The Media's Iraq War

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"During seven weeks spent with half a dozen [U.S. Army] units," recalls David Zucchino, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times (May 3, 2003), "I slept in fighting holes and armored vehicles, on a rooftop, a garage floor and in lumbering troop trucks. . . . I ate with the troops. . . . I complained with them about the choking dust, the lack of water, our foul-smelling bodies, and our scaly, rotting feet." Like the 600 other journalists "embedded" in U.S. military units during the 43-day war in Iraq, Zucchino was dependent on his hosts for sustenance, transportation, protection—and access. This last enabled him to write vividly detailed stories about the battle for Baghdad and the performance of American soldiers in combat. But the officially sanctioned access also limited him. "I could not interview survivors of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. soldiers. . . . I had no idea what ordinary Iraqis were experiencing."

Despite its drawbacks, the extensive embedding experiment (which had been tried on a limited basis during the 2001–02 war in Afghanistan) was deemed a success by both the military and the media.

Major newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, also dispatched many reporters and photographers who were not lodged with U.S. troops. Those colleagues, says Zucchino, "covered what we could not—the Iraq government, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, military strategy, political fallout, and everything else beyond our cloistered existence." "The war has been reported superbly by newspapers," says Stephen Hess, who scrutinizes the media from his scholarly perch at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The stories have been rich in variety, coming at this from so many different angles."

But only a minority of Americans (30 percent, in one poll) relied on newspapers for news about the war. Advanced technology and access to the battlefield allowed both cable and broadcast TV to relay powerful images of firefights and bombs exploding over Baghdad.

Yet graphic footage of the death and suffering seldom made it on the air, at least in the United States. A study of more than 40 hours of coverage on the broadcast and cable networks early in the war "found that about half the reports from embedded journalists showed combat action, but not a single story depicted people hit by weapons," writes Jacqueline E. Sharkey, head of the Department of Journalism at the University of Arizona, in American Journalism Review (May 2003). "As the war continued, the networks did show casualties, usually from afar. The footage was much less graphic than still photographs shown in newspapers and magazines."

Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel, and MSNBC, which drew on the journalistic resources of NBC News, took an "overtly patriotic approach" in their coverage, Sharkey notes, and reaped huge ratings increases. That’s not to say there was no media criticism of the war, observes contributing writer Rachel Smolkin in a subsequent issue (June 2003) of American Journalism Review— especially when the march on Baghdad seemed bogged down. She reports that journalists are still debating whether they overreacted to Washington’s cues—pumping up the promised "shock and awe" campaign, then complaining when a quick victory seemed out of reach, for example—and to the demands of a round-the-clock news cycle.

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review who was in Qatar during the war, found MSNBC’s "mawkishness and breathless boosterism" repellent. "Its anchors mostly recounted tales of American bravery and derring-do," he writes in The New York Review of Books (May 29, 2003).

Far more impressive, in Massing’s judgment, was the coverage by the BBC. "With 200 reporters, producers, and technicians in the field, its largest deployment ever, the network offered no-nonsense anchors, tenacious correspondents, perceptive features, and a host of commentators steeped in knowledge of the Middle East, in contrast to the retired generals and colonels we saw on American TV. Reporters were not afraid to challenge the coalition’s claims."

The coverage CNN offered to the world at large was, despite "plenty of overlap," different from the coverage it gave American viewers, according to Massing. CNN International "was far more serious and informed"—more like the BBC. "For the most part," he says, "U.S. news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see."

 

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