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Edward Said’s book was an influential indictment of Western media’s failures to understand Islam.
As American writer P. J. O’Rourke once quipped, ‘The press stands accused of holding the Israelis to higher moral standards than it holds the other peoples of the Middle East. That’s not our fault. Moses started that.’ Numerous volumes allege press bias on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict is probably the most difficult of the Middle Eastern conflicts in terms of media objectivity. The Western media have been consistently accused of systematically failing to cover the Islamic world impartially. This charge is analysed in Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism, published in 1978. Said argued that Western reporting of events in Islamic countries had been superficial and cliché-ridden, tainted by cultural bias, and at times dangerously xenophobic. American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s later work on the alleged clash of civilisations added fuel to the fire.1 The events of 9/11 suggested that both Said’s and Huntington’s warnings were becoming tragically self-fulfilling.
Edward Said’s book was an influential indictment of Western media’s failures to understand Islam.
Said’s critique contended that Western media coverage of the Middle East was conditioned by strategic and economic interests – primarily oil supplies – and that events in the region were traditionally reported from the angle of threats to the production, distribution and pricing of oil. The early 1970s witnessed the rise of oil power in the form of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); the period also marked the rise of Arab terrorist groups. Although it was too simple to ascribe Western interests in the Middle East as being only, or mainly, about oil, it is equally simplistic to suggest that Middle Eastern terrorism was only related to Israel and that the United States became the target of the 9/11 attacks because of its support for Zionism. The arrival of continuous global satellite broadcasting in the late 1980s and 1990s might have framed the Arab-Israeli clash in such terms, leading one to conclude that television in particular is event driven and perhaps even incapable of complex issue-based coverage. It may also be argued, though, that Said’s critique has been challenged by the televised coverage of the more recent major conflicts in Israel, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, not least by Arab satellite stations.
As in Africa, the news in the Middle East has been generally negative – wars, coups, terrorism, and underdevelopment – throughout much of the late twentieth century. While Israel was not the cause of Arab underdevelopment it became the symbol of the Arab world’s failure to redress its many deficiencies. With the founding of Israel in 1948 much of the world favoured the infant state. After the Holocaust many Western correspondents believed that Israel deserved to succeed, though why the majority Muslim Palestinians should pay for the Christian West’s guilt about Jews’ treatment during the Second World War was never fully established. The Palestinian-Israeli dispute was a head-on collision between Western and Middle Eastern values, a dispute over borders and historical rights compounded by highly distorted images of the adversary, and a chronic regional arms race allied to superpower intrigue.
After the surprise military victory in what Israelis call the War of Independence in 1947–8, the Jewish state earned the reputation as a successful military underdog. This underdog image was reinforced by the victory in the 1956 war, although the support of France and Britain tempered some of the triumphalism. It was fully restored, however, in the Blitzkrieg of 1967’s Six Day War when Israel defeated the combined armies of its Arab neighbours, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. This defeat led to the occupation of Syrian, Palestinian/Jordanian and Egyptian territory and also prompted Israeli hubris and a reluctance to rapidly trade land for peace. Though, as one of Israel’s most distinguished political scientists, Yehoshafat Harkabi, said, ‘Israel’s problem is that with the best will in the world it cannot meet the Arabs’ demand, because it is unlimited and cannot be satisfied as long as Israel exists.’ Western statesmen and most correspondents did not agree with this bleak conclusion and spent the next forty years exploring ways to reconcile Palestinians and Israelis.
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Israel map.
Israel also benefited from the so called Jewish lobby, especially in America, which became the military protector of the Middle East’s sole democracy. Added to this idea that Jews hold influence in Western politics and government, among other arenas, was Christendom’s fascination with the Holy Land and a Jerusalem now united under Israeli rule. This fascination played into a powerful Armageddon complex in the American Christian right, which has been satirised as ‘doomsday chic’. Israel’s victories were ascribed to the biblical prophecies that would soon bring about Christ’s return. Americans were also alarmed by the rise of terrorism and concerned about Israelis’ wellbeing, especially after live terrorist television was born at the Munich Olympics in September 1972, when Palestinian guerrillas massacred eleven Israeli athletes.
Israel’s much-vaunted intelligence services were fixated on terrorism, which was why the conventional attack by Egypt and Syria on the Yom Kippur holiday in October 1973 caught the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) off guard. Prime Minister Golda Meir gave the order to assemble Israel’s nuclear weapons at Dimona in the Negev. This order was soon leaked to Washington, which immediately provided the biggest airlift of military equipment the world had yet seen. Israel counter-attacked effectively, and the USSR and the United States intervened to prevent another total Arab military defeat.
Israel buttressed its military image in the Western media with its daring and successful rescue mission of the hostages held at Entebbe, Uganda, in July 1976. Books and movies on the mission rapidly ensued. For an American military traumatised by the recent Vietnam disaster, and haunted by the searing pictures of Americans escaping in helicopters from the Saigon embassy, the IDF in Entebbe by contrast exemplified the successful use of force. According to an American cultural historian, ‘After Entebbe, and after Saigon, Israel became a prosthetic for Americans. The “long arm” of Israeli vengeance extended the body of an American nation no longer sure of its own reach.’2
Said’s critique of Western media’s role in the Islamic world was amply vindicated in the case of the 1979 fall of the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. The British and the American press were little prepared for this major event. The pruning of foreign desks in major British newspapers had almost destroyed the old area specialists, and only one of the 300 Western journalists who flocked to Iran could speak Persian. Western intelligence agencies were also caught unprepared. The Cold War was still in full swing and the opponents of the Shah were dubbed, interestingly, Islamic Marxists. The Shah had been considered a moderniser by his people and was apparently popular among them, except for the handful of fanatics, turbaned, black-robed and self-flagellating. Most correspondents, though, neglected to ask why the Shah needed a large and viciously omnipotent secret police if he had such strong popular support. In Afghanistan the same turbaned extremists were in the holy war against communism. Afghan fundamentalists were freedom fighters, Muslim militiamen – at worse, noble savages, and at best, plucky anti-Soviet heroes. Ironically, Osama bin Laden, organising those same Afghan fighters, was then dubbed a pin-up boy for the CIA.3
The Islamic leaders who brought down the Shah were usually portrayed in the Western media as history’s slow learners, anti-modern fanatics, and their militancy as forms of madness without roots. One acute observer, Hamid Mowlana, argued that the reportage of Iran was related to US interests in the region. He further argued that the Iranian revolution was crudely depicted as ultra-religious conservatives’ reactions against a Shah determined to drag ‘his stubborn, backward people into the present century’, rather than a mass movement, led by clergy, to rectify deep-seated economic and social inequalities.4 Likewise, Mowlana attacked the Western media for creating the myth of liberalisation under the Shah when his regime was notorious for stifling criticism, torturing dissenters, censoring the Iranian media and outlawing opposition parties. When the regime collapsed the British press analysed the impact on employment in Britain because of contracts lost to American and British companies, and ignored the conditions of the people in Iran.
