Journalists shared the perspective and tactical emphasis of the units
they accompanied, and their group solidarity (“going native”) affected their inde-
pendence. This “routinized” perspective was not new and can be seen in other
settings where journalists effectively take the perspective of police, by using, for
example, television footage shot from the police side of an altercation or, in the
case of reality-based programming like Fox’s “cops,” following agents into homes
and through neighborhood backyards.
For US news organizations, embedding met professional needs for access to the
story and, from their standpoint, was a step forward compared to Gulf War I.
Although BBC news executives had been distrustful of the program, they later
regretted that some of their top journalists had missed out on the main action
(Byrne 2003). Although the view from the military units was not the only part of
the larger story, its historic immediacy, technology-enhanced drama, and first-
hand vantage point gave embedded reports a quality that overwhelmed other
perspectives. As a matter of framing emphasis alone, the war on terrorism became
a military conflict with Iraq, which became ultimately the story of individual
units seeking their objectives: immediate tactical details of casualties, speed, and
logistics. Nevertheless, the multinational character of the embedded journalists
gave insights into the depth of the American national frame of reference. That
embedding was to a large extent an image-management strategy was seen in the
exclusion from desirable assignments of reporters from countries regarded as
unfriendly to the “policy,” such as France and Germany (two major German tele-
vision news organizations were “offered” the same assignment to an aircraft
carrier far from the front; they refused). Non-US journalists observed that the
Americans seemed “completely signed up” to “America, Inc.,” with little critical
distance.
This perspective, however, allowed the American journalists to work in rela-
tive harmony with their units and for American officers to make assumptions
260
about their coverage (while obliging them to monitor more closely the work of
non-US journalists—particularly, for example, from countries such as Abu
Dhabi). Ted Koppel of ABC News Nightline was unable to resist seeking an
embedded position (an enhanced one attached to the division commander) and
prefacing one report with ominous heroic imagery from Shakespeare (“Unleash
the dogs of war!”). An embedded reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
exhibited this professional ease with the heroic theme by presenting a photo-
graphic retrospective of his work following his assignment, accompanied by an
arrangement of Samuel Barber’s sublime “Adagio for Strings” (also used in the
movie Platoon).7 Indeed, I would argue that the unilateralist policy that got
the troops to Iraq made this perspective even more necessary, for it was a policy,
after all, predicated on the assumption that US military superiority would be
used wisely and was “power that can be trusted.” Thus, perhaps it was not surpris-
ing that American journalists internalized this assumption and that non-US
journalists were more likely to at least make a distinction between taking the
perspective of the unit and the side of “the American war machine.”8 Thus,
although the embedding program worked to reinforce a military logic and a
heroic frame, within the still emerging global norms of newsgathering there was
evidence of a fault line between a nationalistic unilateralism and a multilateral
world.
Thus, embedding was a form of control that created a strong dependency rela-
tionship between journalists and their units (not only for getting the story but
for protection in a dangerous place). Even the training supervised by the military
for aspiring embeds underscored the premise that “we know what we’re doing,
and you don’t.” Nevertheless, on the ground of military conflict, it became more
difficult to manage information in an environment more fluid and porous than
just 12 years prior, with satellite phones and other technologies making commu-
nication easier and quicker. In some ways, this more fluid communication field
made controlling the “story line” more crucial, with the Pentagon and the US
administration seeking foremost to frame the story as “mission accomplished.”
The availability of satellite phones, for example, made it possible for many more
journalists to instantly transmit their first-hand observations to editors any-
where in the world. Peter Arnett was alone in transmitting via satellite phone
from Baghdad in 1991; reporting from the same city in 2003 he noted far greater
competition, with 200 to 300 such phones in the city and a dozen video uplinks
and video phones (Blumenthal and Rutenberg 2003). In the first Gulf War,
restricted coverage led many viewers to give little consideration to civilian suf-
fering, while during that later war reporters had greater access to the impact of
the conflict.
In the current Iraq conflict of Gulf War II, even the powerful “support the
troops” component within the frames of dissent cuts both ways, that is, with
dual and contrary consequences. On the one hand, the media dynamic remained
similar today, with news organizations clearly “on board” with the policy. A
recent report from NBC Nightly News, for example, documented the hospital
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STEPHEN D. REESE
rehabilitation efforts of American soldiers wounded in Iraq. The account of men

with missing limbs learning to walk again easily leads viewers to question the
wisdom of the policy behind their suffering, but anchor Brian Williams worked to
block this possibility in his studio conclusion: “If you’re looking for anti-war spirit
you won’t find it in this (hospital) ward. These men are anxious to get back to
their unit” (October 31, 2003). On the other hand, soldiers had families at home
who, as the engagement lengthened, became increasingly unhappy. Unlike in
Gulf I, they were able to email and communicate their own impressions of the
conflict in ways that their organization found difficult to control. A quick and
decisive conflict with few military casualties allowed the “support the troops”
atmosphere to work unchallenged by qualms over policy. But as they remained
vulnerable in a protracted struggle, as rationales for the war became increasingly
questioned and undermined, then the troops engaged a counter-dynamic at
home, leading their communities to question the policy putting them at risk.
The work of unembedded “unilateral” journalists remains important, and their
work is more globally available than ever before. Supported by technology, jour-
nalist Robert Fisk, for example, was able to base himself in Lebanon, reporting for
a London newspaper, The Independent, with many more readers around the world
via the Internet. Although his ideological stance gained him a wide audience on
the left and critics within the profession, reporters like him remained valuable for
their first-hand accounts on the ground of world hot spots. These first-hand per-
spectives supported a broader perspective by readers who otherwise would not
have had much available beyond their own narrow national frames of reference
articulated, in particular, by network and local television.
In addition to the freer information environment, and the associated link-ups
of world publics around issues, casting the public sphere globally made it less
susceptible to control and cooptation by a single “state.” State-controlled
propaganda in the traditional sense was less viable when the global public had
alternative sources of news beyond their national organs and could coordinate
their efforts across international boundaries. Bill Dutton of the Oxford Internet
Institute, for example, argued that “The most obvious thing that the web pro-
vides is access to a greater diversity of viewpoints and a more international
viewpoint.” Adam Porter, of the British on-line current affairs quarterly, Year
Zero, said,
It’s really patronizing to assume, as the mainstream media often does

that ordinary people don’t talk about Iraq, asylum or economics down
the pub. You can go all around the world and find similar things and it’s
the web that’s bringing them together.
(Media Guardian 2003)
Issues as important as war must be understood beyond a single national context.

Thus, it is natural that the public actively seeks a globally oriented perspective.
One example may be seen in US audiences tracking European news sites more
262
closely for alternative points of view concerning the war in Iraq. According to
Croad (2003), “Much of the US media’s reaction to France and Germany’s
intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the
so-called ‘respectable’ press.” As a result, she observed that the feedback to these
European websites suggested that people no longer rely only on their own
national media, exercising instead their need for information on a global scale.
Web-based autonomous media emerged such as Indymedia.org, a collective of
independent media organizations and journalists, that provided a critique of war
coverage in the mainstream press, reframed issues away from military strength to
diplomatic relationships and, as it reported, promoted “global citizenship.” So,
information globalization means that citizens have access to the policy record in
a way never possible before, and other countries have access to well-informed
points of view around the world. Thus, greater transparency has developed con-
cerning US policy objectives, even if not from the government itself, making it
harder for national leaders to “go it alone” with the expectation that the world
public will fall in line.
As a globalized public sphere becomes more complex and interconnected, it
will become important to theorize the implications for public support for military
conflict. Local news organizations during Gulf War I effectively structured sup-
port for the policy as they applied a military logic to local debates. As these
debates over military conflict become globalized and denationalized, beyond the
scope of any single local community, there remains the hope that these policies
can be debated clearly through a more multilateral cultural media lens.
Notes
1 A fuller analysis is contained in a previous article (Reese and Buckalew 1995).
2 Lynch was an American soldier captured and taken to an Iraqi hospital, where by all
accounts she was treated humanely before being retrieved in what was hailed at the
time as a heroic special rescue operation. The Pentagon has denied staging the rescue
as a media event, but it provided to the media its video footage of the operation, acted
no doubt as the source of many details in news accounts attributed to anonymous
sources, and failed to later correct erroneous details that didn’t conform to the story
line (Lynch was captured without resistance, although early reports had her emptying
her gun at the enemy before being overcome).
3 I understand that in the Arab world this most recent Iraq war is Gulf War III, with the
Iraq–Iran war being the first.
4 News stories in November 2003 at this writing discuss the White House’s attempts to
distance the president from the “mission accomplished” banner, a jarring symbolic
memory given the ongoing presence of US forces in Iraq. The president has blamed
the navy for posting the banner, but the administration’s skill in framing visual back-
drops for his speeches and controlling every other aspect of media interaction casts
doubt on this innocence. What appeared to be a classic presidential photo opportunity
and a golden opportunity for campaign advertising now ironically may be just that, for
the opposition that is.
5 In the original study, another frame, “control,” was also explored. It emerged from the
tight relationship between local news organizations and law enforcement, making it
easy to slip into a “police work” perspective and cast public dissent as a threat to
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STEPHEN D. REESE
social control. Dissent, as a result, was often treated as a matter of police work, keep-
ing unruly crowds in check and focusing on procedures in place to manage public
gatherings.
6 This interlock with sports continues on a national level, as seen, for example, in the
National Football League promoting its “Intrepid fallen heroes fund” meant to support
the families of military personnel “who have given their lives in the current operations
in defense of our country” (www.nfl.com/heroesfund, November 10, 2003). My point
is certainly not to diminish the loss of these individuals but to suggest how deeply
ingrained the troops are in the national psyche, reinforced in this case by initiatives
supported by commercial enterprises. The frequent analogies of sports to war and vice
versa is another lengthy subject.
7 My observations from this section are drawn from various comments at recent profes-
sionals’ meetings. Insights into the foreign press are from the Newsworld International
meeting for news professional in Dublin (October 20–3, 2003). The Koppel and
Atlanta details are from a symposium on war reporting at the University of Texas at
Austin (November 4–5, 2003).
8 The latter view was expressed by BBC correspondent David Loyn at the same News-
world meeting referenced above (October 21, 2003).
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14
WAR O R PEACE?
Legitimation, dissent, and rhetorical closure in
press coverage of the Iraq war build-up
Nick Couldry and John Downey
The global space within which much news and media comment are produced and
circulate has never been clearer than in the contentious build-up to the recent
UK/USA war in Iraq. As disputes within and between national governments over
the very definition of the issues at stake intensified, the global circulation of critical
perspectives on the expected war was striking and cut across the divisions between
official government positions. Whatever the local tendencies toward closure of the
issues from a specific national perspective (and as the war began in the UK, those
tendencies intensified), in order to understand the conflict fully, it is essential to
comprehend the global character of dissent and opposition. The global nature of
elite media and political discourse was matched by the globalization of opposition
to a UK/USA invasion of Iraq. On February 15 over 8 million people marched in
five continents to express their dissent (although the large majority of them
marched through the streets of major cities in western and southern Europe). The
analysis of both media discourse and popular dissent as a consequence demands a
cosmopolitan approach (Beck 2000). In this chapter we will focus on press dis-
course in the UK but we see this very much as a contribution to a broader
cosmopolitan project that does not, however, overlook national specificities.
There are good reasons to focus on the UK beyond the limitations of the
authors and their circumstances. Not only was the UK America’s closest ally,
diplomatically and militarily, but the UK government was renowned for its public
relations, having won two landslide elections in 1997 and 2001 with apparent
ease, leaving the major opposition party in disarray. Moreover, it was unusual that
a supposedly left-of-centre government, unlike other European social democratic
parties, should support a neo-conservative US Republican executive and that
consequently the two major UK political parties were united in their support for
the USA. Despite this, only 38 percent of the British population surveyed in an
opinion poll supported a “unilateral” war (a war without UN sanction) against
Iraq immediately before the outbreak of war. (After the advent of war there was a
dramatic shift in favor of military action.) The low point in terms of support for
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WA R O R P E A C E ?
the war was between mid-January and mid-February 2003 when opinion polls
revealed that only 30 percent and 29 percent of representative samples of the
British population supported war (The Guardian, ICM). On February 15 an
unprecedented one and a half million people marched through the streets of
London to voice their dissent. The numbers took most people by surprise. Only a
few days before the march newspapers were predicting 500,000 demonstrators but
it was clear that a momentum was developing. A march organizer commented
that week: “it’s a new movement, out of anyone’s control. It’s like a tidal wave.
The people organizing it are not in control. It has its own momentum” (Burgin,
The Guardian, December 2, 2003: 6).
We will analyze the reporting of the conflict by seven national newspapers
during a key week of this low point in support for war. The first day of analysis
coincides with the publication of the Blix Report on January 27. George Bush
delivered his second State of the Union speech to Congress on January 28. Tony
Blair travelled to Camp David for “a council of war” at the end of the week (at
which time journalists were presented with copies of a new intelligence dossier
quickly dubbed the “dodgy dossier” by most of the British media because of its
extensive plagiarism of dated academic work downloaded from the Internet and
passed off as based on new intelligence sources). It was thus a key week for news-
papers to take their position with regard to the possibility of war.
The degree of dissent from the pro-war position of the UK government and
official opposition poses an interesting but welcome problem for critical media
researchers. It has become the received wisdom among critical media scholars
that the mainstream media generally act as handmaidens to the public relations
state in the manufacture of consent. Whether or not this describes accurately the
normal relationship of media and state, it is clear that, during the early months of
2003 at a time of geopolitical crisis, relations between some sections of the mass
media and state were and indeed remain severely strained. The degree of media
dissent may have also helped to legitimate and mobilize popular dissent, although
we also argue that the narrow terms on which some of that dissent was drawn
may, in the longer-term, have contributed to the fragility of the anti-war majority.
The relationship between media dissent and popular dissent is, of course, com-
plex and multi-causal, and requires, ideally, an holistic approach, both to media
(texts, production, and consumption) and to broader social and cultural change,
beyond that which we can attempt here.
Theoretical and methodological background

Jurgen Habermas (1996) sets himself a similar problem to the one we address: to
explain how in certain crisis situations, generally neglected actors in civil society
can assume “a surprisingly active and momentous role” (1996: 380). What inter-
ests Habermas is how poorly resourced and institutionally powerless groups and
movements can throw a spanner into the workings of the public sphere dominated
normally by the interests of the economically and politically powerful. This is a
267
key question for understanding how social change occurs in complex, mediated
societies and is essential for assessing the prospects of democratization. Echoing
the work of Alberto Melucci (1996) and others, Habermas argues that the great
issues of the last decades—feminism, ecology, nuclear disarmament, and global
poverty—have all been raised initially by new social movements and subcultures
who through effective dramatization (for example, by non-violent symbolic acts of
civil disobedience) of their concerns have persuaded the mass media to place the
issues on the “public agenda.” Of course, while opposition to the war was surprising
and momentous, it prevented neither the UK’s participation in the war nor a
sudden shift in public opinion in favor of war in March and April 2003.
While Habermas’ account (1996) possesses a certain plausibility, it needs to be
supplemented by considering how these groups may penetrate the confines of the
public sphere. Habermas seeks to explain this largely in terms of the mass media’s
self-understanding in liberal democratic societies (rightly or wrongly) as objective
observers of society. However, the ability of counter-publicity groups to make
their voices heard in the mass media depends not only on this self-understanding
but also on the existence of crisis in the public sphere, manifested through medi-
ated disagreement and controversy within economic, political, and cultural elites.
The destabilization of the public sphere is both a top-down (centre–periphery)
and a bottom-up (periphery–centre) process whose dimensions may be mutually
reinforcing. It follows that, to understand both the generation and outcomes of
crisis, one must grasp the dynamic relationship within and between elite and pop-
ular discourses, and between actors in the mass media public sphere and in the
counter-public sphere (Downey and Fenton 2003). Indeed, this is an essential
and overlooked task if we wish to understand social change in global modernity
(Fenton and Downey 2003).
We are interested primarily in three broad processes: the construction of con-
sensus (and dissent), the construction of authority (specifically authority to
represent the reality of what is happening in the world), and the naturalization of
facts or frameworks of interpretation (Potter 1996).
Taking these in turn, the build-up to a major international war is, obviously, a
time when many actors are intensely concerned with the representation, or con-
struction, of consensus around that war; what was immediately striking, however,
from the early days of the Iraq war build-up, was the degree to which consensus
against the war was also being constructed not just by media, but also by elements
within the military, diplomatic, political, and cultural elites. This was why we
chose the representation of consensus and dissent as our principal focus from the
outset. Consensus is however never just consensus; it is used, rhetorically, as a
warrant of truth (Potter 1996: 117). Hence the importance of the second theme:
the construction of particular actors as “entitled to know particular sorts of things
[so that] . . . their reports or descriptions may thus be given special credence”
(Potter 1996: 114), against which there is the equally important construction of
other actors as having a “stake” in this or that statement which disqualifies them
as credible sources (Potter 1996: 124–5). The construction of consensus and
268
authority occur within a third and wider construction, more difficult to detect:
what Potter calls “constructing out-thereness,” that is, the construction of certain
claims “as not being constructed’ (Potter 1996: 151, added emphasis).
This is a complex process: certain major explicit claims are presented as simply
factual (and therefore beyond contestation) on the basis of other claims that are
left implicit (but whose obviousness is assumed). The selection of background
and foreground “facts” is obviously crucial to what forms part of the apparently
natural “surface” of events and what does not. During the Iraq war build-up the
relative exclusion of certain issues from the frame of possible discussion (for
example, perspectives which challenged the relevance and justification of the US
timetable toward war) was important if other claims and statements (specifically
US and UK claims about what was happening) were to appear as “just” facts. This
complex process of light and shade is what Steve Woolgar has called “ontological
gerrymandering” (quoted in Potter 1996: 183–4). There was a lot of it around in
the early months of 2003.1
Our analysis focuses on press articles from the six days beginning January 27,
2003.2 Seven newspapers were chosen (the four broadsheet dailies—Daily Tele-
graph, Times, Guardian, Independent—and the top three tabloid dailies in terms of
circulation—Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail) to represent broadsheet and tabloid
opinion in the UK. All war-related articles were analyzed (the initial selection
used the Lexis-Nexis database and contained 955 articles), from which articles
(news items, but also editorial and “independent” comment columns) were chosen
for a more detailed discourse analysis on the basis of being broadly representative
either of the discourse positions and/or rhetorical strategies of newspapers. A full
list of the latter articles is contained in Appendix 1. Our analysis does not, there-
fore, pretend to be an exhaustive study of the full range of comment present (or
absent) during this period (this would have required a much more extensive study
that would have also considered images as well as written texts), but rather an
indicative analysis of certain key discourse positions that seem to us significant in
the broader construction of the crisis. Different discourse positions could be found
within the same newspaper during the Iraq crisis. This is indicative in itself of both
crisis and flux in the mass media public sphere concerning the then impending
invasion of Iraq.
The construction of consensus

The most unambiguous support for the UK/USA position was granted by the
Times. In contrast to other newspapers that backed the UK/USA position, the
Times supported both policy and rhetoric, at times appearing to see itself as coach
of a somewhat disorganized team. The editorial of January 30 assumes both the
existence of WMD under the control of Saddam and an Iraq invasion’s justifica-
tion, with or without the support of the UN Security Council, as a means of
protecting international security; there are no covert reasons for going to war (for
example, to secure access to oil supplies). Indeed the editorial, published on the
269
same day as a letter signed by eight European leaders in support of the US’s
stance, even holds out the prospect of constructing a united European–US posi-
tion. The chief stumbling block to this, of course, was the Franco-German
position that the UN inspectors should be given more time to complete their
work and that war should be contemplated only as a last resort. The predicational
strategy of the Times is illuminating. Jacques Chirac is accused of “posturing.”
This implies that his present opposition is not sincere, calculated in order to
bring about certain effects that would be to the advantage of France, and that
France’s opposition will be reversed once suitable accommodations could be
found. Schroeder is accused of “strategic pacifism.” Given that Germany under
Schroeder took part in the Kosovo conflict (its first military engagement since the
end of World War II), it is somewhat curious to accuse Schroeder of pacifism. Of
course, the charge of pacifism means that one can both explain and dismiss Ger-
many’s opposition by reference to this principle without having to justify the
present conflict by reference to the principle of a “just war.” The Times not merely
misrepresents the German position but also attempts to dispel pacifism’s positive
connotations by suggesting Schroeder’s was not a principled pacifism but adopted
for strategic reasons. Without claiming the Franco-German position was some-
how interest-free, our point is the Times’ contrast between the “universal”
interests represented by the UK/USA position (international security) and the
“particular” interests ascribed to the Franco-German position.
This editorial position had been developed in a comment article by Daniel
Finkelstein on January 28. Finkelstein supports war, with or without the UN’s res-
olutions. Finkelstein adopts a Kantian-sounding moral vocabulary that gives the
impression of possessing some intellectual authority. We have, according to
Finkelstein, a moral duty or obligation to maintain international security and this
demands that we should support the invasion of Iraq whether it has the sanction
of the UN or not. Whereas the UK/USA is presented as obeying a Kantian cate-
gorical imperative and as acting selflessly, the UN as an institution is brought into
question: “the Security Council is not a panel of disinterested philosophers. Its
decisions all too often are based on national prejudice, imperial adventurism, the
vanity of individuals, and the murderous impulses of dictators.” This juxta-
position of the UK/USA and the Security Council is contradictory and rather
ironic bearing in mind that the UK and USA are two of its five permanent mem-
bers and thus are presumably as interested as other members. The article’s clear
strategy is to remove the argument from matters of fact (whether or not Iraq pos-
sesses WMD and poses an imminent threat to the world) and, assuming that
“fact” as widely recognized, to convert the argument to one about morality. The
moral case for war is wrapped in a pseudo-Kantian vocabulary and presented as a
contrast between the dutiful and selfless UK/USA (going to war to protect the
universal good of international security) and the war’s immoral opponents.
The editorial of the Daily Telegraph “Why Britain should fight” on the day of the
publication of the Blix Report (January 27: p. 21) admitted that three-quarters of
the British public were opposed to war and argued this was because anti-war cam-
270
paigners were presenting the better argument; Tony Blair by pursuing a “narrow
legal” case for war against Iraq (i.e. via UN resolutions) had left the majority of the
public confused as to “what they are fighting for.” The only way to overturn the
anti-war consensus, the editorial argues, is to invoke the national interest irrespec-
tive of the reports of the UN inspectors; not only is the regime of Saddam a
military threat to the UK but also “let us not be shy of saying that it is in no one’s
interest for the [sic] some of the world’s key oil supplies to be in the hands of an
unstable dictator.” Ultimately, then, the war is about “who is the boss.” An Anglo-
American hegemony would also be good for Iraq, the region, and the world.
The Daily Telegraph is here arguing for a new era of imperialism based on liberal
representative democracy and free trade under the auspices of the benign powers
of the UK/USA. The account that it provides is strikingly similar to the radical
critique of the war aims. Of course, what is different is the evaluation of the out-
come. Prima facie, the Daily Telegraph’s assumption that, once anti-war
campaigners’ diagnosis of the war rationale is admitted, the majority of public
opinion will switch from being anti- to pro-war, is paradoxical; the paradox disap-
pears, however, if one assumes a natural consensus in favor of that rationale, once
directly stated.
While the Daily Telegraph’s assessment may indeed have been close to the un-
official government reasons for going to war, the open espousal of such a position
hardly helped Blair who at this stage was relying on winning UN Security Coun-
cil support for a war to win over public opinion and, therefore, emphasizing
the supposed threat of Saddam rather than the benefits of “regime change.” Not
only therefore was there no consensus for war but also no consensus among the
war’s supporters about how to wage the rhetorical battle for public opinion.
Indeed the clear anti-war consensus meant that assorted supporters of the UK
government felt at liberty to advocate various rhetorical repair jobs, thus adding
to the sense of confusion concerning the war’s justification and the impression
that the official justification was a screen to cover imperial ambitions. (In this
context, the contradiction between the Daily Telegraph’s claim that the UN
inspectors were irrelevant on January 27 and its editorial (January 28: 21) the day
after the Blix report’s publication stating the “case for war [was] still strong” seems
less surprising.)
The Daily Telegraph’s discourse position was consistently adopted across genres
(news reports, comment columns, and editorials). Even the devastating and sur-
real comment article by comedian Armando Iannucci, that offered an immanent
critique of the UK/USA attitude toward the authority of the UN and the notion
of a pre-emptive self-defense, may be seen as consistent with the newspaper’s
stress on realpolitik (the overwhelming importance of projecting Anglo-American
power in oil rich regions of the world).
Whereas the Daily Telegraph clearly supported a war against Iraq if not entirely
for the reasons used by the UK Government, the Daily Mail came out against the
war in editorials on January 27 and 28 (p. 10 on both occasions), stating that the
UK and USA had failed to provide evidence that Iraq was an “imminent threat”
271
and consequently the war was not justified. The Daily Mail’s doubts went beyond
the evidential, however. Rather than sharing the Daily Telegraph’s judgment that
a post-Saddam Anglo-American empire would be good for UK and global inter-
ests, the Daily Mail, after noting the great likelihood of conflict, comments: “at
what cost to the Middle East, world oil supplies, the war against terrorism, the
Western alliance and the public’s trust in the prime minister remains to be seen”
(January 27: 10). It is not that the Daily Mail is against an Anglo-American
empire, just that it believes that this enterprise is likely to backfire. The Daily
Telegraph and Daily Mail agree on the criteria by which the world should be
judged but have radically different projections of the consequences of war.
Whereas the Daily Telegraph was consistent in its discourse position, the Daily
Mail adopted a number of positions across different genres. Its columnists, for
example, ranged from the skeptical (in line with the editor: for example Peter
McKay January 27: 13; Keith Waterhouse January 27: 14) to that of Melanie
Phillips (January 27: 10) who bolted a “clash of civilizations” thesis between the
“West” and Islam onto a “decline of European civilisation” argument, reaching
general conclusions about Islam from the activities of neofundamentalist groups
and distinguishing liberal Europe (unwilling to defend itself, therefore likely to be
crushed by the “Islamist tiger”) from the USA (strongly nationalist, deeply reli-
gious, and prepared to fight). The meaning of Phillips’ argument is clear: Europe’s
survival is dependent upon becoming more like the USA and rejecting liberalism
in all shapes and forms.
Despite an editorial line that was skeptical of the UK/USA position, Daily Mail
news journalists accepted the UK/USA framing of the conflict. Thus coverage
written by David Hughes of the Blix report claimed the report exposed Iraq’s
“charade” (adopting uncritically the phrase of Jack Straw), so that “the count-
down to war quickened last night” (January 28: 4–5). The illogical idea of a
countdown quickening (rather than, say, being continued or interrupted) is a
strategy of intensification taken from the UK/USA. The elision of the actors (the
people setting up the “countdown”) serves to make conflict appear an unavoid-
able, natural process rather than a humanly constructed, and thus entirely
mutable, series of events. The same journalist employs the same strategies a day
later when writing of the “looming conflict” (January 29: 15) as though the con-
flict had a life of its own, beyond human control.
The Independent adopted a consistently anti-war position across genres with
Robert Fisk spearheading its coverage and analysis of the conflict. Fisk used the
occasion of the day of the Blix Report to launch a broadside against UK/USA
“deceptions” (January 27: 5). The first “deception” is that Saddam is a dictator
who poses an imminent threat to the region and the world in the manner of
Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, making the anti-war position one of “appease-
ment.” Not only was this Saddam/ Hitler elision intended to bring the conflict
closer to home, thereby making the threat appear more real, but it also borrowed
World War II’s legitimacy for the present conflict while intimating a successful
conclusion. This was a key strategy of the UK/USA because it provided the moral
272
justification for war and was an argument designed to appeal to liberals, leftists,
and pacificists by questioning the morality of their moral opposition to the pre-
sent conflict. The difficulty in disrupting this analogy lay, Fisk argued, in the
obviously brutal character of Saddam’s regime. The easier task was to disrupt the
idea that Saddam posed the same threat to the world after a crushing military
defeat in the 1991 Gulf War and 12 years of sanctions and containment as Hitler
did in the 1930s after the German annexations and invasions of Czechoslovakia
and Poland. That is, of course, why the issue of “weapons of mass destruction” was
crucial. Fisk asks whether “we are prepared to pay the price of so promiscuous a
war” and points to the likelihood that thousands of Iraqis will die and that the
UK/USA will be seen as an occupying power that will strengthen support for
neofundamentalist groups. The second deception, Fisk argued, was that the war
was not about oil. While the UK/USA insisted that the war was exclusively about
WMD, the Iraqi regime and protesters insisted that the war was about the imper-
ial control of Iraq’s oil and that the issue of WMD was a rhetorical fig leaf to
cover naked ambition and self-interest. This was the central argument of more
radical anti-war protesters for whom the UN “weapons inspections” were a public
relations charade. This radical position seemed to win widespread support in
everyday life in the weeks leading up to the war. Even many war supporters did
not believe the UK/USA official version of the war.
Fisk presents the UK/USA as relatively isolated: “The only other nation push-
ing for war—save for the ever-grateful Kuwait—is Israel.” This serves of course to
emphasize the lack of consensus in favor of war internationally and to damn the
UK/USA through association with an already occupying power. Domestically the
populations of the UK/USA, despite “being told to go to war by their newspapers
and television stations and politicians,” are becoming increasingly skeptical of
the claims of their governments. Indeed, the “popular” consensus in Britain is
anti-war. What Fisk does not explain, however, is how this might be so: is this
popular anti-war consensus generated from the periphery? Does Fisk overstate the
elite consensus? Or do both play a role in the generation of popular dissent? In
any case, it is this “popular” consensus for which Fisk claimed to speak.
A striking feature of press coverage in this period, notwithstanding this signifi-
cant dissent about the ends and means of war, was the de facto consensus
constructed around the time-frame of the UK/USA war build-up. The dominant
news-frame almost everywhere was the momentum building toward war around
the UK/USA diplomatic agenda. Turning to the three remaining papers in our
sample, this was virtually the only perspective referred to in the Sun and it also
dominated the news coverage in the Guardian; only in the Daily Mirror did other
perspectives contribute to news reports, and then always within a context deter-
mined by the UK/USA official agenda.
Since the Sun has been the most belligerent UK newspaper, its construction of
national and international consensus for its position was hardly surprising. This
was expressed not only in terms of UK “hearts and minds” (January 30: 9) but also
in terms of a broad coalition of “the West v the Rest” (headline January 30: 9)
273
and even “the world” being on course for war (January 28: 8). There were other
more disturbing aspects to this construction of consensus: the denigration of
Islam and asylum-seekers set up a situation where Muslims were seen as the
“enemy within.” Where dissent from this “consensus” was mentioned, it was
always in disparaging terms: unspecified “anti-war campaigners” (January 28: 8),
“rebel lefties” and the “loopy left” (January 30: 9).
Since the Guardian was the newspaper whose editorial opposition to war was
most predictable from its general discourse, its reproduction of the momentum for
war in its lead news items is more surprising: for example, the suggestion of a diplo-
matic “consensus” after the Blix report that Iraq was not cooperating (January
28: 1); in addition, the isolation of France implied by its comment (after the Blair/
Bush summit on January 31) that, while the UK and US were seeking to convince
“the international community,” Blair felt increasing “frustration with the French”
(who, however, would have “the squeeze” put on them) (February 2: 1).3 The sig-
nificance of these suggestions in Guardian news reports emerges more clearly when
we look later at their close reliance on UK and US diplomatic agendas; for now, we
should just note that it was at odds with the Guardian’s clear editorial position
(January 28, January 30) against the war.
In contrast, the Mirror followed its editorials’ anti-war position into its news
articles, interpreting diplomatic reactions after the Blix report as a consensus
against war that left the US isolated (January 28: 4) and mocking Blair’s Janu-
ary 29 House of Commons performance as “My war against the world” (headline,
January 30: 2). Here there was an overlap with the editorials, if not the news cov-
erage, of the Guardian which argued (January 28: 21) that the UK/USA reaction
to the Blix report “will not be how most of the world views” that report and (Jan-
uary 30: 23) insisted that Blair should overturn his existing pro-war, pro-Bush
policy and instead “speak for this nation.” The idea that, far from war tapping
into a national consensus, war went directly against the national consensus
(noted already in Robert Fisk’s writing for The Independent) was developed later in
the week by the Daily Mirror (January 31: 6), reporting its commissioned YouGov
poll that showed 75 percent currently against the war and, more strikingly, only 2
percent believing that the war would make them safer from terrorist attack. The
resulting image of Blair as the isolated leader battling against the tides of popular
opinion remained, however, ambiguous, as we note below.
To sum up, the Times, Daily Telegraph and Sun (the two biggest circulation
broadsheet papers and the biggest tabloid) supported the UK/USA war at this
stage but the last two used arguments for war (for example, control over oil, the
West versus the rest) that were antithetical to the official UK/USA position.
These arguments presumably only helped to confirm popular doubts about the
truthfulness of the official line. Only the Sun claimed an international and
domestic consensus existed in favor of war. The other newspapers clearly recog-
nized and commented upon both the international and domestic absence of such
a consensus, even if in more subtle ways they generally reinforced, rather than
challenged, the event-frame assumed by the UK/USA position. The four news-
274
papers that took anti-war editorial stances did so for contrasting reasons. While
the Daily Mail was simply concerned about whether the national interest would
be served by war, the Independent, Guardian, and Daily Mirror raised moral objec-
tions concerning the consequences of war.
Media elites, then, were split not only in terms of which action would further
national interests but also of which actions were moral. The confusion between
the two in anti-war positions is one explanation why, once the war started, some
newspapers and some of the public swung in behind the UK/USA position. It was
not that they supported the war but that once the war which appeared irre-
versible had started, apparently consensual appeals to “the nation” (for example,
the call to support “our” armed forces) trumped prior doubts concerning whether
the war was, in fact, in the national interest.4
The uses of authority

