As CPJ marks its 25th anniversary, our early board members and former directors look ahead to the emerging challenges facing the international press. Moderator John Carroll, Knight visiting lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, leads the panel in a two-week discussion about Iraq, national security, Internet censorship, and the new threats to press freedom.
| Other Topics Stringers and Fixers Israel-Lebanon Conflict United State Standards Reporting from Censored Countries China and the Internet Emerging Threats |
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Your comments and reactions are welcome. Write to cpj@cpj.org |
IRAQ
Posted 10 a.m., July 18, 2006
From John Carroll: I’m directing this first question to Peter Arnett, David Marash and Michael Massing. (We’ll be doing this daily to be sure of getting at least three responses, but all panelists are invited to respond every day.)
Having killed 74 journalists and 27 support workers, Iraq is now the most lethal war for journalists in CPJ’s 25-year history. Please give us your perspectives. Specifically, how does the current war compare with others within our memories? How severely has the danger limited the coverage? Is there anything further that we, the press, should be doing? Are U.S. government policies helping or harming our cause?
A more perilous world
From Peter Arnett: The ever-rising toll of media casualties in Iraq is indeed disheartening, and a sad reaffirmation of the reasons why the Committee to Protect Journalists and other like-minded groups were formed in the first place.
I’ve seen the world change for the worse. So today and in the years since CPJ was created, journalists hoping for a career overseas face perils that did not exist when I began my foreign coverage in Southeast Asia in the mid-1950s. At that time the major international issue for the media was political repression against journalists in communist Eastern Europe. One victim was Endre Marton, an AP reporter in Hungary, who was eventually released from prison and allowed to immigrate to the United States. The rest of us traveled through the troubled post-colonial world wearing our press passes like body armor, and rarely faced an issue more dangerous than expulsion.
Of course the big wars were dangerous, as the media casualty tolls in Korea and Vietnam reveal. But even in those wars we could expect to benefit from practices that seem to have disappeared over the past 30 years.
Journalists captured by the Communist side in Vietnam—and there were many—invariably were released unharmed, no hostage-taking there. And even though many local Vietnamese worked for the media in Saigon and in the field, there were no cases of the “friendly fire” casualties that have been a dismaying phenomena in Iraq.
A sea-change occurred in Cambodia in 1970 and set the course for the rest of the century up to the present. The fanatical Khmer Rouge insurgents were indifferent to the international norms that had protected our profession. They murdered far more captured Western and local journalists than they released, seeing the media as political agents of their governments, an argument used by the insurgents in Beirut in the 1980s and their counterparts in Iraq today as they kidnap journalists and threaten their lives.
Bearing all this in mind, then, the coverage of important components of the Iraq war—the Sunni insurgency, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Shiite militias—falls short of what would be desirable in this multimedia age. So did coverage of the Khmer Rouge in its heyday fall short, as did efforts to cover the Lebanese militias then and now, and the numerous activist militias in Africa that to this day threaten the well-being of shaky governments. There is a window, of course, into the thinking of many of the current groups, courtesy of Internet Web sites and Al-Jazeera, but this is not enough for us to interpret their strengths and weaknesses.
I have made many visits to Baghdad during and after the 2003 war, the most recent on a magazine assignment in June this year. It seems to me that the full dimensions of the war’s terrible impact on the Iraqi people is being well covered by the international media, as is the convulsive political story. And the past three years has seen the recruitment and training of a superb cadre of Iraqi journalists who have been hired to support the international coverage effort. Equally impressive is the improved performance of local print, television, and radio journalists who are working in uniquely dangerous conditions.
Can the press do more? From what I have seen on my visits, the media have been giving in blood and money as much to the Iraq story as could be hoped for.
Are U.S. government policies helping or harming our cause? At this point, the U.S. authorities in Baghdad are as cooperative and supportive to the media mission as necessary. Has it always been thus? Not entirely so. I would hope that at some later point in our discussions we can address that impact of the Defense Department regulatory requirements for the media in the field, which, speaking as an old Vietnam hand, I find very, very controlling.