In reaction to US support of the fallen Shah revolutionary students stormed the American embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979 and held 400 personnel hostage. The US military countered by launching a mission, named Operation EAGLE CLAW, to rescue the personnel. It ended, though, in bloody failure at a secret landing strip in the Iranian desert when a C-130 aircraft collided with a helicopter. The world learned of the fiasco when pictures were sent from Iran of grinning ayatollahs picking through the wreckage. The pictures reinforced the failures of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and were another reminder of how Israeli hostage rescues were more successful than the US military versions.
Washington needed proxies to do its work. A classic example was the dual containment policy for Iraq and Iran. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 Baghdad expected a quick victory and the easy seizure of disputed territory. Instead it became the longest conventional war of the century, with more than one million casualties.5 Saddam Hussein’s invasion inadvertently consolidated the Islamic revolution in Iran, while the 1982 counter-invasion by Teheran similarly had the unintended consequence of bolstering the rival Ba’athist regime. Baghdad secured the key support of fellow Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Eventually, the two superpowers, the USSR and the United States, also conspired to contain Iran as it gained battlefield advantage. Washington, in effect, opened up a second front by placing its naval forces in the Gulf to ensure the security of oil tankers. Nevertheless, many Western companies became mired in murky defence contracts with Iran. With one contract, in particular, the US government became embroiled in the major scandal, Irangate. In 1986 it was revealed that the United States had been selling arms to Iran, officially branded as a terrorist state, in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon. The story emerged not through the investigative reporting skills of American journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame in the early 1970s. Rather, it emerged from Lebanon, in its magazine Ash-Shiraa. This unexpected source perhaps indicated a decline of American foreign correspondence after the 1970s.
After eight years of fighting and a military draw, Iran concentrated on building its revolution in one country, in a replay of the Bolshevik experience of the 1920s. Iran’s revolutionary anti-American ideals had not contaminated the crucial Gulf States. Iraq, however, had become militarised and was soon to threaten US interests in the region, not least by invading Kuwait. Washington’s policy of playing Iraq and Iran against each other did not contain either in the long term. Western television media poorly reported the war, except for the last stages, or the so-called Tanker War, not least because neither authoritarian regime provided foreign correspondents with regular access. Furthermore, evidence of Baghdad’s use of chemical weapons against its own Kurdish population was slow to filter out to the West.
The war that began in Afghanistan in 1979 had a profound impact on the whole Islamic world. When the Soviets invaded, hatred of the USSR was grafted onto raw nationalism, local Afghan tribalism and religious fervour. The jihad was declared before Soviet tanks rolled in on Christmas Day 1979 to support the pro-Marxist regime in Kabul. The tribal warriors disliked any government, let alone a communist one backed by what they considered foreign infidels. Previous attempts at land reform and improvements in women’s conditions had incensed rural conservatives, both landlords and peasants. The Soviets, as with the British before them in the nineteenth century, soon discovered that defeating and then controlling the Afghans were two entirely different feats. In the first years the Soviets’ war did not resemble the Americans’ Vietnam conflict. First, the Soviets were fighting on their own doorstep. Second, despite the mounting casualties, Soviet press and public opinion were muzzled. Finally, although Afghanistan was ideal guerrilla terrain the tribal fighters were not natural soldiers. Convinced of their innate martial qualities they were reluctant to undergo training and spent as much time praying as working out tactics or maintaining their weapons. By sheer doggedness, though, they managed to keep the Red Army at bay. The Soviets controlled the cities and, initially, the air. The mujahedin, comprising some forty major political groups, controlled perhaps 80 per cent of the country.
The mujahedin war was undermined, though, by tribal and political feuds; the ‘muj’, as the correspondents called them, spent as much time ambushing each other as attacking the invaders. Their rigid individualism was both the guerrillas’ main strength and weakness. No Tito or de Gaulle emerged to seize overall leadership, though in the north, the renowned ‘Lion of the Panshir’, Ahmed Shah Massud, was an effective and charismatic military commander, who was suitably lionised by the few tough correspondents who managed to reach his lair. But the persistent divisions were partly a legacy of traditional social structures in which elders reached the decisions, and fighters were hesitant to venture outside their own villages. As the inveterate traveller and photographer Nick Danziger observed, ‘The civil war was more about tribal and sexual apartheid than about the defeat of a foreign invader’. The holy warriors had to work out a fundamental dilemma: to fight a modern war they had to give up their instinctive individualism and tribal ways, which is what they were fighting communism to defend.
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Afghanistan, 1984, near Kabul during a major Russian offensive. Author, cameraman Chris Everson (centre) and sound man Ian Robbie. The team was making a film to mark the fifth anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Many of the part-time muj, numbering approximately 150,000 men, regarded military operations as a highly individual ritual, performed on a whim or to save face according to their eccentric, often ferocious, code of honour. The intensity and tide of the war varied immensely. The conflict in the Tajik-inhabited highlands of the north often bore little resemblance to the fighting in the Pushtun desert regions of the south. A heavy Soviet offensive, tribal feud or the death of a popular commander could quickly and dramatically alter local conditions, although the news could take weeks or months to trickle back to the respective guerrilla headquarters in Pakistan’s Peshawar.
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Afghan map.
Afghanistan was not a media war in the same way Vietnam was. Few US television teams reached the heart of the fighting. Covering Afghanistan was risky in the extreme, and film crews had to be prepared for days and days of long, hard marches. No press helicopters commuted to the battlefields from plush hotels or massage parlours, as in Saigon. It was not a popular war for journalists.