Max Weber (1968) argued that modern societies have developed three types of
authority: rational–legal, traditional, and charismatic. Rational–legal authority is
developed from impersonal rule-based institutions and practices, traditional
authority from historical continuities of institutions and practices, and charis-
matic authority rests on the force of personality of protagonists.
During the period of our analysis the UK/USA were attempting to develop an
international rational–legal justification for war through the United Nations
Security Council. As the possibility of this receded in February and March, there
was a concerted attempt to question both the authority of the UN and that of the
governments of anti-war states (most notably, the French President, Jacques
Chirac). The failure to win international rational–legal authority meant that
such a justification had to be produced nationally (via a vote in the House of
Commons and the Attorney-General’s opinion on the legal basis for war) but
such an enterprise was hindered by the obvious failure to secure an international
agreement. In such circumstances, the attempt to build support for war drew
increasingly heavily upon the charismatic authority of Tony Blair.
A striking feature of the early articles we analyzed was the limited range of
interpretative sources that were treated as credible. All newspapers reproduced
extensive quotations from official speeches by US and UK politicians, the obvi-
ous “primary definers” in the build-up to war (Hall et al. 1978). Also universally
cited was Hans Blix himself, as the UN weapons inspector more inclined toward
the UK/USA position (note that the Sun never referred at all to Mohammed al-
Baradei, the head of the Atomic Weapons Authority, who reported alongside
Blix that the possibility of Iraq’s nuclear weapons could be eliminated in
months). More significant are differences in how other sources were treated. UK
intelligence sources played a significant part in the week’s events, with the
announcement late on January 26 (the day before the Blix report) that the UK
government had handed a “dossier” reporting Saddam’s breaches of cooperation
with the UN inspectors. The Sun reported these intelligence claims directly as
275
fact (“Saddam is using guerrilla tactics to sabotage the hunt for his doomsday
weapons, it emerged last night,” January 27: 2); in the Guardian (January 27: 1)
the story was the fact of the intelligence briefing itself and its diplomatic signifi-
cance, although there was little reference in its main news report to alternative
interpretations of the claims in the briefing. Only in the Mirror was there substan-
tial skepticism, with its sub-headline “War in weeks as Blair gives ‘evidence’ for
attack” (January 27: 4).
Similar differences were played out in news treatment of diplomatic sources.
While the Sun presented UK and US diplomatic sources without any suggestion
of distance from them, the Guardian on occasion indicated skepticism (for exam-
ple in noting (January 28: 1) the difference between the UK Foreign Secretary’s
“bellicose” interpretation of the Blix report and the UK ambassador to the
United Nations’ more cautious interpretation). On other occasions, however, it is
striking how close the Guardian’s news reports stayed to the interpretation that
the UK and US administrations were encouraging; its front page February 1
report on the Blair/ Bush Washington summit read more like a Whitehall press
release (“Mr Blair impressed on the Americans . . . Mr Blair secured support [from
the US],” and so on). The implication—one that UK diplomats no doubt encour-
aged—was that the summit was about diplomacy (Blair restraining Bush from war)
even though, as the same report made clear, Blair had already secured Bush’s sup-
port on the need for a second UN resolution by phone on the evening before the
summit. Why then the time and expense of Blair’s transatlantic visit? The reason,
already anticipated in media comment earlier that week, emerged clearly in the
Sun’s news report, but was fudged in the Guardian: “The President and the PM
thrashed out final details for an onslaught beginning in mid-March—as exclu-
sively revealed in yesterday’s Sun.” So much for diplomats’ claim (reported by the
Guardian without demur) that the summit was a “council of diplomacy”! Only
the Mirror kept a more consistent distance from official UK/USA sources.
A quite different issue of authority concerned Blair’s own standing as prime
minister. Some personalization of the war build-up is hardly surprising. The per-
sonalization, however, that really mattered for the British public’s perception of
the issues at stake concerned Blair himself. A theme, more dominant in press
coverage nearer to the outbreak of war, was the presentation of Blair as the lone
leader, bravely opposing the skepticism of his people at considerable personal
cost. It is worth noting the assumptions about the credibility of Blair’s self-
representation as a man of “ideals” upon which this depended. Possibly the
strongest attack on Blair’s policy during the week we analyzed came in a Guardian
editorial (January 30: 23), which argued that his policy would have results
directly at odds with his ideals (of “global justice” and so on). Even this criticism
already conceded that the prime minister was motivated by “ideals,” rather than,
say, by a calculation of Britain’s strategic interests; yet this was a reading of Blair’s
actions and motives on which he later played himself when under maximum
pressure just before war started. We see how, behind the surface of dissent from
the British government’s position, there were significant limits to that dissent.
276
While pro-war reports tended to personalize the war by focusing on Saddam—

contrasting him with Bush and Blair, comparing him to Hitler—thereby creating
the impression that the war was not against Iraq but against Saddam, the Daily
Mirror resolutely referred to the “war on Iraq.” The contrasting referential strate-
gies are designed to connote different types of conflict—one limited and precise
with few casualties, the other widespread with many casualties. This counter-
personalization strategy was accompanied by a re-personalization strategy.
January 31 was an excellent example. The Mirror’s front page carries the story of
a Nelson Mandela speech in Johannesburg criticizing the UK/USA position and
ties this in to the anti-war petition organized by the newspaper. This is followed
by a longer news story relating to the speech (pp. 4 and 5). Also on page 5 is an
article relating to two popular Labour politicians’ (Claire Short and Tony Benn)
criticism of the UK/USA position. This is followed on page 6 by an editorial sup-
porting Mandela. On pages 8 and 9 there is a list of celebrities, politicians, and
war heroes who have signed the paper’s anti-war petition. The global meaning of
“Mandela” is that of selfless and ultimately victorious struggle against oppression.
The Daily Mirror (January 31: 6) editorial asks Blair (and by extension the
British people) to choose between Mandela, “symbol of honour, principle and
commitment to justice” and Bush, “the warmongering president.”
The reliance on charismatic authority, rather than legal–rational and tradi-
tional authority, to legitimate dissent at this time needs to be understood both in
terms of the discourse strategies and the character of British society. The UN’s
rational–legal authority, for example, was ambiguous from the point of view of
the anti-war movement, since accepting the UN’s authority could have under-
mined the anti-war movement if the UK/USA had in fact persuaded the
Security Council to back war. Traditional authority figures were also rarely used
to legitimate dissent. Anti-war religious leaders, for example, were given a much
lower profile in the UK than in Germany and Italy. The Daily Mirror clearly
judged that the oppositional opinion of pop stars would do more for the anti-war
cause than that of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or leading British
Muslim clerics.
Closing down/opening up the argument

We now look more specifically at how press coverage naturalized certain frame-
works of interpretation of great relevance to the official UK/USA position on
events. We have already seen how the UK press gave credence to UK/USA intel-
ligence and diplomatic sources in ways that were at least open to question. The
broad UK/USA policy framework (that the war was “to disarm” Iraq) and its
inherent military momentum (in relation to which the UN inspections were
merely a “delay”) was naturalized right across the British press. It was uncommon
to find dissenting opinion reflected, or even acknowledged, in the news articles
we analyzed; even in the comment columns, dissenting opinion was often surpris-
ingly uncritical on this crucial point with the exception of some columnists
277
writing for the Daily Mirror, Independent, and Guardian who directly raised oil
resources as a key reason lying behind the UK/USA drive to war.
The naturalization of the UK/USA perspective took the form, first, of constant
references to “time running out” for peace. This was, of course, the stated
UK/USA position, but it became naturalized when, for example, UN inspectors
were described as having “earned themselves” a few further weeks, whereas the
UK had “nudge[d] back Bush’s decision to go to war” (The Guardian, January
28: 1); or when the UK’s release of “intelligence” information just before Blix’s
report was described as if it were a disinterested speeding-up of the weapons
inspections: “Britain is aiming to prevent the process from dragging on indefi-
nitely, by handing over and publicizing sensitive intelligence which allegedly
shows that Iraq is flouting the UN” (January 1: 1). The word “allegedly” hardly
counters the naturalizing force of that apparently neutral phrase “the process.”
“The process” is not the UN inspections as such, but those inspections as inter-
preted by the US and UK (as “delay” to their underlying war timetable; otherwise
how could a few months’ inspections be seen as “dragging on indefinitely”?). The
Guardian’s editorial (January 28: 23) made a concerted effort to dislodge this nat-
uralization, by arguing that it was the inspections process that was “natural” and
should be left undisturbed: “if the Bush administration and its admirers wish to
curtail or cancel this UN process, after a mere two months or so, it is up to them
to explain why. They have not done so to date . . . ” Yet this fundamental point
failed to influence the Guardian’s own news reports later in the week, most impor-
tantly in its reports of the Blair/ Bush summit (see above).
It is worth noting what metaphors came to dominate in newspapers’ coverage
of the war build-up. We might have expected the metaphor of war as something
to fear (Mirror, January 27), although in fact it was surprisingly rare; we might
also have expected the Sun’s celebration of Blair confronting his critics in the
House of Commons on January 29 as a man of action: “the Prime Minister raised
the stakes . . . [he] was stung into action . . . under fire from all sides . . . it was the
first time he had lined up Stalinist tyrant Kim Jong II for a possible military
strike.” With an image of a watchful rifle-carrying UK soldier above the article,
and a comic-book picture of the globe with members of the “axis of evil” named
within jagged balloons (like mini-explosions), it was almost as if the war had
begun (Sun, January 30: 8). Less expected, however, was the way that this “Boy’s
Own” picture of Blair—as the isolated, embattled, but brave quasi-military
leader—circulated beyond the pages of the Sun and into articles elsewhere that
prima facie were strongly critical of the Prime Minister (for example, the colum-
nist Jackie Ashley’s article: The Guardian, January 30: 21).
Such an idea of Blair as the embattled leader was however double-edged, as
became clear in the article published in the Mirror the next day (January 31: 6)
by Ashley’s fellow Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, headed “A leader
who has left behind his people.” This article analyzed the devastating findings of
that day’s YouGov poll (referred to above) and concluded that Blair was isolated
from his people as never before. However:
278
. . . that is not, by itself, a reason to condemn him. On the contrary, it

can be a mark of greatness for a politician that he dares to lead, rather
than follow his people. We always say we want someone who is prepared
to trust his own convictions rather than merely obey opinion polls. Well
now we have one.
Not surprisingly, this was a line used to great effect by Blair’s supporters (and even
some of his formal Conservative opponents) later in the war build-up. The article
concluded:
How will historians look back at this solo stance by Tony Blair? That
depends on the outcome of the coming war. But they will either say this
was his defining act of great statesmanship—or the decision that ulti-
mately led to his downfall.
Naturalized here are a number of assumptions: first, that the war was inevitable
(remember this “critical” piece was written a full two weeks before the largest of
the global anti-war protests on February 15); second, that Blair’s position was dic-
tated solely by a sense of what is right (otherwise, how can the mere success of the
war be grounds for attributing his stance to “statesmanship,” rather than, say,
lucky miscalculation?); third, that Blair will survive, if he does, because his policy
proves a success, rather than because his opponents fail to oppose him (much
closer to the truth, as we write); and finally, and most obviously, that if the war is
a “success” on UK/USA terms, it will be impossible to interpret otherwise than to
Blair’s credit, which precisely reproduces the UK/USA framework for interpret-
ing the build-up to war as “inevitable.”
If the image of Blair, the isolated leader, rose to prominence, it is worth asking
what other themes (less favorable to the UK/USA position) received less promi-
nence in UK press coverage. A minimal list would be:
• the arguments behind the French, German, Russian, or Chinese positions

against the war, let alone those of Arab or Latin American countries, who
faced acute risks in opposing the US;
• the range of dissent (both popular and elite) within the US (it was Le Monde
which reported the Washington Post anti-war article by the US’s Supreme
commander in Gulf War I, Norman Schwarzkopf: Le Monde, January 31: 15);
• underlying concerns whether a war was likely to increase Britain’s risk of
being a target for “terrorist” attack (mentioned for example in Freedland’s
article, but rarely referred to in news coverage);
• the opinions on the war of Britain’s ethnic minorities, especially its Muslim
population (to its credit, the Guardian later began a comment column which
tried to cover this, but this was the exception, not the rule).
279
Yet it must also be noted that, in contrast to this naturalization of the UK/USA
framework for interpreting the coming war, the Mail, Guardian, Independent, and
Mirror began to give the anti-war movement greater prominence, especially in
the period directly after our sample week. The Mirror was the most campaigning
anti-war paper, urging its readers to sign a petition (by February 15 it claimed to
have collected 195,000 signatures) and also sponsoring the “Stop the war coali-
tion” march on February 15. On the morning of the march the Mirror headline
read “The world against the war” with the contents devoted to details of the glob-
alization of the anti-war protests and accounts of the preparations for the London
deomonstration. The Guardian and Independent ran stories about first-time “ordi-
nary” protesters. The Mail provided a map for its readers wishing to join the
march. The anti-war movement, if only for a while, cut across ethnic, class, reli-
gious, and political boundaries, as newspapers helped to construct as well as
simply reflect the diverse character of the movement.
Conclusion
How are we to make overall sense of this complex picture? The fundamental
point is that elite media and political discourse concerning the waging of a war
against Iraq in the UK was deeply divided. Opinion was divided concerning
whether war was in the national interest and/or right morally. Generally speaking
right-wing papers (Times, Telegraph, Sun, Mail) either supported or opposed the
war along lines of perceived national interest whereas liberal and left-of-centre
newspapers (Mirror, Independent, Guardian) employed arguments questioning the
morality of the UK/USA position. Divisions within elite media discourse and the
consequent legitimation of dissent helped to establish the preconditions for a suc-
cessful mobilization of one and a half million people on the streets of central
London in winter. To understand this mobilization fully, one must acknowledge
not only the legitimacy crisis in the public sphere but also the creative disobedi-
ence of counter-public spheres and alternative media in encouraging such a
display of public opposition.
Of course, public opposition to the war did not prevent it taking place (for
reasons which we have also explored) and, when the war started, media represen-
tations and public opinion shifted to being pro-war. In the longer term, as the
memory of “liberation” fades in the face of the realities of occupation, critical
media voices are returning and popular disaffection is growing. In the post-war
situation, there is no naturalized “timetable” on which the UK/USA position can
rely to close down popular dissent. On the contrary, the situation in Iraq, the UK,
and the US is open-ended and uncertain. It remains to be seen what conse-
quences the long-term legacy of dissent from the war at all levels will have for
national and international politics.
280
Notes
1 Nor of course, in the UK, was it unique to this period: compare Fairclough’s analysis of
New Labour language in relation to “the international community” during the Kosovo
war (Fairclough 2000, p. 152–3).
2 Sunday papers were excluded since the principal war-related events (Blix report, State
of Union address, Blair–Bush summit) all occurred during Monday to Friday.
3 The same article’s sub-headline was “Blair gains extra time to win over waverers.”
4 There were other reasons for this shift: the limitations inherent in the framework of
mediated dissent (see next two sections) and probably a general fatalism (cf Croteau
1995, p. 115).
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nity,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 79–105.
Chiapello, Eve and Fairclough, Norman (2002) “Understanding the new management
ideology: a transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new soci-
ology of capitalism,” Discourse and Society, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 185–208.
Croteau, David (1995) Politics and the Class Divide, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press.
Downey, John and Fenton, Natalie (2003) “New media, counter publicity and the public
sphere,” New Media and Society, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 185–202.
Fairclough, Norman (1995) Media Discourse, London: Arnold.
Fairclough, Norman (2000) New Labour, New Language, London: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman and Wodak, Ruth (1997) “Critical discourse analysis” in T. Van Dijk
(ed.), Discourse as Social Interactions, London: Sage, pp. 258–84.
Fenton, Natalie and Downey, John (2003) “Counter public spheres and global modernity,”
Javnost, vol. X, no. 1, pp. 15–31.
Habermas, Jurgen (1996) Between Facts and Norms, Polity: Cambridge.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., and Roberts, B., (1978) Policing the Crisis:
Mugging the State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan.
Melucci, Alberto (1996) Challenging Codes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Potter, Jonathan (1996) Representing Reality, London: Sage.
Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Michael (eds) (2001) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, Sage:
London.
Appendix 1
List of 2003 articles chosen for detailed analysis:
January 27
The Daily Telegraph, editorial, p. 21
Daily Mail, editorial, p. 10
Daily Mail, comment, Peter McKay, p. 13
Daily Mail, comment, Keith Waterhouse, p. 14
Daily Mail, comment, Melanie Phillips, p. 10
281
The Independent, comment, Robert Fisk, p. 5

The Guardian, lead story, Wintour/Watt/Younge, p. 1
The Sun, lead story, Wooding, p. 2
The Mirror, Hardy article, pp. 4–5
January 28
The Daily Telegraph, editorial, p. 21
Daily Mail, editorial, p. 10
Daily Mail, news, David Hughes, pp. 4–5
The Times, comment, Daniel Finkelstein
The Guardian, lead story, Borger/White/Macaskill, p. 1
The Sun, Kavanagh/Flinn article, pp. 8–9
The Mirror, Wallace article, pp. 4–5
The Guardian, editorial, p. 21
The Sun, editorial, p. 8
Mirror, editorial, p. 6
January 29
Daily Mail, news, David Hughes, p. 15
January 30
The Times, editorial
The Guardian, lead comment, Jackie Ashley, p. 21
The Sun, lead comment, Kavanagh, p. 9
The Mirror, lead story, Hardy, plus Routledge comment, p. 2
The Guardian, editorial, p. 23
The Sun, editorial, p. 8
January 31
The Guardian, lead story, Wintour/Campbell, p. 1
The Sun, lead story, Pascoe-Watson, p. 2
The Mirror, lead comment, Jonathan Freedland, p. 6
The Mirror, pp. 1–9
February 1
The Guardian, lead story, Wintour/Borger, p. 1
The Sun, lead story, Pascoe-Watson, p. 2
The Mirror, news article, Roberts, pp. 4–5
282
15
HOW BRITISH TELEVISION
NEWS REPRESENTED THE CASE
FO R THE WAR IN IRAQ 1
Justin Lewis and Rod Brookes
Introduction
There has been much interest in whether there has been a fundamental transfor-
mation in governments’ attempts to manage news coverage of international
conflict in the post-Cold war era (Thussu and Freedman 2003). The effects of
globalization and technological development on the production, distribution,
and consumption of the media have been seen as crucial: the proliferation of new
sources of information (Allan 2002); the emergence of transnational, 24-hour
rolling news channels (Thussu 2003); the uncertain future of state-owned and
public broadcasters in the context of deregulation, privatization, and the growth
of transnational entertainment-based, mainly US-owned media conglomerates;
and the development of transnational media services such as Al-Jazeera serving
diasporic communities that transcend national boundaries (Miladi 2003). The
events of September 11, 2001 and the adoption by the US government of policies
based on pre-emptive military intervention have given urgency to this discussion
(Zelizer and Allan 2002; Thussu and Freedman 2003).
Two key aspects of the British news media’s role in covering the war in Iraq in
the UK cut across most of these themes. The first was an attack led by the British
government on the role of particular news organizations in undermining its case
for the war: its targets being Al-Jazeera and other Arabic media, and, most signif-
icantly, the BBC.2 The second was a debate about the implications of the
Pentagon-led policy of embedded reporting. Purportedly an exercise in facilitat-
ing access for news organizations to the frontline (enabled by the development of
portable communications technology), the policy had attracted criticism for
encouraging a sense of identification among reporters with the military units on
whom they were dependent for everyday survival.
Contributions to these two debates have often focused on particular episodes.
The most notable was BBC Radio 4 Today correspondent Andrew Gilligan’s report
that members of the British security services were unhappy that the government’s
283
dossier on Iraqi WMD had been “sexed up” by 10 Downing Street. In many quar-
ters, this single episode was held up as symptomatic of the BBC institutional
anti-war bias. In this article we take a broader view in order to test competing
claims over different broadcasters’ coverage of the case for the war. Our analysis is
based on an extensive content analysis of weeknight bulletins by the most-
watched UK television news providers during the war itself.
In the six months leading up to the beginning of the war, opinion polls sug-
gested that public opinion was divided. Those in support of a war against Iraq to
remove Saddam varied between 30 percent and 40 percent throughout those six
months.3 Support for the war with Iraq rose significantly on two conditions: first, if
it could be shown that Iraq possessed WMD, or second, if the war had the approval
of the United Nations. In an ICM poll for the Guardian, for example (September
20–2, 2002), only 37 percent approved of a military attack to remove Saddam
Hussein, as opposed to 46 percent against. However the number approving if the
government provided evidence that Saddam possessed WMD rose to 65 percent.
Conversely, polls indicate that even with evidence that Saddam possessed WMD
about a quarter of the population were still against a war. The polls therefore indi-
cated that there was a significant group who could be won over to either side
(Kellner 2003).
Three arguments were central to the case for war: the assertion that Iraq pos-
sessed—and might use—WMD; the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime; and
the notion that an invasion was in support of (and supported by) the Iraqi people
themselves.
In the ensuing battle for public opinion, a significant shift occurred during the
war itself, when polls suggested support for the war—without the two conditions
having been met—rose to high enough levels for the government to be able to
claim majority (though by no means overwhelming) support. Research suggests
that this was partly a function of a residual feeling of patriotism—once war began,
some people felt it was important to put aside doubts and support the mission of
the British armed forces.4 But we were also interested to see how the govern-
ment’s case for war was presented during the conflict.
Methodology
We carried out a content analysis of the four main British television news sources
during the Iraq war in order to examine the patterns of coverage and to assess the
degree to which the government’s case for war was validated or undermined by
that coverage. We chose BBC News at Six; ITV Evening News at 6:30 p.m.; Chan-
nel 4 News at 7 p.m. and Sky News at Ten. The early evening news programs on
BBC and ITV were chosen because they are generally the most popular, and
because they were more consistent in terms of time slot and length throughout
the war than the late evening bulletins.
Each news bulletin was broken down into discrete units of analysis—something
increasingly difficult to do in contemporary styles of broadcasting, especially when
284
B R I T I S H T V N E W S A N D T H E C A S E F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
one news event dominates the news bulletin, and various reports flow into one
another. In this study a “report” involved an identifiable, authored segment of the
news program: a news anchor’s introduction—if it contained substantive informa-
tion in its own right—and a correspondent’s report would typically be coded as
two discrete reports.
The sample consisted of 1,534 reports, all of which were coded by type/
authorship. This allowed us to look at the overall shape of news coverage in
order to see which part of the news operations were important in relaying infor-
mation to viewers. The main categories of authorship used in our analysis were
as follows:
• Embedded reporter
• Baghdad reporter
• Qatar reporter
• unilateral reporter
• available footage
• studio analysis
• interview with reporter
• interview with expert(s)
• anchor.
Methodologically the task of differentiating between categories of news reporting

proved difficult. This problem was, in itself, revealing about the character of tele-
vision news coverage of the 2003 Iraq war, whereby it was often hard to identify
the origins of a report. There were a substantial number of reports sent back by
front line correspondents clearly showing the correspondent embedded with their
unit. Reports filed by Baghdad-based reporters were also relatively easy to iden-
tify, at least until the arrival of embedded and unilateral correspondents after the
US forces entered the city. There were, however, a large number of reports whose
origin was unclear.
Some of these were edited by correspondents embedded with the Ministry of
Defence’s Forward Transmission Unit (known as the FTU), based initially in
north Kuwait and, a week into the war, six miles north of the Iraqi border (Franks
2003). These correspondents were intended to form the “hub,” their role to edit
reports sent back from front-line embedded correspondents or “spokes” (whose
reports were pooled) in an attempt to convey a broader picture of the war in a way
that the embeds could not (see Lewis et al. 2003 for a detailed analysis of the hub
and spokes system). Reporters at the hub also had access to other footage—from a
range of sources—which were inserted to accompany the reporter’s narration.
Thus while a report’s voiceover might have been an embedded reporter, the
footage came from a range of (embedded and non-embedded) sources whose origin
was difficult to identify.
Where we could not positively identify the origins of stories as filed by any of
the above types of correspondent we coded these under the category “available
285
footage.” This category could include footage from embedded reporters and uni-
laterals from the same news organization or others through pools, news agencies,
news exchanges as well as footage from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence
(MoD).
Stories filed by embedded reporters, Baghdad-based unilaterals, roving uni-
laterals and Doha-based correspondents, were coded thus when they were clearly
marked as such. Two-ways between anchors and correspondents in the region
were coded under the category of reporter they were with, on the basis that it was
the correspondent who provided most of the information during the exchange.
Some reporters—notably political correspondents—delivered much of their
reports during two-ways with anchors, and these were categorized as “interviews
with reporters.”
The first stage of analysis gave us a broad picture of how the war was covered.
The second stage of analysis focused on the three main themes central to the case
for war:
1 Iraq had a program of WMD which constituted a threat;

2 Saddam was an evil and brutal dictator;
3 his regime repressed an Iraqi people who would welcome liberation through
US/UK military intervention.
We explored the presence and treatment of these themes during the war, in order
to see the extent to which broadcasters embraced or rejected the government’s
case.
Theme 1: Iraqi WMD capability

These were references that alluded to the Iraqi possession of WMD. This
included footage of the US/UK forces’ discovery of facilities suggesting evidence
of WMD capability, stories in which US/UK forces or correspondents donned gas
masks or chemical protection suits (thus implying the clear and present threat of
Iraqi deployment of chemical or biological weapons), and speculation about Iraq’s
WMD capability.
We coded assessments of Iraqi WMD under two broad headings: those refer-
ences that asserted or implied the possible or likely presence of chemical/biological
weapons, and those references that either cast doubt or denied Iraqi WMD
capability.
Theme 2: rescuing the Iraqi people

While the presence of WMD—and the threat they posed—constituted the legal
basis of the government’s case for invading Iraq, war supporters also stressed the
moral basis of intervention, as the only way in which the Iraqi people could be
liberated from Saddam’s oppressive regime. Critical to this argument was the idea
286
that the Iraqi people would welcome liberation, and that civilian casualties could
be kept to a minimum.5 We therefore coded every reference to the condition and
attitude of the Iraqi people in order to see whether they were represented as sup-
porting and celebrating the invasion, or as suspicious, angry, or hostile. We also
coded every reference to news of Iraqi casualties (although it would be a mistake
to assume that news of civilian casualties was necessarily a problem for the gov-
ernment’s case, as the numbers reported in these cases were usually quite small,
which could be interpreted as supporting the idea that casualties were minimal).
Theme 3: the depravity of the Iraqi regime

A significant moment in the media coverage of the war was the broadcast by Al-
Jazeera of footage showing two dead British soldiers. On March 27, during a press
conference with George Bush, Tony Blair seized on these photographs, asserting
(incorrectly, as it transpired) that these soldiers were executed POWs. In a con-
demnation shown on all the British news channels, he claimed that “if anyone
needed further evidence of the depravity of Saddam’s regime, this atrocity pro-
vides it.” We coded all such references as indicative of the depravity of the
Saddam Hussein regime—a list which included visual footage of UK/US forces’
discoveries of torture chambers or morgues, condemnations of Iraqi propaganda,
and pictures indicating the decadence of Saddam’s palaces with their expensive,
and extravagant nouveau riche fittings.
Finally, we coded each report which included one of these three themes in
order to establish the nature and type of source used to justify claims being made.
How the war was reported

It would be wrong to draw conclusions only from the percentages expressed in
Table 15.1, as our method takes no account of the widely varying length of differ-
ent types of discrete stories, or the significance of their position in the running
order. However, it does indicate that, while this was perhaps the most televised
war to date, edited packages delivered by anchors in the studio remained central
to the coverage. What is perhaps surprising here is that Sky, as the one rolling
news channel, carried more reports by news anchors than the other broadcasters.
The coverage of the war against Iraq in 2003 differed fundamentally from the
previous Gulf War and other conflicts because of the practice of deploying
“embedded reporters,” a phrase which had entered common currency only a few
months before.6 Although reports had been “embedded” in previous conflicts, the
Pentagon saw its implementation in 2003 as marking a new approach to combat
news management. Embed opportunities were assigned to news organizations
centrally by the Pentagon and by the MoD, giving certain reporters privileged
and protected access to the front line.
This is clearly manifested in our analysis: after news anchors, embedded
reporters were responsible for the largest identifiably authored form of reportage.
287
Table 15.1 Types of news report, by percentage
BBC ITV C4 Sky Total7
Embedded reporter 6.3 13.0 10.5 6.7 9

Baghdad reporter 6.9 6.6 5.9 4.1 6
Qatar reporter 2.7 7.0 3.9 1.8 4
Unilateral 1.8 2.3 0 0.2 1
Available footage 17.1 19.9 12.9 13.1 15
Studio analysis 8.4 2.3 3.7 1.0 4
Interview with reporter 6.6 3.7 3.9 9.2 6
Interview with expert(s) 0.3 3.9 8.0 1.4 3
Anchor 45.6 39.9 43.9 57.1 48
Other 4.5 3.3 7.3 5.3 5
If we exclude reports by anchors, reports from embeds constituted 17 percent of

the coverage—notably more than any other form of reporting from the region.
Embeds also produced much of the material for the sizeable “available footage”
category, as well editing and/or providing voiceovers for the footage compiled
under this heading.
The size of this miscellaneous category should, perhaps, give us pause. It is
worth noting here that if we, as analysts, had difficulty identifying the origins of
many news reports without background knowledge—what chance did the viewer
have? Most journalists would agree, for example, that footage should be attrib-
uted, so that the viewer is aware of its origin. And yet some of the footage used in
these news reports came from Pentagon and MoD camera crews, which was
mixed in with other images but not attributed (MoD footage of Iraqi’s surrender-
ing, for example, was used by ITV and Channel 4 news on March 21 with no
indication of its origin).
Correspondents based in Baghdad (under the supervision of the Iraqi military)
were also prominent in the coverage—providing 11 percent of the non-anchor
based reports. The UK and US governments, while happy for reporters to be
reporting from the US and British troops’ point of view (in a literal rather than
necessarily a figurative sense), had expressed opposition to the deployment of
journalists in Baghdad, reporting, as it were, from the perspective of the “enemy.”
While the US television networks caved into this pressure and pulled their jour-
nalists from Baghdad, the British broadcasters felt that this was an important side
of the story to cover, and they remained there throughout the war. Indeed, it is
notable that the BBC, at least in the formal terms of this analysis, was especially
assiduous in balancing reports from embeds with reports from Baghdad.
In previous conflicts, military briefings have been a prominent information
source for reporters. Indeed, during the previous Gulf War, broadcasters were
heavily dependent on such briefings, as well as on the footage supplied by the mil-
itary at such briefings. In this conflict, the main US/UK news management
288
operation was based at Central Command in Doha, Qatar, where UK correspon-

dents were largely dependent on US military press conferences and unofficial UK
military briefings as their only sources of news.
On this occasion, there was widespread reported dissatisfaction among UK jour-
nalists about the paucity and low quality of the information provided at Doha and,
while reports from these briefings punctuated the coverage, they were, in this con-
flict, very much overshadowed by journalists filing reports closer to the action.
The other main contrast with the 1991 conflict was the comparative absence
of the “armchair generals,” experts brought in to provide commentary on the
progress of the conflict. The only channel to use interviews with experts in any
significant number was Channel 4, and many of these provided non-military
expertise.
In sum, it is fair to say that the presence of embedded reports, and, to a lesser
extent, reporters in Baghdad, made this a very different kind of television war,
with far more testimony from the “front lines” than hitherto. We will explore the
controversy about embedded reporting shortly, but it is worth noting that without
the embeds, broadcasters would have been much more dependent upon informa-
tion from military briefings, and far less able to provide independent testimony of
what was occurring.
As our findings imply, the bulk of the coverage during the war focused on the
progress of the war itself. Apart from, to a small extent, Channel 4’s coverage,
very little space was made available for discussion of wider issues. While this
might seem, on the surface, an ideologically neutral position for broadcasters to
adopt, it did mean that the central question about the merits of war was eclipsed
by more pragmatic questions about the outcome of the war. In this context, the
narrative shifted very much onto the US and British governments’ terrain. In
brief, political and moral questions were replaced by military ones—which, given
the overwhelming strength of US-led forces, were always going to be answered on
a triumphant note.8
Reporting the government’s case for the war

Sources
While the bulk of the coverage focused on the progress of the war, of the 1,534
reports we looked at, over a third (36 percent) contained references to (at least)
one of the three themes central to the government’s case.9 Of these, the most
common were references to the condition/attitude of the Iraqi people, found in
25 percent of all the reports in the sample (see Table 15.2). We found reports
containing references to Iraqi WMD capability in just over 8 percent of the
sample, and reports referring to the theme of the depravity of the Iraqi regime in a
little over 7 percent of the sample.
The BBC was, by comparison with the other broadcasters, more reluctant to
engage in (generally highly speculative) coverage of WMD. Sky, by contrast, was
289
Table 15.2 Number of stories including one or more reference to themes relevant to the
government’s case10
BBC % ITV % C4 % Sky % Total %
WMD 15 4.5 20 7 43 10.5 49 10 127 8

