This Week: Special Edition on the Media and Iraq

 

Imagine.  Two Stories About U.S. Bombs

The Daily Airpower Summary

Why Reporting from Iraq is So Bad

Greetings,

I sent out this issue and the next to the paper subscribers as a single issue: "Number 322-323 Special Antiwar Edition."  But it was really long, so I am splitting up the "super-issue" into two issues for you electronic readers.  The content is the same, but the timing is different.  This is the first time that the paper and electronic versions have been different, if anybody cares.  I can't imagine anyone does, but I have to point out these things.  So, think of this issue and the next (which I plan to put out on Friday) as one big issue--the biggest Nygaard Notes ever, in fact.

I don't know why, but I think it's a good and important issue.  Some of you are in the habit of forwarding Nygaard Notes to your friends and associates.  I hope you will forward this particular issue, and I hope that some of you who never forward the Notes will consider forwarding this one.  The fact that our country is at war (declared or not) and this is not considered THE major story in every day's news cycle is completely and totally amazing to me.  The unusual length and detail in this issue of Nygaard Notes is, I guess, my small attempt to address this shocking deficit in our public discourse.  As I often do, I focus on the media because that--like it or not--is how almost all of us learn about the world and how our government is acting in that world.

Despite the criminal negligence of the corporate media in reporting the reality of the ongoing occupation of Iraq by the United States and its assistants, polls continue to show increasing numbers of United Statesians opposed to the war.  A Zogby poll released today reveals that 72% of troops in Iraqi bases said the US should withdraw in 2006, while the latest CBS News polling shows that only 34 percent of Americans now approve of the job the "President" is doing, with 59 percent of those surveyed disapproving.

Those numbers are a remarkable tribute to the ability of "average people" to figure out what is going on, despite the media performance that I lay out in this issue.  Yet one has to consider how much sooner this war could end--and whether we might be able to prevent the next war--if we had better information offered to us on a daily basis.  That's why the need for media activism has never been greater.

By the way, I did notice (after I mailed it out), that I published a list of things in last week's issue that was numbered "1, 2, 3, 5."  For the record, I do know how to count to five, and I realize that something is missing there.  And, as always, I hope people see this sort of error as part of the charming informality of this sort of publication.  The facts are good, even if the proofreading isn't always!

For an end to war,

Nygaard

Imagine.  Two Stories About U.S. Bombs

On January 4th the news agency Agence France Presses reported that the United States had bombed a  residential house in northern Iraq--specifically, in the city of Baiji--killing the family of Ghadban Nahd Hassan.  According to Hassan, rescue workers recovered eight bodies from the debris after the bombing-- those of a nine-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl, three women and three men. The attack was also reported in the U.S. press, where the number killed was reported as 12.  The New York Times reported that nine were killed.

The Washington Post reported that "A Washington Post special correspondent watched as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger than 10 were removed Tuesday [January 3] from the house."  The Post added that the "bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping."

Following standard practice, the Post reported that "The U.S. military says that it does not count civilian deaths from American attacks and that investigating deaths caused by any one strike is often impractical in dangerous areas."

Here's the official report of the event, as reported by the Post: "A U.S. military statement said that an unmanned U.S. drone detected three men digging a hole in a road in the area.  Insurgents regularly bury bombs along roads in the area to target U.S. or Iraqi convoys.  The three men were tracked to a building, which U.S. forces then hit with precision-guided munitions, the statement said."

"Officials said six surrounding houses were damaged and two residents in the area were wounded seriously enough to require treatment.  Officials and other people at the scene said there had been no insurgents in the house targeted."

A week later, on January 13th, the U.S. again dropped bombs that killed more civilians.  This time it was in Pakistan--specifically, in the village of Damadola--and the attack destroyed three homes and killed at least seventeen people.   Various news services carried headlines like "Pakistanis Say 17 Killed in Airstrike" and "Fourteen Killed in Pakistan Tribal Blast: Residents."  The U.S. press, in contrast, ran headlines like "U.S. Airstrike Targets Al Qaeda's Zawahiri" (Washington Post), and "Top Qaeda Aide Is Called Target In U.S. Air Raid" (NY Times).  It turned out that Zawahiri was not there, and most of the dead were simply "villagers."  This attack provoked nationwide protests of untold thousands in the streets of Pakistan, as well as a formal protest from the Pakistani government.