Phillip Knightley quoted Peter Worthington, the editor of the Toronto Sun, who claimed that Afghanistan was one of the worst reported wars of recent times: ‘The fighting there is the subject of rumour, unconfirmed reports, and widespread ignorance, and the media are the prime villains.’ This assessment is unfair. Although it was poorly reported, the terrain, extreme difficulties of access, and sheer volatility of the muj made access to the fighting often nearly impossible. British journalists Sandy Gall and Nigel Ryan endured a series of mishaps and mayhem when they tried to film the early stages of the war, which included losing their cameras when escorting muj rode off with their horses during an attack.6 Working with the muj, especially in frequent combat, and under attack from Soviet Hind gunships, could disrupt any filming schedule. Gall and Ryan, however, had broken the golden rule: never get separated from your TV camera. Peter Jouvenal, a British ex-soldier who often worked with the BBC’s John Simpson, was the doyen of film camera crews in Afghanistan. Despite understanding the country and its people better than any foreigner, he was reluctant to write about his experiences – as with most combat cameramen. Tim Lambon, later the deputy foreign editor of Channel Four News, was a frequent visitor to Afghanistan and, as a cameraman, to many other combat zones. Regardless of winning numerous journalism awards, he never committed his experiences to paper beyond short articles. An exception was Sebastian Rich, of ABC and then ITN, who wrote a memoir (but with the help of a journalist) titled People I Have Shot.7 A few journalists, such as Peter Jouvenal, often alongside the BBC’s John Simpson, had the courage and stamina to return regularly to Afghanistan but even fewer continued to follow the story after the Soviets quit the country in 1989.8
American filmmaker Jim Burroughs returned repeatedly to give a wider context to the Afghan tragedy via the traditional long-form documentary. In terms of news coverage, though, Afghanistan fell off the map. This blindness also applied, fatally, to intelligence agencies. Just a handful of Westerners chronicled the rise of the Taliban and its crucial links with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). Even fewer tracked the rise of the one-eyed mullah, Mohammed Omar, as the presiding genius, ‘the saint on the satellite phone’, though the title mullah had as much connection with spiritual integrity as the term comrade has with solidarity. An exception was British freelance journalist Michael Griffin who wrote a detailed and elegant account of the Taliban’s rise and the hospitality extended to Osama bin Laden in 1996.9 Writing in 2003 Griffin related the political complexities of Afghanistan to the dominant issue in the whole region:
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Afghan mujahedeen preparing for an attack on a Russian-controlled fort near Kabul, June 1984. (Author)
The conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Turkish Kurdistan and Chechnya in the 1990s were all linked by a single golden theme: each represented a distinct, tactical move, crucial at the time, in determining which power would ultimately became master of the pipelines which ... will transport the oil and gas from the Caspian Basin to an energy-starved world. Global demand, like global population, will double in the next 25 years and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan sit on the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel on the planet. These resources offer the West a unique opportunity to break free of its dependence on the Gulf, which still furnishes 40 per cent of US demand.
Although the oil issue is again the principal focus for much journalistic analysis it is difficult to argue against oil security being an important factor in the biggest multi-national war the region had yet witnessed.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 posed the first major challenge to the post-Cold War era. The significance of the event is clear in hindsight. It brought Western infidel troops, including female soldiers, to the holy land of Mecca and Medina and prompted fears of a new era of crusades in the minds of some devoted Muslims who were prepared to turn to extremism. At the time, though, the senior President Bush talked more optimistically in terms of a new world order to replace the bi-polar world that had disappeared. As evidence of this new world order, he pointed to the formation of a remarkable thirty-fivenation coalition prepared to oppose militarily the Iraqi invasion under UN resolutions – and under US leadership. Crucially, this coalition consisted of Arab as well as Western nations, while Israel was persuaded to stay out. Shortly after the initial invasion stories began to emerge from Kuwait of Iraqi atrocities, such as how babies were being plucked from their incubators and thrown on the floor. The propaganda war soon geared up to full speed and the media inevitably was caught up in the crossfire. Subsequently, the incubator story was revealed to have been the creation of a public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, working for the Kuwaiti government in exile. Six and a half months later, in January 1991, this ‘coalition of the willing’ launched Operation DESERT STORM to liberate Kuwait. Saddam Hussein called for the ‘Mother of All Battles’ against the ‘Devil in the White House’, who responded by calling the Iraqi dictator a ‘new Hitler’. War’s first casualty, however, was dead long before the actual fighting began.
In this second Gulf War, with the first being the Iran-Iraq War, the most striking element of the reporting was how much the coverage was alike in form and content. Remarkably little official censorship was imposed, despite complete books being subsequently devoted to that subject, and numerically there were more field reporters from more news organisations than in any previous conflict. Whether this event merited so much attention at the time is open to speculation, especially since the break-up of the Soviet Empire was still in progress. The news organisations, however, reduced their staffs in Moscow and Eastern Europe and instead swarmed to the Middle East. The events of 11 September were eventually to show they were right to do so, although the extent to which the magnifying glass of continuous global television coverage in 1991 actually helped to spark the flames of the ‘war on terror’ must remain open to debate.
The arrangements for the release of war information to the correspondents were perhaps the most sophisticated to date. A Joint Information Bureau (JIB) staffed by scores of public affairs officers trained in the art of media relations, nicknamed ‘Jiblets’ by the media, was established in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Colin Powell later admitted in his memoirs that all military spokesmen were auditioned: ‘In the twenty-four hour coverage of the TV world, we could no longer put just anyone, no matter how well informed, in front of the cameras.’ And Operation DESERT STORM, or GRANBY to the British, also witnessed the full implementation of the pool system instituted by General Winant Sidle in the 1989 Panama operation. With around 1,500 journalists in Dhahran and Riyadh, the so-called hotel warriors were dependent on information supplied at daily JIB press conferences. With more than 300 in pools with troops in the field, combined with the countless hundreds reporting from news nodes such as London and Washington, one might have expected diverse coverage. What emerged, however, was monopoly disguised as diversity. As one BBC commentator quipped, ‘Never in the field of recent conflict has so little been disclosed to so many by so few.’
In contrast to earlier conflicts, though, authorities were releasing a remarkable amount of information. This realisation prompted Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams to comment that the Gulf War witnessed ‘the best coverage we’ve ever had’. Although he did not mean that the media had uncritically reproduced themes desired by the Pentagon, this was what resulted. One exception is what might be termed the Baghdad loophole. For the first time, reporters were in the enemy capital throughout the conflict while their own countries’ air forces attacked it. Historically, the equivalent would have been reporters from Nazi Germany being present during the London Blitz or Soviet reporters covering the fall of Berlin from German lines. In the past reporters would have been regarded as ‘eyes and ears of the enemy’, as spies for the other side. This new situation, though, reflected the internationalisation of news organisations that was taking place by the early 1990s. More specifically, the reason for the reporters’ presence in Baghdad was due to Saddam Hussein’s conviction about the so-called Vietnam Syndrome. Saddam recognised that, although he might not be able to win the war militarily against the Americanled coalition, he could undermine popular support for the war in coalition countries by permitting the Western media to transmit explicit images of mutilated bodies of women and children. Such a strategy is a testimony to the exaggerated belief in the power of television to change policy, which will later be discussed in the section on the CNN Effect. For the moment, however, note that DESERT STORM signalled the start of a process that effectively mobilised the media from enemy countries as an asymmetrical weapon against those countries. For example, the North Vietnamese entreated Western celebrities such as Jane Fonda to visit Hanoi. Saddam’s ploy of allowing Western reporters to stay for as long as the war lasted meant that the they could no longer argue that they were simple observers of war. They had become, wittingly or unwittingly, active participants.
