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From NBC News

http://www.msnbc.com/news/893235.asp?cp1=1

New Arab TV channels show clout
They focus less on bombs, more on bombs' victims

WAR DIARY

By Charlene Gubash

NBC NEWS

CAIRO, Egypt, March 31 - In the first U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991, all eyes in the Middle East were turned to CNN for live coverage. But now, in a media revolution, several competing privately owned Arab satellite channels are offering war coverage. And their pro-Arab viewpoint is hardening public opinion against the United States throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

FOR THE FIRST time in history, we have a good front line of 24-hour news networks operating in the field and they ... have a great impact," says media analyst Hussein Amin.

And their perspective is definitely not American. "They are all giving news coverage from an Arabic perspective," says Amin, "talking about Iraqi casualties, Iraqi resistance, inviting Arab analysts to comment on U.S. press briefings and pick out what is wrong with them, just as the British use English experts. In Arab eyes it is fair; in American eyes, it is biased."

Not only do Arab networks have correspondents "embedded" with U.S. troops, they also have roaming correspondents on the ground in Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities. Six-year-old Al Jazeera, the oldest and most popular network, has five correspondents in Iraq and two embedded with U.S. troops. Newcomer Arabiya TV already has 25 correspondents in the region of conflict and two embedded with U.S. and British troops.

Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi and Arabiya TV all have cameras trained on the Baghdad skyline to broadcast live bombing of the city. In a measure of their success, U.S. and other international networks rely upon them for access to exclusive video from Iraq of the bombing and of breaking news.

Because they have reporters on the ground, they are in a position to investigate U.S. and British assertions about the war, or simply outpace information received by Washington. For example, when U.S. officials initially claimed to have gained control of Umm Qasr, an Al Jazeera reporter inside the city denied those reports. On Sunday, Al Jazeera showed a tank near a warehouse, where people were delivering food. Later they reported that a British tank fired on the warehouse and showed exclusive video of the burning building. Then a few hours later, they interviewed a British military spokesman who denied the incident occurred.

And in the most controversial report yet, Al Jazeera aired graphic Iraqi TV pictures of five dead U.S. soldiers and interviews with U.S. prisoners of war before the U.S. military acknowledged the casualties.

MIXING MESSAGES

While Al Jazeera and its peers air U.S. and U.K. press briefings and speeches, they also broadcast in full all Iraqi briefings. But sometimes the context in which U.S. briefings are broadcast delivers a mixed message to viewers.

On Friday night, for example, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's briefing was broadcast on half the screen, while the other half of the screen showed video of bloodied bodies of civilian victims being evacuated from the latest bombing raid on a market. A few days earlier, Secretary of State Colin Powell's exclusive interview with Al Jazeera was later dissected by two pro-Iraqi analysts, the editor of an extremist newspaper and an Iraqi analyst from Baghdad.

Mass communications student Lubna Al Elaimy, who watches Al Jazeera, thinks analysts should be more neutral. "I feel Al Jazeera is slightly biased, but subtly," she said. "They try to show both sides, but most of the time they show you the Arab side or people who are opposed to the war, which illustrates bias."

EMPHASIZING CIVILIAN DEATHS

The most obvious difference in the way Arab networks cover the war is in the emphasis placed on civilian and military casualties. Rare are the sanitized images of war so common on U.S. networks - the black-and-white cockpit video of successful coalition bombing raids and state-of-the art military machines in action.

Arab networks, concerned less with the weight of bombs than with the damage caused by them, frequently broadcast graphic - critics say lurid - images of the aftermath of war: a wounded man being carried in bloody blankets to a hospital, two toddlers sharing one metal shelf in a morgue, a little boy with a blood-soaked T-shirt swathed in bandages and a charred corpse next to a burned car.

These are images that resonate among the Arab public, strongly opposed to a war they deem unjust and deeply sympathetic to the Iraqi people many consider Arab brothers. "It angers and saddens me," says student Al Elaimy. "It makes me extremely depressed. That's the same for a lot of people."

Demonstrations continue to wrack Arab capitals, where people are enraged over the war itself and the growing civilian death toll. "Of course these pictures escalate the anger," says media analyst Amin. "Pictures are the most powerful and influential medium that bypass any barrier."

CLAIMS OF BIAS

Arab networks, notably Al Jazeera, have been accused of sensationalizing the war and showing pro-Iraqi bias. Al Jazeera's Omar Bec, head of news-gathering, disagrees. "We are just giving the big picture," he said. "It is up to individuals whether they grasp it. War kills, and that's a fact. The message is clear. Nothing is sacred."

After Al Jazeera broadcast pictures of U.S. war dead and POWs, Rumsfeld told CBS News that Al Jazeera is "obviously part of Iraqi propaganda and responding to Iraqi propaganda." Al Jazeera's Bec counters that his network is not pro-anybody, noting that Al Jazeera has been accused by the Americans of being pro-Osama bin Laden because it has aired statements by the al-Qaida leader, while some Arab countries have charged it with being pro-Zionist because it has aired interviews with Israelis.

As to Al Jazeera's decision to immediately air pictures of U.S. war dead and captured, Bec has no apologies: "War kills, and we are covering this. We have also covered detained Iraqis on the ground…. We are covering all sides of it: the good, the bad and the ugly." However, such pictures sometimes upset not only Americans but also Arabs. "I was thinking, how would the families feel if they saw their son?" said one young medical student of the pictures of killed and captured U.S. soldiers. A professor called the interviews with U.S. POWs some of the most upsetting war video she has seen.

REFUTING U.S. AS LIBERATOR

Arab networks have also challenged the notion of U.S. troops' being welcomed as liberators. On Friday, Al Jazeera beamed pictures of men cheering the downing of a U.S. drone plane over Basra. In a far more chilling broadcast last week, the network showed live pictures of hundreds of Iraqis gathered on the banks of a river in Baghdad, setting fire to cane fields and shooting into the river to flush out U.S. pilots who witnesses said had parachuted from the sky.

And the Arab networks have shown a surprisingly defiant and organized Iraqi resistance impeding the progress of U.S. and British troops.

Arab broadcasters insist that their coverage is in fact less biased than American coverage. "There is no Arab point of view. There is one point of view, which is balanced," contends Arabiya's Salah Nigm. "American coverage has to be one-sided because they are party to the conflict and don't have access to the Iraqis."

Although Western critics dispute the balance of networks such as Al Jazeera, one thing is for certain: Arab networks have a viewership any 24-hour news network would be proud of. In the shops, homes, cafes and offices of Cairo, people are glued to the TV as they watch the war unfold live. "I feel like I am in the war," says a young architecture student in a Cairo café.