Iraqi people 83 25 90 30 109 27 101 21 383 25
Regime depravity 21 6 28 9 28 7 33 7 110 7
a little less likely to concern itself with the state of the Iraqi people, while ITN
was more likely than any other channel to run stories on the themes of the Iraqi
people and the depravity of the Iraqi regime.
We then looked at who was used as the source of claims about these issues. This
includes all sources shown directly (i.e. through coverage of press conferences, in
interviews, etc.) as well as where such claims are attributed to a particular source
verbally by anchors or correspondents or visually through graphics. Obviously
any content analysis is limited in its ability to account for journalists’ use of
sources in that it cannot account for unattributed use of sources, unofficial brief-
ings, or off-screen use of official briefings. Nevertheless such an analysis indicates
which sources were given the opportunity to present their version of events as
authoritative.
We identified 185 instances of where on-screen sources were used to back up
claims related to the case for the war. Given that there were 549 reports that
included one or more reference to these claims, it is striking how sparing was the
use of identifiable sources overall. We are left with the conclusion that the claims
made in the vast majority of the stories were not backed up by an attributable
source. Overall, Channel 4 was the most likely to attribute claims: of the four
broadcasters in our sample, Channel 4 accounted for 40 percent of our total
number of sources identified.
Table 15.3 shows that of the sources used, most were, fairly predictably, official
US/UK government or military (48 percent), followed by official Iraqi sources
(30 percent). This almost certainly underestimates the importance of British or
US military sources, however, as many claims that came from military sources
were not attributed. So, for example, when we analyzed the television coverage of
four stories that came from military sources—all of which turned out to be
unfounded11—we found that nearly half the claims made were unattributed
(Lewis et al. 2003).
What is notable from Table 15.3 is that, despite allegations that the BBC’s cov-
erage was anti-war, the BBC made more use of British/US government and
military sources than any other, outnumbering the use of Iraqi sources by more
than 2 to 1. Channel 4’s coverage, by contrast, struck the closest balance between
US/UK and Iraqi sources.
Other types of sources were used sparingly. Iraqi citizens were not often used
290
Table 15.3 Use of on-screen sources
BBC ITV C4 Sky Total
UK/US gov. and military 56 50 42 48 46

Official Iraqi sources 26 22 37 27 30
Other media 11 8 3 4 5
Iraqi citizens 0 11 5 8 7
Other e.g. Red Cross 7 8 15 13 12
as sources—indeed, in our sample the BBC did not use Iraqi citizens as sources
at all. Thus while a number of claims were made about the mood of the Iraqi
people, these tended to be made on their behalf. Other types of source were also
used—spokespersons for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the
Red Cross—but these amounted to only 12 percent of occasions, with Channel 4
accounting for half of these.
These data confirm the extent to which the coverage focused on the war itself,
the majority of sources identified being government or military sources. Those
who might have shed light on the validity of this case as the war progressed—
whether NGOs, weapons inspectors, academics, or experts on and in the Arab
world—played very little part in the story told by television news.
Weapons of mass destruction

The presence (or absence) of WMD became a significant issue after the war, as
the US-led forces failed to uncover any evidence of WMD, undermining the
claims made by the US and British governments in seeking a legal and “national
security” justification for the use of force. But, during the war, broadcasters
seemed to broadly accept the claims made about WMD. Overall, 91 percent of
the reports we examined contained references to WMD that suggested that Iraq
had or could have such weapons, while only 15 percent contained references
which raised doubts about their existence or possible use (Table 15.4).12
Of the four channels, Sky was most likely to run stories including references
that supported the argument that Iraq possessed WMD—96 percent of all its sto-
ries on this theme did so—and least likely to cast doubt on their existence. The
BBC, who were less likely to include speculation about WMD one way or the
other, were the most cautious, a third of their reports on this issue casting a note
of doubt.
This suggests that broadcasters were, on the whole, persuaded by the govern-
ment that Iraq probably possessed WMD, and that those—such as Robin
Cook—who cast doubt on these claims before the war were deemed less credible.
Indeed, it could be argued that it was an adoption of such an unquestioning
stance that made post-war allegations that the public had been misled on this
issue—by reporters such as Andrew Gilligan—so controversial.
291
Table 15.4 Number of stories including one or more references to Iraqi WMD capability
Implying capability 87 85 91 96 91
Doubting capability 33 20 19 4 15
The mood of the Iraqi people

It was, of course, difficult to know how most Iraqis felt about the invasion—Iraqis
living in Britain embraced a range of views, and, even so, it was unclear how rep-
resentative they were of the Iraqi population. Most considered analysis suggested
that views were decidedly mixed, as did the first post-war survey to test Iraqi opin-
ion in Baghdad, conducted by YouGov, which suggested that most people were
happy to see the end of Saddam Hussein but unhappy about the US occupation
and cynical about its motives.13
While the impression created by television news was similarly mixed, it erred
heavily—by around 2 to 1—on the side of the government’s claims that the Iraqi
people would welcome the US-led “liberation.” Thirty-nine percent of reports
referring to the Iraqi people showed or suggested the Iraqi people welcoming the
invasion or the overthrow of Saddam Hussein14 (Table 15.5)—with the common
use of words like “joy” and “celebration”—compared with only 22 percent of
reports referring to Iraqis as unhappy, angry, upset or merely suspicious. Sky was,
once again, the most likely channel to reflect the pro-war view (47 percent to 19
percent), with only Channel 4 showing “liberated” and “invaded” Iraqis in
roughly equal number (33 percent to 28 percent). Again, there is no evidence
here to suggest the BBC erred in favor of anti-war assumptions.
This is not to say that television news ignored the negative effects of war on
the Iraqi people—42 percent of reports about Iraqi people concerned the injury
or death of Iraqi citizens. Channel 4 was, again, the most likely news bulletin to
refer to Iraqi casualties (55 percent of its reports representing the Iraqi people
mentioned casualties, as opposed to 33 percent on the BBC and 32 percent on
ITV).
Other stories referring to the Iraqi people were, in terms of the case for war,
ambiguous—whether it was Iraqis going about their everyday lives in a market in
Baghdad, or Iraqis looting from presidential palaces. Stories including these types
of references—representing the Iraqi people in ways which neither demonstrably
supported nor opposed the government’s case—amounted to about a third (34
percent) of the number of stories on the Iraqi people.
The picture that emerges from this analysis is one in which we were much
more likely to see or hear about Iraqis feeling liberated rather than invaded. Our
finding therefore suggests that the weight of coverage of the Iraqi people was
292
Table 15.5 Number of stories containing one or more reference to the theme of the state
of the Iraqi people
Iraqis welcoming liberation 39 40 33 47 39

Iraqis opposing invasion 21 21 28 19 22
Iraqi casualties 33 32 55 44 42
Other 39 34 28 37 34
more likely to support the government’s case than undermine it. And since much
of the pro-invasion imagery happened toward the end of the war—with a great
deal of coverage given to the “celebrations” and “joy” of Iraqis tearing down stat-
ues of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and Kirkuk—it could be argued that the
lasting impression was of a people happy to be free of Saddam Hussein, and less of
a people disgruntled about being invaded and occupied.
The depravity of the regime

Although the least referred to of the government’s themes, 7 percent of the
reports in our sample contained references to evidence suggesting the depravity of
the regime. These reports were most likely to feature the mistreatment of US/UK
POWs (35 percent) or the manipulative nature of Iraqi propaganda (34 percent)
(see Table 15.6). A number of reports—20 percent—referred to the decadent
nature of the regime—usually signified by journalists’ discovering the opulence of
Saddam Hussein’s palaces,15 16 percent involved the discovery of torture or sur-
veillance facilities, and 8 percent were reports of atrocities committed against
Iraqi people.
The BBC was proportionately more likely to run stories on the mistreatment of
US/UK POWs—52 percent of all BBC stories on the theme of the depravity of
the Iraqi regime were in this category, as opposed to 32 percent on Channel 4.
This may be because of Tony Blair’s allegations on this issue—the BBC being
more likely than the other broadcast news channels to use British government or
military sources.
Few would argue, in this instance, against the idea that the Saddam Hussein
regime was brutal and self-serving. It is worth noting, however, that while most of
these reports contained ample evidence of the depravity of the Iraqi regime, we
found no attempt to situate it within the broader context of the abuse of human
rights by many other dictatorial regimes worldwide. Without such a context, it
could be argued that the Iraqi regime was represented as exceptional in its abuse
of human rights, bolstering the government’s case that military intervention was
justified.
293
Table 15.6 Number of stories including one or more references to the theme of Iraqi
regime depravity
BBC ITV C4 Sky Total %
Discovery of torture facility 19 25 4 18 16

Regime decadence 19 25 18 18 20
Propaganda/state media 24 32 40 36 34
Atrocities against Iraqis 5 11 11 9 8
Mistreatment of POWs 52 29 32 30 35
Embeds or in-beds?
We cross-tabulated the types of news reports against the number of stories
including references that supported the government’s case for war, in order to
explore a number of key questions. Did the practice of “embedded reporters”
result in news coverage that was more sympathetic to the government’s case for
war than types of reports that used different newsgathering methods? Did the
deployment of correspondents under Iraqi government supervision in Baghdad
lead to stories about the public mood of Iraqi citizens as more hostile than the
government’s case suggested, or to more stories about Iraqi citizen injuries or
deaths?
We tabulated the stories including references supporting the government’s case
on the existence of WMD according to type of news report, and compared the
results with the overall distribution of our sample according to type of news report
(Table 15.7). So, for example, reports including references supporting the govern-
ment’s case on WMD were most likely to come from anchors (24 percent) but,
given that anchor reports dominate our overall sample (48 percent) this suggests
that anchors were proportionately less likely to refer to such claims. This is
indicative of the fact that the WMD story tended not to make headline news
(which, given none were found, is hardly surprising).
Perhaps more significant is that reports from embedded correspondents were
also less likely to contain references supporting the government’s case on WMD.
By contrast, reports supporting the government’s case on WMD were more likely
to come from correspondents based at the official military briefings in Qatar.
The fact that embedded reporters were less likely than most other forms of
reportage to imply the presence of WMD would seem to go against the idea that
embedded reporters were more likely to reproduce government and military
claims. Indeed, had broadcasters been more reliant upon military briefings, it
seems likely that assertions about Iraqi WMD would have been more widely
repeated. This suggests that, while embedded reporters will inevitably be present-
ing a limited view of war, their reports are more likely to be independent than
information coming from military briefings.
More significant, in our view, is the breakdown of representations of the Iraqi
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Table 15.7 Stories including one or more reference to the theme of Iraqi WMD capability,
tabulated against type of news report
Implying % of Doubting % of % of total

capability reports capability reports news reports
Embedded reporter 6 5 1 5 9
Baghdad reporter 5 4 0 0 6
Qatar reporter 10 9 1 5 4
Unilateral 1 1 0 0 1
Available footage 23 20 6 32 15
Studio analysis 10 9 4 2 4
Interview with reporter 11 10 0 0 6
Interview with expert(s) 9 8 3 16 3
Anchor 27 23 4 21 48
Other 14 12 0 0 5
people. Table 15.8 indicates that, whereas the ratio between stories portraying
the Iraqi people as welcoming liberation as opposed to antagonistic to invasion in
our total sample was nearly 2 to 1 (151 to 85) in favor of the government’s case,
reports by embeds were much more balanced. Embedded reporters were, in other
words, notably more likely than news reports in general to portray the Iraqi
people as antagonistic to or suspicious of US/UK military action. Put another
way, out of the 85 stories which included references representing the Iraqi people
as unenthusiastic about or hostile toward the invasion, 32 percent were based on
embedded reports (remembering that embedded reports constituted only 9 per-
cent of our total sample).
More predictably, reports from correspondents based in Baghdad were also as
likely to include references to the Iraqi people opposing US/UK intervention as
they were to welcoming it (by 19 to 16). This type of report accounted for nearly
a quarter of all the reports including references suggesting that the Iraqi people
opposed US/UK military intervention.
By contrast, in reports by anchors the ratio between stories including refer-
ences to the Iraqi people welcoming compared to opposing US/UK military
intervention was almost 7 to 1 (34 stories as opposed to 5). It would seem that the
account of the war given by television news anchors, highly trusted by the public
according to surveys, was overwhelmingly more likely to give the impression that
the Iraqi people welcomed US/UK military intervention.
While we would not want to draw too much from this, the picture presented
here is an interesting one. We have found no evidence that embedded reporters
were more likely to cover issues critical to the government/military case
sympathetically. On the contrary, they tended to be more balanced than other
kinds of reporters. The distinction implied by Table 15.8 is not between
embedded reporters and those based in Baghdad—who both gave a similarly
balanced account, but between reporters on the ground and scripts written for
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Table 15.8 Number of stories with references to the state of the Iraqi people, against type
of news report
Iraqis welcoming Iraqis opposing Iraqis as Other

liberation invasion casualties
Embedded reporter 29 27 29 17
Baghdad reporter 16 19 21 25
Qatar reporter 3 0 4 2
Unilateral 0 2 2 3
Available footage 54 25 31 47
Studio analysis 2 2 3 1
Interview with reporter 8 1 8 2
Interview with expert(s) 2 3 1 2
Anchor 34 5 56 32
Other 1 1 4 3
Total 151 85 160 131
anchors in London. In short, while reporters in the region told a fairly nuanced
story about the reaction of the Iraqi people, the editorial line in London echoed
the government’s position. If there was bias here, in other words, it was in spite of
rather than because of the embedded reporters.
Use of on-screen sources

The use of sources does differ according to which aspect of the government’s case
is being covered. Table 15.9 indicates that US/UK government and military
sources were often used to support the government’s case. Conversely, Iraqi
sources were used only four times and other types of sources (NGOs, academics,
etc.) were used on only seven occasions. During the course of the war UK news
broadcasters appear to have given official US/UK government and military
sources carte blanche to make assertions about the likelihood of Iraqi WMD
capability with little attempt made to balance these claims.
This suggests that, on this issue, broadcasters had decided that Iraqi officials—
in contrast to US and British officials—were of so little credence as to be not
worth reporting. This judgment now looks somewhat premature.
Official Iraqi sources occur almost exclusively in stories relating to the Iraqi
people: on 51 out of 55 occasions. And out of those 51 occasions, 48 referred to
Iraqi casualties—an area where there were few alternate sources of information
(US and UK forces rarely commented on Iraqi casualties). Thus while official
Iraqi sources appear to have constituted 30 percent of the sources used overall,
they were really only used as a source of information by UK/US news broadcasters
on the issue of the number of deaths and injuries sustained by Iraqi citizens.
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Table 15.9 Number of on-screen sources tabulated against theme
UK/US Official Other Iraqi Other Total

government Iraqi media citizens
and military
WMD 53 4 0 0 7 64
Iraqi people 20 51 6 7 13 97
Regime depravity 10 0 4 5 2 21
Total 83 55 10 12 22 182
The performance of different news organizations

As we noted in the introduction, the BBC has been singled out by the UK govern-
ment and by antagonistic newspapers as more critical of the government’s message
than other UK news broadcasters. Our evidence suggests that the argument that
BBC news was institutionally more critical of the government’s case for the war
than its competitors is difficult to sustain. The BBC (along with Sky) was more
likely to run stories simply reporting the progress of the war, rather than the case
for the war, than either ITV or Channel 4. On the BBC, the balance between
Iraqis happy or unhappy about the US/UK military intervention was about aver-
age for the four channels, although its reporting of Iraqi citizen casualties was
much less than average (33 percent as opposed to an average of 42 percent).
In terms of the use of on-screen sources on subjects relevant to the govern-
ment’s case, the BBC was marginally more likely to use official US/UK government/
military sources (56 percent of its sources used were of this type, compared to an
average of 48 percent). And while all broadcasters were sparing in their use of
Iraqi citizens, we could not identify a single case on the BBC reports in our sample
where Iraqi citizens were used as a source.
The only instance where the BBC was less likely to report the government’s
case was on WMD. The BBC was half as likely to cover the WMD issue than
either Channel 4 or Sky and, when it did, it was a little more likely to challenge
the idea of Iraqi WMD capability. Even so, the BBC was much more likely to
accept the government line than not.
Our figures would suggest that the BBC’s coverage of the war would be better
characterized as a mix of caution in covering contentious issues, and trust in UK
government and military sources. The indicators that any news organization
might have been adopting an anti-war stance, such as the disproportionate use of
sources expressing skepticism about Iraqi WMD capability or the validity of
US/UK military intervention, and disproportionate reporting of civilian casual-
ties compared to other news organizations, could not be applied to the BBC.
If there was one broadcaster more likely to feature reports about the Iraqi
people that could be seen as critical of the government’s case for war, it was Chan-
nel 4. A greater percentage of Channel 4 stories on the Iraqi people featured
Iraqis demonstrating opposition to the UK/US invasion: 28 percent as opposed to
297
an average for all four broadcasters of 22 percent. Channel 4 ran more stories
including reports of Iraqi casualties: 55 percent of stories on the Iraqi people fea-
tured reports of casualties as opposed to an average of 42 percent. Embedded
correspondents for Channel 4 were more likely to report Iraqi opposition to
US/UK intervention and Iraqi citizen casualties than the other channels. Finally,
Channel 4 was least likely to use official UK/US government or military sources
than other broadcasters: 42 percent of all its sources as compared to the average
for all four broadcasters of 46 percent.
It should still be noted that, while our analysis seems to indicate that Channel
4 news was relatively more critical of the government’s case for the war than the
other news broadcasters, overall all broadcasters were significantly more sympa-
thetic to the government’s case than they were critical.
Our analysis suggests that the most pro-war broadcaster, by these measures, was
Sky, which was most likely to portray Iraqis as welcoming the invasion and was
most likely to suggest the presence rather than the absence of WMD. Again, we
should not exaggerate this, as Sky and Channel 4 represent opposite ends of a
fairly small spectrum.
Conclusion
While British broadcasters clearly did not submit to the kind of cheerleading that
characterized much of the US network coverage, our research suggests that the
wartime coverage was generally fairly sympathetic to the government’s case. This
manifested itself in various ways, notably: the focus on the progress of war to the
exclusion of other issues, the tendency to portray the Iraqi people as liberated
rather than invaded, the failure to question the claim that Iraq possessed WMD,
and the focus on the brutality or decadence of the regime without putting this
evidence in a broader historical and geopolitical context.
This is not to say that all the coverage was sympathetic—but we can see how
the overall weight of the coverage might have encouraged some hitherto uncon-
vinced people to support the war. Opinion polls during the war indicated support
increased from 54 percent at the beginning to 63 percent in the days following
the destruction of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.16
As for concerns that embedded reporting would result in more sympathetic
coverage toward the case for the war, we found, on one level, no evidence to sup-
port this. Rather, reports filed by embedded correspondents were a major source of
information suggesting Iraqi citizens had mixed feelings about US/UK military
intervention. Whereas reports by Baghdad-based unilateral correspondents
accounted for a significant proportion of the coverage, the tiny amount of reports
filed by roving unilateral correspondents suggests that the Pentagon’s attempt to
replace independent reporting with embedded reporting was largely successful.
What the embedded reporters did do, however, was help to make the main nar-
rative a simple story of the progress of a war. It is in this context that the debate
about embedded reporting—and media coverage of war generally—needs to
298
move away from simple notions of censorship toward a more complex under-
standing of the media–military relationship. The Pentagon’s embed strategy was
ingenious because it increased rather than limited access to information. By giving
broadcasters access to highly newsworthy action footage from the front line, they
were encouraging a focus on the actions of US and British troops, who would be
seen fighting a short and successful war. The story was thus all about winning and
losing, rather than a consideration of the context in which the war was fought.
Notes
1 We are indebted to our research assistant Kirsten Brander for her work on this part of
the project.
2 In a widely reported interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (G.
Jones, “Blair calls for claims to rebut ‘negative’ Arab media,” Daily Telegraph, April 1,
2003). Downing Street Director of Communications Alastair Campbell expressed
dismay at the reporting of allegations of atrocities committed by UK/US forces by
Arabic television and newspapers, and announced that as a result, Downing Street was
setting up an “Islamic media unit” to rebut claims allegations raised in the Arab
media. In the context of this attack on the Arab media, Campbell also attacked the
Western media for allowing dictatorships to exploit what they see as the weaknesses of
democratic media systems, by which he implied that media organizations were allow-
ing dictatorships to exploit their freedom to report claims critical of the conduct of the
war. The BBC had already been attacked by a number of columnists working for news-
papers widely recognized as editorially antagonistic to the BBC: the Sun’s Richard
Littlejohn had accused the BBC of treating “statements by coalition spokesmen . . .
with scepticism bordering on cynicism, while any old drivel put out by Baghdad is
taken as gospel” (R. Littlejohn, opinion, Sun, March 28, 2003).
3 ICM conducted a regular poll for The Guardian asking the question “would you approve
or disapprove of a military attack on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein?” between August
23–5, 2002, and April 11–13, 2003, at variable intervals (www.icmresearch.co.uk).
4 Our own survey of opinion before, during, and after the war suggested that much of
the shift to a pro-war stance was based on a desire to support the troops—see Lewis et
al. 2003.
5 The reporting of civilian casualties became a major issue in debates around US tele-
vision news coverage of the war in Afghanistan. US television news channels tended
to minimize the reporting of such figures—partly because of lack of access—and some
channels (CNN) issued guidelines indicating that reporting of civilian casualties
should be accompanied by a reminder of how many US citizens died on 9/11.
6 A search of the Lexis-Nexis Executive database for the term “embedded reporters,”
conducted on August 29, 2003, revealed only five articles before January 1, 2003, as
compared to 914 articles for the first quarter of 2003; 1,457 articles for the second.
7 Percentages have been rounded up, and thus add up to 101 percent.
8 Many journalists found it hard not to get carried along with this shift, hence the
moment of victory was interpreted by many as a vindication of the war (such as
Andrew Marr on the BBC), even though few advancing the anti-war case did so on
the basis that the US-led forces would lose the war.
9 This percentage is lower than the figure derived from adding the three categories in
Table 15.2, as some reports contained references to more than one theme.
10 The percentages here refer to the proportion of reports in which these themes were
covered as a percentage of all reports broadcast during the war.
11 These involved unfounded claims that Iraq had fired Scud missiles at Kuwait; of a pop-
299
ular uprising against Saddam Hussein in Basra, a large tank column leaving Basra, and
premature claims of the capture of Umm Qasr.
12 These add to more than 100 percent, as some reports contained both claims and
counter claims about WMD.
13 “What Baghdad really thinks,” poll conducted for the Spectator/Channel 4 News, July
8–10, 2003, www.YouGov.com
14 These two things are, of course, quite separate, although they tended to get lumped
together in much of the coverage.
15 The tone of condemnation adopted by many journalists at this lavish lifestyle was, in
some ways, curious, given the wealth of Britain’s royal family in a country that has, by
European standards, a conspicuously large disparity between rich and poor.
16 ICM Guardian polls March 21–3 and April 11–13, 2003; YouGov polls taken at the
same time are very similar: 53 percent (March 20) rising to 66 percent (April 10)
agreed with the statement that the US and UK were right to take military action
(Kellner 2003, p. 13).
References
Allan, S. (2002) “Reweaving the Internet: online news of September 11” in B. Zelizer and
S. Allan (eds), Journalism after September 11, London: Routledge.
Bennett, W.L. and D.L. Paletz (1994) Taken by Storm: the Media, Public Opinion and Us
Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
Franks, T. (2003) “Not war reporting—just reporting,” British Journalism Review, vol. 14,
no. 2, pp. 15–19.
Glasgow University Media Group (1985) War and Peace News, Milton Keynes: Open Uni-
versity Press.
Hallin, D. (1986) The Uncensored War—the Media and Vietnam, Berkeley, CA: University
of California.
Kellner, D. (1992) The Persian Gulf TV War, Boulder, CO: Westview.
Kellner, P. (2003) Iraq—the Public and the War: a Report on YouGov Opinion Surveys before,
during and after the Conflict, www.yougov.co.uk
Lewis, J., Brookes, R., Mosdell, N., and Threadgold, T. (2003) “Embeds or in-beds?”
BBC/Cardiff School of Journalism.
Miladi, N. (2003) “Mapping the Al-Jazeera phenomenon” in D.K. Thussu and D. Freed-
man (eds), War and the Media, London: Sage.
Thussu, D.K. (2003) “Live TV and bloodless deaths: war, infotainment and 24/7 news” in
D.K. Thussu and D. Freedman (eds), War and the Media, London: Sage.
Zelizer, B. and S. Allan (eds) (2002) Journalism after September 11, London: Routledge.
300
16
EUROPEAN NEWS AGENCIES
AND THEIR SOURCES IN THE
IRAQ WAR COVERAGE
Terhi Rantanen
After September 2002, when US President George W. Bush told a UN General

Assembly session to confront the “grave and gathering danger” of Iraq or stand
aside as the United States acted, it became clear that preparations were being
made to declare war at any moment. When the first US missiles hit targets in
Baghdad on March 20, 2003 and the war started, followed by US and British
ground troops entering Iraq,1 the news war that had started long before became
an actual war. World opinion was divided: several countries, including France,
Germany, and Russia, condemned the war. People voted with their feet: millions
of people all over the world marched against the war. In conflict situations where
world public opinion is divided, news becomes even more important than usual.
The question “whose news?” is suddenly raised loudly again. As Lewis et al.
(2003) note, what made the war in Iraq different from other wars was the scale of
the exercise, the changes in technology which made live or near-live television
war reporting from the battlefield possible for the first time, and also, perhaps, the
level of political controversy about the war itself and whether it was justified.
Despite the fact that the two countries which invaded Iraq are considered the
most powerful media empires of the world, they did not succeed in convincing
millions of people of the rightness of their actions. If people who opposed the war
were not pleased with the news that was available they turned to alternative
sources, increasingly through the Internet. Many people, dissatisfied with the
news they received from their national media, turned to the media of other coun-
tries using the access provided by the Internet. They also visited the websites of
anti-war organizations.
However, it is to their national media that most people still turn for news. The
national media indigenize global news by translating it into national languages.
They also frame this news by situating it within a national framework. They offer
complementary news, locating the global news, which often comes from a dis-
tance, by the addition of national actors. In short, the national media make
sense of global news by transforming it into national news. They also measure its
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T E R H I R A N TA N E N
importance by giving it a certain amount of space in relation to domestic, local,

and other foreign news. Increasingly, because of the growing availability of global
news, national media start increasing the number of news items on a conflict
even if their country is not directly involved. This is the power of global news: to
set the agenda for news around the world.
In a conflict, there are at least two sides. In the war against Iraq, the media in
Iraq and in other Arab countries were much less prepared for the news war, which
had already begun before the actual war. According to the news criteria com-
monly accepted as ideal in Western countries, news should be neutral, impartially
covering different stances. In the war against Iraq, the biased structure of news
machinery inevitably favored the USA and the UK simply by the sheer amount
of news coming from their national media. The Arab media, however, have not
adopted Western news criteria, but operated on a different basis, not setting out
to construct the news in a similar way to Western media. Those Western media
which sought to present a balanced picture about the conflict found themselves
in a situation where there were either no sources available to cover both sides
equally or, if there were, these sources were not equal in number, style, or level of
professionalism. Despite the discrepancy in resources, a conflict like the war
against Iraq also reveals the vacuum, the non-existence, of non-Western global
media. It thus provides an opportunity for new players, if they are able to provide
news that is sought after.
The success of Al-Jazeera, the 24-hour pan-Arabic satellite news channel
established in November 1996 in Doha, Qatar, and providing the Arab perspec-
tive, is a living example. Al-Jazeera has 630 members of staff, more than 50
correspondents working in 31 countries worldwide, 27 bureaus spread across
major Arab states and major world capitals—Washington, New York, London,
Paris, Brussels, Moscow, Jakarta, and Islamabad (Teh 2002). It has not only
become a major source of news in the Arab world (el-Nawawy and Iskander
2002: 33) but also a source for Western media. As Miladi (2003: 149) writes, it
was from the coverage of the 1991 Gulf War that CNN became the “eyes and ears
of the world.” In a similar fashion, Al-Jazeera ascended to the world stage after
September 11, 2001 through the exclusive coverage of the war in Afganistan.
Today Al-Jazeera is available to most of the world’s 310 million Arabs, with a reg-
ular audience of 35 million (Miladi 2003: 150).
The importance of sources

In this war the sources of news come under particular scrutiny. As is commonly
known, the sources of news available to any medium have an effect on what is
covered and how it is covered. As Sigal (1986: 15) famously put it, “news is not
what happens, but what someone says has happened and will happen.” This was
one of the findings of the news flow studies (International Press Institute 1953;
Kayser 1953; Schramm 1960; Sreberny-Mohammadi et al. 1985) which focused
on sources of news. These studies revealed that news agencies played a significant
302
role as sources of news for the media. This, in turn, resulted briefly in an increas-
ing scholarly interest in news agencies and their critical evaluation (the
UNESCO New World Information and Communication Order debate in the
1970s and early 1980s)—this has now almost completely disappeared.
Much of the earlier research took the form of quantitative content analysis,
untheorized or under-theorized (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998: 2–3). Most
studies were based on a mechanistic model of a communication chain leading
back to news agencies as primary sources of news. Metaphors of “flows” or
“chains” were frequently employed to describe a one-way dissemination of news
from powerful international agencies to national agencies, and from national agen-
cies to national and local media. The “flow” metaphor was not foreign to early
models of communication, which depicted linear processes of message transmis-
sion from senders to receivers without much reciprocity. As Galtung and Ruge
(1965: 64) wrote in their classic study “The structure of foreign news,” in which
they analyzed the presentation of the crises in Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus in four
Norwegian newspapers,
we shall treat the news media as non-personal invisible entities and not
distinguish between the journalist in the field in the news-sending coun-
try, the local press agency bureau, the district bureau, the central bureau
of the press agency, the district bureau on the receiving end, the local
bureau in the news receiving country, the news editor in the receiving
paper, the layout man [sic] and what not—to indicate a chain with seven
or eight steps in it [emphasis added].
Much has changed both theoretically and empirically in the almost 30 years since
Galtung and Ruge published their study. The division between wholesalers and
retailers of news is no longer entirely valid; increasingly traditional wholesalers
(news agencies) find themselves in competition with retailers such as CNN and
the BBC, or with their own media clients who either directly subscribe to global
news sources or even compete themselves with national agencies. News agencies
have also themselves become retailers by delivering news on the Internet. As
Gurevitch et al. (1991: 197) argue, the institutional arrangements for transmitting
and exchanging news materials spawned by the availability of new technology
have transformed the global structure of news dissemination around the world
toward a greater decentralization of news. According to Gurevitch et al., we have
also entered a relatively new stage, the globalization of news (see also Boyd-Barrett
and Rantanen 1998).
The globalization of news challenges earlier seven- or eight-step chain models.
We now live in a largely convergent media environment in which simple chain
models leading to a single source are no longer valid. It is now time to start re-
theorizing the global news system as a complex network of different media where
every medium both receives and transmits news. We need to bear in mind, how-
ever, that there are still some clusters which are significantly larger and more
303
important than others. Equally, it is important to understand that this network is

not stagnant, but that relationships among clusters do change and new clusters do
appear.
News agencies as sources

The most recent research (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998; Boyd-Barrett and
Rantanen 2000; Rantanen and Boyd-Barrett 2004) has shown that some global
news agencies have already partly lost their previous power, and that they—like
many national news agencies—struggle with financial difficulties and competi-
tion from other media. Instead of five international news agencies, we now have
three global agencies, namely the British Reuters, the US Associated Press (AP)
and the French Agence France-Presse (AFP). Even these agencies have faced
severe financial difficulties. Reuters’ loss was £493 million in 2002, the biggest in
its history and the first since its listing in 1984 (Cassey 2003). In 2000 AP was
forced to break its cooperative ownership tradition dating from 1848, when it
began selling news to non-members. The move allowed AP to keep costs down
and fund new services for members; it also blunted the competitive edge between
AP members and other news providers.2 As a result, AP now profits from provid-
ing information to third-party subscribers such as state governments and private
corporations. With revenue from newspapers representing less than 40 percent of
the total, AP cannot thrive and remain stable on their custom alone.3 AFP has
secured its financial position by continuing reliance on the state.
The state subsidy is in the order of 50 percent. AFP accounts are not presented
in a way that enables one to distinguish profits or losses, at least officially. In late
2003, AFP was in the throes of a crisis about attempts to balance the books and
plan forward expected sources of income. Its accumulated losses had reached
already the amount of €66 million (with a budgeted turnover for 2004 of €251.1
million and a budgeted loss of €5.8 million).4 In the field of news agency tele-
vision news, there are only two significant contenders left: Reuters Television
News and Associated Press Television News (the result of a merger between AP’s
APTV and Disney’s WTN), both headquartered in London (Boyd-Barrett 1998).
The traditional wholesale media news agencies now also compete with global
broadcasting companies, such as the US CNN and the British BBC World, which
operate both as wholesalers and retailers. Tunstall (1999: 77) writes that we now
live under a world news duopoly, where the British Reuters and BBC, the US AP
and CNN, and the French AFP dominate the world’s news market. Tunstall
groups the French and UK organizations as one. In his view, western Europe now
offers serious competition to the USA for the title of world news leader. In this
new world duopoly situation, most European media thus face a choice between
US and western European news sources.
There are, however, significant differences between European agencies in terms
of size and wealth (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 2000: 89). Those agencies with
significantly above average turnover have larger and thus wealthier markets and
304
even operate globally. The largest of these is AFP (France) with a turnover of
€195 million. It is followed, by dpa (Germany) at €99.8 million, ANSA (Italy) at
€91.6 million, the PA (UK) at €87 million and EFE (Spain) at €70.6 million. At
the other extreme is one of the smallest European agencies, ANA (Greece) at
€6.6 million. The average turnover for these agencies is €16.5 million.
Two very strong national agencies, the German dpa and the Spanish EFE,
increasingly operate as global agencies. So far, although many national agencies
face severe financial difficulties, news is primarily still exchanged between global
and national players. In most European countries there is one national news
agency, which serves most of the media in that country, although it often finds
itself in competition with its own clients or with the global media. The situation
is much more complicated than it used to be, but national news agencies are still
important sources, especially of foreign news for small and medium-sized national
and local media which cannot afford to maintain their own foreign correspon-
dents or other direct sources. With the collapse of Communism and thus of the
position of the Soviet TASS, there is no longer a clear difference between, on the
one hand, western and, on the other hand, central and eastern European media
in terms of the sources they use. All central and eastern European media now
increasingly use Western sources.
Hence news agencies maintain their importance, even if they are no longer the
only sources of foreign news, especially in times of crisis such as international
conflicts when the costs of sending and maintaining one’s own correspondents
can become very high. We do not have accurate data on the number of news sto-
ries coming from different sources during the Iraq war. The study by Lewis et al.
(2003) of British television news states that 48 percent of reports were delivered
by anchors in the studio, while nearly one in five (19 percent) were edited pack-
ages or studio-based analysis. A high percentage of this news probably came from
agency sources. The number of news stories in other media, especially local
media, coming from agency sources is even higher. As a rule of thumb, the
smaller the medium, the higher the percentage of foreign news which comes from
agencies.
It seems more than reasonable to study how European news agencies covered
the beginning of the war in Iraq in the first part of 2003. This is an especially
interesting object of study since, although the conflict is outside Europe, the two
countries which invaded Iraq, the USA and the UK, are also the home countries
of the world’s news duopoly. Their governments and military forces also waged a
news war, which was probably more carefully planned than any previous news
war. The second European player in the world news duopoly is AFP in France,
where the government took a very different stance to the war than the UK and
US governments, and opposed their military actions. In general public opinion in
the EU was very divided, with huge anti-war demonstrations taking place around
Europe. So, what sources did the European agencies turn to in this situation?
The results presented here are based on a questionnaire, which I sent to the
members of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA) in July 2003. The
305
French AFP, the German dpa, and the Spanish EFE are all members of EANA,
along with small national agencies which operate mainly inside their own coun-
tries. The British Reuters, however, is not a member. Nineteen out of 28 member
agencies returned questionnaires. They were AA (Turkey), AFP (France), ANA
(Greece), ANP (Netherlands), ANSA (Italy), APA (Austria), C̆TK (Czech
Republic), dpa (Germany), EFE (Spain), HINA (Croatia), Itar-TASS (Russia),
LUSA (Portugal), MTI (Hungary), NTB (Norway), Ritzau (Denmark),
Rompress (Romania), STT-FNB (Finland), SDA-ATS (Switzerland), and STA
(Slovenia). The respondents were mostly chief editors or foreign news editors.
Golding and Elliot (1979: 92) divide the production cycle of newsmaking into
four stages: planning; gathering; selection; and production. The questionnaire
focused mostly on the first two stages, since I was mainly interested in their use of
sources. This is different from earlier research, which saw news agencies solely as
the source of news, without realizing that they, like any other media, are depen-
dent both on each other and on other media, i.e. they use each other as sources.
Furthermore, I did not study the content of news, i.e. what sources they actually
used, but instead tried to find out what they thought about the different sources
they subscribed to. My main research questions were:
1 What measures did the agencies take to cover the war?

