In Saddam’s time Arab correspondents in Iraq had a knife to their throat as they held up their microphones to deliver the news. Some admitted to it after the fall of the regime, saying they were often compelled to falsify the news. One journalist described how the deposed information minister, Muhammad Al-Sahaf, took him to his office and threatened to kill him if he gave out any information other than that in the government bulletin — which explains why all the press at the Palestine Hotel, though able to see the invading tanks from their windows, remained silent or continued to allege that there were no such tanks.
Nor can those of us who followed the war live forget the day of the famous chase of a pilot whose plane had supposedly fallen into the river. Minister Al-Sahaf took the journalists to the Tigris and showed them a group of guards firing into the water, saying that they had opened fire on the pilot. For hours Arab correspondents repeated the minister’s fairy tale and did not even dare to ask where the plane was. That is why people were shocked the day that Baghdad fell.
Today the Ministry of Information has ceased to exist. Why then do the lies continue? No knives or threats from the office of the minister. So who are the journalists afraid of?
The behavior of our media must leave any onlooker puzzled. I believe that they are hostages to fear of the dominant opinion in the Arab region. That is why in Baghdad voices were raised demanding that the Arab media be punished or banished. An enlightened politician by the name of Iyyad Allawi, who is a member of the Provisional Governing Council in Iraq, accused the two Arab satellite news channels of doing all they could to incite people against the council and its members. The example he gave was that they continued to publish death threats.
Some people wonder whether Allawi has become another Sahaf, deciding what the media can transmit.
It is contradictory for the Governing Council to promise freedoms and then take them away. But it is also wrong for the Arab press to treat these freedoms as though they give them the right to falsify, incite and transmit death threats. There is a middle ground where the Arab press neither turns into an opposition camp nor into a mouthpiece for the current regime. It is going to have to maintain its credibility without becoming a donkey for murderers.
One journalist who was reviewing the current political situation in Baghdad pointed to the continuing power outages without putting them into the correct frame of reference. Iraq has just come out of a war. Surely it must be given time — just like Beirut, which for years lived on candles and generators, or even our own capitals, where there are power cuts all the time even when there is no war on.
It is unfortunate that the Governing Council has resorted to closing the gates of Baghdad as Allawi demanded and has excluded Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya — even admitting that the channels hate the council — because that will mean a great step backward for the press freedom in Iraq. But it is equally regrettable that the Arab media carries on in the way it does.
— Arab News Opinion 27 September 2003