Competition is intense for viewers. Al Jazeera, the hands-down favorite, claims 35 million viewers. Arabiya, less than a month old, is broadcast on Jordan and Saudi state-owned TV and therefore reaches a potential audience of 13 million in addition to its satellite audience. Abu Dhabi TV, already well established, is widely considered second to Al Jazeera in popularity.

Most significant, pioneer Al Jazeera and the other private Arab news networks have broken the monopoly of stodgy, state-controlled Arab TV stations. Arab state-run TV stations used to, and in many cases still do, broadcast only what Arab governments wanted their citizens to see. Now, viewers can switch channels and get the real story, in Arabic.

"Gone are the days when the state-run media or press will run what they want and not go live with what people want. Numbers speak for themselves," said Al Jazeera's Bec. "People want to watch hard news, what is happening on the ground."

Some of Al Jazeera's heaviest criticism has come from Britain and the United States, where its reporters were banned from the New York Stock Exchange. That censorship in a country known for free speech is ironic, Bec said, noting that Al Jazeera also recently won an award from a British magazine for freedom of expression.

Charlene Gubash reports for NBC News from Cairo, Egypt.

From The New York Times/International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/91329.html

Why Al Jazeera matters

Monday, March 31, 2003

New York Times Editorial

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera. Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the Gulf state where U.S. war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people. That is why the decision by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to bar the station's reporters is so repugnant.

The exchanges' complaint against Al Jazeera is that it is not ''responsible.'' This is a cryptic allegation but it seems linked to the television station's decision a week ago to show images of dead American and British soldiers as well as POWs in Iraq. But Al Jazeera says that after the Pentagon asked it to remove the pictures until families had been notified, it did so for eight hours, while the television stations of numerous countries continued to show them.

In truth, it seems that New York's exchanges have a broader complaint, heard in various forms elsewhere - that Al Jazeera is insufficiently supportive of America and its war in Iraq. As the only uncensored Arabic television in the world, Al Jazeera does indeed slant its debates and discussions in a way that can be hostile to the West. It is not Fox News. But if the U.S. hope for the Arab world is, as the Bush administration never ceases to remind Americans, for it to enjoy a free, democratic life, Al Jazeera is the kind of television station Americans should encourage.

It is the only Arabic television station that regularly interviews Israeli officials. It is also an important forum for American officials. Last week alone, it interviewed three senior members of the American government, including General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Al Jazeera has also been a vital source of information about Al Qaeda. Its reporters have had access to Qaeda leaders, and tapes of Osama bin Laden have found their way to the station's offices. This has been a useful window on a world that for too long has been utterly alien to us.

The ban on Al Jazeera by the princes of the free market puts them in impressive company. Libya and Tunisia have both complained that Al-Jazeera gives too much air time to opposition leaders. Jordan has thrown it out. Kuwait refused visas to its correspondents who were to be placed with American forces based there.

If a free, uncensored press ever arrives in the Arab world, many Americans will be shocked by what it says. Then, the energetic if somewhat tendentious broadcasts of Al Jazeera will seem, in comparison, like the nuanced objectivity of the BBC. For right now, Al Jazeera deserves all the help and support it can get.

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera. Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the Gulf state where U.S. war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people. That is why the decision by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to bar the station's reporters is so repugnant.

From Time Magazine

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/Klein/article/0,9565,439128,00.html

The PG-Rated War

War is a force of primal disorder, but we prefer not to see it that way

Monday, Mar. 31, 2003

I am looking at a photo of a dead American, courtesy of al-Jazeera television network. The boy lies diagonally across the frame, his head in the lower-right-hand corner. His eyes are closed, and there is a bullet hole the size of a half-dollar in his right temple; blood puddles beneath his head and soaks his T shirt. You will not see this photograph on American television or in the pages of this magazine. When word came that al-Jazeera had broadcast this image and others like it, the official U.S. reaction was outrage. When similar photos of dead British soldiers were published, Tony Blair said, "To the families of the soldiers involved, it is an act of cruelty beyond comprehension."

It is that, to be sure. The right to privacy after death in combat should trump all other concerns. There are other good reasons not to show the true face of war, especially when the photos in question are acts of aggression perpetrated by an enemy intent on damaging American morale. But the desire not to sicken or offend the noncombatant public should not be among them. There is real danger when journalists edit the truth, especially when we sanitize the cataclysmic impact of high-powered munitions upon human flesh. There are those who say such images might induce America to become a nation of pacifists, but the exact opposite might be the case.

The photo on this page - one of the first images of dead Americans published during World War II, which appeared in the Sept. 20, 1943, issue of LIFE magazine - was intended to incite anger and awareness. It came after Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that the home front had become too complacent, too distanced from the realities of combat, and so he lifted the censorship of American casualties. But the editors of LIFE still felt a need to explain their decision: "Why print this picture? ... The reason is that words are never enough ... the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens ... [I]f Bill" - one of the soldiers in question - "had the guts to take it, then we ought to have the guts to look at it." The photo, by George Strock, is mesmerizing. There is an unadorned bleakness to it that is unsettling even now, after a half-century of casual, blood-ripped Hollywood action fantasies. And it is far more potent than anything we've seen from Iraq during the first 10 days of the war. This is puzzling. We are closer to war than ever before - hardly half an hour goes by without some embedded ace breathlessly reporting, in real time, from the front. But the war we are seeing is bowdlerized, PG-rated. There are fancy explosions galore, shown from a great distance; there are retired generals wandering through giant maps with pointers and Telestrators; there are gagging doses of Oprah-like human-interest drama, the (slightly) wounded saying "Hi, Mom" and tearful families waiting for word. There are photographs of rubble and of bloodstains that could easily be mistaken for spilled wine. But there is none of the horror, none of the unimaginable sights - bodies torn apart, limbs flying - that cause combat veterans to go mute when asked about their experiences. The coverage of this war is as close to the truth of this war as reality TV is to real life. At a moment like this, the media should be an irritant - shocking us, shaking us, making sure that we're as alert and uncomfortable as possible in the comfort of our living rooms.

War is a force of primal disorder; we are a society afflicted by the illusion of orderliness. We have been so buffered by the carefully demarcated rules of television that we lack the intellectual equipment to deal with chaos (even the events of 9/11 - talk about shock and awe! - were carefully groomed. The most shocking images, the bodies falling from the sky, were generally kept out of view).

Afghanistan, Kosovo, the first Gulf War - each a video game played from 15,000 ft. - only added to our delusion of control. We are not so lucky this time. This is an actual war; there are unplanned events: an unruly enemy, uncooperative allies, magisterial dust storms. That doesn't necessarily mean the war is going badly. For all we know, it may be going splendidly; as I write this, Saddam Hussein may be throwing in the towel.