It has become something of a myth that the only Western news organisation present in Baghdad during the Gulf War was CNN. The BBC and NHK were also present while a newspaper reporter from the Spanish El Mundo had his pieces translated for the Guardian. While many people recall viewing the war break out live on television on 16 January 1991, the images they were watching were not moving or live; CNN’s live audio reports were transmitted over a still map of Baghdad montaged with the faces of three reporters who described the assault they were seeing from their hotel window. It was more similar to the radio reports of American correspondents in the London of 1940 than the live reports via videophones from the embedded reporters in Iraq in 2003. Several days passed before CNN could get the videotape out of Iraq via Jordan and before viewers witnessed the memorable green-tinted night skies of Baghdad peppered with tracer fire and explosions. At the end of January CNN finally broadcast both words and pictures in real time from the Iraqi capital.
An estimated 100 million people worldwide with access to CNN, in addition to the millions of others who watched as their local stations switched to the CNN commentary, may have been mesmerised by this footage. It was, however, more drama than news since the journalists were uninformed during this opening night-time bombing raid. Clearly caught up in the excitement on that first night, CNN reporters Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman were later criticised for their commentary. For example, Shaw said to Arnett, ‘It looks like a fireworks finale on the fourth of July display. … Peter, you’re chuckling, but that to me is not an exaggeration.’ ‘I’m chuckling with nervousness, Bernie, not with derision,’ Arnett replied. Arnett was a veteran field war correspondent whereas Shaw, an anchor, was only in Baghdad to interview Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, this dramatic commentary ended at nearly 10.00 pm (EST) when Shaw announced, ‘We’ve got to run. Somebody’s knocking on the door. John and I are going to hide’, followed by, ‘This is Peter Arnett signing off for a minute, and I’ll see what the action is outside’. A new age of real-time reporting had begun, though. CNN, dubbed ‘Chicken Noodle News’ by its rivals when founded in 1980, had changed the nature of war reporting. Now we had witnesses to history – live on television.
No matter the accuracy of the correspondents’ reports, the US military was conscious of the potential for violation of their operational security. Baghdad was not carpet-bombed; it was targeted with a new generation of precisionguided weaponry that proved remarkably accurate in hitting its intended target. With this ‘command and control warfare’, the principal targets were Iraqi air defence systems and communications systems that enabled the Iraqi command to direct its forces in the field. At daybreak on 17 January only military installations and other strategic targets in Baghdad had been hit. Elsewhere in Iraq, especially in the south where around half a million Iraqi troops were stationed, it was a different story, though. No Western journalists covered the carpet bombing of that region from 30,000 feet by Vietnam-era B-52s. It emerged after the war that only 8 per cent of the ordnance used to bomb Iraq was electronically guided, or ‘smart’, which meant 92 per cent was largely indiscriminate, or ‘dumb’. From the outset, the real war was absent from the media war.
The media war had placed the world’s microscope on the Baghdad air raids at the expense of showing where the real war was being fought. There was dispute, however, over whether the media was serving as a tool for Iraqi propaganda. When the Iraqis escorted Peter Arnett to the bombed site of what they claimed was a baby milk plant (clearly marked as such in fresh paint in English) he was accused back home of being a traitor. The coalition countered the rising Iraqi accusations of its barbarism by claiming the baby milk plant site was really an installation for the development of chemical weapons. Although arguments over the true function of the plant persisted, perhaps the best evidence is circumstantial. Since the Iraqis had never escorted Western journalists to the sites of bombed military installations, why would they begin to? These Iraqiled tours would give too much away from an intelligence point of view. One coalition pilot did say, ‘It certainly was interesting for us to come back and land and watch the [CNN] replays. … We could actually pick out who some of the bombs belonged to. … There was some good in having good old Peter Arnett on the ground.’ If the factory was really a baby milk plant – and several journalists visited there after the war and lightened their coffee with its white power – then it was an intelligence mistake. Any further targeting mistakes or other collateral damage were made quickly accessible to Western journalists, forcing the coalition to be on the defensive.
The speed of media reporting was making this into a propaganda issue. The initials BDA, a military acronym for bomb damage assessment, could have easily stood for broadcasting damage assessment. The coalition did not deliberately target Iraqi civilians but Saddam’s totalitarian infrastructure was based on the old Soviet-style system of dual or multi-purpose installations and of rotating their functions. Minders from the Iraqi Ministry of Information carefully monitored the reporters in Baghdad, instructing the reporters on what they could and could not say and taking them to bomb sites that could serve Iraqi propaganda rather than coalition intelligence. Arnett and his colleagues were only too aware of these manipulations; some were conscious of the dilemma between their patriotism and their duty to report what they observed. Arnett even claimed that his reports were coded in a language that was designed to fool his minders. On 13 February 1991 came the critical moment around which these debates came into sharp focus.
When two laser-guided bombs smashed through the roof of the Al Firdos installation in Baghdad’s Amiriyah suburb the Stealth bomber pilots who launched them believed they were targeting a command and control installation. More than four hundred people – mainly women, children, and the elderly – were using it as an air-raid shelter, however. When reporters staying at the Al Rashid Hotel were awoken by their Iraqi minders in a hurry to escort them to the scene of massive devastation, they were given free rein to report without fear of censorship. The reporters witnessed and filmed chaotic scenes of horribly charred remains of those inside being brought out to ambulances. The correspondents then visited the Yarmuk Hospital where, outside, Iraqi nurses were drawing back the blankets covering the dead to show the world what coalition air power was doing to the ordinary people of Iraq. Angry relatives screamed and wailed in grief at the cameras – a defining moment of the war.
Most Western news organisations chose to edit out the most graphic of these images on grounds of taste and decency. Even so, what was broadcast was still shocking. The day following the airing in Britain the Daily Mail accused the BBC of being the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation which, in effect, was shooting the messenger. Coalition spokespeople went into overdrive and claimed that they didn’t understand why civilians would take refuge in a command bunker since the coalition targeted only military installations. Unlike in the baby milk plant episode of several weeks earlier, many people had been killed which made the coalition air strikes look less precise than its spokespeople had been suggesting. As with the baby milk plant, however, the function of the Al Firdos installation had most likely been changed, in this case from a command bunker to a civilian air raid shelter. The intelligence on its use was old, and coalition bombing targets had slipped down the timescale of the air tasking order (ATO) due to the region’s worst weather in living memory. By the time Al Firdos came to the top of the list, its function had changed.
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One of the most controversial aspects of the first coalition war on Baghdad was the bombing of the Almiriyah bunker in which over 400 civilians were killed on 13 February 1991. (Author)
Saddam’s belief in the Vietnam Syndrome was now put to the test. Although evidence suggested that the coalition modified its targeting policy on Baghdad as a result of these images, there was no evidence that the Al Firdos footage tipped Western public opinion on the war. The tabloids suggested that Saddam had deliberately sacrificed his own people as a propaganda ploy to undermine Western public support for the war. The public, though, was not falling for his scheme.