Diminishing Opportunities
From Dave Marash: I went to Iraq three times, for approximately one month each time, in June 2003, February and May-June 2004. The crucial changes—the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the first battle of Falluja—took place between my 2004 visits. By early June 2004, it was clear to me that it was no longer possible for me, an obvious Westerner, to be seen on the streets with a camera crew, and—most important—even more life-threatening for any Iraqi seen talking with me.
Thus for me, the only reporting options were “dialing for dollars,” by phone, or undertaking dangerous trips across town in an armored SUV to pre-arranged press conferences or appointments in the Green Zone or a couple of “international” hotels.
While this, supplemented by constant de-briefings of our Iraqi staff on every aspect of “real life,” does yield some information, as a benefit, I decided, it did not repay the risk of getting from Baghdad International Airport to the ABC bureau, and the month-later return, much less the downside possibilities of daily life. So I opted out.
A sad and saddening choice, but one every newsperson has to make for him or her self.
My previous exposures to war, or “faux-post-war,” in the Balkans, Sudan and Rwanda were nothing like Iraq.
Yes, battle lines were indefinite and frequently changing, and yes, many adversaries were less than glad to see an American media team appear on their turf, but, unlike Iraq, newspeople in Bosnia, or even Rwanda, were viewed as non-combatants and, except rarely, non-targets. In Iraq, journalists have become high-visibility, and therefore high-reward targets for terroristic (which is to say, political-theatrical) kidnappings and worse. And where, just 10 years ago, we were still regarded as important conduits for partisan arguments to the wider world, we are now devalued, far less necessary, since virtually comparable access to public audiences for revolutionary recruitment are readily available via the Internet.
The net result has been, too much of what Americans “know” about Iraq, has come to them from reporters whose movements are restricted, and whose points of view as well as bodies are “embedded” inside military units or “safe zones.” What is more and more missing is what probably counts the most in the long-term, both politically and militarily: How are Iraqi people living?
On the one hand, this means we often miss the small daily “victories” of American and coalition forces, and even more so, the daily defeats of civility and stability in Iraqi existence. Since the “net-net” of America’s strategies in Iraq will, hopefully, be defined by the judgments of the Iraqi people, journalism’s decreasing opportunities to measure them are crippling.
I guess a definitive irony here is that American government policies have no more control over reporting in Iraq than they do over life in Iraq, and presently, “control” is simply not an applicable word. One glaring exception: the several times reported willingness of American forces to take out their frustrations on the offices (and in one case the life) of my new colleagues at Al-Jazeera’s Arabic news channel. The reports remain denied and hardly well-verified, but they are troubling nonetheless.
Let me conclude with a major gripe: reporting on Iraq’s "sectarian war." Unlike, say, Kosovo, where truly popular and communal hatreds can produce outbreaks of neighbor on neighbor violence—Nigeria would be another good example—in Iraq, where two generations of secular rule encouraged wide intermarriage among Sunni and Shiite people, the reciprocal murders are more like gang wars than communal strife. Among the consequences of the undersized, underarmored American military sent to do an overwhelming job in Iraq, has been the empowerment of nothing less than feudalism. Iraq today is a congeries of localities run by local armed forces, more defined by their particular loyalties to political parties or personalities—the Badr Brigades, Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the former Ba’athists—or local crime mafias or clan or tribal organizations, than to a neat division of Sunni and Shiite.
Cleaning up this mess, whether it be done by American forces or Iraqi government units, requires both superiority of military materiel and morale, neither of which “the good guys” tend to have in any particular part of the country.
Also, a lesson we might have learned from the D.C. snipers: Random murder, unconstrained by any particular motivation but mayhem, is easy to do. That’s especially so for insurgents playing on their home field against outsiders representing a still barely-subscribed-to national government, much less the latest iteration of “imperialist” forces from outside the culture and region.