But we aren't very good at uncertainty; to paraphrase a frustrated American commander last week, we haven't "war-gamed" it. The President himself seemed miffed, sputtering sentence fragments when asked by reporters how long the war would last. Bush has taken to warning us about an extended struggle, but one senses he doesn't believe it. He is, after all, an exemplar of a generation for whom the purest expression of "long" is the television mini-series. He'll have to learn to tolerate the ragged rhythms of armed conflict in the weeks to come, and so will we.

From The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45183-2003March28.html

Perceptions: Where Al-Jazeera & Co. Are Coming From

By Mamoun Fandy

Sunday, March 30, 2003; Page B01

The recent airing of gruesome pictures of American casualties and POWs has again set the American media talking about the unbridled nature of Arab television, particularly the Qatar-owned al-Jazeera network. Indeed, the Arabs are watching a different war than we are here.

Their war is presented for television consumption using the templates of recent history: the Palestinian intifada, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1956 Suez War. The imagery of the past infuses the interpretation of the current war with familiar meaning -- and makes coverage easy.

The formats used by the growing number of 24-hour, satellite-based Arab news channels would be familiar to American viewers. There is a mix of news talk shows, press briefings, anchors reading headlines and then turning to video footage of the war. But the messages are uniformly anti-American: Americans are barbaric, and here are the pictures to prove it. We Arabs are heroic, and here are images of us downing their planes. Shots of Iraqi civilian casualties are a highlight of the coverage, as are those that show the "invading" forces suffering routs and setbacks.

Some American commentators have dismissively attributed the violence of Arab television coverage to the nature of the culture. The truth, of course, is more complicated. To understand the coverage, one must take into account the narratives that have shaped the Arab worldview. As an Egyptian who has lived in this country for 18 years, and as a media critic with an eye on both worlds, I recognize the references that shape the Arab coverage of this war. They span historical events from the Crusades to the Mongol invasions of Baghdad to the colonial experience and the recent Arab-Israeli wars.

These elements are also found in the speeches of Saddam Hussein and interviews with his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. Quite simply, this is the frame of reference for the Iraqi wartime message, and no Arab network questions that.

Here in the United States, we tend to think of images only in terms of cameras and television: Photography is separate from narrative. In the Arab world, language is full of images, which cannot be separated from narrative. Arabic is a metaphorical language, rich in shades of meaning.

The image-based style of the Arabic language acts as an excellent interface with pictures. Thus television is terribly important. Consider the effect achieved, for example, when Majid Abdul Hadi, an al-Jazeera reporter in Baghdad, shows a picture of a coalition bombing while referring to Baghdad as the pulsing heart of the Muslim caliphate, a pulsing heart engulfed in flame.

What appears in this country as rantings and ravings by Hussein can seem coherent to people who are not bothered by his manner of stitching together disparate or historical images with current events. Recall that in Hussein's latest videotaped speech, he called for descendants of the Iraqi tribes who had defeated the Mongols at the walls of Baghdad to defeat the Americans in the same way. The overall impression is like being at a slide show. What Americans have seen in the POW pictures is thus just one moment in an ongoing spectacle. More is yet to come.

Among the templates being used -- not just on al-Jazeera, but on almost all Arab TV stations -- is the Palestinian struggle against Israel, an analogy that Hussein has also used to advantage. Consider his use, only since the start of the war, of the term "fedayeen Saddam" to describe his protective force. "Fedayeen" has been used for years to refer to the PLO fighters of the 1960s and '70s. By appropriating it, Hussein is attempting to blur the lines between the Palestinian cause and his own.

Unfortunately, the Pentagon and some of the media initially took his bait. "Fedayeen" has been translated here as "martyrs," giving it a religious connotation. But the word in fact means "someone who is willing to sacrifice himself" -- in this case, for Saddam. If the Pentagon had wanted to use "fedayeen" to advantage, it would have translated it as "killers for Saddam."

The Palestinian template has been useful in other ways, particularly in emphasizing the asymmetry of the opposing forces. Like its coverage of the intifada, al-Jazeera's reporting on the war in Iraq depicts a relatively unarmed populace facing down a trained army. Palestinians fielded the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade against the Israeli army, for instance. And now the Iraqi leader, too, has an al-Aqsa brigade, which, like his fedayeen, is fighting a battle that eerily echoes the Palestinian one. His deliberate borrowing of terms is clearly manipulative. The same parallel pervades television coverage. For instance, on al-Jazeera and some other networks, the Americans are described as an "occupying" force. The Iraqi military is the "resistance." Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV have shown dead Iraqis being paraded through the streets by crowds shouting "Allahu Akbar" -- intifada-style. Broadcasters and viewers alike speak of Hussein using the language developed for speaking of Arafat: Both are corrupt dictators, but the issue now is that the United States and Israel are occupying Arab land.

Thus, although Israel is not participating in this war, it looms large in the meta-story. It provides an important model of a dominating and unjust force. But this is not the only model that is driving news coverage in the Arab world.

Other dominant models evoke Arab pride. One recurring television image is that of an Iraqi farmer standing with his gun next to a downed Apache helicopter. This iconic picture -- the simple peasant defeating Western invaders -- is taken directly from the popular imagery of the Suez War, when Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt. Although in reality the United States saved the day and ordered the invading forces out, in the Egyptian popular imagination it was the local resistance that drove out the occupying forces. Pictures of men shooting at planes and of farmers and workers resisting the mighty powers is what Nasser fed Egyptians and exported all over the Arab world.

Why do the Arab TV networks accept the Iraqi narrative lock, stock and barrel? State-owned satellite news channels such as al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV are very recent creations. Al-Jazeera, the oldest such channel in the Gulf, did not exist during the first Persian Gulf War. Based in Qatar, it was established in 1996. Al-Arabiya, based in Dubai, is only three months old. The people who work at these stations were by and large recruited from state-owned television networks throughout the Arab world. Thus, they are reacting to their own past. While they were working in state TV they no doubt felt oppressed; now they have somewhat more freedom. But they are pushing the envelope, as are their colleagues at entertainment channels such as Lebanon's al-Mustaqbal and LBC TV, which have added some war coverage to their schedule. Before the war, Future and LBC competed over whose belly-dancers showed more skin. Now it's about who will show the most Iraqi civilian blood and American casualties. Now, as Egyptian TV producer Jamal Enyat told me, "it is political nudity," or what some call "political porno," that is dominating their screens.

Beneath the Arab modes of visual representation, the Western style is also present. Indeed, Arab coverage often copies the CNN and Fox News formats. Today, just like CNN, every one of the 10 Arab channels I watch, or appear on as a commentator, has a "war room" staffed with retired generals discussing the progress of the war and freely advising the Iraqis how to conduct it. In this way, these veterans of Arab wars are compensating for past defeat with on-air political speeches.