The war consisted of a five-week aerial bombing campaign followed by a rapid ground assault into Kuwait and southern Iraq that was over in 100 hours. Both aspects of the war – the aerial and the ground offensive – were intrinsically problematic for the media coverage. First, journalists were not allowed to go on carpet bombing missions and, even if they had been allowed, they would have seen only distant puffs of smoke 30,000 feet below. They would have heard nothing except the roar of the plane’s engines. Aerial warfare is war fought at a distance and the early retreat of the Iraqi Air Force to Iran ensured coalition air superiority. Second, the ground war was fought largely at night, as most modern battles are, and the media was equipped with few up-to-date night-vision cameras. Besides, coalition forces moved so rapidly that the pool reporters could hardly stop the advance and ask soldiers to take their copy from their media reporting teams (MRT – the official name of the pools) to the forward transmission units (FTU) behind the advance. As a result, until the end, the public saw neither the devastation of the Iraqi army by the carpet bombing nor the ferocity of the rapid assault into Kuwait – even then the footage showed images of the war’s aftermath, such as burning oil wells and bombed-out convoys.
Some journalists, out of frustration, broke away from the pool system and reported independently. Indeed, they managed to enter Kuwait City before the military and film the liberation as if it were Paris in 1944. These journalists joined a small band of brothers known as the ‘unilaterals’, or ‘mavericks’, a term describing reporters who would not conform to the coalition’s media management systems either in the pools or in Riyadh and Dhahran. Their presence in Kuwait City was a dangerous business; roaming around the battlefield without military protection potentially subjected them to arrest or even assault. Following the Iraqis’ arrest of a CBS unilateral crew on the Kuwaiti border early in the campaign, it was unlikely that the unilaterals could cover the war from outside Baghdad. Only a year earlier the Iraqis had hanged London Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft for roaming through the country unescorted and without permission. The Iranian-born Bazoft was accused of spying for Israel. Indeed, following the first land battle of the war in the Saudi seaside resort of Khafji, which the Iraqis had seized at the end of January as a propaganda coup, pool reporters screamed at one unilateral covering the coalition’s counter-offensive, ‘You asshole. You’ll prevent us from working. You’re not allowed here. Get out. Go back to Dhahran!’
While the pool system may have given reporters a chance to witness the military action, most reporters disliked it, because it undermined the traditional competitiveness of the media. Journalists do not like sharing their material. They are looking for a scoop and anything that gives them an advantage over their fellow reporters. The pool reporters, however, had to consent to the security review agreements drawn up by the military. From a military point of view, these agreements were largely designed to prevent valuable information, such as troop sizes and locations, from reaching the enemy. Reporters either had to agree to the arrangements and in the process allow prior military scrutiny of reports and possible censorship or have no access at all.
The press corps was therefore dependent on military sources for information about what was happening. The primary concern of the military, especially now that there was a real-time media environment, was operational security. As with many journalists in the Kuwaiti area of operations, however, security was a daunting and increasingly difficult task. For example, the arrival into the commercial sector of the Inmarsat satellite telephone, which was then the size of a large brick, created a potential nuisance for the military minders. The BBC’s most prominent female correspondent, Kate Adie, believed that the satellite phones were ‘clearly engineered for hotel balconies rather than desert trenches’. Those reporters who were equipped with the Inmarsat satellite phones were instructed not to use them because ‘they could radiate signals to the Iraqis’. Whether the Iraqis possessed such tracing technology at that time was doubtful but, in case this rule was violated, the coalition kept a watchful eye on their use. One British television crew was even arrested after an airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft monitored an allegedly illegal call to its London base. Whether such efforts to control the theatre information environment were disproportionate to the risks involved, the military’s thirst for control and power was also evident in the pools: journalists were not allowed to transmit live using their satellite equipment. However, evidence suggests that the Iraqis attacked Khafji because they had discerned from television pictures, filmed by unilaterals, that the town was empty.
Back at the JIB the military found use in the live daily televised press conferences. Many reporters there were not military or defence specialists and were unversed in military jargon. When they asked for clarification or asked questions that could not be answered on OPSEC grounds they looked ignorant to a live global television audience. In fact, military representatives bypassed the traditional mediating role of journalists and directly addressed viewers. Polls indicated that Americans would trust the military far more than the media and were content to suspend knowledge of the truth until after the war if it saved lives in the process. The military was also fortunate to be able to front Vietnam veteran General Norman Schwarzkopf, nicknamed ‘The Bear’. A larger-thanlife character, General Schwarzkopf knew how to play to an audience and he regularly gave live press conferences. He charmed the press, an indication of how much journalists like to be briefed by the organ grinder rather than his monkeys, terms frequently used by correspondents. Access to the overall field commander gave the briefings enormous credibility and Schwarzkopf ’s use of language was florid and well measured; for example, he famously used ‘bovine scatology’ as a response to an Iraqi claim. In the early days of the war, with very few pool reports coming back from the front, because of little ground activity, the reporters – dubbed the hotel warriors – were growing restless. Their reports of the war were largely based on what military spokespeople communicated to them and, apart from the Baghdad loophole, the message essentially was ‘we are winning, and we will go on winning’.
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Two of the key military players in the ‘first’ Gulf War: Colin Powell and ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. (US Department of Defense)
In an attempt to placate an increasingly restless press corps, the military began to release videos of missile strikes against Iraqi targets. The smart weaponry carried cameras and their videos conveyed, through cross-hairs, strikes of remarkable accuracy. Incidentally, no videos were initially released of the few missiles that missed their targets and none taken by the high-level bomber crews were released either. At one press conference Schwarzkopf even showed a video of a bridge being attacked, with an Iraqi truck passing through the cross-hairs before the explosion. His commentary ran, ‘And now in his rearview mirror – the luckiest man in Iraq!’ The journalists present laughed. Anchors back at base were clearly siding with the military and speaking the same language. CBS’s Charles Osgood described the initial bombing of Iraq as ‘a marvel’, following two days of what the same network’s Jim Stewart described as ‘picture-perfect assaults’. Journalists copied the military’s disingenuous phrase ‘collateral damage’ and used it to draw a veil over the death and injury to civilians. Media analyst Norman Solomon described it as ‘linguicide’ while a British commentator wrote, ‘Rarely has it been so obvious that language is volatile stuff, that it succumbs easily to manipulation, to the sedulous distortions of propagandists and censors … words have been used to salve the conscience, to cordon off the truth, rather than to communicate it.’10
Then the media was provided with the chance to report on events for itself. The Iraqis started firing Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and at Israel. Journalists scrambled to the building roofs to see the nighttime light shows as coalition air defences launched Patriot missiles to repel ‘dumb’ weapons. Anchors in New York and Atlanta pleaded live on air for their reporters to seek the sanctuary of air raid shelters rather than risk their lives to cover the attacks. NBC’s Arthur Kent was perhaps the most famous, with millions watching him go live:
Get us up on audio. Please get us up. Hello, New York? This is Saudi Arabia. This is not a drill. Hello, New York? [Holding up gas mask.] This is Saudi Arabia. This is not a drill. New York? OK, let’s go. We’re firing Patriots. We’ve got flares and we’ve got sirens. Let’s go – focus! [Explosions in distance. Kent ducks.] There goes a Patriot, let’s go!
