DOSSIER: THE MEDIA IN TIMES OF WAR
NewsXchange: coverage of the Iraq
conflict
Morand Fachot, Media Officer, EBU Communications
Service
The coverage of
the conflict in Iraq, the biggest news story of 2003, was at centre
of the debates of the second edition of the NewsXchange conference
which took place in Budapest on 6 and 7 November 2003.
NewsXchange, a not-for-profit conference underwritten by the
EBU, has the backing of the 70 members of the EBU’s Eurovision News
Exchange and of the 29 members of European News Exchange (ENEX),
the cooperative of commercial broadcasters. It is also supported by
the major international broadcast news agencies and
networks.
The 2003 conference brought together broadcast news executives,
experts on safety issues in the field and media specialists for a
comprehensive review of the coverage of the war in Iraq, a
presentation on the latest developments in newsgathering technology
and debates about the risks faced by journalists in conflicts and
post-conflict situations.
The strained relations between the media and governments in
several countries and the influence of reality TV were also
discussed at the conference, attended by some 340 delegates from
over 40 countries.
Participants in places as far apart as Baghdad, Doha, Jerusalem,
the United States, Moscow, London and Paris took part in the
debates via some 40 satellite link-ups ensured by the Eurovision
network.
Embed vs unilateral?
NewsXchange 2003 opened with ‘The Year in Pictures’ and ‘A Week
in Baghdad’, video reports produced by APTN and Reuters TV
respectively.
The reports were followed by a lively debate, moderated by CNN
Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, on the
‘embedding’ of correspondents in frontline units, the role of
‘unilateral’ reporters who operated outside official military
arrangements and what many regarded as attempts on the part of the
British and US military to manage the news agenda.
"The US will control the battle space, it has to," US Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) Bryan Whitman
argued.
"When there are civilians we have to be sure that in no way do
they compromise the battlefield. At the moment journalists are
civilians, not combatants," he added.
The presence of hundreds of journalists on the battlefield is a
major concern to the military, explained Col. Chris Vernon, chief
spokesman of the British Armed Forces in the Gulf region. Concern
based on both risks to operational safety – which could be
jeopardized by careless or untimely reporting – and risks for the
personal safety of journalists, for which the military may
ultimately be held responsible.
Although acknowledging that ‘embeds’ contributed to better news
coverage as reporters gained first-hand experience of the
complexities of modern warfare, Col. Vernon also stressed that the
presence of large numbers of journalists in the battle zone
represented a burden for the military particularly in terms of
logistics and security.
A number of reporters, particularly unilaterals and those based
at allied headquarters, expressed frustration at what they
considered unnecessary restrictions placed on them by coalition
forces, delays in releasing information and attempts at feeding
them an official line.
Frustration
Frustration was visible on the part of the military too. British
Army Major General (retd) Arthur Denaro called on members of the
media to learn more about the military, explaining that though the
military went on training courses, the media never took part
alongside them.
The general also pleaded for more contact between the military
and the media in peacetime to improve media coverage of conflicts.
"In something which was forecast so well, as this latest conflict
was, I believe there could have been much more effort, on both
sides – by us to educate you and by you to come in and try
understand the dimensions of this multidimensional business that
we’re all in," he said.
The session also featured the launch of a joint study by the BBC
and Cardiff School of Journalism on war reporting and the policy of
embedding journalists with frontline units.
Prof. Justin Lewis, deputy director of the Cardiff
journalism school, noted: "The criticisms that were made at the
time, that the embedded reporters were more likely to give a
pro-war spin, do not hold up.
But we do have some reservations, particularly about the
narrative that is created by embedded reports, where the only
discussion is about who’s winning and who’s losing, with
little of the wider picture."
The study also found that television reports produced by
embedded correspondents during the conflict in Iraq gave a
‘sanitized’ picture of war.
According to Mark Damazer, deputy director of BBC News, if
reporters were able to be objective, they tended to avoid images
that would be too graphic or violent for British television.
Consequently, this became a "disservice to democracy".
Although participants were split on many of the issues, the
general consensus was that comprehensive coverage was best ensured
by a combination of reporting from embeds and unilaterals, not by
reliance on a single category of correspondents.
Safety
Opening the second session Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British
representative to the Coalition Provisional Authority, said:
"Every-body should travel with their own hired protection, if
possible in protective vehicles".