The tone of many reporters in Baghdad is much the same. For example, an al-Jazeera reporter in the Iraqi capital falsely told his viewers on the first day of the air campaign, "Here in Baghdad, a city accused of hiding weapons of mass destruction is being hit by weapons of mass destruction." This kind of repetition is the stuff that has made Arabic poetry so justly admired. Here, the rhythm and sonority of the language act to encourage audience disregard for the true definitions of the words being used.

With few exceptions, ethical constraints are rarely discussed in the Arab media, where the notion of editorial judgment sounds to many like censorship. Several have said it reminds them of what they had to do while they were working for state-owned broadcasters. Reporters and producers know what their viewers want to see: images of empowerment and resistance because of past defeats. They also want to see what Hussein's information minister, Muhammed Said al-Sahaf, calls teaching the Americans a lesson. "We are no less than the Vietnamese. Just make it costly in body bags and the Americans will run," said a general who comments regularly on al-Jazeera. Some Arab journalists say they have little choice but to go along. "The cost of speaking out now -- even to simply say that Saddam is partially responsible for what is taking place -- is very high. It could cost you your job and could even cause you physical harm," said one.

The Arab world has experienced that before. In 1967, Egyptian reporter Ahmed Said announced that Arab guns were bringing Israeli planes down like flies. A week later Arabs woke up to the fact that their armies had been roundly defeated. With that, Arab media lost credibility and audiences turned to foreign stations. It would take almost 25 years for the Arab media to regain some credibility. Their coverage of this war could well cause them to lose it once more.

Mamoun Fandy, a columnist for the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, teaches a media and politics course at Georgetown University.

From The New York Times/International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/91482.html

Penetrating the fog of the TV war Frank Rich NYT

Saturday, March 29, 2003

And so it turned out that "Shock and Awe" - or "shockinaw," in cable parlance - didn't have legs. Less than a week after it pumped up the stock market and gave the United States a presentiment of a quick and tidy war, it was all but forgotten. Even before Time and Newsweek could hit the stands with their cover displays of the fireworks, we were fixated on images we could not readily see: Al Jazeera video of American troops who had been butchered or taken prisoner by Iraqi forces.

These pictures, declared contraband by the Pentagon after their initial showing on CBS's "Face the Nation" last Sunday, contained one element that the antiseptic, depopulated Baghdad pyro-technics could not deliver - the human face of people visibly mauled by war. For the first time we could smell American blood, and while that was shocking, it was far from awesome.

For those trying to juggle these polar mood swings while watching the war on television, there are two conflicts raging - the fight between the antagonists themselves and the pitched battle between journalism and the imperatives of show business. The conflicts are intertwined, and the second determines how we view the first. If we are to penetrate the fog of the real war, journalism must be the clear victor over the inherent need of television to impose its surefire entertainment formulas, its proven arsenal of slick storytelling and rousing characterization, on a reality that may not be nearly so neat.

In this war, American television news has an unusually tough job. It must not only compete with other TV storytellers with fierce agendas, starting with Iraqi television, but it must maneuver around the manipulations of an administration so television-savvy it doesn't leave a single backdrop to chance. Not for nothing was a designer who has worked for Disney, MGM and the illusionist David Blaine hired to build General Tommy Franks a $250,000 set for the briefings in Qatar. The master of the Pentagon media operation, including the program "embedding" more than 500 journalists among our troops, is Victoria Clarke, whose résumé features a stint directing public affairs for the National Cable Television Association. In that job, says The Wall Street Journal, she helped persuade the public that cable's "terrible reputation for customer service" was unjustified. In other words, she's a p.r. genius.

We now know that the short-lived rush of "Shock and Awe" was contrived, a victory of TV's show-business instincts over news. It was the irresistible clichéd climax to the first 72 hours of TV war coverage, with its triumphal story line bereft of gore and starring enthusiastic embedees in mufti cruising through the desert like the youthful participants in a second-tier Olympic sport. "If you hired actors, you could not have gotten better coverage," observed Kenneth Bacon, a former Pentagon spokesman, before the mood of the war and its coverage began to turn.

One correspondent on the scene who didn't buy the initial story line was Peter Arnett. He recognized a mindless rerun when he saw it. "It's déjà vu all over again, the idea that this would be a walkover, the idea that the people of Basra would throw flowers at the Marines," he said from Baghdad when I spoke with him by phone last week. He had been there to see the early burst of optimism in Gulf War I, which he covered for CNN. "This is going to be tough," he said just before it became tough. "When I interviewed Tariq Aziz two weeks ago - it was not put on the network - he said: 'You'll have a hard time tearing us down. We're ready to be martyrs.' Whatever you think about Saddam Hussein, there is a sense of nationalism here. The Iraqis like American culture - American movies and pop songs. But are they really going to like American tanks?"

Television news can never be utterly innocent of showbiz, Arnett included. His exploits in the last war were fictionalized in last year's HBO movie "Live From Baghdad," in which the attack-simulating special effects were, in his view, "absolutely ridiculous." Commercial networks are not C-Span. There is branding at stake, not to mention careers and ratings. Yes, it's important that we find out if Saddam actually has weapons of mass destruction, but we also want to know if Arnett will make a comeback moonlighting for NBC and MSNBC, after having been let go by CNN only to hitch his star to, of all unlikely outfits, "National Geographic Explorer."

NBC must also attend to the continuing cliffhanger of anchor succession: Will Brian Williams, dressing down for the desert, at last prove himself a worthy heir to Tom Brokaw? In the overnight stardom sweepstakes, will MSNBC's Rob Morrison, until recently a local weekend anchor, or ABC's Richard Engel, a free-lance radio reporter, emerge as the new scud stud? When even weathermen are predicting rain in Kirkuk, it's clear everyone must get into the act.

So far the biggest inside-TV drama has starred Peter Jennings. On the night the war began, he was AWOL by anchor standards, arriving at the studio a half-hour later than his peers. For a while, while Baghdad burned on CBS and NBC, "The Bachelor: Where Are They Now?" continued purring on ABC. "The war has already claimed its first victim: ABC News," concluded The Washington Post's TV columnist, Lisa de Moraes, soon after. But it's exactly here that showbiz's standards of success and failure part from those of journalism. By the measure of its industry, ABC had flopped, losing ratings and irritating its affiliates with its opening-night fiasco.

But as a news operation, ABC has succeeded since, by bucking the initial consensus story line. After Donald Rumsfeld spoke in a post-"Shock and Awe" press conference of "the humanity" of American weaponry pinpointing noncivilian targets, Jennings said, "No offense to the secretary, but at this moment we simply do not know whether that is the case." Later the network would feature a John Donvan report from the liberated town of Safwan in which we learned that the citizens who had famously cheered the tearing down of a massive portrait of Saddam the day before were now angry at Americans because of the lack of humanitarian aid.

