Wednesday, April 02, 2003

Peter Arnett and Enemy Reporters

Below is a letter by Mark Hand posted on Romenesko:

Iraq may be the “enemy” to the Bush administration and his military commanders. And I’m sure many reporters around the world also view Iraq as the enemy in the context of the U.S. invasion, while other reporters may view Iraq more as a target of unjustified aggression. It’s fine for reporters to have opinions and to share them with other media outlets in interviews. I would hope, though, that a reporter would try to do his or her job as impartially as possible while on the clock. When Peter Arnett was interviewed by Iraqi state television — comparable to, let’s say, an Iraqi television foreign correspondent giving comments to CNN in Washington if Iraqi forces were staging an invasion of the United States — he was stating his opinion on the success and failure so far of the U.S. invasion, based on his vantage point from the ground in Baghdad. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you are a nation that frowns upon private individuals speaking their minds.

In my hypothetical Iraqi invasion of the U.S., I’m sure the Iraqi foreign correspondent would have been fired too by his bosses back home if, in his conversation with CNN, he had given a negative assessment of the Iraqi military’s war plan against the United States. But Iraq is a dictatorship and we’re not (at least that’s what I’m told incessantly by our vaunted press), thereby making such a cowardly personnel decision by Iraqi state television unsurprising.

As a sidebar, where’s the solidarity for the Iraqi reporters and media staffers being targeted and, in some cases, killed by the coalition forces attacking Iraqi state television and media outlets? Would the U.S. journalistic establishment hold the same callous attitude if state-backed BBC or CBC facilities and staffers were bombed in an attack on their countries, or if U.S. government media mouthpieces — CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, et al. — were targeted by a foreign invasion force?

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