Here's an ethics exercise for you:  Imagine, if you can, that "intelligence" revealed some activity in, say, London, and "intelligence officials" believed might be someone planting a bomb.  Imagine, further, that this "someone" retreated into the home of the Smith family.  Now imagine that the U.S. air force flew in and bombed the Smith's house.  Finally, try to imagine that reports in the U.S. press couldn't even find out how many were killed, and that the U.S. air force said they didn't care enough to count, as it was "impractical."  Can one imagine anything like this ever happening?  If not, why not?

The fact that these two incidents merited headlines and, in the case of Pakistan, major protests, indicates that the killing of innocent civilians by the occupation forces of the United States is newsworthy and upsetting, at least to some.  The U.S. media, however, has failed--and continues to fail--to report on innumerable incidents like this that are likely occurring every week.  I cannot say for certain that these things are happening, but it seems very likely.  Exactly why it seems very likely is the subject of the rest of this issue of Nygaard Notes, and the next one.

The Daily Airpower Summary

Last week I examined one week of coverage of the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the Star Tribune and the New York Times.  Never, during that week, did the phrases "air war" or "air strike" appear in reference to Iraq (nor to Afghanistan, which is another crucial story).   But just because most of the consequences of the U.S. air war in Iraq are not reported should not lead one to believe that this is because all of the activities of coalition air forces are kept secret from the U.S. press.  Far from it.

Although most "consumers" of the media are likely not aware of it, the U.S. Central Command Air Forces, or CENTAF, releases a "Daily Airpower Summary" five days a week, access to which is available to anyone in the world with access to the internet. (Go to http://www.af.mil/news/ and see for yourself.)

Just to get a hint of the war news that we are not getting in the major media in this country, I went and looked through the "Daily Airpower Summaries" for the week of February 6-12, the one that I examined last week in these pages.  Here's a tiny fraction of what I found:

During that week, CENTAF reported that "Coalition aircraft flew 42 close-air-support missions Feb. 9th," 32 missions on Feb 8th, 55 on the 7th, 52 on the 6th, 57 on the 5th, 56 on the 4th, and 28 on the 3rd.  That's 322 missions in one week aimed at what CENTAF bizarrely refers to as "anti-Iraqi forces."  These "anti-Iraqi forces" are actually 90 to 98 percent Iraqis, whose activities might reasonably be described as resistance to the occupation of their country by a foreign military.  CENTAF refers to their activities, not surprisingly, as "terrorist activities." (CENTAF doesn't report on the weekends, so the dates are the closest I could get to the week I covered.  And some number of these missions apparently took place in Afghanistan, but it's hard to tell how many; not most of them.)

To conduct these strikes, the "coalition forces" led by the U.S. used equipment like the Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II, the Navy EA-6 Mercury, the RAF GR-7 Tornado, the Air Force F-15 Eagle, the F-16, the Navy F/A-18 Hornet, the Navy F-14 Tomcat, the Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons.
The CENTAF reports included air strikes or activities of some sort all over Iraq, in or near the cities of Baghdad, Balad, Fallujah, Hit, Salman Pak, Samarra, Tall Afar and Tikrit, Deh Rawood, Asadabad, Al Hawijah, Al Iskandariyah, Al Miqdadiyah, Al Mahmudiyah, and Baquba, Al Musayyib, Al Taji, Ramadi, Bermal, Jalalabad, and Mosul.  (There were also reports of activities in Gardez, Gereshk, Khowst, and Orgun-E, all in Afghanistan.)

How many people died as a result of these activities?  No one in this country knows, since casualties at the hands of U.S. forces are not reported, but the attacks do not appear to be as "precise" as some may want to believe.  For instance, on February 8th, says CENTAF, "An F-16 successfully expended a precision guided munition against a suspected enemy position."  In other words, U.S. forces in this case "precisely" targeted they-know-not-who, just like in Baiji.  How often does this happen?  And who, actually, was hit?  The U.S. media doesn't tell us, so nobody knows.  Another attack involved the strafing of a target in Afghanistan with "approximately 230 cannon rounds" fired by A-10s.  Who was hit by these rounds?  Again, no one knows.

The unavoidable conclusion: There are large, and tremendously important, aspects of the story of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that people in the United States are not getting.  Why?  Keep reading...

Why Reporting from Iraq is So Bad

Last week I did a little case study of media reporting from Iraq, and showed (I hope) how limited and misleading it has been.  I didn't go into why that should be the case, so here are seven reasons why reporting back to the United States from Iraq is so bad.  There are undoubtedly more reasons than this, but this newsletter is too short to even attempt to be comprehensive.  I'll list just these seven, and follow the list with brief explanations of each one.