The session, moderated by BBC World main anchor Nik Gowing,
started with a tribute to the winners of this year’s Rory Peck
Award and a tribute from the International News Safety Institute to
journalists and media workers killed in action. He also presentend
Dying to tell the story, a book dedicated to all media workers who
fell covering the Iraq war.
Is it time to reassess safety training? What about the use of
security advisers? The complex issue of armed security escorts for
journalists was hotly debated followed by footage of the shoot out
between the security guards protecting CNN corres-pondent Brent
Sadler and armed men near the town of Tikrit.
"I would have five or six dead colleagues had it not been for
the defensive action that had been taken," said Eason Jordan, CNN
executive vice-president and chief news executive.
"I very much regret that we find it essential at times to put
armed protection in the field, but Iraq is not the first place
where it happened.
We faced it in Somalia, in Afghanistan. I have no regret
whatsoever that this action was taken to keep our colleagues
alive," Jordan continued.
Many participants expressed concern that armed security escorts
might make the work of journalists more – not less – dangerous at
times of war.
Chris Cramer, managing director of CNN International, disagreed
with those who argued that a line had been crossed irreversibly.
"This is not a Rubicon, we have not crossed the line, this is a
slippery slope," he said. "We are – whether we like it or not –
legitimate targets."
He also argued that attacks against journalists were often
motivated by greed, "We are travelling ATM machines, we have many
carloads of many shiny boxes, very expensive cameras, which
represent an opportunity for robbery."
Channel 4 correspondent Lindsey Hilsum and her crew, held up on
the road from Amman to Baghdad by two armed men who took $4,500 and
a satphone, supported this claim. However, cameraman Tim Lambon,
who had also been travelling with her, argued that they might have
been killed had they been armed.
Proponents and adversaries were split over the issue of armed
escorts for journalists. The divide was mainly – but not
exclusively – between representatives of large US or British news
organizations, main users of armed escorts, and media organizations
from other countries which cannot afford the cost of hiring
security guards. This was confirmed by a reporter for Dutch public
broadcaster NPS who said that it simply could not afford to hire
armed guards.
Dr Anthony Feinstein, a clinical psychologist from the
University of Toronto, and Mark Brayne, director of the Dart Centre
Europe, questioned whether news organizations were doing all they
could to help journalists who may suffer from trauma or
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Technology
The latest technology that allowed the remarkable coverage of
the Iraq war and new developments that may revolutionize the
broadcast news industry were presented in a special
session.
Remarkable leaps in graphics and virtual reality have made
stories more informative and visually stimulating. Experts
demonstrated these new technologies and also debated the dangers of
technology going too far and distorting reporting.
The year 2004 will present more challenges to the news industry
and the NewsXchange conference later this year will welcome even
more broadcast news executives, experts on safety issues and media
specialists.
Websites / Links
NewsXchange: http://www.newsxchange.org
INSI: http://www.newssafety.com
Eurovision – Zerorisk International http://www.zerorisk-international.com
Dart Centre Europe: http://www.dartcenter.org/europe/
_____________________
Embedded!
Monica Maggioni, War Correspondent TG1, RAI
This was the somewhat unusual headline in the New York Times in
2002: the article that followed told how the Pentagon was
organizing preparatory courses for war reporters who might perhaps
one day follow US troops if there should be a conflict in
Iraq.
The article, followed by a phone call to the Pentagon Press
Office and several months of bureaucracy and form-filling, took us
into the war in Iraq among the columns of American soldiers;
embedded, as it was called.
On the morning of 12 March 2003 the meeting point was the Hilton
Hotel in Kuwait City. A squad of journalists, 500 strong, was
kitted out with gas-masks and NBC (nuclear, bacteriological,
chemical) anti-contamination suits and dispersed over a vast
territory to mingle with 200,000 soldiers.
Despite the initial intentions, no-one was afterwards asked
whether they had taken part in survival courses or similar training
and we realized all too well that the imminence of the events – the
war round the corner – did not leave room for any of
that.
The Pentagon had decided in its own way to open up and bring
into its war a number of reporters who would travel with the
troops, see the fighting and the advances at close quarters, and
share the daily risks and hard work.
Of course, the immediate consequence was that a number of
conditions had to be respected. First of all, the locations of the
actions in progress during the missions must not be revealed, it
said in the official guidelines; these could only be reported once
they were over, finished.
