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9/29/2003

Media Bias On Display in Iraq Coverage
John Leo says media reporting from Iraq is one-sided and flawed

In his new book, 'Embedded,' [John Burns, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter] says the vast majority of correspondents in prewar Iraq played ball with Saddam and downplayed the viciousness of the regime. He said Iraq was 'a grotesque charnel house' and a genuine threat to America, but to protect their access, the reporters did not tell the truth.* Burns named no names (he should now) but he was particularly contemptuous of the BBC and CNN.
And then there are the comments of U.S. District Court Judge Don Walter of Shreveport, La., who "was vehemently anti-war but changed his mind after an assignment in Iraq as a U.S. adviser on Iraq's courts," says Leo, adding the Judge Walter now believes "we should have invaded sooner to halt the incredible butchery and torture that the United Nations, France and Russia knew all about and were quite willing to tolerate." Judge Walter: "The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE MEDIA."

Read the whole thing. And stop believing that what you read in the New York Times, or the Nashville Tennessean or your hometown daily, represent the complete truth about Iraq.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing has more on the lousy job the media is doing covering what's really going on in Iraq.

And Deborah Orin says:
Contrary to a lot of press reports, the Iraqi people aren't ungrateful - even in unsettled Baghdad, a remarkable 67 percent of Iraqis are optimistic and expect to be better off in five years. In most of the country, the number is surely higher.

Yes, there were plenty of blunders in planning for the postwar, many perhaps because the State Department and CIA were too suspicious of Iraqi exiles. In hindsight, it would have been smarter to trust the exiles more - and train more of them as Iraqi soldiers and police.

It's also true that the Bush administration has been remarkably inept at communicating the success stories out of Iraq. One result is the surging growth of an Internet universe - a lot of it linked via Instapundit.com - focused on spreading good news from Iraq and lambasting 'Big Media,' especially the anti-American BBC, for ignoring it. But this week's Time magazine is typical of a press corps that has - mostly - raced to highlight every bit of bad news from Iraq, and virtually none of the good news.
The good news is, some in the press are now reporting how others in the press have been ignoring the good news and hyping the bad news from Iraq. This will inevitably lead the accused press to race to prove it is not guilty of the accusations. They'll do so by starting to publish or broadcast more balanced coverage - and by running columns criticizing media outlets that persist in pushing the demonstrably false "Iraqi quagmire" theme. Soon, very soon, the mainstream media will be filled with good news from Iraq.

* Embedded is not actually a book by John Burns. Instead, Burns is one of a group of 60 journalists, public affairs officers, and freelance photographers from a wide range of print, television, and radio sources interviewed shortly after the Iraq war and whose stories of what it was like to cover the Iraq war are collected in one volume.

In the book, Burns, the New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief, describes in the book his refusal to be intimidated by his Iraqi information ministry minders.

More on Burns: Slate's Jack Shafer comments on the explosive charges Burns made in Embedded:
If the interview New York Times reporter John F. Burns gave to the editors of Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq is completely on the level - and I have no reason to think it isn't - the Times is sitting on a daisy-cutter of a scoop about perfidy and malfeasance by a member of the Baghdad press corps. And it's not just the Times holding back. Few in the mainstream press seem interested in identifying the reporter Burns says ratted him out to the Iraqi ministry of information.

Burns details the occupational hazards of reporting from a totalitarian, murderous country in his Embedded interview, excerpted in Editor & Publisher and on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. The Iraqi regime was ghastly, Burns says, but he saves his special scorn for the foreign correspondents who ignored how "Saddam had turned this country into a slaughterhouse." They sucked up to the Iraqi minister of information, wining and dining him, "plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars." Burns, who names no names, says TV correspondents gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to senior members of the ministry and then "behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror."

It's not unprecedented for TV correspondents to bribe their way into a country or for reporters to flatter their handlers to win a visa extension, but Burns does visit new territory with his shocking claim that a correspondent "with a major American newspaper," seeking the favor of the Iraqis, printed copies of his and other reporters' stories and gave them to the ministry of information "to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state" - namely Burns.
Also, here's a link to an Editor & Publisher excerpt of Burns' story. What Burns has to say is shocking and cuts to the heart of the major media's credibility in reporting from Iraq. It's not just CNN that covered up Saddam's crimes - and thus was complicit in them.

An excerpt from Burns:
Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.

There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.

In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories - mine included - specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance. CNN's Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in The New York Times missed that point completely. The point is not whether we protect the people who work for us by not disclosing the terrible things they tell us. Of course we do. But the people who work for us are only one thousandth of one percent of the people of Iraq. So why not tell the story of the other people of Iraq? It doesn't preclude you from telling about terror. Of murder on a mass scale just because you won't talk about how your driver's brother was murdered.
Read the whole thing.

And, Mr. Burns, please name names.