The List

Some of the reasons why reporting from Iraq is so incomplete and misleading are:

1. There are relatively few journalists reporting from Iraq;

2. Foreign news coverage in general, and high-risk wartime journalism in particular, is expensive, and news corporations continue to cut back on needed newsgathering resources;

3.  Many of the reporters who are there are "embedded," with all the distortions that go with that;

4. The security situation makes standard reporting (that is, talking to "non-offical" sources or actually witnessing the results of military engagements) extremely difficult in Iraq;

5. An unknown percentage of U.S. military operations are intentionally kept out of the view of reporters, especially independent ones;

6. News "consumers" in the U.S. don't seem to be clamoring for better coverage of the occupation (or, if they are, the news corporations are not letting on);

7. As in any war, both sides engage in propaganda.

The List Explained

1.  LACK OF REPORTERS:  Many news organizations don't even bother to send reporters to Iraq.  I mentioned last week that my local paper the Star Tribune has 4 reporters in Italy for the Olympics, and none in Iraq.  Is this typical?  It seems so.  On January 17th Paul McLeary of the Columbia Journalism Review filed a report of his conversation with an acting bureau chief for an American newspaper.  Here's what he said: "As [the bureau chief and I] were discussing the state of reporting in Baghdad and Iraq in general, he told me that I was a little late to the game.  These days, more American reporters are leaving Iraq than arriving.  In large part, for the U.S. press, 'The party's pretty much over.'"

2.  LACK OF RESOURCES.  The overall cutbacks in the budgets of news organizations for foreign news is almost certainly affecting the willingness, if not the absolute ability, of smaller news organizations to place reporters in Iraq.  A recent study on the embedding of reporters in Iraq by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) found that Iraq reporting is costly, with estimates of $10,000 to $50,000 per embedded reporter on life insurance, $1,000 to $1,500 per person on body armor and helmets, and more than $575 each for vaccinations for smallpox, anthrax, and other potential diseases.  Other costs for the news outlets included airfare of about $1,500 one way, $200 to $300 per night for hotel rooms prior to embedding, and satellite phones running from $1,000 to several thousands dollars each.  It's a lot cheaper to cover the Olympics, I'm guessing.

3.  EMBEDDING.  Some of the news organizations that DO have reporters in Iraq have chosen, for a variety of reasons, to have their reporters "embedded" with U.S. troops there.  I am in the process of doing research for a story on this "embedding" business, but for now I'll just say that the IDA study referenced above found that the embedding of U.S. journalists "was deemed an almost unqualified success by both military officials and journalists who participated" in the study.  As of last week, 28 news agencies officially had reporters embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, including National Public Radio, the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, USA Today, the LA Times, and others.  Who are they?  Hard to say.  I contacted NPR, for instance, and they told me that "our policy is to not give out information on reporters that are currently embedded."  Not even their names, apparently.

4.  LACK OF SECURITY.  The Columbia Journalism Review's McLeary reports that many journalists "either left the country after the December elections or were pulled out by their publications, which have been cutting back on Baghdad staff as things have gotten progressively more dangerous."  Those that remain are often afraid to venture too far outside of the U.S.-controlled "Green Zone" because, as NPR recently reported, "the conflict in Iraq is the deadliest one for journalists since the Vietnam War."  The Boston Globe reports that "U.S.  military forces in Iraq have killed as many as 13 journalists since the U.S. invasion in 2003."

5.  SECRECY.  Much of the "action" in Iraq, as I spell out elsewhere in this issue, is conducted out of the view of U.S. reporters, and the people who know--the U.S. military--are not about to help reporters understand the true magnitude of the suffering caused by the U.S. occupation.  U.S. air strikes, for example, are rarely seen by reporters, nor are the targets of those strikes.  Some number of permanent U.S. bases are likely being constructed, but reports on them are infrequent, so details are sketchy.  Civilian casualties?  For the most part, out of sight, out of mind.

6.  MARKET FORCES.  If there were sufficient "demand" for hard-hitting news from Iraq on the part of "news consumers," the media corporations might attempt to respond to it, so as to attract an audience to sell to advertisers.  Apparently the demand is not sufficiently high for such "market forces" to produce high-quality wartime journalism.

7.  PROPAGANDA.  The occupation forces and the U.S. administration are actively involved in propaganda efforts aimed at tilting the reporting of the occupation toward a "good news" perspective.