Dangers and Limitations
From Michael Massing: Having not been to Iraq since the invasion, I cannot comment with the authority that Dave Marash can, but I think it goes without saying that this is the most lethal war journalists have faced within our memories—and the reporters who continue to work there deserve tremendous credit.
It’s equally clear, I think, that the dangers those reporters face have placed severe limitations on what they can cover. I’ve spoken with a number of reporters who’ve recently been in Iraq, and all lament their inability to get out into the field to see what’s really going on. To cite just one example, they’ve been unable to visit Fallujah without the protection of the military, and as a result they (and we) have little real sense of what’s going on that city, nor of what has been the long-term impact of the U.S. assault against it in November 2004. More generally, we have only a very limited idea of what the U.S. military has been doing in the rest of the country. Throughout the war, I’ve been very frustrated at my inability to get any clear sense of the strategy that U.S. forces are pursuing in Iraq, and of the chances of success of that strategy. Of course, this may be because the U.S. military itself is not clear on what its strategy is, but that in itself would seem to be a story worth pursuing.
Because of the dangers journalists face, the only real way to see anything in the field—especially outside Baghdad—is to embed with US troops. The embedding process in my view has had mixed results. On the one hand, it has given journalists a remarkable opportunity to see the U.S. military in action, and they have used that opportunity to provide many excellent reports. On the other, I think that the reporting from an embed is inevitably skewed by the circumstances in which it takes place, including the natural sympathy reporters feel for those protecting them and the great difficulty reporters have of talking to local Iraqis and getting their side of the story. There’s also the worry that if one writes too critically of the military, one will not be able to embed again; this, I think, has had an inhibiting effect on the coverage. In fact, from what I understand, the military has become much more selective in deciding whom it will allow to embed—part of a more general effort to control the flow of news. I do wish journalists would write more about such issues. Amid all of the talk in the news business about being more “transparent” about what we do, journalists in Iraq rarely write about the various factors—physical or otherwise—that shape and limit their reporting. I wish they would be more forthcoming on this point.
Finally, I am very concerned about the huge toll the war is taking on Iraqi journalists. Because of the extreme dangers Western reporters face in Iraq, most of the actual newsgathering has been left to Iraqis, and they have overwhelmingly suffered the brunt of the attacks on the press. In their continued willingness to endure such attacks, these journalists have shown heroic courage. And there seem few other ways to get the news at this point. But I do think we have to ask ourselves if the price for getting that news, in terms of the ever-mounting death toll of Iraqi journalists, is worth paying.
History’s Incomplete Record
From Anne Nelson: During the last "most lethal war" for journalists, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, CPJ staff was constantly fielding press queries as to whether it was the most lethal in history.
We spent some time looking into it. The question turned out to be more subtle than it appeared. There were two issues to deal with: first, the phenomenon of the professional journalist is relatively recent, and second, until CPJ was founded in 1981, no individual or group took it upon themselves to record journalists apart from other casualties.
There was a handful of full-time journalists reporting on the Civil War, for example, but much of the coverage was written by military personnel—often, literally “correspondence” in the form of letters describing experience in the field. Philip Knightley begins his magisterial history of war correspondence, The First Casualty, with British journalist William Howard Russell in 1854.
I believe that most extensive of the large-scale killings of journalists must have been World War II, in Europe. I’m writing a book about a German resistance movement, and it’s clear that German journalists were particular targets of Nazi terror.
When the Nazis invaded Poland and wiped out huge populations of Poles, including Jews, aristocracy, intelligentsia, Communists and Socialists, large but uncounted numbers of journalists were among them. Add in similar populations from various conquered lands, from Czechoslovakia to the Ukraine, and the number surely ran into the thousands.
In the case of my small German group alone, which was based in Berlin, several dozen were executed who would have qualified as journalists by CPJ standards (for largely "samizdat" activities). My belief is that the total numbers would far outstrip any of the later journalistic catastrophes that transpired.