2 What sources did they use in covering the war?
3 How did the agencies evaluate their sources?
The questionnaire sent to the agencies included four kinds of questions:
1 Factual general questions about their operations (resources, number of corre-

spondents, their locations, sources subscribed) before the war started;
2 Factual questions about the measures the agencies took before and during the
war (changes in resources, correspondents, and their locations, timing, in
their routines);
3 Evaluation questions about the value of different sources (what were the
sources they thought they used most/least; which one they would give up
first/last, what they considered the most reliable/least reliable sources);
4 Open-ended questions where the respondents themselves could write in
their own words how they experienced various issues (any difference from
earlier war coverage, any lessons learned from this war).
1 What measures did the agencies take to cover the war?

Early preparation
Often war is understood as something which takes place unexpectedly and has to
be covered instantaneously without long-term preparations. Modern wars, and
especially the war in Iraq, are anticipated and thus give time for the media to pre-
306
pare their coverage. Approximately half of the agencies started their planning as
early as the autumn of 2002, and the other half in January or February 2003.
Many agencies sent correspondents to Iraq and neighboring countries early in
2003. There were only a couple of agencies which made no advance preparations.
These were smaller agencies, often with a small corps of correspondents.
Number of correspondents uneven

One of the striking features of the war coverage is the variability of the resources
the agencies had available. The biggest agency in the alliance is AFP, with an edi-
torial staff of 1,250 in 165 countries, in a league of its own comparable in Europe
only to Reuters. AFP phased in the deployment of around 80 special correspon-
dents and photographers to destinations including Baghdad (6), Kuwait (9),
Qatar (5), Jordan (5), Kurdistan (4), Dubai (5), Turkish border (4), Tel Aviv (1),
embedded with US troops (19), Washington (6), and Nicosia (13). The German
dpa, the Spanish EFE, the Italian ANSA and the Russian Itar-TASS each had
between 50 and 70 foreign correspondents. ANSA formed a task force of 10 (cor-
respondents and roving reporters) who later traveled to cover the war from Iraq,
Jordan, Turkey, Abu Dhabi, and Iran. Between March and June EFE deployed 15
journalists from other countries to the conflict area. In January dpa sent two cor-
respondents to Baghdad, one to Kuwait, one to Cairo, and one to Dubai.
Itar-TASS had one correspondent in Baghdad and the Middle East before the war
and sent no new correspondents when the war started.
In contrast to the mega (AFP) and large agencies, most European national
news agencies were unable to send any correspondents to the area, or sent only
one. Two of the small national agencies with a small corps of correspondents, the
Finnish STT and the Norwegian NTB, each sent one correspondent—the former
to Syria and Jordan and the latter to Baghdad and later to Amman. There were
also agencies, such as the Austrian APA, the Croatian HINA, the Greek News
Agency (ANA), the Portuguese LUSA, the Rumanian Rompress, the Slovenian
SPA and the Danish Ritzau, which sent no correspondents to Iraq or to neighbor-
ing countries. Hence, many news agencies in Europe were completely dependent
in their coverage on other media sources. As one editor put it, “we, as a small
national news agency, are totally dependent on the big media and official in-
formation.”
Working hours extended

Many of the agencies increased the number of staff working or hours worked in
the home office, or set up a special Iraq war desk. For many agencies this was
the most significant change in their normal routines. Some of them also offered
military training to their staff members. AFP organized training for staff in battle-
field awareness and first aid, and enrolled 15 staff members in field survival
courses offered by the US and French military. It also published and distributed a
handbook in French and English for correspondents and photographers in war
307
zones. The Finnish STT sent five of its journalists to a one-day training course at
the Finnish Defense Forces International Center, where they learned what to do
if wounded or taken hostage.
2 What sources did they use in covering the war?

AFP and Reuters most subscribed services
Apart from those who sent correspondents to Iraq or neighboring countries
and/or increased their home desk working hours, most national agencies in
Europe did what they have always done: they relied on the sources they already
subscribed to. There was no significant change from the European sources they
used before the war to those they began using after the war started. All agencies
in Europe subscribe to Reuters and AFP.
Most agencies also subscribe to the German dpa and often to agencies in
neighboring countries. The Nordic agencies, for example, subscribe to agencies in
other Nordic countries, as do central European agencies to agencies in central
and eastern Europe. Because of this long-standing principle the Turkish agency
AA already subscribed to INA (Iraqi News Agency), QNA (Qatar News
Agency) and Kuna (Kuwait News Agency), even before the war broke out,
making its situation very different from that of other national agencies. The
biggest agencies, AFP, dpa, and EFE, all subscribe to news agencies such as INA,
IRNA (Iranian News Agency), and KUNA together with broadcasting com-
panies in the Arab countries.
CNN more popular than AP

In addition to their traditional news agency sources, most news agencies now sub-
scribe to CNN and many to the BBC. The US Associated Press has lost its
position in western Europe to CNN, but not in central and eastern Europe, where
national agencies still subscribe to the Associated Press. The Austrian APA, the
Croatian HINA, the Hungarian MTI, the Russian Itar-TASS, the Turkish AA,
the Czech C̆TK and the Slovenian STA agencies all subscribe to AP as well as to
their western European sources.
Al-Jazeera has achieved a foothold in Europe

In the arena of global news, which has traditionally been dominated by the West-
ern media, Al-Jazeera has now taken a place. At present all the large agencies in
Europe (AFP, ANSA, dpa, EFE, and Itar-TASS) subscribe to it. Most national
agencies in Europe in turn receive Al-Jazeera’s services through these five agen-
cies. There are three national agencies, the Swiss SDA-ATS, the Hungarian MTI
and the Czech C̆TK which subscribe directly to Al-Jazeera. Use of Al-Jazeera
increased after the outbreak of war and it was monitored more closely, even
around the clock. As one editor put it:
308
One ground-breaking aspect of the Iraq war was the emergence of Al-
Jazeera and other Arabic-language television stations as major providers
of battlefield news. The journalistic community should encourage the
development of a pluralistic, indigenous media, coupling it with training
programs to foster a more rigorous and objective approach to the news.
AFP and Reuters most used during the war

Since news agencies did not start subscribing to new services, AFP and Reuters,
followed by dpa, remained the sources which agencies said they most often used
in their war coverage. The only significant change was the increased use of Al-
Jazeera and, to a minor extent, of other Arab news agencies and media. The news
agencies also considered AFP and Reuters the most important sources. Their
position remained unchanged and unchallenged. Reuters’ position was not ques-
tioned, and it was not considered more biased or less reliable than AFP.
3 How did the agencies evaluate their sources?

Greatest trust in own correspondents
Overall, there was not much diversity in the sources the agencies subscribed to
and/or used. There seems to be a shared professional culture (Gurevitch et al.
1991: 202) among agencies across Europe of using the same sources. This is also
partly related to the resources they have available: roughly, the poorer a national
agency is, the fewer sources it has. There was an interesting difference between
the sources which the agencies said they used and those they thought were the
most important, fastest, most reliable, most comprehensive and objective. While
Reuters and AFP were most used, they were appreciated for different qualities.
AFP was seen as the most important source, followed by Reuters, but Reuters was
seen as the most comprehensive. No one agency was seen as the most reliable and
objective source; those agencies which have their own correspondents view these
as the most reliable. CNN was considered as by far the fastest source, but was
hardly mentioned for any other qualities. CNN was also seen as giving most pub-
licity to material justifying and glorifying the war.
Mistrust in US and Arabic sources

Although news agencies almost unanimously saw their European sources as reli-
able, they cast doubt on the reliability of the US and Arab sources. AP, Fox, and
CNN were given as examples of the least reliable US sources, while Al-Jazeera,
INA, KUNA, and Iraqi television were mentioned as the least reliable Arab
sources. However, editors were also aware of the imbalance between the resources
available to the different parties to the war. One editor wrote that “as always, the
actual winners also win the news war.” Another noted that, in covering a war
where the media capabilities of the two sides are so unequal, the media must
309
make a concerted effort to be balanced and report from both sides of the conflict,
including political, economic, and social consequences as well as human interest
angles.
Military officials on both sides mistrusted

One source was mistrusted more than any other: the military. It was seen to con-
trol information more than in earlier wars. As one editor put it,
the military can never be considered a trustworthy source of information

when they are fighting a war in their national interest. Their reports
must be confirmed or offset by independent reporting on the ground and
at other news centers such as the Pentagon.
Both US and Iraqi officials were mentioned most often as the least reliable
sources. As one editor put it,
The briefings in Qatar were virtually useless, filled with slogans more
than information, as well as disinformation and a lack of explanation.
Also absent were the background briefings offered in Riyadh on various
aspects of the war, as well as around-the-clock access to the US or
British spokesmen’s office. The Washington briefings on Iraq, featuring
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, provided more quotable copy but
were still full of vagaries and propaganda.
Modern technology seen as both a blessing and a curse

The Iraq war was again a war where visual images played a major role. Many edi-
tors felt that television became more and more important for immediate
coverage. This is also reflected in the increasing use of CNN. However, as one
editor noted, with visual information, manipulation is possible and difficult to
identify.
It was generally agreed that “technology makes it a lot easier to do our job,” but
at the same time it was felt that news was perhaps delivered too fast and was in
danger of losing its credibility. It was also noted that US military successes were
announced faster than any other news and that these announcements were not
always true. As a result, there was a constant need to weigh speed against accu-
racy, but this was difficult in the news race. “Getting the news out” even faster has
become the new parameter for competition among news agencies in the era of
the Internet. Some editors even felt that there was too much media coverage and
too exclusive a focus on the war.
310
Journalists with troops increase bias

In the Iraq war, journalists reported from alongside the troops, and from both
sides, as has never happened before. The editors were very aware of the advan-
tages and disadvantages of using “embedded” journalists. The positive feature
was that this resulted in genuine access to military action on the ground and
some unique perspectives. However, many editors noted that reporters who trav-
eled with the troops could hardly be completely unbiased. According to one
editor,
the embedded journalists seemed to be tempted to play a double role,

but that fact perhaps made us more aware of possible bias. The result of
the embedding was that it provided any one correspondent with a frag-
mented view of the war in his/her sector, with US officials reluctant to
furnish a more strategic overview. But it produced only a fragmented
view of the war and fostered in too many journalists an unhealthy iden-
tification with coalition troops, consciously or unconsciously
engendering a pro-American slant. The embedding process also pro-
moted a sense of identification with the troops and an “us-versus-them,”
pro-US boosterism among too many of the American media.
This result is very different from those of Lewis et al. (2003) in their study of how
the British media covered the war. They found no evidence to support the idea
that embeds were necessarily “in bed” with the military or the US/British govern-
ment in the tone of their reporting. They wrote:
Indeed, our evidence suggests that the embeds provided a much more
balanced account of events than some non-embedded reporters—espe-
cially studio based anchors, whose scripts could be seen, on some issues,
to be inadvertently tilted toward certain pro-war assumptions.
The agencies also faced another problem, which they were fully prepared for. The
presence of so many journalists on the ground, whether embedded or not, also
made the Iraq war one of the most dangerous for the media, with more than a
dozen reporters killed over a relatively short period. This raises the question of
journalists’ security in war zones and their need for training and protection.
Conclusion
There is no question that news agencies in Europe share a professional journalis-
tic culture which goes beyond national boundaries. They subscribe mainly to the
same sources and, even more importantly, also trust the professionalism and
integrity of these sources. This shared professional culture does not disappear
when war breaks out, even if the government of the country in Europe where one
311
agency is located is involved in the war. In the Iraq war, sources outside Europe
were seen as less reliable and this applied to both the US and Arab media.
It is somewhat surprising that US sources were seen as so biased, since US and
European media have traditionally shared to a great extent the same journalistic
ideology of objective, reliable, and unpartisan news. The fact that the US Associ-
ated Press had lost its position in western Europe before the war and been
replaced there by CNN indicates that a structural change is taking place.
Whether this means that CNN has managed to become a global source able to
serve the diversified interests of its clients around the world better than other US
media remains, now that the war has ended, to be seen. But CNN has already
succeeded in becoming part of the professional journalistic culture in Europe.
It is less surprising that Arabic media are also considered less reliable. They are
after all new players with less experience of operating in the global market. They
do not share the same Western journalistic culture as other agencies. However,
the success of Al-Jazeera cannot be underestimated. It has become a global actor
noted and quoted around the world.
The high trust in agencies’ own correspondents gives support to what Gure-
vitch et al. (1991: 206) noted already 16 years ago, i.e. how the global is being
domesticated. Own correspondents were seen as the most reliable, almost covering
the war “with our eyes.” The trust in them illustrates a situation where there was
so much news available that it was difficult to know which source to trust. But
very few agencies actually had their own correspondents. What is the next
“domesticated” source if you do not have it available in your own country? In the
coverage of the war in Iraq, the next trustworthy source was a European source. It
did not even matter if the source was located in the UK, a country that was allied
with the USA against Iraq, as long as it was a European source.
The trust in European sources can be explained in at least in two different ways.
First, one could say that because of the political unification of Europe in the frame-
work of the European Union a new European identity is emerging and that
identity is reflected particularly in conflict situations. Second, in more narrow and
more professional terms, the fact that the agencies kept on trusting Reuters, some-
thing they have done in western Europe for a long time, reveals that they did not
see Reuters losing its professional integrity even if the UK was involved in the war.
The evidence is still scarce but indicates that a structural change may take
place. Tunstall wrote about the global duopoly that was based on the power of US
and British media. However, what we witnessed in the war coverage was a clear
drift between western European and US sources where the former were favored
over the latter. Of course, this situation is different from normal day-to-day cov-
erage when conflicting interests do not become visible and remain hidden. In this
sense, war coverage brings the issues of impartiality again to the surface and under
public scrutiny. Most European news agencies were very aware of their responsi-
bility before the public.
Whether the drift between US and western European sources is permanent
remains to be seen. But it challenges our previous theorization of the nature of
312
Western media: we can no longer take for granted that there is a holy alliance
between the US and western European media, and that they are the same. We
should concentrate more on the differences between the two rather than the sim-
ilarities. This is even more important when not only the alliance of the US and
Western European agencies has become fragile, but also a new global player, Al-
Jazeera, has emerged. It still has a different status compared to Western sources
and is being viewed critically. Its status is partly based on the conflict between the
Western and Arab worlds, to use very crude categories, but its rapid rise shows the
niche it has filled. Again, we do not know how permanent the Al-Jazeera phe-
nomenon will be after the day the Iraq war is over. Whether Al-Jazeera becomes
today’s equivalent of the Cold War Soviet TASS—a global source with a recog-
nized status, but clearly in a different category compared to its Western
counterparts—is also something that can only be seen in the daily routines of
global news transmission in years to come.
The war against Iraq, like wars in general, not only reveals the existing media
structures, but also questions them. As one editor put it, “too many interests col-
lided under the surface of the war, so the spectrum of coverage was far more
comprehensive than in the case of an average war, and in a way indicated the
birth of a new world order.” The old world order of news is still in place, but if one
looks carefully at it, one can see fractures that may cause more permanent
changes in the future.
The author would like to thank the members of the European Alliance of News
Agencies (EANA) for their help.
Notes
1 news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/737483.stm, October 3, 2003
2 www.azcentral.com/specials/special50/articles/1016apme-conversation17-ON.html,
16/11/2003
3 www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1061417078.php November 16, 2003
4 Libération, September 18, 2003
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17
AL-JAZEERA AND WAR
COVERAGE IN IRAQ
The media’s quest for contextual objectivity
Adel Iskandar and Mohammed el-Nawawy
Across the world, the word Al-Jazeera has become synonymous with war. Since
the station’s emergence on the global media scene in 1996, the Qatar-based satel-
lite station has been the go-to channel for conflict coverage from the Middle
East. As Al-Jazeera reaffirms its position as a top transnational news organization,
its coverage of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has catapulted it into a prominent
position and stirred much international controversy, placing its approach to jour-
nalism in the spotlight. Despite having had reporters arrested, licenses rescinded,
bureaus closed, and offices bombed, Al-Jazeera’s audience figures continue to soar.
Why does Al-Jazeera’s brand of journalism draw so much attention, debate, and
controversy? No evaluation of Al-Jazeera and its operations is coherent or com-
plete without a close look at the media landscape from which the network
emerged.
This chapter is a discussion of Al-Jazeera’s journalistic model and the network’s
coverage of the US-led war in Iraq as a case study for thinking about the journal-
ism of conflict. Since most historical landmarks in the development of Arab
media relate to conflict coverage, we briefly describe three major stages in the
development of journalism in the region and show how they articulate the dilem-
mas facing journalists, suggesting that the impact of foreign programming and the
Arab world’s quest for press freedoms have culminated with Al-Jazeera and other
satellite news channels. Two contesting forces in war coverage of the region—
editorial decision-making and network responsibility to audiences—help explain
how Al-Jazeera works, and we describe this tension as contextual objectivity and
illustrate how it is employed generally by Al-Jazeera and specifically in the case of
its coverage of the war in Iraq.
Broadcasting in/to the Arab world

Journalism in the Arab world has been shaped by three major stages of develop-
ment—the introduction of foreign media and negotiations over a presumed
315
A D E L I S K A N D A R A N D M O H A M M E D E L - N AWAW Y
standard of “objectivity”; a gravitation toward “the Voice of the Arabs” as a

model for journalism, occasioned by a need to develop a venue for voicing
regional concerns; and the “Phoenix of Arab media,” by which journalism in the
region took on its own autonomous and singular identity. The evolution across
these three stages was gradual and occurred in conjunction with larger develop-
ments in the region.
The first stage was parallel with the introduction of media more generally. It was
in the juvenile days of international journalism that fundamental questions of
objectivity, independence, and fairness in the region were first contested and artic-
ulated. When the West first considered broadcasting to the developing world with
the purpose of influencing public opinion, they came to the Arab world (Boyd
1999). Italian Radio Bari, built primarily to boost Italian influence in the Arab
world beyond the colony in Libya, was the earliest Arabic language radio station to
go to air in 1934, while a Nazi German broadcast went on air shortly afterwards in
the hopes of winning Arab hearts and minds. The Arab world’s most influential
foreign radio outlet, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), began its pro-
gramming in Arabic in 1938 with the aim of countering Radio Bari’s messages,
winning Arab public opinion, and furthering Britain’s national interests in an
increasingly influential region. Known at first as the Empire Radio, BBC programs
were meant to be a “projection of British culture” (Hourani 1988) and a technique
of mass persuasion. It was this very mandate that conflicted with the network’s
journalistic principles and highlighted one of the earliest accounts of media’s
undeterred pursuit of “objectivity.” Soon after its inauguration and within days of
its first broadcast, the BBC’s editorial policy soon came into question when the
story of a Palestinian Arab’s execution was featured in the news bulletin. The story
cast a dark shadow on the British government’s policy in the Palestine mandate
and marked the beginnings of tension between BBC broadcasters and the British
government. From that point forward, the BBC differentiated its news operations
from the empire’s policies and recommendations. Other broadcasters, such as the
French government-sponsored Radio Monte Carlo Middle East (RMCME) and
the Voice of America (VOA), broadcast with a narrower and more contested
appeal.
The events of September 11 helped the US government recognize the impor-
tance of relaunching its instruments of “public diplomacy” in the Arab world. A
complete overhaul of the former VOA, the allocation of millions of dollars to the
campaign, the hiring of a larger pool of bilingual staff, and the re-invention of the
station’s image produced Radio Sawa. Heralded as the single most ambitious pro-
ject of the kind since Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Sawa’s formula is
comprised of juxtaposed Arabic and Western pop music presented in disc-jockey
style. Its clearly pro-US message is transmitted within the interspersed news bul-
letins that interrupt the flow of music. Although preliminary surveys point to a
rising audience-base for Radio Sawa’s edgy music line-ups, there is little concrete
evidence that the station’s directive messages are affecting impressions of the
United States.
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A L - J A Z E E R A A N D WA R C O V E R A G E I N I R A Q
Overall, the history of foreign radio programming to the Arab world seems to
have gone full circle. Early messages from Italian, British, German, and American
stations sought to win Arab popular sentiments. Following World War II, the
credibility of a foreign radio broadcast was built on its ability to deliver fair and
balanced news to a region that depended on external feeds for uncensored jour-
nalism. Once again, the events of September 11, the war in Iraq, the prospects of
a protracted conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, and the threat of an
expanded war in the Arab world have redirected foreign media messages back to
the mandated agendized “diplomatic” discourses of yesteryear. It is this sidelining
of news balance which threatens the perceived credibility of foreign broadcasters,
both radio and television, in the Arab world. This first stage of broadcasting
is therefore characterized by its marked emphasis on “diplomacy” rather than
objectivity.
A second stage signaled the earliest major indigenous experiment in Arab
broadcasting, which occurred in Egypt. This venture, which would eventually
establish the country as a leader of the Arabist movement and home of the most
developed media, film, and theatre industry, was facilitated by Egypt’s efforts in
being first among the Arab nations to build a high-powered medium-wave and
short-wave transmitter for radio broadcasting (Boyd 1999). Built both to reach
the indigenous population within the country’s borders and to project and dis-
pense the message of pan-Arab nationalism throughout the region, the venture,
called “Voice of the Arabs,” allowed Arab anti-colonial revolutionaries to use the
Egyptian radio service to broadcast dissenting messages to their home states.
Situated as the prescribed vehicle for pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s,
“Voice of the Arabs” became immensely popular throughout the Arab world.
Nasser’s speeches and the late Egyptian singer Um Kalthoum captured and
mesmerized audiences across the region through their broadcasts, consolidating
Egypt as a leader in the Arab world, both as a political and media power (el-
Nawawy and Iskandar 2003). However, “Voice of the Arabs” soon fell from grace
in the Arab world, when, during the first few days of the 1967 war, its news
bulletins painted a misleading picture of the war, suggesting that Arab armies
were successful and neglecting to report casualties and damage in their ranks.
The fact that “Voice of the Arabs” had kept a general optimism throughout
the war was seen by many Arabs as a betrayal. Though the station was trans-
formed after the war, it was too late to salvage its reputation with its listeners
(Boyd 1999). Nonetheless, some characteristics of the nationalistic “Voice of the
Arabs” model are still emulated throughout the region. At its side, however,
an elaborate printed press in some Arab countries developed a tradition conso-
nant with principles of free discourse. Lebanon and Egypt had for long allowed
newspapers with leanings across the political spectrum to publish, and various
political publications allowed public discourse to flourish among the literate
(Boyd 1999; el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003). This trend, however, was not con-
sistent throughout the Arab world, with countries applying varying degrees of
pressure on opposition press. Furthermore, while some nations in the Arab world
317
had loosened the belt on the print press, until the advent of satellite television,
none had allowed this phenomenon to translate to the broadcast media which
were virtually all extensions of government.
Until the late 1990s, most Arab countries had a Ministry of Information—
formally a regulatory body—which was primarily responsible for monitoring and
censoring all mass communication in the nation. That is primarily why foreign
broadcasters had initially built such a large audience in the region. The rise of
Arab satellite television stations would soon displace Arabic language foreign
programming.
A third stage of development began with a chain reaction which followed
access to CNN in the Arab world during the Gulf War of 1991 and led to the
transformation of the Arab media landscape in the years that followed. It her-
alded the birth of investigative reporting and war correspondence in the Arab
world. The Arab satellite networks’ coverage of the war was nothing short of a
revolution in the region and amounted to a phoenix rising out of the ashes of pre-
vious experiments such as “Voice of the Arabs.” The first Arabic station to
emulate the CNN formula was the London-based Saudi-funded Middle East
Broadcasting Center (MBC). A mixed content station, MBC, offered news,
entertainment, sports, and specialty programs. In the 1990s, a new satellite sta-
tion was launched virtually every year. Over time, there would develop two types
of satellite television stations in the region, those that were an extension of the
local government’s programming, and those considered “offshore”—with little or
no “clear” relationship to the government of a particular nation. Most of those
listed here are considered “offshore” satellite networks. Other major contenders
to MBC that tried to carve a niche for themselves in this domain included the
Saudi-owned Arab Radio and Television (ART) and Orbit. While these stations
were not directly and overtly connected to particular governments, they were not
subject to the work of censors, at least not formally. The Lebanese Broadcasting
Corporation (LBC) and Abu Dhabi television were also among the newcomers
that made their mark on regional broadcasting and continue to be influential
today. However, it was not until Al-Jazeera came on the scene in 1996 that the
Arab world had its own 24-hour all-news station with an extensive international
bureau system.
A product of the 1996 editorial fallout between the BBC and the Saudi
investors in the BBC Arabic Television News Service, Al-Jazeera was the brain-
child of Qatar’s comparatively progressive emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
Al-Thani (el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003). While Saudi investors had pulled the
plug on the BBC service after a row over the airing of a documentary on execu-
tions in the Saudi Kingdom in 1996, Qatar’s emir saw this as a unique opportunity
to hire a group of critically minded, independent, and well trained journalists to
better represent the interests of the region. The emir and Al-Jazeera’s founders
recruited the staff of the fallen BBC service and relocated them to Doha to com-
prise the start-up crew for the first 24-hour Arabic television news channel
(el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003). The differences between the BBC’s Saudi fun-
318
ders and Qatar’s emir embody the contrasting principles of their respective net-
works.
Today, Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha are filled with professionals from
most Arab countries, comprising a demographic microcosm of the 22-nation
Arab world. The diverse pan-Arab workforce of 350 journalists in its main office
and 35 international bureaus reflects every political leaning, religious affiliation,
and educational background in the Arab world. However, as far as funding, Al-
Jazeera is exclusively Qatari. The emir provided a start-up fee of $140 million to
launch the network and continues to make regular loans (almost $100 million
annually) to help sustain the station’s operations (el-Nawawy and Iskandar
2003).
While some have called into question Al-Jazeera’s financial dependence on the
Qatar government (el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003), it seems that much of the
network’s editorial policy is independent of direct or indirect governmental con-
trol as far as international affairs are concerned. Alternately, we have been
critical of Al-Jazeera’s negligence toward domestic news in Qatar and have
brought forward questions regarding political connections between the network
and the Qatari government. This, however, seems to have a marginal impact on
coverage of international news (el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003).
It was not long before Al-Jazeera raised eyebrows with its aggressive investiga-
tive reporting style, demonstrating dissent against regional governments, hosting
volatile political debate shows, and its journalistic professionalism. The station’s
news style and political debates have been imitated to varying degrees by a grow-
ing number of other channels in the region. The latest members of the now-highly
competitive media terrain are Al-Arabiya and the reinvented Abu Dhabi tele-
vision and Dubai television.
In addition to rattling governments in the region, Al-Jazeera’s coverage of wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq triggered a global debate about conflict in the media and
the nature of “objectivity.” The network’s immense success, with an estimated
audience of 50 million viewers worldwide, has drawn attention to its brand of
journalism.
While most Arab news organizations imitate Al-Jazeera’s approach and style,
the network’s global reputation and reach have made it the regional victor. Like
news organizations everywhere, these stations all have one thing in common—
the pursuit of journalistic integrity. This is notably due to a well articulated
journalistic philosophy and a unique way of employing it. The ways in which this
philosophy is conceptualized are exemplified by its application during coverage of
the recent war in Iraq.
The Minotaur of contextual objectivity