Otherwise there were no specific requirements except one
absolute condition: everybody should have with him or her only that
amount of baggage, including technical material, that he was able
to transport by himself without weighing down or hindering the
regular advance of the troops.
Everything seemed to be perfectly well organized and television
crews were asked to use lightweight equipment. Translated this
meant no Betacams but just one less cumbersome digital TV camera, a
computer, and the transmission equipment.
The rules also stipulated that each of us would bring with him
just essential clothing and, as a fundamental condition, we were
requested to be independent in all respects except for food and
transport.
On this basis, that same morning an American official assigned
us to the unit with which we would move about. The first meeting
sufficed to make us understand that no-one would be looking after
us: this was not a trip organized by the press office; each
participant had to come to terms with his own reality, would have
to find the stories to report in the twists and turns of each day’s
actions, of the life of a group of soldiers there to make war. And
at the same time would have to manage to stay alive.
At this point I and the operator, Silvio Giuletti, found
ourselves on our own to face the adventure.
Silvio had with him a Sony 150 camera and a Sony 120. I had my
120.
This was absolutely neccessary if we were not to be left without
coverage for we knew that harsh conditions were awaiting us: the
desert sand, the dust, the heat.
Our initial concerns related mainly to censorship. Would anyone
want to see our stories? Would they check everything we sent? In
reality, no-one asked us anything during the first week in Kuwait,
as we covered the lives of the soldiers as they trained while
awaiting the outcome of the ultimatum to Saddam.
Then, when the war started, the organizational machine went into
a state of crisis: taken altogether the very long columns of the
convoys entering Iraqi territory, the sandstorms, and logistics
became too complicated to manage.
Reporters were the least of the problems. No-one checked
anything any more. The sole absolute obligation was that of
avoiding any mention of the places we were in, as asked by
everybody we met during our work. Security was fundamental, for
them and for us.
We soon realized that at this point only the cameras of the big
American and British networks remained under the watchful,
restrictive gaze of the Pentagon. All the others were tiny pawns
floating around in the huge machine of the attacking
army.
In this way any change of place turned into a negotiation with
the official met by chance, with the soldier calling out at the
last minute to tell you to jump into his jeep or that there was a
transfer by helicopter to a different position . . . and every
flight, every metre of Iraq became an opportunity to see that army
from the inside, to see, close up, the faces above the camouflaged
battledress.
And so, day after day, we discovered their stories. There was
sergeant F., a soldier through and through, talking about the
actions of the special forces as if they were a videogame; coldly
lucid, he was familiar with war and was perfectly at home in it.
And there was K., 19 years old, who wanted to be a helicopter pilot
but could not afford the civil licence, so he decided to enlist and
found himself in Iraq almost by chance. And there was C., who read
and read from morning till night. Who was earning the money for
college. But today he is in the war.
Every day we managed to transmit thanks to our small but trusty
system. With us we had one Nera (the second one, indispensable for
live transmissions, was never to function) and a laptop running
Adobe on it. Thanks this software we easily and quickly edited our
stories and then transmitted them. However, as we only had one Nera
to reply on, the transmission speed was one of our worst
nightmares. To send back one-and-a-half minutes of story we had to
remain connected for almost an hour. In the end, though, we even
got used to this and our production timings changed in relation to
these limitations which we learned to live with.
The nights on the move were the toughest time: slowly, filled
with anxiety, headlights switched off, we crawled forward into
enemy territory with the battles only a few kilometres
away.
There were almost seven weeks of tents, army food, camp life. Of
attempts to tell the most difficult of all stories, that of war.
But above all, we lived through a unique experience with an
extraordinary inside view of a world that from the outside really
is hard to imagine.
For those who, like us, did not have to deal with any form of
censorship, the long tour as embedded journalists turned into an
exciting journey into one of the lesser-known aspects of war, that
of the soldiers, their fears, their way of life. A journey on which
we encountered experience and ingenuity, ice-cold professionals and
young boys often unaware of what was going on a few hundred meters
from their positions. We often spoke of it, too, with the fellow
journalists we encountered on rare occasions on the way.
The viewpoint of the embedded reporters could not, of course, be
the only one in the war but in a news programme with a lot of
correspondents it became an opportunity to obtain extraordinary
stories.
