In his speech at the US Naval Academy last week, President Bush told his audience that the administration will settle for nothing short of victory in Iraq, and regaled them with details of how Iraqis are seemingly making progress toward democracy, independence and stability.
Never mind that this was in sharp contrast to daily reports of bombings, assassinations, hostage taking, sectarian violence and torture of prisoners in government-run prisons. The president wants to “stay the course,” so let him stay there.
What was weird about the speech, however, was the reference in it to how the US, in its most ambitious intervention in a foreign country since Vietnam, was providing Iraqis with “technical assistance and training to support a free and independent media that delivers high-quality content and responsible reporting throughout the country.” What he did not say was that this was done through payola, propaganda and duplicity — one fake news item at a time.
The Los Angeles Times broke the story last week that the US was behind a multimillion-dollar coordinated campaign to plant upbeat articles in Iraqi newspapers, presented as factual journalism written by independent local reporters, reporters who are in fact hired hacks paid monthly stipends by the American military. The program is run in Baghdad, with the help of a Washington-based contractor, The Lincoln Group, which translates the articles and markets them to Iraqi media outlets without informing editors and publishers where the material came from.
One piece, for example, cited by the New York Times, is cheerily titled “The Sands of Victory Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq,” with a lead that goes thus: “Western press and frequently those self-styled ‘objective’ observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation.” It even quotes from the Hadith to support its call for unity, and scorns those who express pessimism about the country’s future.
When the US government intentionally plants fake news and commentary in the Iraqi press, disguised as independent reporting — presumably to distort the picture in favor of the occupation — the harm to the US reputation as a whole clearly far outweighs the benefits.
Washington cannot set out to convince Arabs that it will “introduce” them to democracy when it subverts a major building block of democracy — an independent, free media — by engaging in crude, unethical and propagandistic practices worthy of an East European regime under Soviet control.
In the US, a reporter or editor dumb enough, or unprofessional enough, to be party to the egregious practice of publishing fake news will get a kick in the behind, that is, before he gets fired. By planting phony stories in Iraqi newspapers, the Pentagon in effect is saying that while it is not done here in the US, it can be done there. Those Third World Arabs don’t know a free press from a hole in the wall anyhow. They’ll believe anything they’re told. Now that would be a troubling stance if it were true.
You subvert a free press and you subvert freedom in society. Heaven knows the many professional impediments and intellectual constraints Arab journalists have faced over the years in pursuing their craft — known universally as the rough draft of history. To “tell the truth as nearly as the truth can be ascertained,” in the words of Eugene Meyer, founder of the Washington Post, has not been easy for us in those countries saddled with a “mobilizing media,” whose role is to advance the interests and political thinking of the ruling elite.
How different, then, are officials at the Pentagon, when they insinuate themselves into Arab newsrooms and editorial pages, from this ruling elite? Let’s face it, when foreign governments, along with their diplomats and other officials posted at their embassies, form an impression of an Arab country’s national mood, they often form it as filtered through the judgments of the major newspapers. To be credible, these newspapers have to build traditions and live up to them. The re-publication of Die Welt, Corriere Della Sera and Asahi Shimbum after World War II, was made all the easier because there were traditions to uphold, and professional journalists around who remembered how an independent, free paper should be run.
When we talk of a newspaper’s tradition, we are not only talking of how it develops an institutional voice in its editorials, but also of the reputation it earns as a news outlet. This very publication you are perusing now, which in this electronic age is read outside its national borders, used to get on its website one and a half million hits a day on the eve of, during and immediately after the invasion of Iraq. That is because readers at home and abroad trusted its news coverage and editorial integrity.
If there were even the hint of a suspicion that editors of Arab News had knowingly printed fake articles presented to it by, say, a foreign embassy, that hard-earned reputation would evaporate instantly. The paper would lose the respect of its readers and face defections by its regular contributors in the opinion page. It takes years, often a generation or more, for a paper to become worthy of being called a credible member of the Fourth Estate.
Freedom of the press is a moral imperative in society. You subvert it, and you subvert the public’s right to know and the paper’s right to expose. If the Western democracies work better than many others, it is because the concept of accountability — expected from the president on down — is a crucial function of their national ideology.
And it is left to the media to aggressively, thoroughly and responsibly act as a watchdog over all that.
Newspapers are not published to advance the political preferences of proprietors, or the commercial interests of advertisers, though, to be sure, it is advertising dollars that in the end pay for the costs of good journalism. And in the Arab world they are certainly not published to advance the infantile whimsies of Pentagon officials who feel that their dismal efforts to rebuild Iraq need a face-lift. Hands off our press!