Kent’s heroics earned him two nicknames among an admiring audience: ‘the Satellite Dish’ and the ‘Scud Stud’. The reporter as star had arrived, although Kent was deeply disturbed at this development, concerned that it might become the norm. He was right.
In Israel Scud attacks were reported live, including supposedly one on Jerusalem’s Old City, though in actuality it was never deliberately attacked – it is a Muslim holy city. Television reporters donned gas masks in fear of chemical weapons strikes, which also never happened. One psychologist dubbed the viewing of live reports of Iraqi attacks as ‘Scudavision’. Live coverage was failing its audiences, becoming more about excitement than about reality, what Nik Gowing later called ‘the tyranny of real time’. The cynic might say that real-time reportage was about excitement over non-events, or mediamanufactured events for the ‘infotainment’ of the audience who accordingly could feel part of history as it happened – or as it wasn’t happening. A collective fantasy had developed, in which war had become entertainment, a video game in which the horrors of real war – the death, the brutality and the destruction – were absent.
All this might suggest a poor media performance during the Gulf War. Such judgements, though, rest on viewer’s expectations of the media in wartime. If audiences expect the media to report the truth, then reporters and editors need time to verify the information they are given by different sources before going public with their reports. Live television had changed the rules of the game. The media had conveyed an accurate impression of the events, really a one-sided war, and because they were dependent on coalition sources they had reproduced the coalition line. After all, coalition sources were presumed to be more credible than Iraqi sources; even the Western journalists’ presence in Baghdad had to be tempered with on-screen warnings that their reports ‘were subject to Iraqi censorship’. The media, however, also gave the impression that the coalition’s war was being fought with hi-tech coalition weaponry, which was a distortion of the reality. Since only the Americans, British, French and Saudis were allowed to hold press conferences in Saudi Arabia, the media and the public were dependent on these sources.
The devastation being wrought on the Iraqi military, and their very high rate of combat deaths, was absent from the coalition sources and, consequently, the media. Despite the omission of these images in Western media outlets, combat camera crews had taken footage; however, it was not released until several years after the war was over. Would those who had complained about the ‘video-game war’ – who were also largely part of the anti-war factions – view the actual war on television? Was this not essentially a propagandist stance, similar to the Vietnam Syndrome, where if audiences watched such horrors they would agitate to stop the war? This line of thinking resurfaced during the Balkan wars after the BBC’s Martin Bell called for a ‘journalism of attachment’. Again, it is linked to the issue of the alleged CNN Effect and whether television images possess the power to change policy.
As for the military, especially the post-Vietnam US military, it now had a template with which to handle the hundreds and sometimes thousands of journalists from worldwide media flocking to areas of combat operations. The American military had vastly improved since the American invasion of Grenada. The media dutifully represented the US military’s desired image of war and, despite the unilaterals and the Baghdad loophole, that image largely benefited the coalition. How different, though, was this media management from the propaganda of the Saddam regime?
A controversial point of friction in the military–media relationship was whether the media had been deliberately used as part of the military deception plan in the build up to the ground war. The plan involved sending messages to the Iraqis that the impending coalition assault on Kuwait would take place from the sea rather than the now famous, but misnamed, ‘Hail Mary play’. Why American journalists didn’t question Schwarzkopf ’s use of American football terminology is curious as the attack was not made out of last-minute desperation. The operation would see coalition ground forces swing up to the west of Kuwait in a lightning advance and cut off the retreating Iraqi forces before they could reach home. Code-named Operation DESERT SABRE, this deception plan called for a feint of amphibious operations, the seizure of the Qurah and Faylakah islands in the Persian Gulf and the movement of 17,000 US Marines northwards up the coast. Meanwhile, the British Rhino Force played recordings from previous training exercises, tank movements and communications traffic as it kicked up clouds of dust, called ‘coat trailing’, moving west along the Kuwaiti/Saudi border. The plan worked. When coalition forces reached Kuwait City the Iraqi guns were pointed out to sea, ready to repel the supposed seaborne assault.
Were the media used to underpin this subterfuge? Many journalists believed they had been exploited because it was well known that the Iraqis were watching CNN, as in the case of Khafji. Certainly American reporters noticed that they were now being given access to training exercises of the Marines going ashore, and indeed to more and more naval-related stories. Reporters in the British pool, on the other hand, were briefed on the entire battle a week before the actual assault began. As Colin Wills of the Mirror recognised, this briefing was an astute move by General Rupert Smith:
We knew the entire battle plan a week before the land war started. On a professional level, needless to say, it was very frustrating. To be in the know and not be able to file a word was like being given the secret of alchemy and at that same instant being struck dumb.
The degree to which the British pool reporters, but not the Americans, were entrusted with such gold dust and then trusted not to publish may have been a legacy from the Falklands War and the bonding that took place between journalists and soldiers. The Americans still had Vietnam on their minds.
When interviewed, several of the military minders involved with journalists at sea suggested that they were not at fault if the journalists assumed that a naval assault would take place. They maintained that they had never actually said this assault would happen. And because the reporters were reliant on the military for their knowledge, their assumptions on the breadth and validity of the information given by the military may have been naive; this line of argument, however, throws emphasis back onto media performance. Again, the problem arises of making generalisations about the media, who are a heterogeneous body of people with varying degrees of experience, understanding and insight. After all, it is often forgotten that on 11 February 1991 Newsweek published a highly accurate map of the likely land assault, almost two weeks before the invasion was launched. Several days prior, the Guardian also published a fairly accurate map of the likely main attacks. All of this precise reportage was forgotten in acrimonious debates after the war when some reporters were furious at the military’s manipulation of the media; most military representatives were content to adopt the stance that if lives of coalition soldiers had been saved thanks to the deception plan, then it was fully justified. One wonders whether the public would side with the military or the media on this one.
Perhaps the issue revolves around not only how much the public sees but also how much it chooses to see when armies go to war in the information age. Add to this issue the military fear that if the public sees too much, it would be repelled and shift to an anti-war stance. Although little evidence exists to suggest that this would happen, the military nonetheless worried that television images of the ground war’s aftermath, especially of the burned-out convoy of fleeing Iraqi vehicles on the highway running north out of Kuwait City, would jeopardise its mission. Indeed, although images of the ‘highway of death’ surfaced three days after the battle, which suggests a military embargo, warnings from Kuwait to the White House about their potential impact may have had an influence on Washington’s decision to end the coalition advance after a mere 100 hours. As Colin Powell wrote in his memoir, A Soldier’s Way, ‘The television coverage … was starting to look as if we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.’
