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Sins of commission, sins of omission By George S. Hishmeh Jordan Times, 4/4/03 WASHINGTON — Last Sunday, The Washington Post ran a large photo in colour on the upper half of its front page showing “a US Navy doctor with a Marine unit hold(ing) an injured girl in central Iraq, where a family was caught in crossfire with Iraqi forces.” The American doctor was sitting cross-legged on the ground cuddling the Iraqi infant in his lap while other Marines in the background appeared to be searching the area. That was a touching photograph on a Sunday morning when I was about to take my first sip of Arabic coffee. But when I picked The New York Times, it had the same photo, a little larger, on the upper left of its front page. I was shocked, in fact enraged, that the Times caption had additional and newsworthy details. The Marine doctor was holding the young girl, the paper said, “after her mother was killed by crossfire on the front line near Rifa”, in Iraq. Why did The Washington Post, which had supported the war against Iraq, drop the all-important reference to the mother is anybody's guess. Needless to say, the Times caption was more heart-wrenching and elicited sympathy from readers. The sins of commission, we are told, are mortal, but the sins of omission are venial. I cite this case because some in the American media have taken the influential Al Jazeera television network to task for airing an interview with American prisoners of war and showing the bodies of several others. In fact, Al Jazeera website has since been hacked and the US hosts of Al Jazeera were reported planning to drop it from its service. Moreover, the correspondents of the Doha-based television station were kicked out of the New York Stock Exchange. All this followed the daily briefing of US Secretary of Defence, Donald H. Rumsfeld, when he said Al Jazeera' action was in violation of the Geneva Convention, as it apparently was. But as I pointed out in last week's column, so is the US in holding Taleban fighters who remain in solitary confinement and are still denied legal representation. Moreover, Hafez Al Mirazi, Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Washington, told the American television network CNN that they too have carried footage of Iraqi and American PoWs. His point was not challenged. The harsh exchanges about the controversial footage on Al Jazeera were topped last week when a senior official of Radio Sawa, the US government's Arabic-language station, lambasted the Arab media at a panel discussion at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, much to the chagrin of Arab journalists present. He began by ridiculing how the Arab press covered the June 1967 war with Israel, for accepting Arab government accounts uncritically. There is hardly an Arab journalist who would not concede that there is more press freedom in the West than in the Arab world; but Western governments are also known to manage the news in their daily press briefings or control what the public needs to know during crises, as is the case with the war on Iraq. A case in point has been the issue of the so-called “embedded” journalists, accompanying the American and British troops which have invaded Iraq, a term that has been the butt of jokes on the Internet. They are described deridingly as correspondents who are “in bed with” the military. Jack G. Shaheen, an acclaimed media critic and professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University, says embedded journalists “are reporting what the generals are telling them to report”. In other words, he continued, “the Pentagon is in charge of what we see and what we do not see”. More to the point, he added: “It is really what the administration wants reported that is being reported.” But Shaheen, the author of highly-praised `Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People', told me that he believes the role of these some 600 journalists, including some Israeli reporters, with American and British troops could change. “If the war continues and there are more casualties, God forbid, then I think there will be fewer embedded journalists and more journalists going out, doing stories based on their own initiative. If in fact, (American) public opinion changes, then I think you will see that reflected in the news coverage.” Typically, he went on, the United States, like any nation at war, does not want “any point of view to be put across except (its) point of view”. But, he stressed, this is not going to work because Germany, France and other networks throughout the world are reporting the war from their various perspectives. Ultimately, he noted, “if you want to be informed, then go to the Internet”. The “overenthusiastic “media reports from Iraq, as The Los Angeles Times described them, could create real political problems in the US. “That's one reason (President) Bush and ... Rumsfeld launched a major effort (last month) to manage expectations.” Some critics, reported The New York Times, have suggested it has been difficult to tell journalists and military personnel apart. “I am discouraged by reporters' willingness to swallow most of what is being told to them,” Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, told the Times. “How can they keep referring to `coalition forces' as if there were actually some sort of coalition?” In an article that appeared on March 31 in USA Today, Geert Linnebank, editor in chief of Reuters news agency, explained that news executives worldwide had to consider the ethical dimension of the American offer. They had “to weigh the advantages of access to the Iraqi battlefield against a fear that embedding can be used to control media coverage”. Reuters bought in, he admitted, “but with the understanding that some of our reporters would be used by the Pentagon to cast the war in a favourable light, and that we would have to take steps to offset that fact”. In other words, he said, “the Pentagon is quite candid in seeing embedding as a way to help `shape' public perception”. He admitted that “our profession may be at a greater hazard than usual of being a channel for disinformation”.
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