Inevitably The New York Post spanked ABC News, and Jennings in particular, for "America-bashing, pessimism and antiwar agitation." Hardly. His real sin was to violate the unspoken rule that in the early stages of a war journalists should junk the tools of skepticism and irony on camera. But as Michael Arlen, then television critic for The New Yorker, wrote in the mid-1960s while observing cheerleading coverage of the first television war, Vietnam, "Trying to report a war without irony is a bit like trying to keep sex out of a discussion of the relations between men and women."

For those who want their war without irony or ambiguity or anything other than good news, there is the New York Post's TV sibling, Fox News. On Fox an anchor can say that "objectively speaking" it is "hard to believe things could go much more successfully." Last weekend another of its anchors announced, "This is extraordinary news, the city of Basra under control!" Which was extraordinary indeed, given that Basra was unsecured and teetering into guerrilla warfare. On Fox, an anchor can (without irony) call Newt Gingrich "an estimable scholar" of military affairs and bring on Donald Trump to declare, "I think the market's going to go up like a rocket!"

We will always be winning on Fox, and Fox continues to win its ratings battle with CNN. We must pray that its happy talk becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. But as I write on the run-up to the siege of Baghdad, P.O.W. families are telling a story so compelling that even the Oscars took a huge ratings hit as viewers surfed for the latest. While media critics debate how much or little we should see of corpses, the images are bleeding into the media mix by satellite and Internet anyway. The TV story line has turned as dark as only yesterday it was light - provoking Fox's Fred Barnes to call his competitors "weenies" for dwelling on casualties. That's ludicrous, but as the pendulum swings, it's fair to ask: Could the new quagmire narrative be just as transitory and misleading as the discarded celebratory cakewalk of "Shock and Awe"?

From The New York Times

http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/3783140.html

Lucian K. Truscott IV: When the news media become weapons of war

Published March 27, 2003 TRUS27

LOS ANGELES -- Neither Clausewitz nor Sun Tzu had any advice for military commanders on how to manage the news media during time of war. But both agreed that strategic information -- about battle plans, troop strength, disposition of forces and so forth -- should be denied the enemy so as to enhance an army's ability to use deception and the element of surprise.

Pentagon war planners have turned this ancient military maxim inside out. From the first moments of the war, television screens and newspaper pages around the world have shown and described with images of exploding palaces and an armored phalanx rolling rapidly toward Baghdad. Reports from the 3rd Infantry Division do everything but cite highway mile-markers of their progress. Reporters are "embedded" so deep into the war that they are subsisting on the same dreadful rations eaten by the troops.

The Pentagon may have been dragged kicking and screaming into its current embrace of the news media. But it is making the most of it. Planners must have contemplated advances in media technology and decided that if they can't control the press, they may as well use it.

And make no mistake: The news media are being used -- in more ways than they realize. When Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld first announced that reporters would be welcome in the trenches, members of the media were suspicious. After all, this was the same Pentagon that kept journalists far from the front lines during the Persian Gulf War. Yet from reporters inhaling the exhaust of infantry units to bleary-eyed New York anchors spellbound by squads of generals analyzing the data stream, the news media have marched practically in lock step with the military.

Not since the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan has an administration been so adept at managing information and manipulating images. In Iraq, the Bush administration has beaten the press at its own game. It has turned the media into a weapon of war, using the information it provides to harass and intimidate the Iraqi military leadership.

None of the early attacks on Baghdad destroyed the power or communications infrastructure, as they did in the early hours of the Gulf War. As bombs fell on palaces and government ministries, the real war was being brought to Baghdad via satellite dish. Images that had been curtailed in the Gulf War are now being used as a force-multiplier.

Knowing that Iraqi military leaders are watching the same satellite feeds as they are -- from CNN as well as from Al Jazeera and other cable networks -- Pentagon officials have been in contact with Iraqi generals by radio, cell phone, even e-mail. The message they are sending is simple and direct: Surrender your forces. Opposition is hopeless. If you don't believe us, just turn on your TV.

Iraqi leaders have made their own attempts to manipulate the media, of course. They have provided Al Jazeera footage of American prisoners of war, downed aircraft and injured and dead civilians. But the audience they're trying to influence doesn't wear stars. Iraq is trying to influence the so-called Arab street -- inside Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. And they are no doubt attempting to counter the depressing effect of the bombs-over-Baghdad footage on their own beleaguered forces.

Both sides are taking an enormous gamble by using the news media. But it's an especially risky gamble for the Pentagon. The same satellites that transmitted images of U.S. armor rolling easily across the sand last week are now carrying images of dead and captured American soldiers. And now American commanders have to worry not only about embedded reporters, but also about embedded Iraqi Fedayeen forces left in cities passed by during the American advance on Baghdad. All the Iraqi fighters have to do is sneak a dish up on a rooftop in the dark, and they will have access to much of the same information as their enemy.

So maybe the American news media were suspicious of the Pentagon's newly permissive policy for the wrong reasons. They thought the administration had the same goal as they did: high ratings -- not necessarily for the war coverage, but for the war itself. But it turns out that the Pentagon had a different audience in mind. At this point in the war, it is entirely unclear whether its strategy will achieve the results that were intended when the media was weaponized.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a 1969 graduate of West Point, is a novelist and screenwriter. He wrote this article for the New York Times.

From The Media Guardian

http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,923850,00.html

Al-Jazeera critics accused of double standards

Jason Deans

Thursday March 27, 2003

Critics of Arabic news channel al-Jazeera's decision to broadcast footage of dead British and US soldiers were today accused of double standards by a former BBC senior journalist in the Gulf region.

A former BBC Middle East correspondent, Tim Llewelyn, an expert on the region's media, said al-Jazeera was just doing what the BBC "had taught them to do" and providing coverage of the Iraq war from another perspective.

Many al-Jazeera journalists were "products of the BBC", having worked for the corporation's Arabic service before joining the Qatar-based satellite news channel, he added.

"The Arab media is used to [criticism from the west] and they talk about double standards. What they are doing is showing the war from a different perspective while we show it from a British perspective," Llewelyn told BBC Radio 5 Live's lunchtime news.

"Of course what they are showing is upsetting. But we've shown terrible pictures of things happening to other people around the world. They are just doing to us what we've been doing to them.

"We are in a whole new ball game now. Arab journalists can get into places that we can't go. I think that's perfectly valid - there's another side to this."

Nicola Baldwin, a UK freelance journalist working for the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Corporation in Dubai, said there was also a cultural element to an Arabic TV station such as al-Jazeera showing graphic footage of dead British soldiers.

There is much less of a taboo about showing close-ups of dead bodies on TV across the Middle East - an area that has grown accustomed to conflict, Ms Baldwin added.