In times of war, journalism comes under increased scrutiny with evaluations and
re-evaluations of content to ensure and promote the concept of “objectivity.”
Public discourse about media content offers assessments of stations’ coverage,
319
whether they are CNN, Fox News Channel, or Al-Jazeera. Networks’ decisions to
include or exclude items from their news bulletins arouse lively and often volatile
discussion in the print media and the public sphere. Such discussions ultimately
call into question and reflect on journalistic standards, invoking the institutional
ideal—“objectivity.”
The pursuit of objectivity in journalistic reporting has been a cornerstone of
the ideals of news coverage. Every journalism textbook and news reporting course
enshrines and standardizes objectivity as the prime responsibility of a keen
reporter. Although it seems to have its roots as far back as the 1830s, the notion
of “objectivity” became popular following World War I among news organizations
as they developed an appreciation for a scientific validation of truths (Schudson
1978).
Mass communication scholars and media critics have also grappled with this
concept for decades, articulating its variable contexts and applying multiple philo-
sophical interpretations to it. More recently, the aftermath of September 11 and
the war in Iraq have triggered a renewed debate on media’s responsibilities, culmi-
nating with the conceptualization of objectivity as a media practice of information
collection, processing, dissemination, and as an overarching attitude (el-Nawawy
and Iskandar 2002; Zelizer and Allan 2002; Tumber and Prentoulis 2003).
The term objectivity itself, when used within the journalistic context, signifies
the adoption of a position of detachment, rather than neutrality, toward the sub-
ject of reporting. It also suggests the absence of subjectivity, personalized
involvement, and judgment. This ideal or mirage is one that is particular to the
media practitioner and the institution in which she operates. By virtue of her
occupational responsibilities as a reporter—and reflected in her training—she is
trained to avoid leanings in matters of dispute.
The notion of contextualization offers a corrective to some of the limitations
inherent in the notion of objectivity. Contrary to the standard of “objectivity” to
which journalists and news organizations aspire, media audiences are opinion-
ated, partial, and highly invested in the news content. Audiences are expected to
espouse certain opinions and to express a degree of partisanship. While journal-
ists are trained to excavate the “truths” that lie beyond the “context,” audiences
are invariably and inevitably contextualized. Contextualization demonstrates a
situational position, a way by which collectivism among participants within the
same “context”—whether cultural, religious, political, or economic—is realized
and engaged. It is precisely this contextualization that aggravates and complicates
the pursuit of “objective” coverage within the news media setting.
Contextualization further confuses attempts at even-handedness and efforts to
cover all sides of a story. Particularly in times of war, it is the context within
which a reporter operates that makes communication with the “enemy” unac-
ceptable. Context may be seen as the reason why dissenting voices in the US
during the build-up for war on Iraq were perceived and represented negatively by
many policy-makers, the American media, and subsequently by the public.
Accordingly, the ratings for networks that demonstrated a predominantly pro-
320
government and pro-war stance, such as the Fox News Channel (the network
that offered the most support for military action in Iraq), skyrocketed throughout
and during the war—suggesting a growing political “context” in the US. One
instance that demonstrated this was a visit by two US senators to Iraq before the
war to evaluate the humanitarian crisis caused by United Nations sanctions . The
reaction to the visit was swift and intense. Many television commentators and
politicians saw this visit as an act of “national betrayal” and defection. Evidently,
if politicians were heavily criticized for communicating with the “enemy,” then
how would the media fare if they did the same?
That is precisely what Al-Jazeera did—communicate with the “enemy.” In our
discussion of the network’s role in the world of post-September 11 journalism, we
offered the concept of “contextual objectivity,” in an attempt to articulate and
capture the eclectic discourse and epistemological tensions between the relativism
of message receivers and the empirical positivist attempts of message-builders (el-
Nawawy and Iskandar 2002, 2003). Should the media lead the masses or be led by
them? “[T]he theory of contextual objectivity—the necessity of television and
media to present stories in a fashion that is . . . impartial yet sensitive to local sensi-
bilities—is at work” (el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003: 54).
Contextual objectivity, the perpetual tension between the decontextualized
messages of the news deliverer and the nuanced and colored perceptions of the
receiver of news messages, can be witnessed on virtually every news bulletin of
war on every media outlet in the world today, not the least CNN and Al-Jazeera.
It permeates every story, and has become increasingly emblematic of the struggle
for the construction of mediated messages.
We used the Minotaur as a metaphor to describe the contestation forged by the
new media to accomplish both seemingly-contradictory duties (el-Nawawy and
Iskandar 2002). Like the Minotaur, the Cretan mythological character that bore
the head of a bull and the body of a man, contextual objectivity reflects the ten-
sions of the instinctive and rational, the relativist and the positivist. The
Minotaur’s hybrid identity and the contradictory co-existence of human and beast
within the same entity is precisely what makes it a compelling analogy for contex-
tual objectivity. At the root of both the Minotaur’s existence and of contextual
objectivity is an internal tension and turmoil which facilitates a consensual balance
between the two natures, allowing for their cohabitation in the same creature. Both
the Minotaur and contextual objectivity represent a balance between two forces, a
balance that can tilt either way. On the scale’s pivot is the ideal intermediate
between context and objectivity—best articulated as fairness and balance. Like the
Minotaur who struggles to maintain equilibrium between his beastly and human
qualities, the media try to strike the balance between audience appeal and “objec-
tive” coverage.
The media have a dual role as both informants and a mirror for society, hence,
they are held to a rather stringent policy by their viewers. They must meet their
dual duties of being balanced (objectivity) while reflecting the views of
their public constituency (contextualization). For instance, American television
321
coverage, under no overt government influence, may reflect the views of main-
stream American audiences in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks while,
at the same time, creating public opinion.
While most networks engage in contextual objectivity, consciously or other-
wise, in their coverage of war, Al-Jazeera is perhaps the first network to articulate
this approach as a network philosophy. The channel’s mottos, repeated frequently
during program intermissions, are operationalizations of contextual objectivity:
“The opinion and the other opinion,” “Freedom, objectivity, accuracy,” and “With
all the colours of a rainbow.” These slogans demonstrate explicitly the contesting
dimensions of “contextual objectivity”—seemingly suggesting that “truth” is the
culmination of multiple conglomerated subjectivities. This implies that neither
objectivity nor context should be the sole priorities—thereby dismissing the
exclusivity of either. Instead, onus is placed on the gray area in-between the two—
where fairness and balance are situated. As Al-Jazeera attempts to harness the
advantages of both context and objectivity, they represent an experiment that
redefines modern journalism. Their attempts at delivering news and commentary
that juxtaposes multiple opinions and realities into a single mosaic are a testament
to the network’s pursuit of contextual objectivity. However, attempts to strike
equilibrium between the tensions of context and objectivity have left Al-Jazeera
celebrated by admirers and battered by critics (see el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003
for examples).
Since its conception, reactions to the concept of contextual objectivity within
scholarly circles have been generally positive, while the popular press and media
appeared more ambivalent about its ability to explain differences in coverage
between networks. For example, a review article in the September 7, 2002 issue
of The Economist characterized the concept of contextual objectivity as a symp-
tom of the “struggle to defend the network [Al-Jazeera] from its detractors,”
arguing that the concept, which suggests that networks offer news with a particu-
lar worldview, was a “dubious” notion, “at best a muddle, at worst, an evasion”
(“Island in the sun,” 2002). By contrast, an article published in the Washington
Diplomat in June 2002 included an interview with Robin Wright, the chief diplo-
matic correspondent at the Los Angeles Times, who suggested that covering the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict generally emerged from a “set opinion or acceptance
of a certain moral value” on the part of reporters, a view in consonance with the
notion of contextual objectivity (Beyerle 2002).
When the concept of contextual objectivity is applied to Al-Jazeera, it is obvi-
ous that the network faces two major dilemmas: making the news comprehensive
and placing the stories within a meaningful historical account. However, the
inclusion of context and analysis almost inevitably leads to the encroachment of
opinion. For instance, while the network labors to bring forth multiple perspec-
tives on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, the Arab public’s opposition to Israel’s
occupation of Palestinian territories is a prevailing context that permeates Al-
Jazeera’s coverage (el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003: 209).
Much of the controversy and criticism Al-Jazeera has garnered since its incep-
322
tion is a consequence of the station’s pursuit of contextual objectivity as a funda-

mental journalistic standard. In our chronological sketch of Al-Jazeera coverage
during the war in Iraq, we concentrate on the kinds of reporting choices that made
Al-Jazeera distinctive, and offer some reflection on, consideration for, or demon-
stration of “context.” This is an attempt to showcase the editorial decisions made
by one station in the coverage of war. How does Al-Jazeera demonstrate contex-
tual objectivity in its presentation of the war in Iraq?
Al-Jazeera and the early days of the Iraq war

The war in Iraq and the events that ensued in its aftermath have been big news
on the American networks, but they have been even bigger news on Al-Jazeera,
whose perspective on the war has been called clearly Arab rather than American.
The differences in coverage were a reinforcement of the extent of contextualiza-
tion in the news that ensued.
Al-Jazeera’s coverage displayed an invocation of both broader journalistic prac-
tices and a clear instance of contextual objectivity. Its reporters engaged in a
number of practices that suggested a consonance with its motto—“The opinion
and the other opinion,” and in many ways these practices paralleled the journalis-
tic routines followed elsewhere. Its reporters covered press briefings by the Iraqi
officials in Baghdad as well as war updates from US Central Command (CENT-
COM) in Doha, Qatar. Its reporters were interspersed throughout Iraq and
one—Amr Al-Kahki—was embedded with the US marines. It had almost a dozen
roaming correspondents on the ground in Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities. In a
measure of those correspondents’ success during the war, US and other Western
networks often relied upon them for access to exclusive video from Iraq of the
bombing and of breaking news.
At the same time, Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war and its aftermath dis-
played a struggle to find a balance that provided its audience with the “truth” that
fits its context—the same struggle that other networks, Arab or non-Arab, go
through in covering any major conflict. For instance, while the American media
showcased US state-of-the-art military machines in action and the high morale of
the US troops in what was described as a “war of liberation,” Al-Jazeera focused
on Iraqi civilian casualties and damage to Iraqi cities in a “war of occupation” (el-
Nawawy 2003a).
Because Al-Jazeera had several non-embedded correspondents reporting on the
ground from major Iraqi cities where Western correspondents were almost non-
existent, they were in a position to investigate US and British assertions about
the war or simply outpace information received by American networks. On many
occasions, Al-Jazeera’s on-the-ground, non-embedded correspondents did provide
a corrective to the American official line that the military campaign was, barring
occasional resistance, going according to plan.
Similarly, while Al-Jazeera broadcast images reflecting the horror of the bomb-
ing campaign on Iraq and demonstrations of Arab people angry with the US
323
decision to launch this war, it also aired documentaries showing the tough living
conditions inside Iraqi prisons and the brutality of Saddam’s regime. Moreover,
despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Arabs were opposed to the
war, Al-Jazeera correspondents went out of their way to interview members of the
Iraqi opposition who lived overseas and who supported the war.
In some respects, Al-Jazeera correspondents had an edge over their Western
counterparts, owing to the fact that they spoke Arabic and were more familiar
with the Iraqi culture. This enabled them to interview average Iraqi citizens on
the street and to give their audience an overall sense of the general mood on the
Iraqi streets. The following is a report from Al-Kahki (Al-Jazeera’s only embed-
ded correspondent), obtained through a direct feed to Al-Jazeera studios in
Qatar from Umm Qasr, where he was stationed with the coalition troops on
March 27, 2003. Al-Kahki was reporting on the situation inside Umm Qasr,
which was surrounded by coalition troops, but was still controlled by the Iraqis.
Al-Kahki said:
The feeling I got from the people in Umm Qasr is that they were “con-
fused” and weren’t sure exactly what their legal status was. They didn’t
know what type of land they were standing on; whether it was con-
trolled by the British/American troops or still under the control of the
Iraqi regime. All they said they wanted was living peacefully with food,
water, and milk for their children.
Responding to a question from the Doha studio anchor with regard to the general
security and the Iraqi resistance in Umm Qasr, Al-Khaki said:
Regarding the issue of resistance, we cannot predict it, since from time
to time we see some pockets of resistance despite the fact that some
British troops here have been searching for these pockets everywhere.
There is a big void, however, in security and safety in this area. The resi-
dents told us about some looting in the warehouses of Umm Qasr.
Moreover, the power outage is worsening the situation. People are suf-
fering, and they are living in darkness with hardly any infrastructure.
It was that kind of live reporting on the ground from places that were still inac-
cessible to Western correspondents that offered audiences a street-level view of
the war’s impact on Iraqis that made Al-Jazeera a number-one choice for Arab
viewers during the Iraq war. Despite hackers’ attacks, its battered website contin-
ued to top the charts for the most sought-after keyword on the Internet (Schatz
2003). Moreover, Al-Jazeera’s subscriptions skyrocketed to four million addi-
tional subscribers in Europe during the war (Cozens 2003). Its effort to cover
wide-ranging angles of the conflict throughout the war— including the Arab
street, Iraqi civilians, embedded reporters with coalition forces, Iraqi press confer-
ences, and US Central Command briefings—also earned Al-Jazeera the respect
324
and admiration of many journalistic media organizations, with favorable articles

appearing in numerous American and European newspapers (Faine 2003; Hasso
2003; Steele 2003; Suellentrop 2003; Tahboub 2003, etc.).
In the midst of this publicity, the Al-Jazeera Baghdad bureau was shelled by an
American missile on April 8, 2003, leading to the tragic death of one of the net-
work’s star reporters, Tareq Ayoub. This happened despite the fact that Al-Jazeera
officials informed the Pentagon about the exact location of its bureau in Baghdad
three months before the war had started. US Central Command in Qatar said its
forces had come under significant enemy fire from the Al-Jazeera building, and had
returned fire in self-defense. Although many Arabs accused the Pentagon of inten-
tionally targeting Al-Jazeera (they based their conclusion on the fact that the
Al-Jazeera Kabul bureau too was bombed by an American missile during the
Afghanistan war in November 2001), Al-Jazeera officials were wise enough not to
rush to that conclusion. They held a press conference during which they
demanded a thorough investigation by the Pentagon.
The following day, April 9, 2003, was a historic day that witnessed the fall of
Baghdad to the coalition troops. Al-Jazeera was there, along with major Arab and
Western news organizations, in Firdous Square in the heart of Baghdad transmit-
ting to its audience the toppling of Saddam’s statue. During these moments,
Al-Jazeera’s reporter interviewed some Iraqi civilians, who were celebrating in the
square, and he also interviewed a US marine about his feelings.
During the war, Al-Jazeera presented what appeared to be climactic, Holly-
woodesque promotions that dramatized the situation on the ground with the
intention of attracting and retaining the viewers’ attention. One such promotion
which aired throughout the duration of the war opened with US President
George W. Bush warning former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of imminent
war, followed by a montage of a crying Iraqi child wearing a blood-drenched T-
shirt swathed in bandages, burning oil fields, and missiles dropping on buildings.
This moving promotion segued to a news anchor at Al-Jazeera headquarters in
Doha, Qatar, who proceeded to read the headlines. In Olympic competition style,
the background displayed two flags, the American and the Iraqi, draped in juxta-
position.
Since the start of the war, some of the most graphic and gruesome images from
Iraq—wounded men carried in bloody blankets to hospitals, toddlers sharing
metal shelves at a morgue, seared corpses next to burned cars, and the hail of mis-
siles, bombs, and rockets that fell on the Iraqi capital of Baghdad—were
continuously replayed on Al-Jazeera.
Al-Jazeera’s frequent emphasis on Iraqi civilian casualties prompted US offi-
cials to accuse the network of inflaming the “Arab street,” of not just reporting on
the war but stirring it up, and of serving as a “propaganda” tool for the Iraqi
regime. However, viewed in context, Al-Jazeera was not “out to get Americans”;
nor was its reporting of the war any more inflammatory than that of the Ameri-
can networks. Moreover Al-Jazeera did not appear to be aiming to please the
Iraqi government, which expelled two of the network’s reporters from Baghdad.
325
(They were allowed to return after Al-Jazeera decided to completely halt all its
reporting operations in Iraq.) Al-Jazeera played to the general feelings of Arabs
who wanted to see an end to the Iraqi civilians’ suffering and who were strongly
opposed to a war they deemed unjust.
As disgusting as these gory images were, editors at the station argued that not
showing them would have been a denial of the reality witnessed by Arab
reporters. Had Al-Jazeera decided not to show these images, it would have risked
losing its audience to other Arab networks, such as the brand new Saudi satellite
channel, Al-Arabiya, which also showed close-up images of dead and wounded
Iraqis (el-Nawawy 2003a).
Al-Jazeera also focused on US losses in the Iraq war. For example, during the
early days of the war, Al-Jazeera beamed pictures of Iraqi farmers cheering the
downing of a US plane over the Iraqi city of Basra. The network also showed live
pictures of hundreds of Iraqis gathered on the banks of the Tigris River in Bagh-
dad, setting fire to cane fields and shooting into the river to flush out US pilots
who witnesses said had parachuted from the sky.
Most Arabs who followed these losses on television were pleasantly surprised,
perhaps even exhilarated, to see the much weaker Iraqis resist what they consid-
ered an “occupying superpower.” In a way, there is a desire in the Arab world to
support the underdog, and Arab networks, including Al-Jazeera, fed that desire
during the war. That was one main reason why US officials appeared dissatisfied
with Al-Jazeera’s war coverage.
However, it was Al-Jazeera’s broadcast on March 23 of video footage (taken
from Iraqi television) of American prisoners of war and dead American soldiers
that stirred much anger and outrage against Al-Jazeera in the United States. The
footage showed dead US soldiers, easily identifiable by the faces. One of them was
a young man lying diagonally across the screen, his head in the lower-right hand
corner. His eyes were closed, and blood was gushing beneath his head and soaking
his T-shirt. The American POWs, who were shown in the same video, were visi-
bly exhausted and somewhat confused. They were interviewed by an unseen
speaker, presumably from the Iraqi government or Iraqi state television. The
POWs were asked their names and their hometowns.
In a move that was considered a punishment for Al-Jazeera for airing these
images, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq ejected Al-Jazeera reporters.
(The Al-Jazeera reporters have since been readmitted to the New York Stock
Exchange.) Moreover, hackers attacked Al-Jazeera’s new English-language web-
site, replacing it with a red, white, and blue US map and the slogan “Let freedom
ring.”
While some of Al-Jazeera’s coverage may be seen as “contextually” objection-
able to an American audience, it was appropriate for non-American viewers.
Regardless of judgment, the treatment the station received in the US was unwar-
ranted for several reasons. First, some European and American networks showed
still pictures from the same footage that was broadcast on Al-Jazeera but were not
singled out. Second, it was a dramatic demonstration of how US officials found
326
themselves outpaced by reports and images from the battlefield. Al-Jazeera, by

showing these images, placed pressure on the US administration to admit to the
capturing of these POWs. On the other hand, most American media showed the
faces of Iraqi POWs captured by American troops. Hence, asking Al-Jazeera to
refrain from airing footage of American POWs is a double standard.
Third, Al-Jazeera is not watched by most American families, and so the con-
cern, raised by some US officials, that American families might have learned
from the media that their sons were captured did not apply to Al-Jazeera. Despite
that, Al-Jazeera aired the complete footage of American POWs only once, and
then it aired segments of it later on.
Finally, the decision as to whether or not to show these images should be deter-
mined by the networks themselves depending on the nature of their audiences. A
plethora of wars in the Arab world’s contemporary history and the ongoing Pales-
tinian–Israeli conflict have provided Arab audiences with years of gruesome
imagery of war casualties. That is why, perhaps, the images of casualties shown on
Al-Jazeera were not as shocking to the Arab audiences as they might have been
to the American audiences. In this regard, Al-Jazeera, which often bases its
editorial decisions on its audiences’ sensitivities, was operating, at least in part, on
“contextual” market principles, which dictate that content follows audience
interest.
For these reasons, the reaction by which what may be the only indepen-
dent and uncensored television network in the Arab world was punished
because its style of war coverage was seen as unsuitable to certain people
seems to have been counterproductive. The question remains whether
other nations similarly have the right to ban US media outlets because
they disagree with their coverage?
(el-Nawawy 2003b)
On one evening during the second week of the war, Al-Jazeera broadcast a phone
interview with Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the former Iraqi Information Minis-
ter. Al-Sahhaf became a media star and a cult figure in the West for insulting the
Americans in charming and flowery Arabic, feeding Arab television with mis-
information about Iraq’s military power, and declaring Baghdad “safe and secure,”
even when the coalition troops were on the capital’s doorsteps. Following the
phone interview with the Iraqi official, Al-Jazeera aired a speech by President
George W. Bush, and then US Secretary of State Colin Powell came on to give
an exclusive interview to the Al-Jazeera anchor, Adnan Al-Sharif, a former
employee of Jordanian television and now Al-Jazeera’s interim managing director.
Powell told Arab audiences that the US wanted this war to end as soon as possi-
ble and that American forces had been doing their best to minimize Iraqi civilian
casualties. Realizing Al-Jazeera’s great popularity among Arab audiences, US offi-
cials in Washington have been lining up to get on the network.
327
Al-Jazeera and the recent stages of the Iraq war

Al-Jazeera’s attempt to offer wide-ranging coverage of the Iraq conflict has contin-
ued in the more recent stages of the war. In 12 weeks of Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the
so-called “post-war” period, reporters used field reports and interviews with key
Iraqi figures to explain the complexity of the situation after the fall of Saddam,
given the various religious, ethnic, and nationalist rivalries among different Iraqi
factions.
For example, in late June 2003, Al-Jazeera interviewed Sheikh Mohammed
Baqir Al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SAIRI), the largest Shi’ite Iraqi group, who was assassinated later that year,
about his position toward the existence of coalition troops in Iraq and his assess-
ment of the political situation in post-Saddam Iraq. The interview with
Al-Hakim had special importance because of the tension that has started since
the end of the war in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, where thousands of Shi’ites
had been demonstrating against what they called the “foreign occupation” of
their land.
The multiple Iraqi perspectives were not the only ones presented on Al-Jazeera
after the war. The American perspective was also presented through interviews
with US political strategists working for think tanks in Washington, DC. One of
those strategists, Jon Alterman of the Center for International and Strategic
Studies, came on Al-Jazeera in July 2003 to comment on the Iraqi resistance to
the US troops and the daily violent confrontations between the Iraqi guerrillas
and the American soldiers.
Al-Jazeera also included a series of exclusive interviews with key American fig-
ures in Iraq. In early July 2003, one of its main reporters in Baghdad, Waddah
Khanfar, conducted an interview with Paul Bremer, the top US administrator in
Iraq, who addressed the key issues that had been going on in the minds of most
Arab people after the situation in Iraq had started to deteriorate. The following is
a transcript of part of the interview:
Khanfar: During the past few weeks, there has been an increase in the attacks
against the American soldiers. Are you worried that these attacks
might include more cities in Iraq?
Bremer: I certainly hope the attacks do not spread. Until now, these attacks are
concentrated in the north and the west of Baghdad, and they seem to
be individual attempts by Ba’athists from the former regime. We are
doing our best to capture all the militants so that we can live in peace.
Khanfar: But sir, a lot of people are now unemployed and you might find them
joining the resistance groups.
Bremer: Obviously, senior members of the Ba’ath Party are unhappy since they
will not have any role in the new government. This is the most impor-
tant decision I took for this country. People on the streets thank me
for that decision. As for the middle and lower members of the Ba’ath,
328
we are currently preparing them to become civilized members of the

society and have jobs.
Khanfar: When will you go home?
Bremer: When my job here is completed. My job here is clear and identified.
The Iraqi people need to create their own constitution and interim
government. When this is completed, all the coalition forces will
leave. We will not stay one more day or one less day. It all depends on
the Iraqi people and when they finish writing the constitution.
Such open and frank interviews with US officials were much needed at that
point, given a deterioration of the American image in the Arab world since the
start of the Iraq war. For American officials to appear on the most popular Arab
network and talk face-to-face to members of the Arab audience about issues of
concern to them was a vital step in making clear the American point of view.
One of Al-Jazeera’s more notable achievements was engaging its audience in
an open dialogue, where people from various countries exchanged ideas in the
hope of fostering mutual understanding in a constructive and respectful environ-
ment. One popular Al-Jazeera program—“Open Dialogue”—allowed for this type
of exchange. A recent episode of the live monthly program (all Al-Jazeera’s pro-
grams are aired live, which does not give room for any kind of censorship or
previewing editing) invited students and their faculties from Egypt, Lebanon, and
Iraq to engage in a dialogue via direct satellite link about what the Arabs could
do to improve the situation in Iraq after the war. The episode was hosted and
moderated by Al-Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Ghassan bin Jeddo (July 5,
2003).
Although most comments began with students sending regards and wishes for
peace, the discussion heated up and included accusations and pleas from all sides.
Some members of the Iraqi side accused the Iraqis living abroad of being passive
and not helping their country. “Where are the Iraqi professors who are living
abroad? Why don’t they come back and help their country?” said one Iraqi arts
professor in Baghdad. A professor in Beirut said, addressing his words to the Arab
leaders, “Please don’t turn Iraq into a ‘deal’ by distributing its wealth among you
while the Iraqi people are starving to death.” Then a student from Cairo said,
“There are lots of reasons that led Iraq through this dark tunnel, but the number
one reason are the Arab countries; when I say that I mean the Arab leaders, not
the people.”
The Iraqi students in the Baghdad studio disagreed among themselves on the
way they viewed the resistance movements against the US troops. One Iraqi stu-
dent said, “I would like to tell everyone in Fallouja [an Iraqi Sunni-dominated
city which had witnessed repeated Iraqi attacks against the American troops]
please, don’t drive the Iraqis into another massacre; we have been through
enough already.” An Iraqi political science professor interrupted him and said:
“The fact that Al-Fallouja is being accused of resistance is an honor for us and for
all Iraqis. Any country facing an invasion has the right to resist.”
329
This debate and others like it showed that Al-Jazeera aired commentary and
multiple perspectives, and in doing so it broke ground by venturing into the realm
of open discussion rarely attempted by other broadcasters in the Arab world.
In the process of presenting pluralistic and open debates, Al-Jazeera also
assigned episodes of its key programs to assess the Iraq war coverage by Arab news
networks, including, of course, Al-Jazeera itself—an indication that Al-Jazeera
welcomed critical analysis of its own coverage. One such episode was aired from a
program titled “Behind the Events,” a daily program that started airing after the
war (May 12, 2003). The episode was hosted by Faisal Al-Kasim, one of the most
popular television hosts in the Arab world, who some people call “the Arab Larry
King.” Al-Kasim’s celebrity status came from hosting the popular program “The
Opposite Direction,” which is the flagship talk show on Al-Jazeera.
Four guests were invited to the “Behind the Events” episode that evening:
Jawad Maraka, former president of Qatari television, Asa’ad Abu Khalil, a politi-
cal science professor at the University of California, Mowafak Harb, director of
the American-sponsored Radio Sawa, and Mustafa Bakry, editor-in-chief of a
daily Egyptian opposition newspaper. The episode focused on the media revolu-
tion caused by the transnational satellite networks in the Arab world and how
these networks had affected coverage of the Iraq war. The following is a transcript
of part of the show:
Al-Kasim: Now we see Arab news channels are becoming more independent
and free while the Western networks have been cheering for the Iraq
war; even some American viewers complained that they weren’t get-
ting the full picture through their media. What do you think of that
phenomenon?
Harb: The Arab media have come a long way over the past few years. They
have advanced a lot in terms of technology, ways of obtaining the
news, and even in competition with the Western networks. Having
said that, I still think that most of the Arab news channels distort
reality on purpose because they get their commands from the Arab
governments.
Abu Khalil: We cannot look at the Arab media as one entity. There is a difference
between print and broadcast and a difference between the media of
one country and that of another. This difference was apparent in the
Iraq war coverage, where we saw more diversity of opinions in the
French and the British media; however, the American media were
biased and one-sided although they pretended to be giving a bal-
anced picture. Now, with the American networks, there is hardly any
room for the opposite opinion. For example, when Ashleigh Banfield
[MSNBC correspondent] tried to criticize the war, she was labeled as
a “traitor” and received threat notes. On another note, I believe that
Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi television did a better job in covering this
war than the American media; however, I am against the fact that
330
every time an American official coughs or sneezes, Al-Jazeera broad-

casts everything live.
Al-Kasim: The Arab media have been accused of unrealistic reporting and
falsely raising the morale of the Arab viewers in the Iraq war. Can I
get your opinions on that?
Bakry: I don’t believe the Arab media could have been objective in this war,
especially when we know that the true motive behind this war was
not only to remove Saddam Hussein, but Americanizing everything
in the Arab world.
Maraka: During the war, the Arab media made no distinction between the
Iraqi citizens and the Iraqi administration. So, they viewed whoever
defended the Iraqi citizens as a defender for the Iraqi regime. I also
think the Arab media presented more impressionistic, rather than
factual information, about the war.
Harb: I think the problem lies in defining the role of the Arab media. In the
West, each media outlet has a mission and a strategy; however, we
don’t find that with the Arab media. They are confused as to whether
they are seeking facts or criticizing their governments or advertising
for their governments.
Pluralistic dialogues such as this one engaged the viewers and helped them
become critical users of their own media. This is especially important in the Arab
world, where the viewers had never been exposed to a program discussing the role
of the Arab media in covering a major conflict and assessing the strengths and
weaknesses of the Arab networks in a free manner without any inhibitions or red
lines. In processing what they receive from the media, the onus falls on the audi-
ences to use a critical eye and to be aware of the different factors influencing and
biasing the media. In the meantime, media personnel have to be self-critical and
have to hold themselves accountable for any clearly partisan or incomplete
reporting.
Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war was not devoid of context. For example,
its reporters used the term “martyrs” to refer to the Iraqi civilians killed during the
military operations (el-Nawawy 2003a). These leanings often seem inevitable as
networks cannot be devoid of perspective, a perspective that produces and
reflects context. However, this context’s overemphasis ushers in a certain degree
of slant. Our monitoring and analysis of the Al-Jazeera coverage suggests that the
network labored to present multiple sides of the Iraq conflict, despite strong criti-
cism from and measures taken by both Iraqi and US officials, and that these
multiple sides were presented systematically within a larger contextual frame that
made sense within the region, if not to the world at large.
To this day, Al-Jazeera continues to be the target of criticism, prosecution, and
punishment from many governments around the world, in what may be an inad-
vertent reaffirmation of the network’s success at employing, implementing, and
engaging contextual objectivity.
331
Much like the mythical Minotaur, who was thought to be responsible for cli-
matic changes and seasonal unrest, in its short and notorious history, Al-Jazeera
has been no less than a hurricane in the media landscape. On the contrary, unlike
the Minotaur, who in the end was slain, there is much reason to believe that Al-
Jazeera and its news formula—contextual objectivity—will outlive the criticism
and perhaps the network itself. Instead, the Iraq war and its coverage by Al-
Jazeera, have helped create an urgent necessity for a meaningful analysis and
re-evaluation of war coverage to include an assessment of contextual objectivity
as a barometer for fairness and balance in reporting around the world.
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18
BIG MEDIA AND LITTLE MEDIA
The journalistic informal sector
during the invasion of Iraq
Patricia Aufderheide
The brief moment in which the US armed forces with allies destroyed the regime
of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in spring and early summer 2003 offered a snapshot
view of the US media’s performance of the toughest job in democracy: managing
public discussion of controversial issues in a way that included significant minor-
ity voices. It was not a lovely picture, but it was a provocative one.
Electronic big media were bigger than ever, both domestically and internation-
ally, and along with the big moguls—Murdoch, Berlusconi— there were big and
growing corporations such as Disney, Vivendi, and Viacom, and big media merg-
ers, notably that of AOL and Time Warner. At the same time, electronic little
media flourished, a myriad grassroots attempt to fuel public opinion with informa-
tion and attitude—often living, however briefly, in the virtual realm of the
Internet. The vast burgeoning of the World Wide Web over the previous decade
had transformed the expectations of a generation about their ability both to
express their opinions and to reach others. The 1999 anti-globalization demon-
strations in Seattle, WA, that pre-empted a meeting of the World Trade
Organization (Kidd 2002), which used the Internet to launch do-it-yourself news
services and triggered the rise of “indymedia” centers globally, made the possi-
bilities vividly evident within the US. Other global organizations including
OneWorld (oneworld.net) had already combined the strength of grassroots exper-
tise with the power of distributed networking.
The invasion of Iraq—that is, the brief period of military conquest ending offi-
cially on May 1 when President George W. Bush declared on the flight deck of the
USS Abraham Lincoln that “the United States and our allies have prevailed”—
displayed the spaces in which both big and little media flourished. In particular, it
revealed the antic vigor of a journalistic “informal sector.” Borrowed from devel-
opment economics, the term referred to the unofficial, untaxed, unpoliced, and
often flourishing underground economy.
Big media had been on a roll in the US since the Telecommunications Act of
1996 had greatly increased concentration of ownership in radio and moderately
333
P AT R I C I A A U F D E R H E I D E
increased concentration in other areas, including terrestrial television (Aufder-

heide 1999). The act, which started out as a revision of telecommunications sector
regulation to foster new entrants, competition, and investment, became a lumpy
package of legislative gifts to powerful industry players. Major mass media inter-
ests, especially radio, had argued that deregulation of ownership limitations was
critical to provide incentives for mass media to invest capital in new ventures, and
legislators obliged. Concentration of ownership was propelled further by Bush-era
enthusiasts at the Federal Communications Commission, which implements
telecommunications legislation and was charged under the act with biennial regu-
latory reviews. The FCC under the leadership of Michael Powell continued the
tradition of permitting owners of large telecommunication networks such as
Rupert Murdoch unprecedented waivers, and its Republican majority successfully
pursued the goal of further deregulation of anti-concentration measures (US, FCC
2003).
During the invasion of Iraq, quantity became quality in big media. That is, size
affected content. Commercial practice—much of it on entertainment media such
as music radio or prime-time television that did not make claims to be providing
news or public affairs—became effective political clout. This happened whether
management directed it or not. It happened because big media’s bottom-line con-
cerns and practices—its sensitivities to ratings and the notorious fickleness of
audiences, its currying of advertisers’ favor, its support for highly colorful charac-
ters whose sensationalism drives up ratings—shaped choices about political
coverage and events. These practices became ever more extreme as the channels
and alternatives available to people burgeoned. Multichannel cable and satellite
radio and television, Web-based information services and the dawn of the per-
sonal video recorder (of which the commercial service TIVO was one example)
which made it possible to download and replay digitized versions of television
programs all intensified commercial practices that drew and held audiences. In
assessing media behavior in a political crisis, it is important to look here beyond
the headlines of prestige daily journalism, because public opinion is powerfully
shaped by the most popular media—the entertainment that pervades daily life.
Big media
Consider four examples, none of them necessarily a demonstration of tendentious
ideological behavior on the part of news outlets. Rather, they all demonstrated the
consequences of a media entity’s size on coverage and the voicing of controversial
views. The first example concerned using the commercial airwaves as a platform to
rally pro-war demonstrators. As the invasion with Iraq drew close, pro-war demon-
strations suddenly started springing up all over the country. Dozens of “Rally for
America!” events were held. They were organized by a particular conservative
radio talk-show host, Glenn Beck, who positioned himself as someone standing up
against liberal media—by which he apparently mostly meant television and which
he decried for running footage of anti-war rallies (although most US protesting
334
groups argued that coverage was meager and slighted the numbers). Supporting
the “75 to 78 percent in favor of military action,”—he told a group estimated at
20,000 in a Clearwater, Florida, rally to “Begin your day and end your day on your
knees . . . Pray for our troops and pray for our president” (Gregoire 2003).
Beck’s show, along with those of other conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh,
was carried by the gigantic national radio company Clear Channel. Clear Channel
used to be a small radio company until the 1996 Telecommunications Act rolled
back ownership restrictions on radio. Now it is by far the largest company owning
local radio stations in the US, and it lowers costs by sharing programming among
its more than 1,200 stations. Glenn Beck was a national voice with an ability to
reach into local events planning. Though Clear Channel denied any role in
Glenn Beck’s call to action, his efforts clearly didn’t hurt. Clear Channel, which
was in fiscal straits, stood to benefit from a federal government decision to further
deregulate radio—eventually made in its favor, although later challenged in Con-
gress (Krugman 2003; Schwartz and Fabrikant 2003).
A second case also concerned Clear Channel which, besides being the biggest
radio station owner in the US, was also the largest concert promoter. This inci-
dent concerned cross-ownership and control, and it was relayed via actor and
movie producer Tim Robbins, who spoke about the incident in Washington, DC,
in April 2003, at a press conference he called at the National Press Club. Com-
plaining about the way he and his wife Susan Sarandon had been treated by the
National Baseball Hall of Fame, when their invitation to celebrate the 15th
anniversary of Bull Durham was rescinded because of their dissident views on the
invasion, Robbins discussed his isolation within the entertainment community,
but also noted that people were secretly cheering him on.
“A famous middle-aged rock-and-roller called me last week to thank me for
speaking out against the war,” he said, “only to go on to tell me that he could not
speak himself because he fears repercussions from Clear Channel. ‘They promote
our concert appearances,’ he said. ‘They own most of the stations that play our
music. I can’t come out against this war’” (Robbins 2003).
Clear Channel corporate spokespeople denied intimidating and suppressing
speech in this instance. Of course, as an individual under US law, the corporation
does have full-fledged First Amendment rights, and because it is so big, its First
Amendment rights have a very big footprint. But the rocker did not say that
Clear Channel had denied him speech, like the National Baseball Hall of Fame
had done to Tim Robbins. He just said he was afraid. He could not take a com-
mercial risk, not with a company that had the unique power to pull the plug on
his concert-driven career.
A third example also demonstrated the power of size to diminish points of view.
Cumulus Media, a company that owns 262 stations, refused to carry the music of
the country music band Dixie Chicks because the group criticized Bush and the
war while touring Europe. The British left-wing newspaper, the Guardian, was the
first to publish the on-stage comment of Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines in
London: “We’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas”
335
(Campbell). This remark reverberated across the ocean. Once Cumulus dropped
the Dixie Chicks, almost every country music radio station group, including all of
those supported by Clear Channel, dropped them during the invasion. Their
record sales fell 75 percent the following week, and they suffered a near-blackout
of their new album during the invasion. (The sales rebounded after the invasion,
though.) The choice to drop the Dixie Chicks was probably a canny market deci-
sion since country music listeners skew to the conservative. In fact, Cumulus
Media spokespeople argued that the company was just being sensitive to its listen-
ers’ viewpoints. Because of consolidation, though, a few decision-makers had a
blanketing effect, at least during the invasion (Bishop and Florida 2003; Segal
2003).
A fourth example shows the power of commerce to affect the news judgment of
local television stations. Television stations have long been understandably sensi-
tive to ratings because their income from advertisers depends on the number of
viewers they get. Local news is an area where local stations keep the money.
Frank Magid, one of the most respected and trusted media research firms in US
television and known particularly for its consultation with local television sta-
tions, told local stations the week after the invasion started that covering
anti-war protests could, according to a survey the firm had conducted, affect rat-
ings. The firm’s survey of 6,400 viewers showed that anti-war protest information
was the topic that tested the lowest, or the least of interest, and was most likely
therefore to lead viewers to change channels. Polls by the reputed independent
firm Gallup and others showed at that point that 70 percent of Americans were
for the war. Covering the opinions of the 30 percent could affect ratings, which
would affect profits. It seems that many stations got the message. Anchors were
uniformly supportive of the invasion, and station websites were heavy on the
“support your troops” weblinks (Farhi 2003).
Big media’s downplaying of dissent within the US also generated a counter-
effect. It rekindled the never-extinguished coals of customer suspicion and
disgruntlement. The bigger big media get, the more easily their customers move
from their default stance of cynicism and mistrust to anger and rejection. That is
one good part of the reason why big media executives are so very sensitive to
majority customer mood. And the more demographically-targeted big media
get—a function of increased specialization and multichannelization—the less
leeway big media executives have to deviate from a perceived predilection of its
demographic.
“Beyond the box”