(Recent reports have listed World War II journalist casualties as 69. This is embarrassing; my guess is that they were counting journalists killed in the field, omitting the vast numbers of non-U.S. journalists killed through political violence. I am not aware of anyone who has made a serious effort to pull together the various numbers of journalists killed by the Nazis throughout Europe and the USSR, but perhaps it should be done.)
The Soviet Union and Japan were certainly responsible for vast numbers of deaths, but Nazi-occupied Western Europe had a larger concentration of journalists to start with than the territories they savaged, and the Nazis had longer to go about it.
Looking at various figures, my best guess for second place was Argentina during the dirty wars of the late 1970s and early ’80s, where some accounts listed some 90-100 journalists killed in the violence. I found this a credible figure, especially given how large and active the Argentine press corps was at the time. It would be worthwhile to track down harder figures for Argentina, too.
I certainly see the possibility that Iraq will outstrip Argentina for second place in this dolorous enterprise.
Why Journalists Take the Risk
From Ann Cooper: Iraq is indeed the most lethal war since CPJ began 25 years ago, and correspondents who have covered most of the wars in that era and earlier (including Indochina in the 1960s and 70s) have told CPJ staff that they have never been anywhere as dangerous as Iraq. The dangers, which threaten everyone in Iraq, are pretty much everywhere, and can strike at pretty much any time. Journalists have written openly about how the violence restricts their ability to cover the news; with each new death or wounding of a high-profile Western journalist, the media once again report on the risks involved and the impact they have on coverage. To people outside the news business, the risk-benefit ratio must surely look crazy—why would anyone stay there trying to report when every day is potentially life-threatening, and the ability to report is pretty limited?
The answer is, journalists stay because the implications of this conflict are so huge, for Iraqis, for the United States, and for the rest of the world. To abandon this story, and rely on government or military accounts of what is happening in Iraq, is not regarded as an acceptable option by editors and reporters. Thus, while there is no question that Iraq is a hugely dangerous place, it is also true that journalists have chosen to continue taking risks there that they and their editors might not have agreed to take on other stories.
For example, for years foreign media have traveled infrequently to Chechnya, in part because of high danger levels that include kidnapping threats similar to those that face foreign journalists working in Iraq. Avoiding Chechnya is an easier decision for U.S. journalists than leaving Iraq would be. No U.S. soldiers have been deployed there, U.S. taxpayers are not financing a war effort there, Chechnya is not a place of huge strategic interest to the United States.
Chechnya is, however, a huge story for Russia, which severely limits access for journalists and harasses the handful of brave Russian reporters who try to report independently on the Chechen conflict. The result is that the Kremlin now has pretty firm control over reporting about Chechnya, meaning there is little oversight of Kremlin conduct and very limited reporting about conditions in the rebellious region. Chechnya gives us a dramatic example of how ill-informed the public could be if the dangers in Iraq were deemed too severe for journalists to remain on the ground there, however restricted their reporting may be.
FOLLOW-UP:
Keep focus on checkpoints [Posted 11 a.m. July 18]
From Franz Allina: We know that reporters, like all noncombatants in Iraq, are at special risk when they approach coalition checkpoints. Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena’s bodyguard was killed by U.S. troops after he had rescued her from insurgent custody. When more reporters in Iraq were not embedded, CPJ staff developed a good bit of knowledge of typical hazards at checkpoints.
Now the risks of unembedded reporting will likely wax and wane, and when more reporters are again working on their own, some of the safety problems at checkpoints will resemble the earlier hazards and some will be different. (For one thing, checkpoints may be run by Iraqis instead of by coalition military.) But some of CPJ’s checkpoint information will in any event remain valid.
If we can get the facts, periodic review and updates of our checkpoint information could make sense for reporters who are unembedded and if, as seems likely, we are again working to rationalize operation of checkpoints in Iraq.