Media War Coverage - Panel Discussion
On same days this blog actually lives up to it’s title, and today is one of the days. Last night I attended “What Are We Fighting For,” a panel discussion about media coverage of the war on Iraq. There were 10 people on the panel, plus a moderator, which turned out to be far too many to delve very far into any single issue. All 10 made opening remarks – which lasted an hour, allowing 45 minutes for questions.

I took notes, and I’ve typed up some of the interesting bits from my notebook.

Abderrahim Foukara, the United Nations reporter for Al-Jazeera. A native of Morocco, Foukara previously worked for the BBC World Service and AllAfrica.com and joined Al-Jazeera in 2002. He has a Ph.D. in African Studies from Glasgow University. Referring to his BBC background, he pointed out that he came from “empire journalism” – “where you don’t show your emotions.”


After Sept. 11, Foukara wanted to do a feature about how American media functions – a story he later realized was more than he bargained for. He was baffled by a CNN correspondent crying on air while covering the 9/11 story. When he interviewed CNN’s Aaron Brown, he was told “I am a reporter but I am also a patriot.” Foukara said he just didn’t know what to say after Brown’s statement.

Only when he saw an Al-Jazeera anchor crying on air over the death of an Al-Jazeera journalist did Foukara understand that the Arab media and U.S. media are more alike than he thought, he said.

Foukara first came to America in 1999. “I came to the United States thinking about the U.S. as one mass,” he said. But he started out in Boston, and quickly found that even the way people speak in New England clues you in pretty fast that all of America is not alike.

He said some of the most poignant stories have been one’s he’s covered where the Americans may not know a lot about the Arab world, but they are against war. He said that covering the peace rallies, some people actually sought out Al-Jazeera and told him “tell your people we’re not for war.”

Foukara went on to talk about Arab media as a whole, and how Arabs got a skewed view of the war’s progress. “At the beginning, you would think that Saddam Hussein was about to win the war,” he said. If Arabs did not think Saddam would win, they at least thought he would hold out for 6 months or so, which goes to explain why they were so shocked it was all but over within 21 days. The same thing happened in 1967, Foukara said. The main Arab radio station made it sound like Israel was losing and then five days later, the Arabs were surprised when they’d already lost.

On the success of Al-Jazeera as an independent station: “This is a first – they gloves are off, there are no taboos for Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera has pissed off a lot of governments.”

Jim Fuchs – former Air Force captain with the Pentagon’s media outreach program – former as in last Friday. “We looked at bringing the war to the generation fighting the war,” Fuchs said, citing the coverage of troops from MTV in particular.

“That’s our recruiting demographic,” Fuchs said, pointing out that most of the Americans fighting this war are 18 and 19 years old. In addition to MTV, they’ve targeted Telemundo, Univision, Latina Magazine and women’s magazines to help the military better reflect the demographics of the country. “The reason I’m here tonight is indirectly though a pitch we made to Seventeen magazine,” Fuchs said.

The media relations people tried to approach this war differently than in the past, Fuchs said, with a directive to ask “why not?” rather than “why?”

Fuchs said the war was “highly successful for the military” in terms of media coverage. He pointed out that the military sees it’s goal separate from the politics behind the decision – that his job was to show Americans that they have a “competent and well-trained force.”

T. Sean Herbert runs the CBS News Analyst’s desk, an assignment desk dedicated to war coverage. Herbert talked mostly about the network’s strategy leading up to the war – such as how those chose their embedded reporters and armchair generals. CBS tried to get military analysts as recently retired as possible who were most likely to have the best access and most recent knowledge from the inside. Those generals also talked with the embedded CBS journalists off-air to get a better idea of where they were and what it might mean based on which military unit they were attached to. The retired generals also helped plan media strategy before the war, Herbert said. They helped CBS determine which units were most likely to be newsworthy, so the network could request choice spots for their embeds. However, CBS gambled that the most important breaks would come not from the CentCom briefings or the imbeds, but from the roving, unattached journalists. “Our best journalists were unilaterals in Humvees” – put there at “great expense” he said – “ so they could get to the front, where ever that may be.”

Later, he talked about CBS’ miscalculation over the timing of the start of the war. CBS had assumed the war would start just after the December holidays, and staffers were doing a lot of nervous chuckling over the possibility that the war might be delayed into March, when CBS would be airing the NCAA basketball playoffs with ESPN.

“It does come down to competing corporate interests,” Herbert said. He said there was $42 million in advertising revenue at stake, which meant that when March madness began, CBS News was reduced to delivering 1-minute news updates every hour during the playoffs. Their viewership dropped 25 percent as people changed the channel looking for war coverage. “In the end, I think it hurt CBS News significantly,” he said “Those viewers never came back.”

AP had two veteran reporters on stage – Richard Pyle and Edith M. Lederer. I might be wrong, but it looked like there was a reason they were seated far apart from each other. He said: “Open coverage, what we had in Vietnam, is still the ideal.” She said: “You could go anywhere you wanted and talk to anyone you wanted and it’s the kind of freedom that hasn’t happened since.” She pointed out the embedding process isn’t new – that “pool” reporters were embedded with Army, Navy and Air Force divisions during the ’91 Gulf War and Pyle later noted he was “embedded” in Albania after the Gulf War.

Bill Weinberg, author of World War 3 Report, co-producer of the “Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade” and a reporter and former editor for High Times, “the American counter-culture monthly.” “It’s an honor for a left-wing blogger such as myself” to be invited to the panel, Weinberg said in his opening remarks. He pointed out that the extensive coverage of Iraq has obscured other stories such as the recent attacks on villages in Afghanistan and the plane crash and kidnapping of American defense contractors in Colombia.

“I don’t believe in objective journalism,” he said, explaining it can be fair without being objective – and that media need to be honest in revealing their biases. “Just about all media is descending to the level of propaganda,” he said.

Onnic Marashian, editor emeritus for Platts Oilgram News made a comment about perceptions of the media: “In the Middle East, which I used to cover, every journalist is a spy. How else could they make a living.” Whereas now, (unsure if he meant in the West, Middle East or both:) “If you’re too objective, you’re not patriotic enough.”


And finally:

Martin Langfield, deputy news editor of North America for Reuters and dashing spouse of Amy Langfield of Amy's New York Notebook, said that to begin to understand what was going on in the war, you needed to read and watch the news from numerous sources, including "even images that offend you deeply."

He also quoted Lord Wolseley, who commanded the British forces in the Sudan in the 1880s who said it was "very necessary to manipulate correspondents, and to be at all times on the best of terms with them."
- posted by Amy @ 4/22/2003 10:29:00 AM