This is the second in a series by Muhammad Fahd Al-Harithy on the Iraq war and how media covered it. Were there any fundamental differences in the way Western and Arab media reported the war? The difference, the author says, was mainly cultural rather than technical. The conduct of the Arab media, however, resulted in the mindset of an entire nation being distorted.

A new and different world is being shaped in the Middle East. TV has set in motion the process of changing people. It played a considerable role in the conduct of the Iraq war. The ordinary man and woman are addicted to TV that carried a message and planted the idea of war in people’s minds. Scenes from the war, anti-war demonstrations and the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue were not events in Honolulu but in the very heart of the Arab world — Iraq.

Unpleasant events are not easy to watch but people get used to them. Looking at TV is an amusement and after shifting from one channel to another, viewers often turn to a news channel, complete with booming guns and deafening explosions. They are soon sated and so return very soon to whatever triviality amuses them. It is an undeniable fact that TV wields enormous power over the common man. War scenes with their obvious pain and suggestions are registered deep in both hearts and in the subconscious. The very latest reports and pictures from war now reach the public live and uncensored.

The style of reporting has greatly changed since the Gulf War II of 1991 in which press conferences held by a military spokesperson were the major news sources. Press releases were prepared by the US Central Command at the joint media center that was responsible for all media activities in the war zone. The US produced a detailed secret media plan before the beginning of Gulf War II. An important lesson the US learned from past experiences, particularly in Vietnam, was the strategic significance of meticulous planning in advance of all media operations. Thus after Vietnam, US officials gave greater priority to planning and gaining control of the news so that the media did not create embarrassing or unfavorable public opinion at home.

Media plans for the recent Iraq war were made as early as December 2002 with the help of senior officials at the White House and the departments of Defense and State. The strategy emphasized the message to be delivered, the press meetings every two hours and the spokesperson to make the presentation. The timing of the press meetings was planned so that they coincided with the morning TV news bulletins.

The planners were also very careful in choosing the words to be used in the statements to the press. The US and its allies were referred to as Allied forces, a name which conjured up visions of the Allied Forces in World War II, which defeated the Nazis. Most of the media used the term. The media planners also presented American soldiers as kindhearted and sympathetic to the people of Iraq, undertaking humanitarian activities such as distributing relief materials to women and children and carrying the wounded and sick to hospitals.

The soldiers were even seen distributing candies and sweets to children in the streets. The journalists accompanying the armed forces were used as the medium to convey these image-building pictures and reports to the outside world. Pictures of Iraqis shouting slogans against Saddam and welcoming the US and British forces were shown. The pictures apparently implied that Americans were liberators of the oppressed Iraqi people and not an occupation force.

In contrast to masterly Western planning, the press conferences in the Arab world were comical. The difference between the Western and the Arab media was mainly cultural rather than technical. The conduct of the Arab media, however, resulted in the mindset of an entire nation being distorted.

TV news reports reduced events to pictures, which played a lead role in determining the impact of an event. Pictures play a significant role in interpreting events and influencing the minds of viewers. Some people point out that TV coverage is necessarily superficial because of space limitations. A professor of mass communication at Maryland University believes that viewers are negative receivers of war pictures because the pictures generate feelings of depression. And the accumulated depression will gradually undermine their mental health.

Rapidly developing technology has provided the common man with fast and cheap access to information. State censors are helpless against what is now a flood of information.

The difference between the old and new media is not so much in the new machines for news distribution as in enabling people to get news whenever they want it. The conventional method supplied newspapers in the morning and TV programs at fixed times. On the other hand, news websites and online newspapers are continuously updated and news channels report news as it is happening. The choice is with the viewers; they can view any channel whenever they want.

Round-the-clock war coverage created a negative impression in people’s minds. Wherever they turned, it was pictures of war that they had to see and think about. Instead of helping them have a clear understanding about the real war, the pictures were taken out of context and made the viewers lose sight of the reality. The end result was that viewers learned nothing new about the battles being fought.

The extent of damage pictures can do was clearly seen in a study which found that the number of Americans who believed that the war was progressing in a satisfactory way fell from 71 to 38 percent after TV channels showed pictures of American prisoners of war in Iraq. To realize that a few US soldiers could be taken prisoner is one thing but actually seeing them as captives live on TV is much more moving and infuriating. The Pentagon then demanded that TV channels stop showing such pictures.

The images of those prisoners-of-war triggered a controversy since it involved a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Ironically, the American officials did not have a satisfactory answer to repeated questions as to why the Geneva Convention was applicable in Iraq but not to the Guantanamo prisoners.

The Arabic news channel Al-Jazeerah came in for severe criticism following its broadcast of American prisoners and dead bodies.

One British woman writer and human rights activist, however, justified the Arabic channel’s action as upholding the public’s right to know and see what was actually happening in the war.

She said the channel’s decision not to use the pictures contradicted its basic duty to supply information to the public. She substantiated her argument by citing the verdict of a British court which upheld the right of a company to show a TV commercial containing photos of dead and injured human beings.

I wonder why no bloodshed, no dead body and no injured soldiers are seen in wars launched by superpowers. Only charred and destroyed military installations, empty of human victims, are seen. A British academic asked the same question in his book published shortly after Gulf War II, which was described as an electronic war game without actual human presence. The academic pointed out that the media had presented the war as the cleanest one in the modern age, without any dead or injured. He also wanted to know if there was a war at all!

An American study carried out in collaboration with Columbia University analyzed the results of the experience of journalists being embedded with military units. Most reports produced by the journalists lacked photos of actual war.

It was, according to the study, a war without blood. The study also found that 47 percent of the reports were descriptions of military operations without pictures of people who had been hit by weapons.

Withholding pictures with painful content is an issue being debated. Efforts to keep war reports free of blood and killing while thousands are in fact killed is tantamount to encouraging war because it makes people believe that war has no cost in terms of human lives. An article in the Guardian made the point that not only had no weapons of mass destruction been found but that the bodies of civilian victims had not been found either. The writer noted that we never learned the numbers nor did we see the bodies.

(Note: Gulf War I — 1980s war between Iraq and Iran;

Gulf War II — 1991, the liberation of Kuwait;

Gulf War III — 2003 to present.)

— Muhammad Fahd Al-Harithy is a Saudi journalist based in London ([email protected])