"When I'm editing stuff like that out here I get upset, but Iraqis I work with just say 'you've never seen a war before, have you?'," she said.

"TV stations in the Middle East have always shown pictures of bodies. They don't have the same restrictions - it's normal for them. They will show pictures of dead Palestinians and Israelis, for instance," Ms Baldwin added.

But the Conservative media spokesman, John Whittingdale, has called on the BBC to scrap its news footage deal with Arabic news channel al-Jazeera, after the Arabic news channel yesterday broadcast close-ups of two dead British soldiers.

Mr Whittingdale said he would be writing to the BBC to ask the director general, Greg Dyke, to reconsider the corporation's news footage deal with al-Jazeera, adding that it was broadcasting "propaganda".

"The BBC is using footage supplied by al-Jazeera which, it is clear, is not coming from an objective standpoint," he added.

"For the BBC, which is funded by the taxpayer, to be giving a platform to an Arabic station which is putting out propaganda against the war, raises real questions about whether this relationship is appropriate."

But a BBC spokesman dismissed Mr Whittingdale's claims as unfounded, claiming the BBC applied the same editorial standards to al-Jazeera footage as it did for film from other sources.

"Everything we show is subject to our editorial guidelines, so propaganda simply wouldn't get through. We edit material and make sure people are aware of the context," he added.

"We review the situation case by case and hour by hour. We take into account next of kin and context - is it humiliating, are people being used as exhibits?" the spokesman said.

From The National Review

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-phares032603.asp

National online review

Guest Comment

March 26, 2003, 8:25 a.m.

Jihad TV
al-Jazeera, the global madrassa.

By Walid Phares

Al-Jazeera is ruled by politics. Take the recent airing of footage of American soldiers killed by Iraqis and of the interrogation of American POWs. The decision to air the footage was just another example of the network making politics - rather than reporting - its business.

The constant replay of the graphic images on Sunday was a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention. Showing footage of dead soldiers and conducting of prisoner interrogations before the media both clearly undermine international law. The Qatar-based network's goal was clear: It wanted the Americans to be seen as mercenaries.

And the network's politics was all over the coverage. Consider:

• Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Washington, Wajd Waqfi, challenged the American media to broadcast the footage of dead American soldiers and of prisoners of war. Waqfi alleged that such a broadcast would have a "tremendous impact on the American street."

• Later on, Hafiz al-Mirazi, the network's director in Washington, said while interviewing U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher: "How can you talk about the Geneva convention when the U.S. showed political prisoners to the media in Afghanistan" - a subtle attempt to defend al Qaeda and the Taliban.

• Mohammed al-Said Idriss, who is serving as al-Jazeera's analyst on the war in Iraq, claimed that the "American media is an arm of the American government," adding that its role is to prepare the psychological ground for U.S. government decisions. The media in America, he insisted, is as state-controlled as the media in Iraq. As a result, he explained, neutral media - such as al-Jazeera - are needed to "uncover lies."

To rebut these allegations, let's note that in Afghanistan, U.S. forces captured terrorist elements and followed the terms of the Geneva Convention. They haven't filmed al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in close-ups with bullets in their heads. It's one thing for the media to film dead fighters and soldiers in the battlefield, quite another to film and broadcast corpses in the custody of the Iraqi regime. It's one thing to show prisoners before and as they are arrested, quite another to film an interrogation session in which subjects are humiliated. The American forces' handling of irregular militias in Afghanistan exceeded the requirements of the Geneva Convention; the Iraqis' treatment of our troops has flouted it.

Following the sharp criticism of the Iraqis for breaching international law, al-Jazeera asked one of its advisers to provide additional defense arguments. Former Colonel Osama Damj at first acknowledged that prisoners should not be displayed for public curiosity. But, he added, there is an exception: that is, if the display is in the interest of the prisoners. Damj explained that the Iraqi leadership had two objectives in airing this broadcast. One was to prove they did indeed have U.S. soldiers in their custody. The other was to demonstrate that Baghdad respects human rights and that the prisoners are in good health. And then, Damj disclosed the real reason behind his arguments.

To back up the so-called humane aspect of the Iraqis' behavior, he cited the example of the mother of one of the soldiers - who, as soon as she had learned her son was in captivity, begged President Bush to do something for her son. Damj eventually admitted that, at the end of the day, the broadcast was really about using the prisoners to score a political victory.

So, is al-Jazeera a media outlet or a political organization? Answer: It's both. It has the sophistication of modern-day, multidimensional satellite TV - which has led many in the Western intellectual establishment to dub it the "Arab CNN." Despite the nickname, however, al-Jazeera is nothing like Western media outlets, which operate independently of government mandate in countries that guarantee freedom of the press.

In sum, it's "Jihad TV." Its doctrinal message is sculpted patiently through panel discussions including the "al-Sharia wal Hayat" (Law and Life), featuring mainly Sheikh Yussef al-Qardawi, a very influential Muslim Brotherhood cleric. The network functions essentially as a high-tech madrassa, broadcasting the ideology of jihad to millions around the world. Every development is thoroughly analyzed from a jihadist angle.

One example was the Iraq campaign. Months before the U.S. engagement began, two audiotapes were aired by al-Jazeera in which Osama bin Laden called on Muslims to fight for Baghdad as the "second capital of Islam" - not as the center of Saddam's Baath. al-Jazeera was to use the term repeatedly, slowly building up the illusion that such a jihad would be fought for Iraq, not for Saddam. Interviews with religious fundamentalist leaders multiplied. The pressure eventually led al-Azhar, the Vatican of Sunni Islam, to call for jihad if Baghdad were to be attacked. That call, now "news," in turn was broadcasted by al-Jazeera. Call it an electronic fatwa. By the time allied forces invade Iraq and the region's fundamentalist masses explode, al-Jazeera has not merely reported the fact - it has created it.

- Walid Phares is a professor of Middle East studies and comparative politics at Florida Atlantic University, and author of several books on the Middle East. He is also an analyst for MSNBC.

From The Financial Times

http://www.informationwar.org/articlesofinterest/main

The media get conscripted to the fight

By Lionel Barber

Financial Times March 24 2003

General Tommy Franks describes operation Iraqi Freedom as a campaign like no other in history. He is right - but not in the sense of Hannibal's encirclement of the Roman army at Cannae or Napoleon's victory against superior odds at Austerlitz.

Aside from the speed of the US advance on Baghdad, the campaign's salient feature has been the use of non-lethal methods of warfare. These psychological operations - "psy-ops" - aim to break to break the morale of Saddam Hussein's regime, in pursuit of a swift victory without heavy civilian casualties. More than 500 journalists from the world's press in the region have found themselves playing a role in the campaign. Dozens are "embedded" with US and British forces, often reporting from or near the front line.

