[Reader-list] More Media War analysis

[Ravi Sundaram]

Richard Keeble: We see more and more of the conflict, but we know as little 
as ever

Most of the US/UK's important military action is covert, away from prying 
TV cameras and the public's gaze

The Independent

30 March 2003
Propaganda is a vital ingredient of military strategy during the conflict 
with Iraq. The enemy is manufactured, its leaders demonised, and its 
strength grossly exaggerated. Yet the media are not part of a massive 
conspiracy. Rather, the war myth is the result of profound geostrategic, 
ideological, social, political and economic factors.

Most of the important military activity by the US and the UK is covert, 
away from prying TV cameras and the public gaze. But our screens are filled 
with images of the war. Constantly repeated – and tightly controlled – 
battlefield images of coalition forces in action feature as never before on 
TV, while seemingly endless speculation by military commentators only serve 
to crowd out the views of oppoenents to the aggression by the US and the 
UK. Horrific images of the dead and wounded shown by the Arabic TV station 
Al-Jazeera are not being allowed to disturb the sanitised representation of 
the conflict for British viewers.

Today the most obvious contrasts with the 1991 coverage arise from the 
access to the frontlines for the 600 US and 128 UK journalists "embedded" 
with the troops, and the round-the-clock television coverage.

Not surprisingly, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, was quick to praise 
the "embeds": "The imagery they broadcast is at least partially responsible 
for the public's change of mood with the majority of people now saying they 
back the coalition." And those distant shots, from an eerily static camera, 
of huge mushroom clouds erupting over Baghdad following yet another 
night-time aerial bombardment only seem to acclimatise the viewer to the 
everyday ordinariness of the horror.

In contrast, during the first Gulf conflict, reporting pools were used to 
keep journalists huddled in packs in Saudi Arabia away from the frontlines, 
although the war in the Gulf had to be seen. The US desperately needed to 
fight a "big" war to help "kick the Vietnam syndrome", to legitimise its 
enormous military budget and to reinforce the power of the 
military/industrial/intelligence elite.

In the end there was nothing more than a series of massacres bureid beneath 
the myth of heroic warfare. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, reported in his autobiography that 250,000 Iraqi soldiers were 
killed in the conflict – compared to just 150 in the US-led forces (most of 
them through "friendly fire").

Reporters such as Robert Fisk of the Independent and Peter Sharp of ITN, 
who dared to operate away from the pools, were intimidated by the military 
and some of their journalist colleagues. Most of the crucial military 
action in 1991 came from the air, and since journalists had no access to 
fighter jets, the conflict was kept largely secret.

This time a repeat of the same kind of media controls was never feasible 
since the Middle East has been swarming with thousands of journalists for 
months. In any case, military censorship regimes always serve essentially 
symbolic purposes – expressing the arbitrary power of the army over the 
conduct and representation of war.

For their part, mainstream journalists, influenced by professional norms 
and conventional news values, can usually be relied upon to apply 
self-censorship. All the mainstream print and broadcast media, just before 
the bombing of Baghdad on 20 March, were happy to highlight Pentagon leaks 
that suggested 3,000 missiles and precision-guided bombs would be dropped 
on Iraq in an early "shock and awe" campaign.
Now, as the UK/US tanks build up outside Baghdad, countless unnamed Iraqi 
troops and conscripts are being killed away from the TV cameras. When 
civilian homes are destroyed, such tragedies are "inevitable", the fault of 
"Saddam" or simply "mistakes" – blips in an otherwise smoothmilitary 
operation rather than moral outrages.

Take, for instance, the coverage of the bombing of the Baghdad market on 26 
March. How many were killed? "At least 14," say the media. But they remain 
anonymous – dehumanised "targets". We can expect no profiles of the Iraqi 
dead or their grieving families.
Richard Keeble is professor of journalism at Lincoln University, and the 
author of 'Secret State, Silent Press' (John Libbey), a study of press 
coverage of the 1991 Gulf War