And it was exactly by travelling with soldiers and discovering
Iraq metre by metre that we started to think that we were seeing
only the beginning, that very soon the Iraqi boys waiting for us
with smiling faces along the roads in the south would soon have
lost their smiles. The problem is that today in Iraq it is hell.
And the American soldiers are still there.
A few months ago, on one of the bases in Iraq, we saw again some
of the soldiers we had travelled with; they told us that some of
them had gone home in body bags, the black bag used for
transporting corpses. The luckiest ones now watch the war in Iraq
on television in the USA, some have gone home to their loved ones,
but the war will go on a long time yet. C. sent us an e-mail a few
days ago. With the rotation he might well go back there in a few
months’ time, one year after. Except that now he knows Iraq, and he
knows what war is.
_____________________
War in Iraq: coverage by India’s PSB
S.Y. Quraishi, Director General of Doordarshan, India’s
national broadcaster
The Iraq war was a critical event for
India
Notwithstanding India’s long historical ties with Iraq, the
impending war in the region also put Indian diplomacy at a
crossroads.
India had an independent view of the events unfolding and this
independent view of things had to be communicated as it was
considered that the BBC and CNN were not going to present a
perspective which could be completely unbiased.
As hostilities intensified Doordarshan rose to the
occasion.
A Doordarshan team was sent to Iraq to report on the events as
they unfolded whereas many Indian networks positioned their
television crews in the neighbouring regions of Iraq.
The journalists of Doordarshan were selected on the basis of
their credentials, their knowledge of the region and with a network
of contacts in Iraq and its surrounding countries.
As the team had to work in difficult and dangerous circumstances
the next task was to establish a proper channel of communication
with the team and provide them with the necessary funds to complete
their mission.
By sending a team to Iraq Doordarshan upheld its public service
broadcasting mandate and, in particular, contributed to the
plurality of information.
The Indian population had a right to being informed about the
imminent allied attack.
War with its ensuing misery and tragedy was presented from an
Indian perspective.
Doordarshan became the unbiased voice for a large number of
viewers both at home and in the Gulf.
After deliberating on issues of cost, credibility, safety and
speed Doordarshan decided to work with Third Eye, an independent
television producer, in its coverage of the war.
Saeed Naqvi, the chief producer, is a specialist in Gulf affairs
and he put together a team of experienced television reporters,
correspondents, cameramen and engineers.
Some of the best reporters and cameramen from Doordarshan were
also included in the team and were posted to key areas. Satish
Jacob and his cameraman, based in Baghdad, put Indian public
television at the heart of the news.
The programme World View India: India Cares, Indian
Counts was made to reflect India’s view on what was happening
without relying on foreign channels and news agencies.
A half-hour daily programme providing an update on the situation
was broadcast during primetime from Sunday through to
Thursday.
Doordarshan’s team was in Baghdad well before the war started
and informed viewers on the constantly evolving situation leading
to the final negotiations and build-up of military operations in
the Gulf.
A crucial decision was about the timing of sending the teams.
Too early would entail a drain on funds; too late would make it
impossible for the team to enter Iraq.
The right decision was made and our journalists were operational
when the time came, allowing the network not only to stay ahead of
all channels broadcasting into India but also to become a source of
crucial information to many networks around the globe.
Many heads of state and other important politicians, including
US Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary
Jack Straw, gave exclusive interviews to Doordarshan.
The other leaders featured on the programme included UN
Under-Secretary-General for Communica-tions and Public Information
Shashi Tharoor, Pakistani Prime Minister Jamali and Foreign
Minister Kasuri, Afghanistan President Hamed Karzai, UN Special
envoy to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi, Ahmad Chalabi, a
representative on the nine-member collective presidency of Iraq,
Prince Husayn of Jordan, Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Tyronne
Fernando, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto,
politician Imran Khan and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohsen
Aminzadeh.
Doordarshan had the cutting edge in presenting India’s
international relations.
The day war broke out the audience of Doordarshan’s programme on
the Iraq war was equivalent to the peak audience during a
cricket match.
It had an unprecedented audience figure of over 11 million
viewers on the evening of 20 March, 30 times more than the audience
of all channels put together.
The most popular cable and satellite channel, Aaj Tak, had an
audience of a mere 218,000.
As for the BBC and CNN, their audience figures were negligible
for the same period.
The Iraq war was seen from many different angles in comparison
to the first Gulf war.