In previous conflicts, the Pentagon and the UK Ministry of Defence practised a policy of media containment. The restrictions were largely a legacy of Vietnam. A generation of US journalists discovered that neither the US military nor the US government had a shred of credibility, while the military believed the media had stabbed them in the back. The Pentagon's current policy reveals a new self-confidence. It stems not only from technological prowess such as precision-bombing, night-fighting and real-time communication among land-, sea- and air-based forces. It is rooted in a widespread conviction that a well funded, well trained, all-volunteer military is the one part of the US bureaucracy that works.

In the opening phase of the campaign, the US public has seen a host of articulate, confident faces on television: commanders such as Lt Gen John Abizaid, second-in-command to the lumbering Gen Franks, as well as 20-something combat pilots and soldiers.

The result is a new form of reality TV that serves several purposes. The viewing public gets a piece of the action, via a broadcast media hungry for live pictures. The media is "educated" in the art of modern warfare. Pentagon officials hope this will encourage sober judgments about casualties rather than endless recycling of harrowing pictures, as occurred in Somalia. Mindsets may be changing. At the weekend, most networks refused to broadcast the full al-Jazeera tape showing Iraqi captors humiliating American prisoners of war on camera. Footage of a crash of a US Marine helicopter carrying US and British troops was handed to US investigators by a correspondent. The tape was withheld until the victims' families could be notified, although later broadcast.

The "embedding" policy has had other indirect effects. It has made life infinitely more dangerous for "firemen" - free-roaming reporters sent in by news organisations to cover conflicts. The death of Terry Lloyd, ITN correspondent, and two of his crew, apparently as a result of friendly fire, is one tragic example.

Baghdad-based correspondents have also seen their importance diminished. In the first Gulf war, correspondents such as CNN's Peter Arnett grabbed air time simply because they appeared to be in the line of fire.

Today, these correspondents have been upstaged by their colleagues accompanying US and British forces. The advance of the 7th Cavalry Division through the desert, the night-time firefights involving British Marines outside Umm Qasr - these live pictures have beaten out the fuzzy black images of the latest presidential palace exploding on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Television reporters have at times found it hard to maintain distance from their subjects. One network correspondent aboard a US aircraft carrier asked a bomber pilot whether he was pleased with his "performance". On Saturday, a correspondent asked Victoria Clarke, chief spokesperson, whether Americans could expect another "show" like Friday's shock-and-awe strike on Baghdad. War is not a game, snapped Ms Clarke.

Print journalists, too, have found it difficult to avoid being co-opted by the Pentagon's seductive embrace. This is especially true when reporting on the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, has deliberately kept alive rumours that the Iraqi leader is either missing, injured or dead. These comments have been dutifully reported daily, with less attention paid to the underlying goal: sowing confusion in enemy ranks and splitting Mr Hussein from his high command.

Mr Rumsfeld has also dropped hints about unofficial contacts between US intelligence, US special forces and elements of the Iraqi military. Such psy-ops, coupled with the dropping of 25m leaflets in Iraq, the decapitation attempt on the life of Mr Hussein and the bombing of his symbols of power, are all integral to the "effects-based" US military campaign.

In the last resort, much will depend on a short campaign. Pollsters such as John Zogby estimate that public support for the war will remain solid for at least the first three weeks. After that, everything becomes more fluid. This explains why winning the battle for hearts and minds is as important as defeating the Iraqi Republican Guard - not just in Iraq but also in the US and in the rest of the world. That will be the ultimate test of operation Iraqi Freedom.

The writer is US managing editor of the Financial Times

From the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi?file-/chronicle/archive/2003/03/24/MN121046.

DTL Arab news channel fends off criticism of harsh images Al-Jazeera says it must show reality of war

Ashraf Khalil

Monday, March 24, 2003

Doha, Qatar -- The Al-Jazeera news channel, based in Qatar, found itself in the center of a media storm Sunday after airing graphic footage of dead and captured U.S. soldiers.

The video, provided by the Iraqi government, dwelt at length on the corpses of several U.S. servicemen apparently killed during the battle for the southern Iraqi town of Nassiriyah. It later went on to show several dazed, and in some cases bloodied, American POWs being asked questions such as: "Why did you come here to kill Iraqis?"

The airing of the footage, at about 6:30 p.m. local time, cast a pall over the Al Saliyah military base on the outskirts of Al-Jazeera's home city of Doha. One military public affairs officer -- eyes still wet -- declined to comment on the footage, saying, "I really don't want to talk about Al-Jazeera right now."

RAW NERVES EVIDENT

Several hours later, at a daily press briefing, those raw nerves were still evident. After fielding a question by Al-Jazeera correspondent Omar Essawi, Lt. Gen. John Abizaid took exception to the footage, calling its airing "totally unacceptable" and "disgusting." The mood in the press room chilled further when a reporter for New York magazine asked Abizaid if Al-Jazeera would, at some point, be considered "hostile media."

The controversy is just the latest for the 7-year-old Al-Jazeera channel, which has in the past earned the enmity of both the U.S. government and several Middle Eastern countries. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. officials complained publicly about the channel's penchant for airing videos of Osama bin Laden and providing airtime to Muslim fundamentalists and harsh critics of the United States. In early October 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell took the extraordinary step of asking the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, to rein in the channel, which is funded by the Qatari government.

CHANNEL'S MANY CRITICS

Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera has carried on a series of running battles with several Arab governments over its willingness to host guests openly critical of local leaders. Al-Jazeera staffers say the sheer diversity of their critics is proof of their journalistic credentials -- a trait that they say has helped the channel win a vast and loyal Arab viewer base.

One Al-Jazeera producer, who was present when the Iraqi footage first arrived at the channel, said there was never any question of whether to run the images.

"It was footage and it was real, so we ran it," he said. Al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ali Ballout defended the decision to air the gruesome images, saying the channel has never shied away from depicting the reality of war. Earlier Sunday, the channel had aired equally graphic footage of the aftermath of U.S. attacks on the Ansar al Islami group's stronghold in northern Iraq.

"It was horrible today. But it was horrible yesterday as well. War is horrible," he said. "It's like everybody forgot that war creates death."

Most Western broadcasters made repeated reference to the Al-Jazeera footage, but showed only short clippings -- with the faces of the prisoners of war pixilated to obscure their identities.

All the networks said they would not show video of what was said to be an Iraqi morgue containing American bodies, saying the material was neither newsworthy nor appropriate for airing. However, both CNN and NBC aired a still image of bodies that could not be identified.

'HORRIFYING PICTURES'

"They are horrifying pictures, and we are not showing them on MSNBC," said anchor John Siegenthaler. "Why would Al-Jazeera put them on television?"