This time, disgruntlement spilled out into the informal sector of journalism,
inhabited by freelancers, moonlighters, activists, angry citizens, and the odd odd-
ball. At the Center for Social Media at American University, a group of students
and professors sampled activity in this informal sector, in March and April of
2003.1 We used Google and scanned news reports and checked in with a range
336
of alternative or independent media organizations ranging from Indymedia to

Oneworld to Alternet. We developed a website to share our findings with
researchers—a snapshot from the weeks before the invasion began and during the
immediate aftermath of the first fighting (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/warbe-
yondbox/index.htm). We called it “War beyond the box”—“the box” being the
commercial mass media (see Figure 18.1).
Our scan of the informal communications environment easily came up with
dozens of websites against the war. We found fewer but equally vociferous ones
that supported the war. Conservative sites were much more likely to be linked
with an explicitly political organization. Many of the informal sites—and they
dotted the cyberlandscape—were the work of individuals, of ad hoc groups, or
groups that sprung up as part of the anti-war mobilization that used the “viral net-
working” of the Internet, sometimes to mobilize “smart mobs.”
We grouped the behaviors we saw into several categories. While the full list is
on the website, they included the following:
Aggregating
Infomediaries abounded, which were established Internet sites that culled both
mainstream reporting and material from “alternative” international or specialized
presses, and also often encouraged “open publishing” (post your own work or com-
ments on others’), in order to compose a news agenda different from the prestige
dailies. These sites acted as semi-open gates for news creators and news seekers.
Indymedia, itself a child of 1999 anti-globalization protests, put the emphasis on
open publishing, although many sites linked on Indymedia were also infomediaries
(Anonymous 2002; Kidd 2002). Some, such as the Information Clearing House
(“News you won’t find on CNN or Fox Moooo’s”), were labors of love, fed inter-
mittently with donations from site visitors (www.informationclearinghouse.info/).
Others, such as oneworld.net and opendemocracy.net, were foundation-funded.
These latter had different missions. OneWorld hosted a virtual community of non-
profit organizations supporting social justice and human rights. Open Democracy
provided a forum for diverse and conflicting opinions on public affairs. Info-
mediary sites deliberately blurred the line between news providers and news
creators. At the same time, they provided a degree of moderating (indymedia.org
much less than others), which contributed to reader confidence in the veracity of
the material.
Do-it-yourself
We noticed a spontaneous creation of new media, often by activists testifying to a
reality that they found obscured in mainstream media and sometimes by people
demanding a voice in a time of crisis. Some of it was email letters, or petitions, or
a forwarded emailed testimony. We called this “electronic samizdat,” under-
ground duplication of information sneaked among friends in the tradition of
337
Figure 18.1 “War beyond the box”—this website encapsulated the Center for Social
Media’s scan of the informal media landscape (courtesy of the American
University School of Communication)
illegally reproduced work in the USSR (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/war

beyondbox/esamizdat.htm). Some of the DIY work was in the form of Powerpoint-
style slideshows—a kind of cyber photograph gallery, on display for anyone who
chooses to click (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/warbeyondbox/slideshows.htm).
Some of it was websites, where on-the-ground testimony that challenged received
wisdom or mainstream reporting was released, such as that by the anti-war group
Voices in the Wilderness, which reported its eyewitness experiences in text and
images at electroniciraq.org. Some of it drew conclusions from mainstream data,
such as the website iraqbodycount.org, which featured a running tally of deaths
338
in Iraq, providing a data-driven critique of the war (http://centerforsocialmedia.

org/warbeyondbox/infomediaries.htm).
Some of this work was by people creating downloadable documents—poetry
and video and music for friends and sympathizers to download. Some creators,
like the Beastie Boys, who wrote an instant protest song that they made public
domain, were well known; others produced their work as a gift (http://center
forsocialmedia.org/warbeyondbox/digital.htm). And some of it was jokes. One
widely circulated email was the lyrics to the tune of “If you’re happy and you
know it,” including: “If you never were elected, bomb Iraq / If your mood is quite
dejected, bomb Iraq / If you think Saddam’s gone mad/ With the weapons that he
had / (And he tried to kill your dad) / Bomb Iraq.” (This was an email received by
one person from another who forwarded it within three minutes of receiving it to
some 15 people, and who promptly sent it forward again to a blind-copy list.)
These works often circulated from email list to email list, among like-minded
friends. Sometimes they were folded into intermediary sites. They made a claim
for attention and confidence on readers and viewers as the work of friends or vir-
tual friends. Their appeal depended in part on a shared sense of having gone
unrepresented in mainstream media, and unheard by government officials. That
shared sense sometimes overrode reader judgment, as people sometimes for-
warded petitions that were bogus or outdated (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/
warbeyondbox/viral.htm).
Interactive grassroots journalism

Blogs, hybrid-journalism Internet sites that were part diary and part reporting also
emphasized the interactivity, spontaneity, informality, and community we saw in
other behaviors (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/warbeyondbox/blogs.htm). Some,
such as warblogs.cc, depended on the work of trained journalists (Chris Allbrit-
ton had worked at the Associated Press and The New York Daily News, for
example). Some were supported by viewers, others by advertisers and sponsors.
Some conducted journalistic investigations, and they generally had a concern,
typical of journalists, for timeliness, accuracy, and accessibility. They usually pro-
vided links to mainstream news media. At the same time, their deliberately open
structure undercut assurance. On warblogging (www.warblogging.com), blogger
Nick Paine noted that a longtime blog contributor, “Nick,” claimed to be a US
army lieutenant. “I am inclined to believe that Nick is who he says he is . . . It is,
however, up to you to make up your own minds about his veracity,” he noted on
the website’s front page. Blogs showcased voices underrepresented in mainstream
media, most notably an Iraqi citizen calling himself Salam Pax (http://dear_raed.
blogspot.com/), who created a mini-debate around who he was and even if he
existed. (This comment was accessed October 21, 2003, at which time the blog
continued to flourish.)
339
Radio and television

Dissenters to mainstream opinion and individuals looking for a way to express
themselves found their way to ungatekept spots on the usually tightly patrolled
borders of radio and television. We dubbed this “tactical” use of electronic media,
acknowledging the traditions of European—especially Eastern European—
activists who seized small technological opportunities to break through media
blackouts. The Serbian radio station B-92 was one well known example and the
term “tactical” is featured in irregular conferences held by the loosely structured
Next Five Minutes organization (www.n5m4.org).
People used shortwave radio to create anti-war programs and used unlicensed
spectra to link together neighbors on an ad hoc radio network. Creators sought out
cable access—first-come-first-serve channels open to the public on many cable
services—and made work at community technology centers (CTCs). In at least
one case, the CTC distributed the information via broadband Internet. Creators
also sought out program services using the public channels on direct-broadcast
satellite television. FreeSpeech television and WorldLink both aired programs
which were made to respond to the moment. OneWorld’s newly launched Internet
TV service—actually digitized video cut into short segments—showcased dissi-
dent views as well (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/ war beyond box/ tactical
radio.htm; http://centerforsocial media.org/warbeyond box/tacticaltv.htm).
We found anti-war sentiment, information, and outrage at both government
and media popping up all over in electronic media. We found a frequent resort to
humor, and especially satire and parody (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/war
beyondbox/humor.htm). Randall Packer’s “We the blog” (http://wetheblog.org/),
for instance, solemnly proposed a new Bill of Rights appropriate for the Patriot
Act era. (This proposal formed part of Packer’s larger site, www.usdat.us/, hosting
the imaginary US Department of Art and Technology, of which Packer has made
himself the Secretary.) Many humor items borrowed from popular culture. Mad
magazine’s parody of a Star Wars poster, with Bush in the leading role for Gulf
War II, was widely circulated (and rarely attributed). Children’s toys were featured
in a parody of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s UN speech, with murky toy sol-
diers and action figures standing in for Powell’s murky, portentous proofs of WMD.
Other humor items borrowed jokes from the cyber-universe in which they circu-
lated. At www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ inattentive viewers might believe
they were getting a Microsoft error message—until they tried to click on the
Regime change button. This “Weapons of mass destruction 404” page, created by
British pharmacist Anthony Cox on a whim (see Figure 18.2), became the top-
ranked website returned when searching the words “weapons mass destruction” on
search engine Google, as a result of a myriad of links to it from bloggers worldwide
(Cox 2003). The humor turned the tables on the most powerful political and mili-
tary figures in the world, turning them into figures that you could laugh at from
your workstation. This humor employed the familiar weapons of the weak: con-
tempt and ridicule.
340
Figure 18.2 Bloggers’ links turned the “Weapons of Mass Destruction 404” parody web-
site into an international favorite (courtesy of Anthony Cox)
These jokes, like the testimonies, slideshows, and websites, fueled an under-
ground current of resistance. Strongly marked by a sense of community, the
journalistic informal sector was organized by networks of friends and communities
of belief and values. This had implications both for the growth and use of infor-
mation within that sector, and also for its potential participation in the public
opinion-shaping spheres now dominated by professional journalism.
341
Between branded and uncharted

Certainly this burgeoning of the informal sector does not mean that mainstream
media have lost their pride of place. They have hard won reputations for credibil-
ity that went to good use on many informal-sector sites. In fact, many sites in the
informal sector did much more culling and interpreting of mainstream media
than they created or platformed new information. Many blogs were also punctu-
ated throughout the day with links to and reports on gatekept media.
People were able to mobilize others for action more swiftly than ever before,
particularly at MoveOn (http://moveon.org/), an organization that used the Inter-
net to build an “electronic advocacy group,” as its website declared. Born of liberal
outrage at the Clinton impeachment movement and run by brilliant political
strategists and tacticians, the core group of which came out of the Democratic
Party (Hazen 2003), it had extraordinary success in coalescing hitherto inchoate
demands for participation in democratic process. MoveOn mobilized via mass
emails (often then propelled via viral marketing to many more friends-and-family
lists), which linked to websites loaded with specific actions to take. MoveOn
moved into people’s intimate lives on screen, supported a widespread sense of
alarm and mistrust of government, and connected people to anti-war protests. In
fact, MoveOn mobilized many more people—by at least one decimal point—than
conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. But the impact the two had on public
opinion was quite different. Beck made a claim about speaking in a public venue;
MoveOn showed up in one’s office cubicle or home.
What MoveOn could not do was to convince someone who was not in its
address book or listserv or interested in Googling it in the first place that its view-
point was interesting, reasonable or worthy of attention. In his one-to-many
environment, Glenn Beck was able to convince people that he warranted atten-
tion, regardless of agreement. Speaking to millions at once and touching the
button of righteous anger, he generated relatively few demonstrations, but his
position as radio host amplified his opinion into that of a demographic. MoveOn
remained one’s email buddy, while Glenn Beck became one’s angry neighbor.
What Glenn Beck could do that MoveOn could not was sway and intimidate
fencesitters. The clout of Glenn Beck reflected the power of the gatekept journal-
istic venues for agenda-setting, even more than for information provision.
The burgeoning of the informal sector raised the informational noise level dra-
matically, adding creatively to public debate, but that conclusion was by no
means foretold. The proliferation of opportunities to gather information, in fact,
remained a kind of curse for the information end user, without tools to manage
information. Our multi-channel, multi-screen world is too full of information. It
is even regarded as a kind of pollution, as David Shenk’s term “data smog” evokes
(Shenk 1997), whereby filters are sought to make sense of it. While mainstream
media provided an avowedly public filter, the informal sector so far has filtered
information through a lens of domestic life and private judgments, building on
common values or friendship links.
342
Too often during the Iraq invasion that meant choosing between branded info-
tainment and an uncharted information environment. Big media continued,
during the invasion, to be absolutely critical in establishing what we think is our
common reality, because they acted as big filters. The efforts of some sites in the
informal sector, such as OneWorld, to moderate information, to host exchanges
of viewpoints, and to encourage citizen input within a civil framework are all
interesting and encouraging attempts to address that problem.
The invasion of Iraq, in which the US administration so carefully managed
mainstream media, created unprecedented media activity among people who
insisted upon expression of their views, and who had been developing their digi-
tal skills at their workstations, in class, and while producing their family
newsletters. On the basis of this activity, viral networks grew and some sites
became more established sources of information, investigation, and commentary.
Months after the invasion, most of the sites we found and featured on “War
beyond the box” were still active, and many were still reporting.
The informal sector’s burgeoning activity during the Iraq invasion has prompted
a range of responses. Among what Wired magazine editors early dubbed the
“digerati,” some have been inspired to address at least one of the weaknesses in the
sector: its dispersion and lack of indexing. The Media Venture Collective,2 a net-
work of public-interest-oriented digerati, launched an experimental media project
related to the 2004 US presidential election. The central element of the project was
a repository for affirmatively public domain material (licensed under the terms of
the Creative Commons3) at the servers of the Internet Archive, a public domain
project backed by the dot.com plutocrat Brewster Kahle. It anticipated building
relationships with providers of raw material, producers using the material, and dis-
tributors—all of which were already in place and used during the invasion of
Iraq—to develop an open media network on the model shown in Figure 18.3.
Such a nonpartisan, affirmatively public domain repository for audio-visual
material, proposed by project designer Brad DeGraf deliberately as an experiment
to test the waters, offers an interesting approach to the challenges of the journalis-
tic informal sector today. It could create clear lines of antecedence and
origination, without losing easy access. It could give grassroots-created materials a
home, rather than depending on friends, family, Google, and accident to find
voices beyond big media. It could offer advantages to both traditional journalists
and those arising from the informal sector, in that this kind of central space could
permit spontaneity and flexible use of material by commercial and noncommercial
users, from both traditional and nontraditional sources and journalists. Function-
ing as a kind of public library of ephemeral, Web-based, digital information of all
kinds, such a service would need some kind of public backing, investment or
endorsement, rather than depending on the largesse of dot.com winners. It would
need to become a spot on the public media landscape.
Other models to aggregate and share information, already extant during the
Iraq invasion, will assuredly also develop. The left-culture indymedia sites, for
instance, continue to proliferate worldwide and to draw on the youthful energies
343
Figure 18.3 Open media architecture—the nonprofit Media Venture Collective proposed
a nonpartisan repository for informal media linked to events such as the 2004
US election (courtesy of Media Venture Collective)
of many volunteers, at the same time suffering from bouts of incivility and
attempts at sabotage by opposed ideologues. Blogs are becoming a staple journal-
istic hybrid, both personal and public, with some becoming celebrity sites.
Web-based public platforms such as Open Democracy and OneWorld are build-
ing in the learning from each experiment in Web-based public discourse, as they
develop their interactive, grassroots journalism. Meanwhile, mainstream media,
344
especially in their electronic forms, have been made newly aware of the power of
interactivity and the public appetite for it.
The gap between big and little media in the Iraq invasion was enormous, and if
the energy released by the informal sector’s generating of information and opinion
was great, so was the confusion. The contradictions were boldly on display. Minor-
ity voices in the US—generally, those opposed to the war—had an unprecedented
range of expression open to them at unpredecented low costs. At the same time,
these very possibilities were capable of reinforcing paranoia, mistrust, and a sense
of embattlement. These new options could spread misinformation as quickly as
they could enlightenment, and often did.
The journalistic informal sector continued to grow on the sites we identified
on “War beyond the box,” as the post-invasion scenario turned into a grinding
conflict. It will continue to develop, particularly in times of crisis where distrust
of mainstream media turns into action. We may yet get to see the gap between
big media and little media become a spectrum, or even a structured network of
relationships.
For the effusions of informal journalistic sector to develop into a truly public
and participatory sphere of civic engagement as well as discrete communities of
belief, sustained public support and scholarly analysis are both important. Public
support should entail a revision of the current regulatory permission to media
concentration, given the power of highly concentrated media outlets to set agen-
das and intimidate. It should also acknowledge that ad hoc information sharing
in times of crisis indicates the desperate desire of ordinary citizens to contribute
to public decision-making. Such desires should be honored with public resources
to encourage citizen participation. Among many examples of government
fostering of civic informational engagement is the Canadian e-commons project
(http://ecommons.net/). Public funding for affirmatively public domain re-
sources, repositories, and for indexing and archiving systems are valuable invest-
ments in civic discourse. This informal sector also merits closer academic
study—case studies, cultural production studies, textual analysis and reception
studies. The powerful claims that journalists have made in the US over the last
50 years for professional journalistic standards and behaviors can become critical
principles brought to practices developing today in the informal sector.
Notes
1 Participants included principal investigator Professor Patricia Aufderheide, Project
Manager Agnes Varnum, and students Lisa Chan, Aaron Johnson, Navin Kul-
shreshtha, and Catherine Taylor. Professor B.J. Altschul acted as adviser.
2 The Media Venture Collective (www.mediaventure.org) is, as its website maintains, a
“grass roots, non-profit venture fund . . . focused on channeling citizen donations into
strategic investments that facilitate media democracy, and thereby maximizing their
social change impact.”
3 Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) offers licenses that affirmatively
assign the default copyright that authors are granted under US law, in graduated terms,
ranging from highly conditional use only by certain kinds of parties to unconditional
345
public domain use. Creative Commons, which exists to facilitate the range of materi-
als available for creators, works with many partners; for instance, the Open Elections
Network expects to use Creative Commons licensing.
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346
19
THE CULTURE OF DISTANCE
Online reporting of the Iraq war
Stuart Allan
Actually too tired, scared and burnt-out to write anything. Yes, we

did go out again to see what was hit. Yes, everything just hurts . . . I
can’t stand the TV or the lies on the news any more. No good news
wherever you look.
Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger
Writing in the London Review of Books at the time of the British military conflict
with Argentina over the disputed sovereignty of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands,
Raymond Williams (1982) sought to discern how this “unnecessary war,” to use
his apt turn of phrase, was being reported. He argued that underlying the typical
sorts of questions that arise when television news reports are examined, such as
“issues of control and independence; of the quality of reporting; of access and bal-
ance in discussion,” was a deeper problematic. In order to describe it, he coined
the phrase “the culture of distance.”
The central technical claim of television, Williams pointed out, is its capacity
to represent distant events. While reminding us that the televisual picture of
the world is a selective one, he argued that “what is much more significant is
the revealed distance between the technology of television, as professionally
understood, managed, and interpreted, and the political and cultural space
within which it actually operates” (1982: 14). Across this distance—via the
conventions of “familiar connections”—the tragic devastation endemic to war-
fare is recurrently taken-up and re-inflected by television news into an “antisep-
tic” representation of reality. Not surprisingly for someone who had experienced
conflict first hand, namely as a tank commander in World War II, this problem of
distance was particularly troubling, not least in moral terms. Commenting on the
daily news reporting of the build-up to the seemingly inevitable outbreak of war,
he wrote:
After several days of it, feeling the rhythm soaking in, I happened to pass
a bonfire of rags and oil in the village and suddenly, in an overwhelming
347
S T U A RT A L L A N
moment, I was in a field in Normandy and the next tank, with my

friends in it, was burning and about to explode. I think I then under-
stood the professional culture of distance.
(Williams 1982: 17)
Of utmost importance, he believed, was the need to understand the ways in

which television news shaped the “representation of spectacular destruction”
while, at the same time, serving to “insulate us from reality” as we watch our tele-
vision screens in our respective households. Hence the urgency of his call for new
investigations to be made into this culture of distance, this “latent culture of
alienation, within which men and women are reduced to models, figures and the
quick cry in the throat” (1982: 21; see also Williams 1958).
In taking Williams’ notion of the “culture of distance” as the point of departure
for this chapter, it is my intention to help discern the basis for a related line of
enquiry into online journalism. Specifically, I want to explore several issues
regarding the Web-based mediation of witnessing, in general, and that of the dis-
tant suffering of others, in particular. Already the online reporting of the war in
Iraq is being lauded—as well as being assailed—for having a formative influence
on the perceptions of different publics. “In terms of coverage,” Dean Wright,
editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, has observed, “this may well become known as
the Internet war, in the same way that World War II was a radio war and Vietnam
was a television war” (cited in Hewitt 2003). While it is too early to tell whether
this will prove to be the case, this chapter aims to contribute to an evaluative
assessment. It begins in the next section with a consideration of the Internet as a
news source during the conflict, before proceeding to examine, first, the online
reporting of Al-Jazeera (www.aljazeera.net) and, second, the rise of warblogs, such
as that belonging to Salam Pax, cited above. Attention will focus throughout on
the ways in which online reporting provides alternative spaces for acts of witness-
ing, a process which will be shown to be uneven, contingent, and frequently the
site of intense resistance.
Searching for alternatives

“Day 20 of America’s war for the ‘liberation’ of Iraq,” British journalist Robert
Fisk reported, “was another day of fire, pain and death.” His article, published in
the April 9, 2003 edition of The Independent newspaper, continued:
It started with an attack by two A-10 jets that danced in the air like
acrobats, tipping on one wing, sliding down the sky to turn on another,
and spraying burning phosphorus to mislead heat-seeking missiles before
turning their cannons on a government ministry and plastering it with
depleted uranium shells. The day ended in blood-streaked hospital corri-
dors and with three foreign correspondents dead and five wounded.
(The Independent, April 9, 2003)
348
T H E C U LT U R E O F D I S TA N C E
Fisk, well known for his incisive writing style, was clearly aiming to ensure that
his eyewitness description of the unfolding events in Baghdad resonated with his
readers. His report appeared beneath the day’s lead story, “The US advance, street
by street,” on the front page. In contrast with it, however, Fisk’s report provided
the kind of personal insight that ordinarily falls outside of the conventionalized
strictures of ostensibly objective, hard news reporting. Indeed, his commitment to
sustaining a reporter-centered narrative—“The A-10s passed my bedroom
window, so close I could see the cockpit Perspex, with their trail of stars dripping
from their wingtips, a magical, dangerous performance fit for any air show, how-
ever infernal its intent”—presumably would have been particularly valued by
many of The Independent’s readers, even though the events in question had tran-
spired the day before.
The issue of immediacy is important here. It is altogether likely, of course, that
most of these same readers would have been aware of much more recent develop-
ments in Baghdad than those described in their newspaper, courtesy of the
electronic media. Television, as one would expect, led the way in reporting the
battle for control of the city as it unfolded on April 9. While fighting continued in
some areas, images of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdous Square being pulled
from its plinth by a US armored personnel carrier (the bronze head promptly, if
only momentarily, draped by a US flag) featured in television newscasts around the
globe. In visual terms, the fallen statue promptly assumed a charged symbolic
status in some news reports, frequently being held to represent the collapse of the
central regime’s authority, the power of Saddam broken and removed. This tele-
vision coverage, it would be later claimed by some commentators, effectively
demonstrated the immediacy of real-time reporting and its benefits. No war, they
argued, had been better recorded, the sheer volume of words and images offering
an unprecedented degree of detail in near-instantaneous time. Citing factors such
as improvements in news technologies, as well as the use of reports from “embed-
ded” correspondents, they insisted that many of the criticisms first leveled at
24-hour news in the 1991 Gulf War had been laid to rest.
Meanwhile, observations of a different sort were being made time and again
on different Internet websites in response to the day’s television reporting (well
before newspaper reports covering the events in Firdous Square had gone to
press). Across chat rooms, bulletin boards, discussion forums, weblogs, and the
like, Internet users gave voice to their points of view about what these events
meant to them. Some rejoiced, while others, in sharp contrast, demanded to
know what was really happening on the ground in Baghdad. For some, the top-
pling of the statue appeared to have been almost choreographed for the benefit
of the cameras. Awkward questions were posed on various sites about whether it
was a spontaneous act (or one organized with US television schedules in mind?),
the composition of the “crowd” of onlookers (was their number made to appear
more substantial by the camera angles chosen?) and the extent to which these
“jubilant” people were actually “celebrating,” among other concerns. Many of
those writing online posts vented their anger at what they regarded to be the
349
pro-war, even jingoistic stance of mainstream news reports, singling out Fox
News for particular criticism owing to its perceived over-reliance on official “pro-
paganda” and “spin.” Regardless of differing political perspectives, however,
many users simply wanted much more by way of context, critique, and explana-
tion than television news was providing that day, and were too impatient to wait
for the next day’s newspapers.1
Accordingly, news sites—whether “official” ones associated with an estab-
lished news organization, or “unofficial” ones such as personal blogs—were prov-
ing to be indispensable resources. From the moment news of the first attacks
launching so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom” on March 19, 2003 was reported,
Internet traffic to online news services surged dramatically. More people than
ever, according to companies monitoring Internet traffic such as Hitwise, Nielsen
Net Ratings, and the like, were surfing the Internet for news and information.2
For many Internet commentators, the US-led attack on Iraq represented the
“coming of age” of the Internet as a news medium. Regularly singled out for
attention was the role of high-speed, broadband Internet access, not least its
capacity to enable news sites to offer users live video and audio reports, multime-
dia slideshows, animated graphics, interactive maps, and so forth. The rapid rise
in the number of users availing themselves of the technology—over 70 million
people in the US at the time—meant that providers could further enhance exist-
ing types of digital reportage accordingly (Kirkpatrick 2003). Moreover, other
commentators pointed to the ways in which online news was consolidating its
position as a primary news source. Of significance here, for example, was the
extent to which users, especially office workers unable to watch television in the
workplace, were relying on the Internet for up-to-the-minute news of breaking
developments. Research conducted during the first six days of the war by the Pew
Internet and American Life Project (2003) indicated that 56 percent of online
users in the US had turned to news sites for reports about the conflict. “More
than half the people who are online are getting their news online—that’s never
happened before,” Lee Rainie, the project’s director, maintained. “It’s another
milestone moment for online news” (cited in Weaver 2003).
Moreover, this same opinion survey by Pew sought to determine what US citi-
zens thought about the conflict, how they were acquiring their news about it, and
what sort of impact developments were having on them.3 Briefly, its findings sug-
gested that 77 percent of the country’s 116 million adult Internet users had been
online in connection with the war in Iraq. Their main reasons for turning to the
Internet, as one might expect, included searching for information about the war,
seeking alternative opinions about the conflict, sending, and receiving emails
about pertinent events, and expressing their views and offering prayers. Evidently
a relatively small percentage of users were making use of email to mobilize others
in efforts to build collective support for their views about the conflict—while 10
percent of users received email from organizations against the war, 7 percent of
them received email from pro-war organizations. Approximately one in seven (or
14 percent) of users said that they had been online more frequently than usual
350
because of the news, a tendency judged to be more pronounced among opponents

of the war than among its supporters.
Not surprisingly, this study also found that the overwhelming majority of these
Internet users—some 87 percent—were relying on television as their main source
of news about the war. That said, however, it is noteworthy that some 17 percent
of users stated that the Internet was their principal source of information about
the conflict, which represents a considerable increase when compared with the
results of a similar survey conducted after the September 11 attacks. “At that
time,” the report declared, “only 3 percent of online Americans said the Internet
was their primary source of information about the attacks on the World Trade
Center towers and the Pentagon and the aftermath of the attack” (Pew 2003: 2).
Moreover, where previous research commissioned by Pew indicated that some 24
to 26 percent of users typically go online to get news, this survey suggested that
37 percent of users were looking for online news in the days immediately before
the formal declaration of hostilities. This is a substantial increase, one attributed
to factors such as variety and timeliness by users turning to the Internet to keep
abreast of developments. And yet, how varied was the range of perspectives on
offer online? “Even though a clear majority of Internet users say they value the
online environment because they get a variety of points of view,” the authors of
the report wrote, “just 17 percent of Internet users said going online gave them
different points of view” (2003: 7; emphasis in original). Indeed, some 64 percent
of those surveyed said perspectives encountered online were “pretty much the
same” as those in newspapers and television (a further 19 percent of respondents
did not express an opinion one way or the other). Here it should be noted,
though, that the report indicated that more users were going to the websites
belonging to US television networks for their online news (32 percent) than any
other news source online, with US newspaper sites a close second (29 percent).
US government sites were next (15 percent), followed by foreign news organiza-
tions (10 percent) and alternative news sites (8 percent).4
Bearing in mind the usual sorts of qualifications where opinion surveys are
concerned (margins of sampling error, interpretations of question wording, prac-
tical difficulties, and so forth), these results need to be treated with due care.
Nevertheless, while it would be inappropriate to extrapolate from them to char-
acterize a “typical” user, this type of data usefully underscores an important set of
issues. Judging from this evidence, certain celebratory claims about the “global
village” engendered by online journalism would appear to ring hollow, at least
where US users are concerned in the early days of the invasion. Still, for those
users concerned enough about the crisis to look beyond the confines of their
country’s sites, the sheer diversity of the perspectives available online enabled
them to supplement their understanding of alternative, even opposing views.
“The new war in Iraq has made world news sources far more important,” online
writer Stephen Gilliard argued. “While not all news sources are reliable, there is
such a gap between the way Americans see the world and the way other people
do that it is invaluable to use these resources” (cited in Kahney 2003). Indeed, it
351
was presumably this very gap in perception which motivated many users to look
abroad in the first place.
“In the Internet age,” as US journalist Elizabeth Putnam (2003) pointed out,
“overseas newspapers are a few keystrokes away, making them more available
and attractive to people who want to understand why there seems to be so much
anti-American sentiment around the world.” Nowhere were these sorts of
tensions more apparent than with regard to news sites in the Arab world. From
the vantage point of most US and UK users, however, no site in the region
would attract more intense interest during the Iraq war than Al-Jazeera (www.
aljazeera.net).
Al-Jazeera online
Often described as the “CNN of the Arab World,” Al-Jazeera (which means “an
island” in Arabic) is arguably the region’s most influential news organization.
Launched in the Qatari capital, Doha, in 1996, the 24-hour satellite television
network attracts an audience currently estimated to be about 35 million regular
viewers, making it the most widely watched Arab news channel. Available free of
charge throughout much of the Arab world, it is typically a pay-television channel
in Europe and North America. Although backed financially by the government of
Qatar, Al-Jazeera’s journalists consistently maintain that their editorial freedom is
not compromised as a result. That said, the network’s status as an independent
voice in the Arab world, encapsulated in its slogan “The opinion and the other
opinion,” is frequently called into question by its many critics. For some, the net-
work’s commitment to providing news coverage from an Arab perspective means
that it is ideologically compromised, and as such biased against the US and Israel.
Other critics, in contrast, have denounced Al-Jazeera for being a Zionist tool,
while still others insist that it is little more than a front for the Central Intelli-
gence Agency (CIA). In any case, above dispute is the fact that its news coverage
has recurrently placed a considerable strain on Qatar’s relations with other coun-
tries in the region, including Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia where the
network’s offices have been closed on different occasions.
No stranger to controversy, Al-Jazeera came to prominence across the global
mediascape in the aftermath of the dreadful events of September 11, 2001, owing
to its decision to broadcast taped messages attributed to Osama bin Laden (see also
Zelizer and Allan 2002; el-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003; Thussu and Freedman
2003). News organizations around the world paid considerable sums to air edited
excerpts, much to the consternation of US officials—not least National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, for example, who demanded of television network
executives that they “exercise judgment” (i.e. censorship) in re-broadcasting the
messages. Interestingly, most of the considerable traffic to the network’s site
(www.aljazeera.net) at the time was from the US, despite the fact that its content
was entirely in Arabic. During the subsequent “war on terror” in Afghanistan,
attention was once again directed at Al-Jazeera’s role in making available reports
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of the conflict that challenged the preferred definitions of reality set down by mili-
tary officials. For this reason alone, further controversy erupted in November 2001
when a US “smart” bomb destroyed the network’s Kabul offices. Intense specula-
tion ensued that the offices had been deliberately destroyed. For example, Nik
Gowing, a presenter on BBC World, stated afterwards that Al-Jazeera’s only crime
was “bearing witness” to events that the US officials would prefer it did not see. In
demanding that the Pentagon be called to account, he pointed out that when the
presence of journalists is “inconvenient” they risk becoming “legitimate targets” in
the eyes of the military—a charge promptly denied, as one would expect, by a Pen-
tagon spokesperson (see Wells 2001).5
Following the start of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” subscriber numbers surged
dramatically in response to the intense demand for alternative insights into
the conflict. The number of subscribers to the channel in Europe, it was claimed
at the time, effectively doubled once the war was underway. The depth of its
reporting was recurrently singled out for praise—or condemnation—depending
on conflicting perceptions of the relative legitimacy of the war. In addition to
reporting from Central Command in Qatar, four of Al-Jazeera’s reporters were
“embedded” with the US and British military forces. In the main, however, the
network ensured that most of its journalists roamed more freely. Together they
covered the breadth of Iraq, including areas where Western journalists did not
venture. The Al-Jazeera television crews remained in Baghdad throughout the
conflict, as well as in other major battlegrounds such as Basra, Mosul, and in Kur-
dish-controlled northern Iraq. Not surprisingly, a very different kind of coverage
ensued. Tarik Kafala (2003), a BBC News Online reporter, identified a case in
point. “When Western journalists outside Basra were speculating about an upris-
ing on the basis of coalition briefings,” he observed, “Al-Jazeera’s correspondent
inside the city was reporting first hand that ‘the streets are very calm and there
are no indications of violence or riots.’” This type of disjuncture between the net-
work’s reporting and that of its Western rivals attracted considerable comment.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, criticized the coverage, con-
tending that it “magnifies the minor successes of the [Iraqi] regime and tends to
portray our efforts in a negative light” (cited in Delio 2003). For others, however,
it was the very extent to which Al-Jazeera’s reporting called into question the
more “sanitized” representations of the conflict that made its presence so impor-
tant—both on their television screens and, increasingly, on their personal
computers (see Gubash 2003).
Prior to the launch of Al-Jazeera’s website, Arabic speakers were typically most
interested in CNN.com (www.arabic.cnn.com) when looking for news online.
Since the September 11 attacks, however, the page views for the Arabic-language
site operated by Al-Jazeera reportedly grew from about 700,000 a day to 3 million,
with more than 40 percent of visitors logging-on from the US (Ostrom 2003).
Indeed, at the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq, aljazeera.net was widely recognized
as receiving the most “hits” of any Arabic site in the world. Of critical signifi-
cance here was its commitment to pushing back the boundaries of Western
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definitions of “objective” journalism so as to help give voice to contrary defini-

tions of the world (see also Iskandar and el-Nawawy, chapter 17 of this volume).
In the case of the conflict in Iraq, this meant those of the Iraqi people them-
selves—victims, in the eyes of the network, both of Saddam Hussein’s regime and
the invasion of US and UK forces to destroy it. By including in its reports what
were frequently horrific images of civilian casualties, Al-Jazeera re-inflected famil-
iar notions of “balanced” reporting. It was precisely these images, in the view of
Faisal Bodi (2003), a senior editor for aljazeera.net, that made Al-Jazeera “the
most sought-after news resource in the world.” In his words:
I do not mean to brag—people are turning to us simply because the

