BAGHDAD, 23 November 2004 — Fallujah has been a one-sided battle, and we have had one-sided news coverage to go with it. We’ve become accustomed to the first part of this. From Operation Desert Storm in 1991 onward, through the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the reinvasion of Fallujah last week, the world has come to accept the Pentagon war-fighting doctrine of overwhelming force as normal.
I wonder, though, whether we might be in danger of accepting the one-sided coverage of Fallujah, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and, yes, the global so-called war on terror as normal too.
Since 9/11 we have seen the evolution of the embed, the transition from traditional war hacks who got lucky and tacked themselves on to a particular unit for the duration, to a strictly controlled invitation-by-ticket-only. Go embedded or face the — often lethal — consequences.
The coming of age of the embed has coincided with an utterly ideological world conflict. As one side gets into embedding, the other side are into Crusaders versus martyrs. Utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, they don’t need any journos along to record their war and their motivations.
But even Saddam learned about the propaganda value of having Western reporters in town. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 saw the Ba’athists get totally shirty the minute the air-raid sirens wailed over the Tigris. Out went the assembled hacks, with the exception of Peter Arnett and CNN and bizarrely, a single enterprising correspondent from El Mundo.
By the time of last year’s invasion, Saddam had learned a lesson or two. OK, so Comical Ali’s briefings were not exactly Uncomical Ali Campbell. But at least the hacks remained in town, and were able not just to capture the “shock-and-awe” fireworks but to visit Baghdad’s hospitals and discover the impact of modern British and US high explosives upon the flesh and organs of children.
To a limited extent, then, we got something of the other half of the picture. There was something against which to measure the claims of the British and US media-briefing operation. It wasn’t great — but at least it existed.
But Saddam bore as much relationship to Al-Qaeda as Pluto does to wind-surfing. And, boy, don’t we now know it in the international media.
In the ideological and military clash of Christian fundamentals with Islamist fundamentals, the Western media are simply off-limits to the latter. I am still getting e-mails every week from viewers demanding why we are not in Fallujah, Tikrit, Amara covering this war properly and showing the other side.
Many viewers appear to think the media still have some kind of conferred neutrality. That the press badge can still act a bit like the Red Crescent. That Ken Bigley’s appalling death could surely not happen to Western journalists. Well, those days have well and truly gone.
So we come to the assault last week upon Fallujah. I’ve been embedded and I’m not against it. Those who think embeds are the very spawn of Satan should sit down in a dark room, take a long hard look at the coverage Channel 4 News’s Lindsey Hilsum and the BBC’s Paul Wood have produced and ask themselves: Would you rather you didn’t know this?
Would you rather not know about the embeds appearing to show a wounded Iraqi being summarily executed — or a wounded prisoner being shot? For the first time Fallujah brought military embeds hard up against bad news for the Pentagon — and the news sometimes still got past the censor. Without embeds, would there even be military investigations?
There were, too, some images allowed out of wounded Marines — though Hilsum, for one, pointed out that her attempt to film such material was duly censored.
It was a very mixed affair. There were plenty of examples of reporters psychologically embedding to their detriment. A person who sat it out in an edit suite shouldn’t name names, but it’s not appropriate to use words like “enemy” or even “terrorist” and “we” instead of “they” in reference to the military. Far too much embed material was broadcast without mentioning that reporters were operating under censorship rules signed, sealed and delivered.
Throughout the entire operation in Fallujah, I can call to mind almost every shot of the insurgency. Not because I’m the most hooded of anoraks when it comes to this, but because there were so few — and all gathered by the brave local cameramen of the APTN and RTV news agencies.
Have the papers fared much better? Well, a TV man should hesitate to trespass here. But as a reader I’m not sure they have. I don’t want the Guardian to turn FT pink with blushes — but Ghaith Abdul-Ahad did file a quite remarkable dispatch from Fallujah last Tuesday, simply speaking in depth to one would-be martyr.
Meanwhile, Fleet Street’s most battle-scarred must be champing to get in there — but they also want to keep heads on shoulders and avoid the pitiless orange jumpsuit and video execution.
Somewhere along the line of reporting the “war on terror”, things will have to change radically if we are to be able to do anything like a proper job. Perhaps the men in the masks might change tack. You do not set up elaborate websites to showcase your latest suicide attack complete with graphics and musical effects if you don’t care about PR. Bin Laden’s video diaries are careful constructs. So will Al-Qaeda in Iraq and indeed the wider resistance tumble to that most potent of Pentagon weapons? Will we eventually see the resistance embed?
Journalistically, it cannot happen soon enough, because we’re in a dire mess. But, if it does, it will surely come not to our offices but to those of the Arab TV stations from the Gulf through to Pakistan and Afghanistan. If it does, how will we respond?
And how likely is it? Al-Jazeera is all but shut out of Iraq by the pro-US “government”. Attempts at swingeing censorship are being made. “Tell it our way, or leave the country” appears to be the new “freedom”. So even Al-Jazeera would be hard-placed to pick up the resistance embed, should it one day be offered.
My best guess is that it will come though. Even now in Iraq there are some signs that the insurgency is becoming more open to the efforts of Arab cameramen and producers. Should it happen, we in the West must be ready to get the best of it. At the same time, Western media organizations must redouble their efforts to work with Arab journalists.
Then, with luck, these days of the one-sided view might begin to fade. Then we may begin to cover not just Fallujah and Iraq but the whole global conflict more fairly.
(Alex Thomson is a presenter of Channel 4 News)