How much influence these images actually had must be balanced against other factors which prompted not a ceasefire but ‘a cessation of hostilities’. The UN mandates authorising the war only did so to expel Iraq from Kuwait. In the months and years that followed, debate – prompted initially by David Frost’s interview with Schwarzkopf – over whether the coalition forces should have entered Baghdad and removed Saddam persisted. Regime change at that time, though, was not the official policy and had the coalition pursued the Iraqi army farther into Iraq its Arab members would have undoubtedly split away, causing more diplomatic problems than the war had solved militarily.
Removing Saddam may not have been the official policy in 1991 but evidence suggests that covert operations attempted to dismantle his regime by non-military means. This involved several ‘black’ propaganda radio stations broadcasting incitements at the end of the war to the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ites in the south to rise up and overthrow the dictator. Instead of receiving military assistance from the coalition, those active in the uprisings were brutally suppressed by Iraqi forces. Furious, several Iraqis who had participated in these broadcasts broke their silence and went on CNN to claim that they had been working for the CIA. The only assistance the rebels received was a series of humanitarian drops of food relief for the Kurds in the north. British Prime Minister John Major said he urged the Americans to initiate this relief effort, code-named Operation PROVIDE COMFORT, after watching the plight of the Kurds on television news reports. The Shi’a uprising, however, was not televised which meant that there was no pressure to send any relief to those rebels.
When British forces entered the Shi’a areas of Iraq in 2003 they were surprised at the locals’ unenthusiastic reaction. The UK 15 Psychological Operations Group quickly realised why and published a leaflet, which simply said, ‘This time we won’t let you down’. Sceptical Iraqis remembering the 1991 ‘betrayal’ failed to reach for their rose petals to greet their supposed liberators. Still, based on my own experience of patrolling with the Royal Military Police the reaction of the locals was not actively hostile. British troops patrolled in berets, not helmets. The mood was soon to change, however.
The Gulf War resonated throughout the myriad conflicts in the region, not least in Lebanon. In June 1982 the IDF had struck Palestinian resistance/terrorist groups in Lebanon. Israeli armour reached Beirut in a mere six days but a prolonged siege ensued. Constant pictures of Israeli artillery pounding Palestinian camps began turning world opinion, with the exception perhaps of the United States, away from the Jewish state and more toward the Arab cause. Worse, the Israelis gave the Lebanese militias control over the Palestinian camps which resulted in mass bloodshed at Sabra and Shatila. Robert Fisk, a British journalist with an international reputation for covering injustices in the Arab world, penned famous despatches of the massacres. The Israelis withdrew, though they maintained a security belt in the south, and an international peacekeeping force, drawn from the United States, France, Italy and Britain, entered Beirut. The forces did not stay long. In October 1983 Hezbollah bombed a US Marine barracks; suicide bombers had already destroyed the American embassy a few months early. Although French troops were attacked at the same time as the Marines, photographs of the American disaster seized world attention. The media continued to focus on Lebanese anarchy and particularly the taking of Western hostages which included journalists.
Because of their complexity the origins of the Lebanese wars almost defy classification. Internal religious rivalries, such as Muslim versus Christian and Shi’a versus Sunni, allied with ideological and class hostilities and tribal feuds were exploited by the outside powers. In this international battlefield Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Iran had been major contenders. America, Saudi Arabia, Russia, France and Iraq also stirred the pot. The Syrian army had helped the Lebanese army recapture much of the country, although the southern region was still a hodgepodge of UN troops, militias, Palestinian insurgents and Israeli-backed Lebanese proxies. For years a sign hung in the office of Timur Göksel, the official who dealt with the press in the UN zone, which read, ‘If you think you understand Lebanon, you’ve not been properly briefed.’ The Israeli invasion displaced the PLO leaders, notably Yasser Arafat, from the country and, in 1991, the Palestinian cause was further damaged in the West by the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein. This was a poor publicity move by Arafat who, as the Israelis always said, ‘never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity’. As radical Islamic groups began to win over more and more adherents, the relationship between the PLO and the Palestinian people began to sour.
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Tim Lambon and Lindsey Hilsum (Channel Four News) and, centre, Marie Colvin (Sunday Times) in Jenin, during the siege of Jenin, April/May 2002. (Author)
A series of uprisings collectively known as the intifada, which literally means ‘a shaking off ’, accelerated the falling out between the PLO and the Palestinian people. The first Palestinian uprising began in 1987 and lasted six years. Both the first and the more aggressive second intifada, which began in 2000, were born out of deep-seated and bitter frustration with both the Israeli occupation and the ineffectual Arab leadership.
The Gulf War’s Scud missiles had undermined the old Israeli military argument about strategic depth – the need for land to buy time in case of another Arab invasion. This thinking was based upon previous wars, in which armoured ground attacks threatened to slice up the Jewish state. It was an argument seriously flawed in the new missile age in the region. While Israel could still rely on almost unconditional support from Washington, American public opinion was changing. The media image of the tiny democratic state of Holocaust survivors had been tarnished by the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel was no longer seen as the only necessary and reliable ally in the region. Instead, it was becoming a strategic liability, costing American taxpayers officially $3 billion a year in military aid.
The Gulf War had improved Israel’s conventional military position. Its enemy Syria had lost its Soviet patron and Iraq had been humbled. America had become the lynchpin of the Middle East. The Arabs, cowed by American weapon wizardry in the Gulf, had lost interest in fighting Israel. In one sense, though, Saddam had won an accidental victory: he had placed the Palestinian uprising back at the centre of the world stage. By 1993, after a series of conferences and accords, most notably in Oslo, the Palestinian Authority was established in parts of the occupied territories. Yasser Arafat, however, seemed unable to contain the endemic corruption or the rise of Islamic fundamentalist groups such as Hamas. The Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon, yet found no peace. The IDF reacted with reprisal raids as the zealots sent suicide bombers into Jewish areas.
Funded in part by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Hamas garnered enough money to provide a basic welfare system for the Palestinian poor. Hamas leaders enjoyed a reputation of austerity, while Arafat’s Palestinian Authority wallowed in corruption and nepotism. Contrary to most Western opinion, Palestinians came to support Hamas not because of its violence or Islamism, but ‘because it is kind’.11 The impact of television reporting of the uprisings, especially by al-Jazeera, the Arab television station founded in Qatar in 1995, was likened to the alleged effect of Vietnam War coverage. The dramatic pictures from the occupied territories created a sense of immediacy and support in the ‘Arab street’. Israel could no longer claim to be using reasonable force to contain the Palestinians when al-Jazeera showed otherwise, daily and hourly. This coverage of the second intifada meant that the formidable Israeli media faced real Arab competition for the first time. Nachman Shai was the head of an Israeli special media team set up to counter this threat. Predictably, he blamed television for inciting the intifada: ‘This war is a television war. This is completely different from the Gulf War. It has become a daily struggle over which side will have the most air time; which side will have won the latest propaganda war.’
