by Phillip Knightley

London (PANOS) – There were two historic developments in the way the international media covered the war against Iraq. The first was the arrival on the scene of Arab TV networks – particularly al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news organisation run by former BBC journalists. This broke the long-established TV news monopoly enjoyed by western – mostly British and American – networks and added an entirely new dimension to coverage.

Since the war was waged by a coalition dominated by American and British forces most western war correspondents covered the war from the Coalition side.

This was what the Coalition wanted. But it would have meant that the TV images seen around the world would have been restricted to smart missiles leaving Coalition ships in the Gulf, tanks roaring down highways on the way to Baghdad, artillery pieces firing at targets in the invisible distance, and bombers taking off from Coalition airfields, interspersed with scenes of Iraqi soldiers surrendering and war correspondents respectfully listening to Coalition generals explaining what was going on at the front.

The Arab TV networks changed all that. They had no hesitation in showing in graphic detail what happened when the smart missiles arrived at their target, or when the bombs from the B-52s landed. Al-Jazeera broadcast images of dead Iraqi soldiers, dead and maimed civilians, gutted houses and government buildings, homeless people – all the terrible detail of the true face of war. This forced many western TV networks to rethink their coverage and – with the exception of the United States where news executives took a calculated decision to “sanitize” the war – viewers saw scenes on their TV screens that would not have been shown in previous wars.

But why not in America? For the Americans the war has been essentially a military story. With five out of ten Americans mistakenly believing that most of the terrorists who carried out the attack on 9/11 were Iraqis, the American media decided that its readers and viewers were not interested in the plight of Iraqi victims of the war.

The New York Times said it aimed to capture the true nature of the war but avoided “the gratuitous use of images simply for shock value”. Steve Capus, executive editor of NBC Nightly News complained, “You watch some Arab coverage and you get the sense that there is a bloodbath at the hand of the US military. That is not my take on it.”

But the intervention by Arab TV came at a price. There had been no love lost between the coalition forces and al-Jazeera. The Pentagon had never forgiven al-Jazeera for broadcasting Osama bin Laden tapes around the world from its Kabul office and during the war in Afghanistan. In this war it regarded al-Jazeera as an enemy propaganda station, who put out devastating accounts of Iraqi civilian casualties to a vast Arab audience, thus fuelling anti-American sentiments.

Al-Jazeera was so apprehensive about American reaction that it repeatedly informed the US military of the exact co-ordinates of its Baghdad office so that if it were hit, the Pentagon could not offer the excuse that it was an accident.

Nevertheless, on April 8, three war correspondents were killed by Americans at locations that were known to the Pentagon as housing media. Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk was killed when an American tank fired a shell at the Reuters suite on the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad.

Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish TV channel Telecino was wounded in the same attack and died later in hospital. And Tarek Ayyoub, a cameraman for al-Jazeera, was killed when a US plane bombed the channel’s office in Baghdad.

American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi TV, whose identity is spelled out in large blue letters on the roof.

When the news of the attack first came, the American command said nothing – until it emerged that the French TV channel, France 3, had filmed the American tank aiming and firing. Then the Coalition put out a series of contradictory accounts. Colonel David Perkins, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade said Iraqis in front of the hotel were firing rocket-propelled grenades at the tank. Then the Division’s commander, General Bouford Blount, issued a statement saying that the tank had come under sniper fire from the hotel’s roof and had fired at the source of the shooting which had then stopped.

But France 3’s cameraman had started filming some minutes before the tank opened fire and his camera’s soundtrack records no shots whatsoever. More puzzling was an official Spanish government statement about the death of Jose Couso. The Defence Minister, Frederico Trillo, announced that the Coalition had actually declared the Palestine Hotel a military objective 48 hours before it was attacked and that the correspondents should have left. This was news to the correspondents who all denied any knowledge of any warning. ‘Journalists’, a watchdog group that defends press freedoms, demanded an investigation and in a letter to the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said it believed that the attacks on correspondents violated the Geneva Conventions.

The attacks have been condemned across the world. From Egypt to Mexico newspapers have accused the US of intentionally killing journalists. The International Federation of Journalists said: “There is no doubt at all that these attacks could be targeting journalists.”

My own view is that there will be no investigation, no explanation, no apology. I am convinced in the light of all the foregoing evidence, that the Pentagon is determined that there will be no more reporting from the enemy side, and that a few deaths among correspondents who do so will deter others.

War correspondents may now be targets, some more than others.

Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents and propaganda.

Article taken from Panos London Online

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