Western media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a
15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here
could not be more different. Of all the major global networks, Al-Jazeera
has been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be
viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bomb-
ing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the
screaming infants and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembed-
ded correspondents has provided a corrective to the official line that the
campaign is, barring occasional resistance, going to plan.
(Bodi 2003)
At no time was this difference in news values cast in sharper relief than on
March 23, the night Al-Jazeera broadcast footage of US casualties, as well as Iraqi
television’s interviews with five US prisoners of war. Al-Jazeera’s decision to air
the interviews was promptly denounced by US Defense Secretary, Donald Rums-
feld, who alleged that it was a violation of the Geneva Convention protecting
prisoners of war. In reply, the network’s London bureau chief, Yosri Fouda, argued
that Western news reports were being constrained to the extent that they failed
to provide accurate coverage. Regarding the Geneva Convention, he insisted
that a double standard was being invoked. “We and other broadcasters were not
criticized for showing pictures of Iraqi dead and captured,” he stated, “or those
famous pictures from Guantanamo Bay” (cited in Kafala 2003).
The more heated the ensuing furore became, of course, the more news head-
lines it generated around the world. The very images deemed by Western news
organizations to be too disturbing to screen were being actively sought out by vast
numbers of people via online news sites. According to figures compiled by popu-
lar search engines, such as Google, Lycos, and AltaVista, the term “Al-Jazeera”
was quickly becoming one of the most searched-for-topics on the Web. Figures for
the week in question indicated that the term “Al-Jazeera” (and variant spellings)
was the term that showed the greatest increase on Google, while Lycos reported
that it was the top search term, with three times more searches than “sex” (a
perennial favourite with Web surfers). For Karl Gregory of AltaVista, the popu-
larity of Al-Jazeera’s online sites was clear evidence of “people branching out
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beyond their normal sources of news” (BBC News Online, April 1, 2003). The
decision taken at Al-Jazeera to broadcast the images, as well as to display them
online, was justified by its spokesperson, Jihad Ballout, as being consistent with
its journalistic ethos of reporting the war as it was being fought on the ground. In
his words: “We didn’t make the pictures—the pictures are there. It’s a facet of the
war. Our duty is to show the war from all angles” (cited in Whitaker 2003). In the
opinion of others, however, the network had become a mouthpiece for Iraqi pro-
paganda. Citing the images, some military officials began ignoring questions from
Al-Jazeera’s reporters at briefings. At the same time, two of the network’s finan-
cial reporters were evicted from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange
(Nasdaq would follow suit, citing “Al-Jazeera’s recent conduct during the war” as
the reason), their press credentials revoked. It was in cyberspace, however, that
the backlash registered most decisively as various pro-war individuals and groups
made clear their intent to make Al-Jazeera a target of retaliation.
News sites of all descriptions are always vulnerable to attack from hackers—
typically involving little more than webpage defacements and graffiti—but those
directed at Al-Jazeera’s sites were remarkably vicious. The “electronic onslaught,”
as aptly characterized by one Internet commentator, began on March 25, the
same day the English-language site, www.english.aljazeera.net, was launched. Two
days later, hackers “crashed” both sites, effectively forcing them offline by a
“denial of service” or DOS attack. This type of attack aims to close down a tar-
geted site by overwhelming the associated server with so much meaningless data
that it can no longer handle legitimate traffic. Few sites have sufficient resources,
such as the necessary bandwidth, to withstand millions of simultaneous page
impressions. Such was certainly the case with both Al-Jazeera sites. The English-
language site was disabled virtually from the outset, while its Arabic-language
counterpart struggled—with only limited success—to hold up against the storm.
Efforts to restore the sites, which reportedly included re-aligning them with
servers in France, encountered fierce resistance by repeated hack attacks. “We
come up for five or ten minutes,” stated Salah Al-Seddiqi, IT manager at Al-
Jazeera, “and then the attacks bring us down again” (cited in Roberts 2003).
Later the same day, even though security protocols had been reinforced for the
sites, matters went from bad to worse. Evidently, a pro-war hacker was able to
access the servers at Network Solutions Inc., a domain name registration service
based in Dulles, Virginia, that operates a database linking addresses (in this case,
www.aljazeera.net) with the identification numbers of the servers responsible for
maintaining its Web pages. This meant that Al-Jazeera’s domain was effectively
“hijacked” by the hacker, such that users were pointed to an altogether different
site instead. Specifically, traffic was redirected to a pro-war webpage featuring a
US flag, together with the messages “Let freedom ring” and “God bless our
troops,” signed by a self-proclaimed “Patriot.” It was quickly determined that this
latter site belonged to an Internet provider based in Salt Lake City, Utah, albeit
without their knowledge. Hackers calling themselves the “Freedom Cyber Force
Militia” had claimed responsibility for the attack, but in any case the registration
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information provided to establish the webpage proved to be fictitious. Hours later,

traffic intended for the Al-Jazeera site was redirected again, this time presenting
users with a webpage bearing the message “taken over by Saimoon Bhuiyan.” Fur-
ther attacks continued apace, one of which apparently succeeded in diverting
users to a pornography site.
Meanwhile, as Al-Jazeera’s technicians scrambled to reinstate the correct
addresses for the sites, pressures of a different sort were brought to bear. As a result
of the hacker attacks, DataPipe, a US-based hosting company, announced that it
was terminating its services to the Qatar-based company that supported Al-
Jazeera’s sites. In the absence of a detailed explanation for the decision from
DataPipe, some commentators speculated that it must have received complaints
by other clients concerned that the hacking targeted at Al-Jazeera was harming
their sites as well. Others argued that “war sensitivities” were surely involved, once
again pointing to the decision to air the controversial images of US soldiers and its
alleged pro-Iraqi stance. Al-Jazeera’s difficulties were further compounded when
Akamai Technologies, brought in to help deal with the increased traffic to the sites
and to provide protection against hacking attempts, abruptly cancelled its con-
tract. Akamai, based in the US with clients such as ABC.com, MSNBC.com and
Yahoo.com, refused to elaborate on the reasons behind its decision. “It has nothing
to do with technical issues,” Joanne Tucker, the managing editor of Al-Jazeera’s
English-language site, argued. “It’s non-stop political pressure on these companies
not to deal with us” (cited in St John 2003; see also Roberts 2003). Commenting
on the repeated hacking, she added: “It’s a narrow, pro-censorship attempt to
silence a news site.”6
Indeed, it was the relative ease with which the Al-Jazeera site was effectively
silenced that was startling, even for many online commentators at the time.
Some proceeded to argue that the attacks on the sites represented the future of
political protest, the virtual equivalent of burning books containing heretic view-
points. By this type of logic, any site providing news or information which called
into question the legitimacy of a military campaign could be perceived, in turn, as
constituting a threat to the war effort. Hacking thus becomes an insidious form of
censorship. Summing up the crisis engendered by the hacking attacks, Hafez
Mirazi, the network’s Washington bureau chief, commented: “This is very typical
of what Al-Jazeera has been through in the Arab world and in many authoritar-
ian regimes. It’s just sad that the US and US institutions didn’t deal with us any
differently than the Iraqi regime did” (cited in Carlson 2003).
Blogs at war
Much of what passes for journalism in the US, in Mediachannel.org editor Danny
Schechter’s (2003) assessment, “is seen as nothing but propaganda by people in
other countries and by an increasing number of Americans, who are turning to
international Web sites to find the kind of news they can no longer get here.” In
addition to international sites such as Al-Jazeera’s, however, an altogether differ-
356
ent type of site has similarly attracted a remarkable degree of attention during the
Iraq conflict. Specifically, news-oriented weblogs achieved widespread public
salience, being heralded as a new interactive form of participatory reporting,
commentary, and analysis of breaking news. Indeed, by the time of the formal
declaration of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” on March 19, 2003, the term “blog”
was rapidly being appropriated into the everyday language of journalism.
Weblogs, or blogs for short, may be characterized as diaries or journals written
by individuals with net access who are in possession of the necessary software
publishing tools (e.g. those provided by sites such as Blogger.com) to establish an
online presence. Most bloggers pull together their resources from a diverse array
of other sites, thereby situating a given news event within a larger context, and
illuminating multiple dimensions of its elements. The apparent facts or claims
being collected are usually time-stamped and placed in reverse-chronological
order as the blog is updated, making it easier for readers to follow its ongoing nar-
rative. Customarily the sources of the blogger’s information are acknowledged
explicitly and the accompanying hyperlink enables the user to negotiate a net-
work of cross-references from one blog to the next, or from other types of sites
altogether. In principle, the facts or claims presented in any one blog can be sub-
jected to the relentless double-checking of users, some of whom may be even
better informed about the events in question than the initial blogger. Any
attempt by a blogger to present a partisan assertion as an impartial statement of
fact is likely to be promptly recognized as such by other users.7
Many news bloggers—a small minority compared to the number of ordinary
netizens involved overall—consider themselves to be “personal” journalists,
intent on transgressing the border between “professional” and “amateur” report-
ing. By acting as “unofficial” news sources on the Web, these blogs link together
information and opinion which supplements—or, in the eyes of some advocates,
supplants—the coverage provided by “official” news outlets. The potential of
blogs in this regard was widely recognized during the tragic events of Septem-
ber 11, 2001. In the early hours after the attacks, most of the major news sites in
the US, as well as others such as the BBC’s site in London, were so besieged by
user demand that they were largely inaccessible (see Allan 2002). As one site
after the next refused to load properly, users turned elsewhere for news of breaking
developments. Hundreds of refashioned websites began to appear over the course
of the day, making publicly available eyewitness accounts, personal photographs
and in some cases video-footage of the unfolding disasters. Of particular impor-
tance here was the crucial role played by blogs in making these forms of
“amateur,” “guerrilla,” or “DIY” (do it yourself) journalism available. “Most of the
amateur content,” Kahney (2001) remarked at the time, “would be inaccessible,
or at least hard to find, if not for many of the Web’s outstanding weblogs, which
function as ‘portals’ to personal content.” Managers of these blogs spent the day
rapidly linking together any and all items of “personal journalism” from “amateur
newsies” onto their respective sites. In so doing, they rendered problematic the
familiar criteria defining what counted as news—as well as who qualified to be a
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journalist—thereby throwing into sharp relief the reportorial conventions of the

mainstream news coverage.
“The Weblog world before September 11 was mostly inward-looking—mostly
tech people talking about tech things,” Glenn Harlan Reynolds of the blog
InstaPundit.com observed. “After 9/11, we got a whole generation of Weblogs
that were outward looking” (cited in Gallagher 2002). Significantly, in the weeks
following the atrocity, a new type of blog began to emerge, described by its propo-
nents as a “warblog.” Taking as their focus the proclaimed “war on terror,” these
blogs devoted particular attention to the perceived shortcomings of the main-
stream news media with regard to their responsibility to inform the public about
possible risks, threats, and dangers. Warbloggers were divided, as one might
expect, between those who favored US and UK military intervention in the
Middle East, and those who did not. In both cases, however, an emphasis was
placed on documenting sufficient evidence to demonstrate the basis for their dis-
satisfaction with what they deemed to be the apparent biases of the mainstream
news coverage of the ensuing conflict in Afghanistan. For pro-war bloggers, a
“liberal bias” was detectable in much mainstream journalism, leading them to call
into question the patriotism of well known reporters and news organizations.
In sharp contrast, bloggers opposed to the war were equally convinced that
mainstream journalism, with its over-reliance on sources from the Bush adminis-
tration, the Pentagon and other military sources, pro-war think tanks, and so
forth, was failing to provide fair and balanced coverage. Many were able to show,
with little difficulty, how voices of dissent were being routinely marginalized,
when they were even acknowledged at all. For warbloggers of either persuasion,
then, it was desperately important to seek out alternative sources of information
from across the Web in order to buttress their preferred perspective.
Few of these online sources originated in Afghanistan, however, owing to the
severity of the official restrictions imposed on journalists, as well as because of the
limited availability of telecommunications services (an average of two telephones
per 1,000 people). Accordingly, for many in the blogging communities, it was the
US-led invasion of Iraq that proved to be the “breakthrough” for this grassroots
movement. Steven Levy (2003), writing in a Newsweek Web exclusive, suggested
that blogs “finally found their moment” as bombs were dropped on the city of
Baghdad. The formal initiation of hostilities, he maintained, and “the frustrat-
ingly variegated nature of this particular conflict, called for two things: an
easy-to-parse overview for news junkies who wanted information from all sides,
and a personal insight that bypassed the sanitizing Cuisinart of big-media news
editing.” In Levy’s view, blogs were able to “deliver on both counts.” Adopting a
similar line of argument were those who pointed to the success of blogs in attract-
ing attention, especially that of individuals largely indifferent to mainstream
reporting (here young people are frequently mentioned), by virtue of their shared
intimacy. “I think that sort of clarity of voice and immediacy is more possible on
Web logs than in any print media,” argued Dean Allen of textism.com. “I can’t
think of another broadcast medium that has such a potential for directness.
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Someone reporting live from the battlefield for CNN can’t come close” (cited in
Allemang 2003). Commenting on this type of “horizontal” communication,
Glenn Harlan Reynolds (2003) of InstaPundit.com noted wryly that “the term
‘correspondent’ is reverting to its original meaning of ‘one who corresponds,’
rather than the more recent one of ‘well-paid microphone-holder with good
hair.’”
While it is difficult to generalize, most warbloggers posting from Iraq seemed
motivated to share their eyewitness experiences of the conflict so as to counter-
balance mainstream news media coverage. The work of CNN correspondent
Kevin Sites was a case in point. In addition to filing his television reports, Sites
wrote “behind the scenes” features for CNN.com, all the while maintaining a
multimedia blog. Published on his own site, Sites’ blog provided his personal
commentary about the events he was witnessing from one day to the next, along
with various photographs and audio reports that he prepared. Perhaps in light of
the media attention Sites’ blog received, however, CNN asked him to suspend it
on Friday, March 21, 2003. A spokesperson for the network stated at the time
that covering war “is a full-time job and we’ve asked Kevin to concentrate only
on that for the time being” (cited in Kurtz 2003). Sites agreed to stop blogging,
later explaining that “CNN was signing my checks at the time and sent me to
Iraq. Although I felt the blog was a separate and independent journalistic enter-
prise, they did not” (www.kevinsites.net). Reactions from other bloggers were
swift. CNN’s response, according to Steven Levy (2003) of Newsweek, “was seen
in the Blogosphere as one more sign that the media dinosaurs are determined to
stamp out this subversive new form of reporting.”8
In contrast, MSNBC’s support for blogging meant that three warblogs were
focused on war coverage at the height of the conflict. “Weblogs are journalism,”
argued Joan Connell, one of the site’s executive producers. “They can be used to
great effect in reporting an unfolding story and keeping readers informed” (cited
in Mernit 2003). Nevertheless, while she does not share CNN’s stance that blogs
lack a sufficiently “structured approach to presenting the news,” she does believe
that there is a necessary role for an editor in the process. In her words: “Unlike
many Weblogs, whose posts go from the mind of the writer straight into the
‘blogosphere,’ MSNBC’s weblogs are edited. Our editors scrutinize our weblogs for
accuracy, fairness, and balance, just as they would any news story” (cited in
Mernit 2003). Not all bloggers on the front lines were associated with a major
news organization, however. Many worked as a “sojo” or “solo journalist,” writing
and editing their own copy for both online and print or broadcast media. Being
almost constantly on the move meant relying on mobile technologies, such as a
notebook computer and digital camera, or even a videophone and mini-satellite
dish. Still, for these bloggers, their relative freedom of movement enabled them
to pursue the stories which mattered most to them—and the readers of their war-
blog. Herein lay the popularity of the warblogs among users, which in the opinion
of journalist Bryony Gordon (2003) was hardly surprising: “if a television
reporter’s movements aren’t subject to Iraqi restrictions, then his [or her] report is
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likely to be monitored by the Allied Forces. Devoid of such regulations, the Inter-
net is thriving.”
Freelancer Christopher Allbritton had announced his intention to be the
Web’s first independent war correspondent in the months leading up to the inva-
sion. His blog, titled “Back to Iraq. 2.0” (www.back-to-iraq.com), called upon
readers to help contribute to the financial support necessary to fund his travel and
expenses in Iraqi Kurdistan. “It’s a marketplace of ideas,” he maintained, “and
those who are awarded credibility by their readers will prosper” (cited in Warner
2003). Support was such that his expenses were met by some 320 donors, allow-
ing him to file daily stories from the country using a borrowed notebook computer
and a rented satellite phone. As his blog’s daily readership grew to upwards of
25,000, he became accustomed to receiving emails which posed questions and
suggested story leads, while others provided useful links to online materials. “My
reporting created a connection between the readers and me,” Allbritton (2003)
later observed, “and they trusted me to bring them an unfettered view of what I
was seeing and hearing.” This involvement on the part of his readers in shaping
his reporting worked to improve its quality, in his view, each one of them effec-
tively serving as an editor. “One of the great things about the blogosphere,” he
maintained, “is that there’s built-in fact-checking.” Given that so many people
will “swarm” over posts, “generally the truth of the matter will come out” (cited
in Glaser 2003).9
Precisely what counts as truth in a war zone, of course, is very much in the eye
of the beholder. Above dispute, in the view of many commentators, was that
some of the best eyewitness reporting being conducted was that attributed to the
warblog of “Salam Pax” (a playful pseudonym derived from the Arabic and Latin
words for peace), a 29 year-old architect living in middle-class suburban Baghdad.
Indeed, of the various English language warblogs posted by Iraqis, none attracted
a greater following than Salam’s “Where is Raed?” (dear_raed.blogspot.com),
which had begun to appear in September 2002. His motivation for blogging was
later explained as a desire to keep in touch with his friend Raed, who had moved
to study in Jordan. In the months leading up to the initial “decapitation attack,”
to use his turn of phrase, the blog contained material ranging from personal—and
frequently humorous—descriptions of everyday life, to angry criticisms of the
events around him. It was to his astonishment, however, that he discovered that
the international blogging community had attracted such intense attention to his
site. As word about “Where is Raed?” spread via other blogs, email, online discus-
sion groups, and mainstream news media accounts, it began to regularly top the
lists of popular blogs as the conflict unfolded. For Salam, this attention brought
with it the danger that he would be identified—a risk likely to lead to his arrest,
possibly followed by a death sentence. At the same time, speculation over the
identity of the Baghdad Blogger—and whether or not “Dear Raed” was actually
authentic—was intensifying. Some critics claimed that it was an elaborate hoax,
others insisted it was the work of Iraqi officials, while still others maintained that
a sinister CIA disinformation campaign was behind it. Salam responded to skep-
360
tics on March 21, writing: “please stop sending emails asking if I were for real,
don’t belive [sic] it? then don’t read it.” Moreover, he added, “I am not anybody’s
propaganda ploy, well except my own” (cited in BBC News Online, March 25,
2003).
Enraged by both Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist dictatorship and George W. Bush’s
motivations for the invasion, Salam documented life on the ground in Baghdad
before and after the bombs began to drop. This was “embedded” reporting of a very
different order, effectively demonstrating the potential of blogging as an alterna-
tive means of war reporting. His warblog entry for March 23, 8:30 p.m., was
typically vivid:
Today’s (and last night’s) shock attacks didn’t come from airplanes but
rather from the airwaves. The images Al-Jazeera are broadcasting are
beyond any description. . . . This war is starting to show its ugly face to
the world. . . . People (and I bet “allied forces”) were expecting things to
be much easier. There are no waving masses of people welcoming the
Americans, nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are
doing what all of us are doing—sitting in their homes hoping that a
bomb doesn’t fall on them and keeping their doors shut.
Salam Pax, dear_raed.blogspot.com
Salam’s posts offered readers a stronger sense of immediacy, an emotional feel for
life on the ground, than more traditional news sites. For John Allemang (2003),
writing in The Globe and Mail, “what makes his diary so affecting is the way it
achieves an easy intimacy that eludes the one-size-fits-all coverage of Baghdad’s
besieged residents.” As Salam himself would later reflect, “I was telling everybody
who was reading the web log where the bombs fell, what happened . . . what the
streets looked like.” While acknowledging that the risks involved meant that he
considered his actions to be somewhat “foolish” in retrospect, nevertheless he
added: “it felt for me important. It is just somebody should be telling this because
journalists weren’t” (cited in Church 2003).
Multiple truths
Any bold declaration that online journalism will abolish once and for all the
“culture of distance” will invite a more considered response, once it is situated in
relation to the sorts of developments discussed above. As has been made appar-
ent, however, these emergent forms of journalism have the capacity to bring to
bear alternative perspectives, contexts, and ideological diversity to war reporting,
providing users with the means to connect with distant voices otherwise being
marginalized, if not silenced altogether, from across the globe. In the words of US
journalist Paul Andrews (2003), “media coverage of the war that most Americans
saw was so jingoistic and administration-friendly as to proscribe any sense of
impartiality or balance,” hence the importance of the insights provided by the
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likes of Salam Pax. This “pseudonymous blogger’s reports from Iraq,” Andrews
believed, “took on more credibility than established media institutions.” This
point is echoed by Toby Dodge (2003), who argued that Salam managed to post
far more perceptive dispatches than those written by “the crowds of well-
resourced international journalists sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of five
star hotels.” Communicating to the world using a personal computer with unreli-
able Internet access, he reported “the traumas and more importantly the opinions
of Iraqis as they faced the uncertainty of violent regime change.”
To close, this chapter has taken as its focus some of the ways in which online
reporting opens up alternative spaces for acts of witnessing. Warblogs—together
with sites such as those of belonging to Al-Jazeera—have been shown to possess
the potential to throw into sharp relief the narrow ideological parameters within
which mainstream news media typically operate. Journalists’ routine, everyday
choices about what to report—how best to do it, and why—necessarily implicate
them in a discursive politics of mediation. The very multi-vocality at the heart of
their narrativization of reality renders problematic any one claim to truth, and in
so doing reveals that witnessing is socially situated, perspectival, and thus politi-
cized. Before online reporting can become interactively dialogical in any
meaningful sense of the term, however, it will have to counter the forms of social
exclusion endemic to the culture of distance. A first step in this direction, as this
chapter has sought to demonstrate, is to recognize that the culture of distance is,
simultaneously, a culture of othering. At stake, in my view, is the need to decon-
struct journalism’s “us and them” dichotomies precisely as they are taken up and
re-inflected in news accounts where the structural interests of “people like us” are
counterpoised against the suffering of strangers. To recast the imperatives of
“here” and “there,” and thereby resist the familiar pull of the culture of distance,
it is the corresponding gap between knowledge and action that will have to be
overcome.
Notes
1 To gain a quick sense of these sorts of interventions across the webscape, simply type
the words “Saddam,” “statue,” and “blog” into a search engine, such as Google
(www.google.com). At the time of writing, some 7,830 hits were generated by this
combination, thereby providing a flavor of the nature of the ensuing discussion and
debate.
2 In Britain that day, the level of traffic to The Guardian newspaper’s website soared by
nearly 30 percent to around 4.5 million impressions. According to Hitwise research,
The Guardian’s site was the leading online newspaper service with a 7.26 percent share
of the market, followed by FT.com (5.17 percent), the Sun (3.05 percent), The Times
(2.86 percent), the Telegraph (2.24 percent) and the Independent (1.51 percent). Of
the non-print sites, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s stand-alone news site was
ranked highest with a 4.69 percent share. Evidently traffic to this BBC site was up by
30 to 40 percent for the day, a level of demand which appeared to have caused the ser-
vice to repeatedly “crash” in the early hours (see Timms 2003). Over the course of the
days to follow, people going online during office hours appeared to be largely responsi-
ble for the surge in traffic to news sites. Many were seeking out alternative news
362
sources, as well as wanting particular types of perspectives about the factors under-
pinning the conflict. “These figures show the desire of British surfers to get a real range
of informed opinion on the war,” argued Tom Ewing, a Nielsen Net Ratings analyst.
“This shows where the Internet comes into its own when fast-moving news stories are
involved” (cited by BBC Online, April 15, 2003).
In the US, Yahoo.com reported that in the first hour following President George
W. Bush’s announcement that the conflict had started, traffic levels to its site were
three times higher. The volume of traffic to its news section jumped 600 percent the
next day (Thursday, March 20) and again the day after. The sites associated with dif-
ferent television networks proved particularly popular. On the Thursday, CNN.com
evidently secured the highest figures for all news sites with 9 million visitors, followed
by MSNBC with 6.8 million (about half of the visitors for both sites were accessing
them from their workplaces). Other news sites witnessing a significant rise in demand
that day included Foxnews.com (77 percent increase), Washingtonpost.com (29 per-
cent increase) and USAToday.com (17 percent). “Without a doubt,” stated Daniel E.
Hess of ComScore, “people are glued to their Web browsers for virtually minute-by-
minute updates of the war as it unfolds” (cited in Walker 2003, see also Richtel 2003).
3 The evidential basis for the study’s findings was derived from a daily tracking survey,
carried out via telephone interviews among a random sample of 1,600 adults between
March 20 and 25, 2003 (999 of whom were Internet users). “For results based on the
total sample,” the Pew report states, “one can say with 95 percent confidence that the
error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 3 percentage
points. For results based on Internet users (n = 999), the margin of sampling error is
plus or minus 4 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and
practical difficulties in conducting telephone surveys may introduce some error or bias
into the findings of opinion polls” (Pew 2003: 10).
4 Additional results worthy of attention here include the study’s finding that Internet
users in the US were likely to support their country’s war effort by a 3 to 1 margin.
Some 74 percent of users surveyed were found to be backing the war effort in the early
days of the campaign, compared with 22 percent who were opposed to it. Still, it
appears that in contrast with those who support the war, its opponents “are more polit-
ically active online, more anxious to discuss the war, and more likely to seek out a
variety of sources of information about the war” (2003, p. 8).
5 Among the dead foreign correspondents mentioned in Robert Fisk’s report (discussed
above) was an Al-Jazeera reporter, killed by the US air attack on the network’s office
in Baghdad. “Despite two separate assurances from the American government that Al-
Jazeera’s base of operations would not be targeted,” he wrote, “it was destroyed.”
6 Further details regarding who was behind the pro-war hacking attacks against Al-
Jazeera have begun to emerge in the months since these events transpired. In June
2003, John William Racine II, a website designer from Norco, California, pleaded
guilty to felony charges revolving around the hijacking of the Al-Jazeera site. Evi-
dently he had contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) himself on
March 26 in order to confess to the “scheme to defraud,” which also included inter-
cepting some 300 email messages sent to Aljazeera.net (US District Court, California,
case no. CR 03-557; filed June 9, 2003).
7 Interestingly, Fisk has seen his surname turned into a verb—“Fisking”—by some blog-
gers as a form of shorthand to describe the critical practice of deconstructing a
published news item on a point-by-point basis. A somewhat skeptical Brendan O’Neill
(2003) comments: “Fisk is now a kind of mythical figure, that strange British journalist
who dares to say the unthinkable—a view which, it has to be said, is often out of pro-
portion to any biting insight on Fisk’s part.” Evidently it is fair to say that, for some,
Fisking is a way to challenge mainstream journalism’s hegemony while, for others, it is
little more than an opportunity to engage in a politically partisan rant.
363
8 Kevin Sites, working as a freelance journalist at the time of writing, is on assignment

