Letters to Romenesko blast U.S. media on Iraq
Press Action
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/romenesko03252003/
Two great letters commenting on the U.S. press’ coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have appeared on Jim Romenesko’s Media News site.
David Ehrenstein, author of a letter from last Friday commenting on NBC News’ Tom Brokaw coming close to tears during an interview with a U.S. soldier’s family member, responded to my email by saying “this is a weird, unprecedented situation—that’s getting weirder by the moment. ‘Support our troops’ means something quite different now than it did in Vietnam as then we had a draft and this is an all-volunteer army. Support for ‘the troops’ is part of a propaganda shell game devised to draw our attention away from who sent them there and why.”
Below are Ehrenstein’s letter and a wonderful analysis of the U.S. media by Kevin Hoffman:
Ehrenstein’s letter to Romenesko:
So Tom Brokaw gets all choked up when talking to the mother of a Marine got killed during our current criminal invasion [letter below].
So what?
Jerking tears is part of his job. The real problem for a journalist is
making sure our tears are jerked in the most Politically Correct way. We’re supposed to cry over the death of a man who volunteered to kill, and thereby risk being killed himself.
So what?
I’m not waiting to hear Brokaw sob over the corpses of the thousands of Iraquis we’re sending to an undeserved grave even as I type these words.
Hoffman’s letter to Romenesko:
I keep reading stories about how great the war coverage has been. I disagree. A few things that have annoyed me about coverage thus far:
1) TV outlets are going to ridiculous lengths to show how patriotic they are. The embedding thing helps, because the reporters think they’re soldiers and admit to a special kinship with the troops, forgetting that this compromises their objectivity. Worse was the CNN interview with an Iraqi diplomat this weekend. When the diplomat complained about innocent civilians being killed, the CNN interviewer (I think it was Aaron Brown) started haranguing him, asking, How do you know it wasn’t your own weapons that killed the civilians? This seemed designed to forstall Fox News’s idiotic claims that they’re the only ones doing “fair and balanced” coverage because everyone else is focusing too much on civilian casualties (I saw very little focus on this). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that scores of innocent Iraqis are inevitably being killed by our bombs. If you’re OK with that because it serves a “greater good,” fine, but you should at least be intellectually honest about it.
2) I’m so sick of “shock and awe” and its innumerable derivations. Can’t we just call it what it is: death and destruction. This is not a blockbuster. It’s real life. A Sunday story in this weekend’s Cleveland Plain Dealer began: “In an offensive yesterday that was more ‘knock and gnaw’ than ‘shock and awe’” This is already become an annoying cliche, and to create allegedly clever puns about war is, I think, disrespectful to the people getting killed and maimed.
3) Why is it that when Al-Jazeera shows pictures of POW’s it is described with a million qualifiers, such as, “Al-Jazeera today broadcast pictures of people dressed in American military uniforms which the station claims are POWs.” Yet the media includes no such qualifiers when it comes to the actions of our government, such as, “A picture released by the White House allegedly shows George Bush deliberating about the war in Iraq.” Or, “Several people wearing Iraqi uniforms and purporting to be members of the Iraqi military surrendered today.” I realize we might not trust Al-Jazeera as much as our local networks, but it’s clear that those people were indeed American POWs, and the qualifiers indicate, to me, that the networks take what the administration says as gospel yet invoke a reporters’ natural skepticism when it comes to claims made by those in the Middle East. You can’t have it both ways without being biased. Again, it seems designed to show that the networks are on “our” side rather than “theirs.”
4) Lastly, the administration got up in arms yesterday about the treatment of POWs, saying we would prosecute as war criminals anyone who mistreats them and that it is against the Geneva convention to “humilate” them by putting them on TV. Yet I saw nary a mention of our own treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. It’s common knowledge that we are using humiliation to try to glean information about upcoming terrorist attacks, and at least two of the prisoners appear to have died in our custody. How can we ask Iraq to do something we have not done, which is to treat prisoners humanely? I’m not taking a stand here either way, but I think it’s disingenuous of us to be so outraged about Iraq doing to our troops something very similar to what we have done to other enemy forces (albeit ones which we declared to be “terrorists” rather than POWs - a claim Iraq could make about the people invading their country without a UN mandate). If it’s wrong when they do it to “us,” it is wrong when we do it to “them,” and the media should be equally critical.
I’m not coming out for or against the war, nor am I trying to criticize our administration’s actions. My beef is with the media, which seems to be treating their coverage as a PR campaign to further their own interests ("We’re the most American news channel!") rather than providing fair, unbiased reporting.