Israeli and Jewish lobbies worldwide, realising the media-savvy Palestinians and al-Jazeera had outflanked them, fought back. They accused al-Jazeera of bias, in spite of the fact that it had been the first Arab channel to regularly feature interviews with Israelis. They criticised the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse news services, which collectively supplied 80 per cent of the world’s still and television news images. Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO), and even the lumbering IDF, also improved their media act. They claimed that the pictures did not report the real story. There was, however, little evidence of an anti-Israeli media conspiracy. This reporting did create a pattern to the reality programming of television news on the conflict. The complex crisis was reduced, as the American columnist Douglas Davis articulated, ‘to a monochromatic, single-dimensional comic cut-out, whose well-worn script featured a relentlessly brutal demonically evil Ariel Sharon and a plucky, bumbling, misunderstood Yasser Arafat, the benign father of Palestine, in need of a little TLC (plus $50 million a month) from the West’.12
In the summer of 2007, however, the Palestinians fought a civil war among themselves. Hamas gunmen conquered Gaza while pro-Fatah forces held on to the tattered Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel stood back as its enemy collapsed in on itself. The media now proclaimed the ‘two-state solution’: Gaza ruled by Islamists who refused to recognise Israel, and in the West Bank the more secular Fatah who were prepared to handle the Jewish state.
Hundreds of news bureaux and journalists on permanent postings have been based in Jerusalem, as well as numerous visiting freelancers and staff members who have sifted the ancient, overworked soil for new scoops. In the first decade of the century about 900 articles on events in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza were published each day in the English language alone, seventy-five times more than for any other area of comparable population. Israelis question why they are at the centre of media attention, to which several answers can be offered. Jerusalem is the home of three great world religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It is also the fulcrum of a long-running Middle East crisis; perhaps even one of Huntington’s tectonic plates in the clash of civilisations. American journalist Stephanie Gutmann, in her indictment of media bias against Israel, suggests that hostile image making has declined; presumably bin Laden et al had an inadvertent part in that. For over a decade, she argued, only one Webbased voice, the Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), had called for more accurate reporting of Israel. Since then groups of online media monitors have sprung up, some of which are specifically dedicated to measuring the output of individual major news organs. The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Le Monde are analysed daily for anti-Israeli bias. She also commented on the ‘democratic, irreverent spirit’ of the blogosphere. A journalist herself, Gutmann was, however, wrong to claim that there has been ‘a natural tendency for journalists and terrorists to collude’. She cited examples in Iraq, echoing US military complaints, where camera crews from Associated Press and Reuters ‘by amazing coincidence’ repeatedly found themselves in locations where insurgents had achieved some of their greatest carjacking and kidnapping successes. To Gutmann journalists are not ‘priests of neutrality’. They do stray from professional standards and sometimes exhibit ‘petty vendettas, craven desires to be with the cool kids, secret shames, blind spots – and sometimes even diligence and brilliance’.13
Until the late 1980s Edward Said’s critique of the weaknesses of Western coverage was persuasive. Israel’s publicity machine was also effective, at least in the United States. The fall of the Shah was both an intelligence and media failure. The Iran–Iraq War was poorly interpreted and covered, since the authoritarian regimes had mostly restricted independent media access. Afghanistan was also inadequately reported, but mainly because of its terrain and the anarchy of the mujahedin. Despite brave and repeated forays by journalists such as Peter Jouvenal, John Simpson and Ed Girardet of the Christian Science Monitor, little of the strategic direction of Afghanistan’s ten-year war against the Russians was revealed. The Soviets may well have been equally unaware of the war’s developments, along with muj groups themselves, who were locked in their own internecine feuds. Lebanon, meanwhile, was intensely covered, although the constant abductions, not least of Western journalists, rendered continuous media surveillance difficult and often nearly impossible.
When the first intifada broke out Israel initially outmanoeuvred the Palestinians in the media war. Soon, though, the insurgents began playing effectively to the international gallery. The Western media did have an impact on the portrayal of resistance in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of Israeli injustices. The Israeli attempts at official control were unsuccessful: the correspondents’ need for official information was low and the international media had sufficient resources to cover the region consistently. Compared with the vast desert land of the Gulf War, this conflict’s small area of terrain was conducive to rapid and comprehensive reporting. Duration is important too: whereas the Gulf War was short and sharp, the intifadas were long-running sagas. Jerusalem, moreover, was already a media capital, boasting a wellestablished press corps with numerous contacts. No sophisticated weapons technologies had to be learnt, no sweeping strategic plans to decipher and no major cultural barriers to surmount as the action, as in Saigon, was on the doorstep of comfortable hotels with well-stocked bars. Unlike the Gulf War, ‘journalists could cover the intifada without ever having attended a single class in “Army 101”.’14
As in South Africa, previously a state under siege, the cause-and-effect impact of the cameras was intensely discussed in Israel. The Palestinians reacted to the news media’s presence during confrontations by becoming more and more militant. Meanwhile, the presence of the foreign press usually, but not always, tempered the use of excessive force by Israeli security forces. After 1995 the arrival of al-Jazeera meant that not only Arabs outside the territories but Palestinians as well became fixated with live coverage. While al-Jazeera has never denied that its footage rallied support for the Palestinian cause, it has maintained that this was a natural, yet unintended, consequence of the events being shown, rather than a deliberate attempt at propaganda. Nevertheless, the 24-hour Arabic-language station played a major role in altering the media and political balance of power in favour of the Palestinians.
In the Gulf War the role of the news gatherer was far more passive, ‘that of a faithful servant dutifully providing services to their Allied masters’.15 The military’s power over the news media was a question of supply and demand. Only the military could fill the tremendous news holes that existed. This dominance was reinforced by the journalists’ lack of knowledge and access. The US military, often staffed by public affairs officers who had graduate degrees in journalism, understood how to influence the journalists more than the journalists understood how to obtain and, crucially, process information about the military. Indeed, the private military view was that journalists ‘couldn’t distinguish a tank from a turd’. The media, then, became another weapon in the Allies’ massive arsenal to defeat Saddam Hussein. Guardian correspondent Maggie O’Kane described it thus:
A tale of how to tell lies and win wars, and how we, the media, were harnessed like 2,000 beach donkeys and led through the sand to see what the British and US military wanted us to see in this nice clean war.
The British Sunday newspaper the Observer was the only paper to publish at the time the most famous photograph of the war – the burnt corpse of a soldier on the Basra road. It was not shown in the United States. The photographer behind the image, Kenneth Jarecke, ‘believe[d] it was worth risking your life for the truth. The problem was we couldn’t get near it.’