in Iraq with MSNBC which is allowing him to maintain his personal (non-affiliated)
blog. Evidently, MSNBC set down “a few understandable stipulations,” which he
describes in his blog as: “(1) I’m here because NBC News has hired me to be here,
therefore the observations and experiences in Iraq that I relate to you in this blog
would probably not happen without them. (2) They have the right of first refusal on
anything that I write that relates to this assignment. That means I run it by them and
if they want it they will publish it on MSNBC.COM. It will be republished here. (3) If
it’s something they’re not interested in or not directly related to an assignment they’ve
paid me to do—it can appear here first. I think that’s fair and bypasses any of the edi-
torial oversight and ownership issues that we encountered in the first run of
kevinsites.net.”
9 An example of the “corrective power” of the medium’s interactivity, to use Allbritton’s
(2003) phrase, revolved around Fisk’s report in The Independent newspaper of an inci-
dent where a bomb exploded in a crowded Baghdad marketplace, killing many
individuals in the vicinity. In the report in question, Fisk cites the Western numerals
painted on a metal fragment found nearby. According to Welch (2003), “Australian
blogger Tim Blair, a freelance journalist, reprinted the partial numbers and asked his
military-knowledgeable readers for insight. Within twenty-four hours, more than a
dozen readers with specialized knowledge (retired Air Force, former Naval Air Sys-
tems Command employees, others) had written in describing the weapon (US
high-speed antiradiation missile), manufacturer (Raytheon), launch point (F-16), and
dozens of other minute details not seen in press accounts days and weeks later. Their
conclusion, much as it pained them to say so: Fisk was probably right.”
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365
INDEX
ABC News (Australia) 226, 227, 229, 230, Al-Seddiqi, Salah 355
231, 232, 233, 235, 237 AltaVista 354
ABC News (US) 7, 80, 87, 88, 103, 109, Alternet 337
140, 142, 143, 144, 152, 200, 261, 356 Amanpour, Christiane 8, 9, 70, 182
Abu Dhabi television 81, 261, 307, 318, Amnesty International 142
319, 330 Anderson, Steve 7
Acheson, Dean 37 Andrews, Paul 361
Adams, Eddie 119, 121, 126 anthrax 48, 64
Adie, Kate 3, 5, 11 anti-war protests 10, 28, 31, 54, 103, 104,
advertising (influence on reporting) 12, 26, 108, 142, 143, 145, 159, 180, 247, 248,
38, 93, 101, 124, 125, 334, 336, 339 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 259, 262,
Afghanistan 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 266–82, 299, 301, 305, 334, 336, 337,
45, 51, 65, 68, 69, 77, 78, 80, 87, 105, 340, 342
107, 120, 122, 123, 124, 129, 131, 153, AOL Time Warner 333
174, 175, 184, 191, 206, 211, 220, 247, Argentina 191, 347
259, 260, 299, 315, 319, 325, 352, 358 Arnett, Peter 159, 261
Africa 16, 63, 67, 120, 155–73, 207 A-shafi, Suleiman 88
Agence France Presse (AFP) 18, 44, 304, Associated Press (AP) 18, 68, 176, 304,
305, 306, 307, 308, 309 308, 309, 312, 339
agenda-setting 6, 11, 12, 15, 26, 30, 33, 54, asylum seekers 48, 166, 184, 262, 274; see
69, 71, 78, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, also refugees
158, 161, 162, 168, 212, 216, 231, 268, Atlanta Journal Constitution 67, 261
302, 337, 342, 345 Atomic Weapons Authority 275
Al-Arabiya 81, 326 Atta, Muhammad 90, 91
Albright, Madeleine 164, 176 Auchmutey, Jim 67
Al-Jazeera 8, 18, 19, 51, 65, 80, 81, 83, 84, Australia 17, 31, 208, 224–43, 299, 364
85, 86, 93, 102, 104, 121, 260, 283, 287, Austria 306, 307, 308
302, 308, 309, 312, 313, 315–32, 348, “axis of evil” 64, 77, 250, 259, 278
352–6, 361, 362, 363 Ayoub, Tareq 325
Al-Kahki, Amr 323, 324 Ayres, Chris 199, 202
Al-Kasim, Faisal 320, 330, 331 Ayyoub, Tayek 51
Allbritton, Christopher 339, 360, 364 Aziz, Tariq 8
Allemang, John 361
Allen, Dean 358 Baghdad Blogger; see Salam Pax
Alouni, Tayseer 84, 86, 93 Bahrain 50, 352
al-Qaeda 9, 45, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, Baker, James A. 149
77, 86, 90, 93, 107, 110, 155 Balkans 13, 16, 120, 126, 174–89
al-Sahhaf, Mohammed Saeed 44, 327 Ballout, Jihad 355
366
INDEX
Bangladesh 214 Bush (Snr), George H. 15, 27, 33, 63, 72,
Barr, Cameron 66 142, 149, 150, 151, 153, 184, 252
Basque separatism 210 Bush, George W. 34, 37, 43, 47, 60, 61, 62,
Basra 7, 8, 105, 123, 225, 300, 326, 353 63, 64, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74, 138, 139, 145,
BBC World 10, 235, 304, 354 148, 150, 151, 156, 157, 162, 174, 180,
Beck, Glenn 334, 335, 342 186, 250, 252, 253, 254, 267, 274, 276,
Belgium 27, 141, 152, 168 277, 278, 287, 301, 325, 327, 333, 334,
Bell, Martin 11–12, 159, 182, 184 335, 340, 361, 363
Benn, Tony 277 Bush administration (George W.) 8, 14, 15,
Benton, Ross 54 60, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73, 106, 136, 137,
Berlin Wall 63, 129, 181 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147,
Berlusconi, Silvio 333 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 62, 174, 187,
Bernstein, Carl 38 247, 259, 278, 358
bias (accusations of) 9, 68, 102, 228, 231,
235, 251, 284, 286, 302, 309, 311, 312, Caldicott, Helen 36
330, 331, 352, 358 Cambodia 34, 125, 216
bin Laden, Osama 48, 64, 80, 81, 83, 84, Cameron, James 224
85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 107, 156, 352 Campaign for Peace and Democracy 103
biological weapons (threat of) 8, 28, 72, Campbell, Alistair 105, 299
146, 153, 196, 286 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Bishop, Patrick 184, 191 (CBC) 4, 20
Black Hawk Down 156 Capa, Robert 124, 127
Blair, Tony 46, 47, 54, 55, 105, 106, 107, Carter, Jimmy 33, 35, 69
110, 178, 180, 184, 185, 267, 271, 274, cartoons 55, 185, 227, 228
225, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 287, 293 Castro, Luis 51
Bleifuss, Joel 141, 152 Catalonia 206, 210
Blitzer, Wolf 85, 86, 94 CBS News 7, 85, 86, 88, 103, 143, 144,
Blix, Hans (report of) 18, 267, 270, 271, 152
272, 274, 275, 276, 278, 281 celebrity 14, 51, 78, 80, 82, 86, 90, 91, 93,
blog; see weblog 183, 277, 330
Bodi, Faisal 354 censorship 8, 9, 13, 30, 50, 98, 120, 137,
Boer War 25, 236, 237 145, 152, 190, 204, 224, 238, 247, 299,
Borger, Julian 53, 282 317, 318, 327, 329, 352, 356
Bosnia 35, 72, 126, 175, 181–6, 191 Center for Social Media 19, 336, 338
Boston Globe 117, 129 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 31, 32,
Boston Herald 197 33, 38, 39, 46, 52, 144, 153, 177, 352,
Bourke-White, Margaret 119 360
Bremer, Paul 328–9 chemical weapons (threat of) 8, 28, 29, 48,
Briganti, Irena 9 52, 53, 69, 72, 144, 145, 146, 149, 153,
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 3, 196, 199, 204, 286
8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20, 34, 47, 159, 176, Chile 32
177, 178, 179, 182, 229, 233, 235, 260, China 37, 59, 126, 212, 214, 216, 279
264, 283–300, 303, 304, 308, 316, 318, Chirac, Jacques 270, 275
353, 357, 362, 363 Chomsky, Noam 25, 34, 38, 39, 53, 97, 98,
Brokaw, Tom 120, 144; see also NBC News 109, 143
Brown, Tina 8–9, 70 Christian Science Monitor 36, 66
Browne, Malcolm 119, 127 citizenship 5, 20, 28, 136, 207, 259, 263,
Bull Durham 335 336, 343, 345
Buoen, Roger 68 Civil War (US) 25, 119
Burkeman, Oliver 6 Clark, David 107, 110
Burns, John 3, 70, 71 Clarke, Wesley 176
Burrows, Larry 119 “clash of civilizations” 56, 181, 272
Burundi 120, 126 Clear Channel 230, 335, 336
367
INDEX
Clinton, Bill 63, 69, 72, 105, 158, 160, embedded reporting 5, 6, 9, 13, 16, 17, 18,
182, 184, 342 19, 28, 30, 31, 49–50, 70–1, 77, 91, 105,
CNN 6–12, 13, 16, 65, 70, 80, 81, 83, 84, 136, 166, 167, 190, 191, 193, 194–200,
85, 86, 91, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 203, 204, 206, 226, 232, 249, 260, 261,
136, 148, 152, 153, 157–63, 164, 166, 262, 283, 285, 286, 287, 289, 294–6,
182, 199, 233, 235, 259, 260, 299, 302, 297, 298, 299, 307, 311, 323, 324, 349,
303, 304, 308, 309, 310, 312, 318, 320, 353, 354, 361
321, 337, 353, 359, 363 Ethiopia 63, 165, 210
Cold War 15, 16, 32, 36, 45, 63, 72, 74, 69, “ethnic cleansing” 16, 34, 177, 178, 179
97, 98, 99, 106, 107, 108, 109, 157, 158, Express and Star (Wolverhampton) 194
159, 175, 180, 181, 184, 283, 313
Colombia 33 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
“compassion fatigue” 161 (FAIR) 143, 145, 152
Connell, Joan 359 Falklands/Malvinas conflict 16, 28, 30,
Conservative Party (UK) 159, 279 104, 120, 122, 152, 190, 191–4, 199,
Cook, Robin 177, 184, 291 201, 202, 203, 204, 225, 347
Couso, Jose 51 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 32,
Croatia 180, 181, 183, 306, 307, 308 363
C-Span (US) 148 Federal Communications Commission
Cuba 36, 303; see also Guantanamo Bay (FCC) 334
Czech Republic 306, 308 Finkelstein, Daniel 270
Czechoslovakia 126, 273 Finland 36, 152, 306, 307, 308
Firdous Square 43, 101, 117, 298, 325, 349
Daily Express 48, 51, 193, 194 First Blood 251
Daily Mail 192, 269, 271, 272, 275, 281, Fisk, Robert 51, 117, 211, 262, 272, 273,
282 274, 282, 348, 349, 363, 364
Daily Star 52, 194 flak (criticisms of reporting) 38, 97, 98, 99,
Daily Telegraph 44, 52, 93, 184, 185, 232, 102, 109
233, 237, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 280, Fletcher, Kim 51
281, 282, 299, 362 Foot, Paul 51
Democratic Party (US) 34, 106, 146, 148, Fouda, Yosri 354
342 Fox News 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 50, 93, 235,
Democratic Republic of Congo 27, 116, 259, 260, 309, 320, 321, 350, 363
155, 164, 168, 303 framing 13, 17, 18, 29, 31, 52, 53, 55, 63,
Denmark 306, 307 64, 72–4, 77, 85, 88, 89, 97, 99, 104,
Detroit Free Press 127 105, 106, 107, 117, 126, 130, 136, 139,
digital technology 119, 224, 233, 334, 340, 143, 144, 152, 161, 163, 183, 219,
343, 350, 359 247–65, 268, 269, 272, 273, 274,
diplomacy 16, 29, 32, 46, 63, 71, 72, 106, 277–80, 301
138, 141, 146, 149, 151, 162, 175, 176, France 176, 260, 263, 270, 274, 275, 279,
177, 180, 182, 226, 263, 266, 268, 273, 301, 302, 304, 305, 307, 316, 330, 355
274, 276, 277, 316, 317 Freedland, Jonathan 180, 278, 279, 282
disinformation 9, 30, 47, 48, 70, 136, freelance journalism 336, 360, 364
137–41, 143, 144, 147, 310, 360 Friedman, Tom 73
Dixie Chicks 335–6 “friendly fire” 13, 44, 54, 146, 204
Dodge, Toby 362
Dyke, Greg 10; see also BBC Gellhorn, Martha 20
genocide 16, 61, 69, 72, 155, 157, 160, 161,
East Timor 116, 126, 206, 214, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 179, 183
Economist, The (UK) 126, 322 Germany 12, 119, 124, 127, 144, 152, 176,
Egypt 11, 93, 94, 307, 317, 329, 330 178, 179, 181, 185, 187, 199, 238, 260,
email 19, 48, 50, 238, 259, 262, 337, 339, 263, 270, 272, 273, 277, 279, 301, 305,
342, 350, 360, 361, 363; see also Internet 306, 307, 308, 316, 317
368
INDEX
Gibbs, Phillip 50 humanitarian intervention 106, 157, 158,

Gillan, Audrey 50, 55, 127, 179 159, 186, 187
Gilligan, Andrew 20, 47, 283, 291 Humphrey, Hubert 34
Girard, Renaud 176, 187 Hungary 117, 306, 308
globalization 46, 102, 103, 169, 221, 259, Hurd, Douglas 159
263, 266, 280, 283, 303, 333, 337 Hussein, Saddam 11, 29, 43, 47, 48, 52–3,
Globe and Mail 361 54, 55, 65, 66, 69, 73, 77, 85, 94, 96,
Goldenberg, Suzanne 54 101, 105, 107, 117, 129, 138, 139, 144,
Google search engine 336, 340, 343, 354, 149, 150, 152, 153, 198, 199, 234, 248,
362 249, 250, 252, 254, 256, 269, 271, 272,
Gordon, Bryony 359 273, 275, 276, 277, 284, 286, 287, 292,
Gowing, Nik 108, 157, 160, 162, 163, 183, 293, 298, 299, 300, 324, 325, 328, 331,
353 333, 339, 349, 354, 362
Gralnick, Jeff 195–6 Hutton inquiry 10, 20, 47
Greece 305, 306, 307
Greenslade, Roy 46, 227 Ignatieff, Michael 72, 159, 168, 174, 175,
Gregory, Karl 354 183, 185, 186, 187
Grenada 28, 30, 45, 152, 251 immediacy 11, 100, 160, 260, 349, 358, 361
Guantanamo Bay 354 In These Times 140, 141, 151, 152, 153
Guardian, see The Guardian Independent 46, 48, 51, 54, 180, 181, 185,
Guatemala 31 262, 269, 272, 274, 275, 278, 280, 282,
Gulf War; see Persian Gulf War (1991) 348, 349, 362, 364
Gupta, Sanjay 199, 200 Independent Television News (ITN) 50,
233, 289
hacking (online) 324, 326, 355–6, 363 India 17, 127, 206–23
Haeberle, Ron 119 Indian Express 212
Haiti 190 Indonesia 31, 32, 36, 126
Hari, Johann 180 Indymedia 263, 333, 337, 343
Harper’s magazine 142 infotainment 19, 101, 202, 248, 343
Hastings, Max 202 Institute for Policy Studies 143
Heller, Jean 140 intelligence dossier 20, 48, 267, 275, 284
Herbert, Gerald 96, 197, 202 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 31,
Herman, Edward 25, 38, 39, 45, 97, 98, 34, 169
109, 175 Internet 19, 87, 92, 96, 99, 100, 102–4,
Heyward, Andrew 85, 86 118, 119, 150, 233, 262, 267, 301, 303,
High Noon 249 310, 324, 333–46, 347–65; see also
Hindustan Times 212 email; online news
Hiroshima 35, 224; see also Nagasaki; Intifada 126, 127; see also Palestinians
World War II IRA 67, 79, 84, 92
Hitler, Adolph 52, 85, 141, 152, 272, 273, Iran 29, 33, 35, 45, 50, 52, 69, 123, 139,
277 149, 152, 153, 247, 263, 307, 308
Holbrooke, Richard 176 Iraqi News Agency (INA) 308
Hollywood cinema 4, 29, 55, 149, 156, Isaacson, Walter 65
166, 204, 249, 325, 335; see also Islam 65, 84, 105, 181, 184, 208, 213, 216,
individual film titles 272, 274, 299, 302, 328
Holocaust 91, 126, 179, 183, 185; see also Israel 27, 33, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 77, 84, 88,
World War II 89, 92, 93, 126, 127, 136, 144, 145, 273,
Hoon, Geoff 50 307, 317, 322, 327, 352
Howard, John 225, 226, 237 Italy 79, 277, 305, 306, 307, 316, 317
Hughes, David 272, 282 ITV News Channel 7, 10
human rights 16, 31, 51, 56, 72, 73, 74,
142, 150, 168, 174, 175, 184, 185, 186, Japan 27, 35, 37, 214, 216, 224; see also
187, 206, 216, 217, 218, 293, 337 Hiroshima; Nagasaki
369
INDEX
Jennings, Peter 200; see also ABC News Lule, Jack 44

Johnson, Peter 71 Lycos 354
Johnson, Scott 88, 93 Lynch, Jessica 8, 29, 44, 55, 105, 249, 263
Johnston, George 237
Jordan 50, 93, 141, 307, 327, 352, 360 MacArthur, Brian 50
Jukes, Stephen 68 MacArthur, John 142
McCullin, Don 118
Kabul 129, 174, 325, 353 McFarlane, Robert 139
Kafala, Tarik 353, 354 McGhee, Ralph 31
Kashmir 17, 206, 209, 210, 212–21 McGowan, Robert 193
Keegan, John 44, 181 McGrory, Mary 138
Kelly, David 20, 47 McKay, Peter 272
Kennan, George 37, 158, 159 McNeil-Lehrer (PBS) 139
Kennicot, Philip 83 Maddocks, Melvin 66, 69
Kenya 162, 167 Madrid (bombings, 2004) 122
Khanfar, Waddah 328–9 Madsen, Wayne 27
Kissinger, Henry 37 Mandela, Nelson 166, 277
Knightley, Phillip 25, 34, 35, 46, 47, 50, “manifest destiny” 61, 70, 74
56, 119 Media Research Center (US) 93
Koppel, Ted 261, 264 memory (collective) 124, 143, 199, 209,
Korean War 45, 119, 122, 224; see also 236, 237, 238, 250, 263, 280
North Korea Mexico 100
Kosovo 16, 34, 35, 102, 104, 105, 129, 168, MI5 46, 47
175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, MI6 46, 47, 49
186, 187, 191, 206, 270, 281 Microsoft 340; see also MSNBC
Kross, Kathryn 9 Middle East Broadcast Center 318
Kurdish crisis 50, 52, 54, 127, 129, 148, militarism 4, 44–6, 56
150, 157, 161, 307, 353, 360 Miller, John 87–8, 93
Kurtz, Howard 10, 65, 68, 359 Minneapolis Star Tribune 68
Kuwait 8, 11, 50, 52, 137, 138, 139, 140, Mirazi, Hafez 356
141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 200, 210, 234, Mirror (UK) 51, 52, 54, 192, 269, 273, 274,
251, 273, 285, 300, 307, 308 275, 276, 277, 278, 280, 282
Missing in Action 251
Labour Party (UK) 277, 281 Moldovia 126
Lake, Anthony 158 Montenegro 178, 181
Lange, Dorothea 118 Morgan, Piers 51; see also Mirror
Laos 33, 34 Moussaoui, Zacarias 90
Laqueur, Walter 66 MoveOn 342
Le Monde 279 MSNBC 7, 9, 86, 330, 348, 356, 359, 363,
Le Nouvel Observateur 178 364; see also Microsoft; NBC News
Lebanon 118, 262, 317, 318, 329 Murdoch, Rupert 7, 17, 31, 51, 227, 228,
Leibovich, Mark 71 230, 333, 334; see also ownership
Levy, Steven 358 museums (in Iraq) 123
Liberia 116, 155, 164, 175 Muslims 17, 91, 126, 181, 182, 183, 184,
Libya 45, 47, 316 208, 213, 214, 216, 219, 274, 279
Limbaugh, Rush 50, 335 Myers, Richard 49, 310
Little, Allan 182
Little, Jeremy 238 Nagasaki 35; see also Hiroshima
Littlejohn, Richard 299 Nasdaq 326, 355
Lloyd, Terry 50–1 National Public Radio (NPR) 67
London Review of Books 179, 347 NATO 16, 34, 35, 51, 53, 106, 168, 175,
Los Angeles Times 60, 85, 86, 93, 149, 153, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 184, 185,
180, 322 186, 188
370
INDEX
NBC News 7, 103, 143, 144, 152, 196, 233, 88, 89, 92, 93, 126, 127, 260, 316, 317,
238, 261, 364; see also MSNBC 322, 327
Netherlands 306 Panama 28, 30, 33, 36, 45, 152
New York Daily News 339 “parachute journalism” 165
New York Stock Exchange 102, 326, 355 Parry, Gareth 192
The New York Times 3, 7, 62, 65, 67, 69, 70, patriotism (impact of on news coverage) 4,
73, 80, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 93, 120, 121, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 26, 28, 50, 51,
123, 126, 129, 142, 152, 158, 174, 186, 55, 68, 74, 78, 85, 91, 92, 97, 98, 115,
187, 219 125, 144, 145, 149, 192, 201, 249, 251,
New Zealand 236, 238 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 259, 284, 358
news agencies 18, 286, 301–14 PBS (US) 139, 150, 233
news photographs 15, 44, 54, 55, 88, 89, Pearl, Daniel 88, 92, 196
115–35, 140, 142, 156, 191, 196, 197, Pearl Harbor 35, 64, 68, 127; see also World
204, 225, 234, 235, 236, 261, 287, 307, War II
338, 357, 359 Pentagon 6, 15, 29, 30, 331, 35, 36, 53, 65,
news values 16, 85, 193, 202, 203, 207, 70, 71, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143,
208, 303, 354 144, 145, 146, 151, 153, 180, 191, 195,
Newsweek 88, 90, 91, 94, 126, 130, 140, 196, 203, 233, 234, 261, 263, 283, 286,
152, 358, 359 287, 288, 298, 299, 310, 325, 351, 353,
Nicaragua 33, 63, 204 358
Nightline (ABC) 261 Persian Gulf War (1991) 6, 15, 17, 25, 28,
9/11 14, 60, 64, 65, 66, 68, 73, 74, 155, 174, 30, 35, 36, 37, 43, 44, 47, 49, 53, 54, 55,
175, 234, 248, 250, 259, 358; see also 97, 104, 105, 119, 120, 125, 130,
September 11, 2001; World Trade 136–54, 157, 191, 224, 225, 247–65,
Center 273, 279, 287, 288, 302, 318, 340, 349
Nixon, Richard 34, 108, 251 “personal journalism” 357
Normandy 348 Pew Research Center 350, 351, 363
Norris, David 192 Philadelphia Inquirer 121, 123, 127
North Korea 26, 45, 66, 200; see also Philippines 36
Korean War Phillips, Melanie 226, 272, 282
Northern Ireland 206, 210 photojournalism: see news photographs
Norway 306 Pilger, John 31, 32, 34, 39, 44, 46, 51, 228,
nuclear technology 26, 28, 35, 36, 47, 48, 231
55, 64, 72, 149, 196, 275 Platoon 261
Nunberg, Geoff 67 Platt, Spencer 197
Poland 273
O’Sullivan, John L. 61, 62, 74 polls 47, 108, 143, 146, 148, 150, 153, 226,
objectivity 6, 7, 13, 16, 19, 49, 92, 159, 191, 266, 267, 274, 278, 279, 284, 298, 299,
193, 194, 201–4, 221, 255, 315–27, 300, 363; see also public opinion
332 pool system 28, 30, 49, 104, 136, 137, 142,
Observer, see The Observer 145, 148, 152, 190, 225, 232, 285, 286
Official Secrets Act 46 Portugal 306, 307
Omaar, Rageh 11 Powell, Colin 48, 174, 249, 251, 327, 340,
Omar, Mullah 85, 90 353
Oneworld 333, 337, 340, 343, 344 Powell, Michael 334
Open Democracy 337, 344 press briefings 30, 101, 104, 105, 141, 162,
Orwell, George 49, 53 191, 227, 233, 276, 288, 289, 290, 294,
ownership of news organizations 17, 38, 98, 310, 323, 324, 353, 355
108, 211, 228, 229, 231, 304, 333, 334, Preston, Peter 6
335, 364 Prime Time Live (ABC) 140
prisoners of war (POWs) 116, 145, 146,
Pakistan 93, 196, 210, 212, 213, 219 147, 148, 251, 287, 293, 326, 327
Palestinians 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 77, 79, 84, professionalism 15, 16, 17, 18, 26, 30, 78,
371
INDEX
81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 118, 121, Robertson, George 177, 178
159, 165, 190, 192, 193, 200, 201, 202, Rokke, Doug 35
203, 206, 208, 209, 221, 225, 231, 235, rolling news 6–12, 13, 165, 283, 287; see
260, 261, 302, 309, 311, 312, 319, 341, also 24-hour news and individual
345, 348, 357 networks
propaganda 8, 13, 16, 25, 31, 34, 35, 38–9, Romania 306
50, 52, 53, 54, 82, 85, 102, 136, 137, Rosenthal, A.M. 67
139, 141, 142, 143, 144–6, 147, 148, Rubin, James 176, 178, 180
160, 165, 174, 176, 179, 180, 206, 231, Rumsfeld, Donald 29, 48, 66, 310, 354
249, 262, 287, 293, 294, 310, 325, 350, Rushdie, Salman 67
355, 356, 361; see also spin Russia 25, 34, 35, 67, 126, 279, 301, 302,
Protsyuk, Tara 51 306, 307, 308
psychological warfare 30, 44, 190, 206, 225 Rutenberg, Jim 7, 261
public opinion 6, 15, 18, 19, 96, 99, 103, Rwanda 16, 27, 69, 72, 120, 126, 155–7,
137, 143, 148, 150, 151, 153, 180, 190, 160–9
207, 252, 257, 259, 268, 271, 280, 284,
301, 305, 316, 322, 333, 334, 341, 342; Said, Edward 56, 143
see also polls St Petersburg Times 140
public relations (PR) 6, 18, 97, 104, 136, Salam Pax 19, 339, 347, 348, 360–2
141, 174, 225, 231, 247, 266, 267, 273 sanitization of reality 28, 104, 144, 231,
public sphere 18, 100, 101, 102, 103, 131, 260, 347, 353, 358
207, 259, 262, 263, 267, 268, 269, 280, satellite technology 11, 19, 55, 81, 96, 100,
320 102, 136, 140, 141, 148, 151, 160, 232,
Purdum, Todd 66, 69 233, 261, 302, 315, 318, 326, 329, 330,
334, 340, 352, 359, 360
Qatar 50, 105 204, 227, 260, 285, 288, 294, Saudi Arabia 93, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141,
295, 296, 302, 307, 308, 310, 315, 318, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 152, 251, 255,
319, 323, 324, 325, 330, 352, 353, 356 257, 318, 326, 352
Saving Private Ryan 55
radio 100, 137, 151, 165, 226 230–1, 233, Schechter, Danny 30, 31, 356
235, 283, 316, 317, 318, 330, 333, 334, Schmemann, Serge 65
335, 340–1, 342, 348 Schroeder, Gerhard 270
Radio Free Europe 316 Schwarzkopf, Norman 141, 142, 150, 249,
Radio Sawa 316, 330 279
radioactivity 35, 36 Seamark, Mick 192
Rambo 250 Security Council 18, 27, 36, 191, 269, 270,
Rather, Dan 120, 144; see also CBS News 271, 275, 277; see also United Nations
Reagan, Ronald 33, 39, 47, 140, 142, 149, September 11, 2001 14, 30, 37, 45, 48, 61,
151, 153, 184, 251 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 73, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83,
Red Brigades 79 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 106, 120, 124, 127,
Red Cross 162, 174, 178, 183, 291 140, 155, 207, 208, 211, 283, 302, 316,
Reeves, Cris 44 317, 320, 321, 322, 351, 352, 253, 357,
refugees 123, 129, 142, 155, 161, 164, 166, 358; see also 9/11; Twin Towers; World
177, 178, 179, 184 Trade Center
Republican Party 9, 27, 34, 148, 174, 266, Serbia 34, 45, 51, 53, 106, 168, 176, 177,
334 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 340
Reuters 18, 51, 67, 68, 128, 162, 304, 306, Shnev, Ismail Abu 88
307, 308, 309, 312 Short, Claire 277
Reynolds, Glenn Harlan 358, 359 Sierra Leone 155, 164, 169
Rice, Condoleezza 69, 85, 352 Silva, Victor 51
Ridge, Tom 71–2 Simpson, John 8, 9, 183; see also BBC
Ritter, Scott 29 Sirota, David J. 7
Robbins, Tim 335 Sites, Kevin 359, 364
372
INDEX
60 Minutes 80, 200, 229; see also CBS News The Times (UK) 50, 54, 143, 147, 269, 270,
Sky News 7, 8, 10, 12, 18, 44, 81, 109, 229, 274, 280, 282, 362
233, 235, 284, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, The Times of India 210, 212, 217, 219
292, 293, 294, 297, 298 think tanks 31, 37, 207, 328, 358
Slovenia 180, 181, 306, 307, 308 Tianenmen Square 126
Smith, W. Eugene 127, 128 Time magazine 126, 129, 152
Snow, Jon 11 torture 142, 145, 146, 287, 293, 294
Solana, Javier 177 trauma 77, 86, 259, 362
Somalia 16, 45, 72, 106, 108, 116, 125, Tucker, Joanne 356
129, 130, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, Turkey 220, 236, 306, 307, 219
162, 163, 164, 184, 191 20/20 (ABC) 142
Sorenson, Erik 7, 93 24-hour news 6–12, 96, 99–101, 104, 108,
Soviet Union 31, 35, 38, 45, 63, 126, 129, 119, 158, 229, 260, 283, 302, 349, 352;
140, 144, 181, 211, 305, 313 see also rolling news; individual networks
Sowcroft, Brent 200 Twin Towers; see World Trade Center
Spain 51, 124, 210, 305, 306, 307 Tyler, Patrick 138, 139
Spanish-American War 36, 119, 122
Spanish Civil War 25, 124 Uganda 27, 161
spectacle (war as) 14, 15, 43, 45, 47, 49, 55, Umm Qasr 8, 105, 194, 300, 324
90, 136, 149, 150, 161, 186, 348 unilateral reporting 13, 50, 195, 204, 233,
“spin” 8, 14, 60, 71, 98, 104, 158, 198, 225, 262, 285–8, 295, 296, 298; see also
233, 350; see also public relations embedded reporting
Stalin, Joseph 117 United Nations (UN) 28, 29, 52, 60, 66,
stereotypes 63, 165, 185 88, 96, 103, 142, 143, 156, 159, 160,
Stockholm Syndrome 195 161, 169, 175, 177, 178, 179, 183, 187,
Stop the War Coalition 103, 280 211, 266, 270, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277,
Straw, Jack 12, 272 278, 284, 301, 303, 321, 340; see also
Sudan 116, 155, 161, 162 Security Council
Sun (UK) 48, 52, 53, 54, 55, 179, 185, 269, United Press International (UPI) 71, 196
273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 280, 282, 299, US Central Command 50, 105, 227, 288,
362 323, 324, 325, 353, 354
Sunday Times (UK) 177, 179, 184 US News and World Report 152
Swain, Jon 11 USA Patriot Act 340
Switzerland 36, 306 USA Today 9, 71, 152
Sydney Morning Herald 227, 228, 231 USS Abraham Lincoln 71, 250, 261, 263,
Syria 35, 45, 247, 307 333
Uzbekistan 73
tabloidization 228, 230, 234–5
Taliban 33, 51, 65, 73, 93, 107, 211; see also Viacom 333; see also ownership
Afghanistan videophone 233, 359; see also satellite
Tanner, Marcus 185 technology
Tanzania 164 Vietnam 25, 31, 34, 47, 50, 53, 63, 72, 73,
Tears of the Sun 166 79, 97, 98, 107, 108, 118, 119, 121, 122,
The Australian 31, 226, 228 125, 125, 126, 127, 129, 143, 150, 157,
The Chicago Tribune 123, 124 159, 160, 190, 195, 224, 232, 250, 251,
The Guardian 9, 39, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 256, 348
69, 70, 90, 100, 174, 183, 184, 192, 208, Village Voice 151
262, 267, 269, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, Vivendi 333; see also ownership
280, 282, 284, 299, 335, 362 Voice of America 316
The Hindu 212
The Nation 151 Waas, Murray 149, 153
The Observer 46, 53, 54, 120, 191 Walker, William 176
The Statesman 212 Wall Street Journal 152, 196
373
INDEX
Wallace, Mike 200; see also CBS News Wilson, Woodrow 36, 67, 106
Walt Disney Co. 304, 333; see also wire services 39, 68, 138; see also news
ownership agencies
Walton, Jim 9 Wolff, Michael 50
“War beyond the box” 337–45 Woodruff, Judy 139
“war on drugs” 25, 32, 33, 250 Woodward, Bob 139, 140–1
“war on terrorism” 14, 15, 16, 32, 45, 49, World Trade Center 64, 65, 68, 77, 82,
59–74, 107, 156, 174, 175, 186, 187, 127, 156, 250, 351; see also 9/11;
248, 249, 250, 259, 260, 352, 358 September 11, 2001
warblogs 19, 339, 348, 358–61, 362; see also World Trade Organization 333
weblogs World War I 12, 25, 50, 122, 124, 141, 224,
Washington Diplomat 322 236, 320
Washington Post 68, 71, 83, 93, 97, 110, World War II 12, 25, 27, 34, 38, 43, 47, 55,
138, 139, 152, 279 63, 64, 66, 119, 124, 127, 190, 199, 214,
Washington Times 196, 197, 202 224, 237, 270, 272, 317, 347, 348; see
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 8, 9, also Holocaust
18, 29, 43, 48, 49, 64, 70, 71, 72, 83, 96, Wright, Dean 348
104, 105, 107, 174, 180, 226, 269, 270, Wright, Robin 74, 322
273, 284, 286, 289. 290, 291, 292, 294,
295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 304, 341 Yahoo.com 356, 363
weblogs 19, 151, 238, 259, 339, 340, 341, Year Zero 262
342, 344, 347, 348, 349, 350, 356–62, Yugoslavia 16, 25, 35, 161, 175, 187
363, 364; see also Internet; warblogs
Wells, Matt 11, 353 Z Magazine 151
Williams, Brian 262 Zaire; see Democratic Republic of Congo
Wilson, Joseph 138, 139 Zelnick, Bob 139
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REPO RTING WAR

Edited by Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

ISBN 0–415–33997–9 (hbk)

List of contributors viii

Rules of engagement: journalism and war 3

2 Information warfare in an age of hyper-militarism 43

3 A moral imagination: the media’s response to the war on terrorism 59

4 The PR of terror: how new-style wars give voice to terrorists 77

5 Researching US media–state relations and twenty-first century wars 96

7 The Persian Gulf TV war revisited 136

8 Tribalism and tribulation: media constructions of “African savagery”

9 Humanizing war: the Balkans and beyond 174

10 Prisoners of news values?: journalists, professionalism, and

11 Out of sight, out of mind?: the non-reporting of small wars and

12 The battlefield is the media: war reporting and the formation of

14 War or peace?: legitimation, dissent, and rhetorical closure in press

16 European news agencies and their sources in the Iraq war

17 Al-Jazeera and war coverage in Iraq: the media’s quest for

19 The culture of distance: online reporting of the Iraq war 347

Critical Approach (Routledge, 2003), Contesting Media Power (co-edited with

Conflict: how Hegemony Works (Routledge, 1997), and American Dreams,

Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

The principles of reporting are put to a severe test when your

“The correspondent moving forward with a company or battalion of combat

War in the era of 24/7 news

and balanced” being derided by critics as a misnomer—was discernible at a

In using the term “disinformation,” Amanpour proceeded to add, “I mean that we

Part 1—war in the twenty-first century

causes, durations and aftermaths of war; and a failure to contextualize conflict

the US media and government, he suggests, have traditionally been characterized

Part 2—bearing witness

Attention turns to Africa in the next chapter, with Susan L. Carruthers’s

Part 3—reporting the Iraq war

Adie, K. (2002) The Kindness of Strangers, London: Headline.

WAR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST

War reporting as genre

may unthinkingly subscribe to or knowingly comply with the objectives, ideolo-

Casualties of war reporting

overshadowed by Iraq. War with Iraq suited the US administration’s game-plan of

Press controls and manipulation

itary experts vetted by the Pentagon. Reporters were subject to 50 contractual

He quoted Jonathan Stevenson, a senior strategist with the International Insti-

Durations and aftermaths

Kosovars? Probably not. Propaganda claims of 500,000 or more deaths proved

Metanarratives of empire and control

War reporting and the propaganda model

The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spread

The war problematic

no credible enemy. In a matter of days the world’s mightiest military power

Militarism “out of control”

supporting the state’s militarism, it is worth identifying the media-military-

Secrecy feeds the myth-making

Spooks and hacks: close encounters of a strange kind

Dodgy dossiers and the epistemological implications

The crucial role of embedded journalists in the

The nature of the Fleet Street consensus

The demonization of “Saddam”

The manufacture of the precise, clean, humanitarian war

ideal. We may be entering an era where it is possible to prosecute a humanitarian

The manufacture of heroism in a post-heroic age