ABC News President David Westin said he decided not to show the footage of dead soldiers even before learning of a Pentagon request to withhold broadcast.

"I didn't see the showing of actual bodies as necessary or newsworthy," he said. "It was clearly done for the purpose of disturbing and enraging people." But he said he would air the footage of the prisoners of war once their relatives had been notified. CBS spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said her network also would make "judicious and tasteful" use of the POW footage after the Pentagon notification.

Late Sunday, Al-Jazeera aired a news package exploring the issue of what is acceptable to broadcast during wartime -- pointing out that equally gruesome images were commonly shown in the Western media during the Vietnam War, images that helped turn the tide of U.S. public opinion against the conflict.

But in what can be viewed as an acknowledgment of the sensitivity of the issue, Al-Jazeera has not shown the footage again after its initial series of airings. The producer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a decision was made not to show the footage in its entirety again.

Chronicle news services contributed to this report

From The Financial Times

www.ft.com

MEDIA BATTLE

US networks launching TV wars

By Alison Beard and Christopher Grimes in New York

Financial Times, March 21, 2003

US television networks put their multi-million-dollar war news operations to work on Wednesday night, launching into commercial-free coverage minutes after sirens and explosions were heard in Baghdad.

NBC, which had Peter Arnett reporting from the Iraqi capital, was first to preempt its regular programming, but it was followed closely by CBS and CNN and Fox News Channel cable networks. ABC, which had been airing The Bachelor: Where Are They Now?, a follow-up to its hit reality series, was last to break away.

The US strike proved difficult to cover. The networks - and viewers - had been led to believe that the war would begin with an assault that would inspire "shock and awe". But they were forced to make do with benign images from Baghdad, speculation from instudio military experts and reports of relative calm from journalists embedded with troops.

"This is a television event that has been promoted for 18 months," said Robert Thompson, a media studies professor at Syracuse University. "All of a sudden it starts, and it was extraordinary how little footage we had. You could have almost listened-to it on the radio."

Excelling at war coverage is a matter of pride for all the networks. Few will reveal how much money they are spending or how much they may lose as ads are pre-empted and pulled. But analysts estimate that costs will total more than $100m for all the networks combined and that a week's worth of 24-hour coverage would result in lost ad revenues of $130m-$150m.

Still, television executives view war reports as a public service and as a way to build their brand. CNN, in particular, wants to re-establish its strength in cable news, after falling behind Fox. The big broadcast networks also hope to score points with viewers.

"It's important to be all over this from the beginning and we really think we established ownership of the story" on Wednesday, said Allison Gollust, an NBC spokesman.

CBS, which had an exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein last month, earned kudos for early reports from David Martin, Pentagon correspondent, that the US had seized a "target opportunity", launching cruise missiles and bombs ahead of its main onslaught.

Anchor Dan Rather added colourful commentary, describing the attack as a "Good morning Baghdad from President Bush" that would "give Saddam the willies". CNN was the first to report that Saddam Hussein had been a likely target in the Wednesday strike. Only two networks, CBS and Fox, used patriotic symbols in their coverage, putting flags on war report logos and, in Fox's case, on journalists' lapels.

Networks were lambasted for similar moves after the September 11 attacks, with critics arguing that it diminished their journalistic credibility.

"Clearly this was being reported from the American point of view," Mr Thompson said of all the reports. "But the average American viewer doesn't see a problem" with the flag imagery. Nielsen Media Research, which tracks US television viewing habits, said yesterday that it was too early to declare which network had achieved the highest ratings on Wednesday night.

On Monday, ABC's decision to follow President George W. Bush's address with a three-hour news special as competitors returned to sitcoms and dramas boosted the network to a second-place tie in the nightly ratings.

From the Columbia Journalism Review

http://www.cjr.org/year/03/1/hickey.asp

March/April 2003

CABLE WARS

In a Desperate Race for Ratings, the Public Falls Behind

BY NEIL HICKEY

In a windowless, sprawling newsroom the size of a football field below street-level in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, scores of youngish writers, editors, producers, and technicians are scurrying about amid a warren of workstations. The pace quickens as prime time in the East, 7 to 11 p.m., approaches. Along one wall, a row of office "pods" enclose the staffs for Fox News Channel's New York-based on-air personalities: Neil Cavuto, John Gibson, Shepard Smith, Bill O'Reilly. Against the opposite wall is the "war room," where top editors meet to decide what stories get covered and by whom. Occupying the "end zone" of this bustling rectangle is an expansive glass-enclosed master control room, with its towering wall of blinking television monitors, from which Fox News - the nation's number one cable news network - sends its television pictures to 80 million homes.

Three floors above, forty-nine-year-old John Moody sits in a smallish office at an impeccably neat desk before three muted television screens, tuned to CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. Moody is the former Time bureau chief in Eastern Europe and Latin America (and author of a pair of novels) who runs Fox's day-to-day news coverage. He is pondering the question: How did the upstart and reviled (in many quarters) FNC, which came on the air in late 1996, so quickly and unpredictably triumph in the ratings over its two competitors: CNN, the granddaddy of cable news networks, begun in 1980; and MSNBC, which arrived (early 1996) with a silver spoon in its mouth, put there by its parents, two of the richest companies in U.S. business history (General Electric and Microsoft), and having NBC News (also owned by GE) as a sibling?

Few in the press gave FNC much of a chance in that field of three, Moody recalls, but they hadn't counted on the resourcefulness of Roger Ailes, the network's chairman - named by Electronic Media magazine as the most powerful figure in TV news for the last two years - or on Rupert Murdoch's determination to mount a successful cable news operation (and, by the by, to spank his old nemesis, CNN's founder, Ted Turner, who had predicted CNN would "squash Murdoch like a bug"). "We had a message," says Moody. "More than a slogan, it's a way of looking at the news business - 'fair and balanced' - and it rang a chord with American viewers who were tired of being lectured to, of being told that snail darters are more important than jobs. If there's a reason for our success, it's that we speak to people, not down to them."

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Fox executives resent the charge (or pretend to) that Fox is unequivocally a politically conservative network. ("I absolutely, totally deny it," Ailes roared to Brill's Content in 1999. In November, Ailes drew hostile fire when it came to light that he had volunteered policy advice to President George W. Bush.) Critics brand FNC with the scarlet "C," Moody claims, because "we don't accept the standard liberal truisms. They want no tinge of doubt, for example, that Nelson Mandela is the best thing that ever happened to South Africa. I'm not sure that's true. They insist that the most pressing health issue in the U.S. is AIDS. I think more people would rather cure cancer. They want homosexuals treated not just as equals, but given special treatment. On the street where I live, most people would say 'no thank you' to that idea. So if we are accused of being conservative it's because we haven't fallen for the same truisms that have masqueraded as journalism for the last twenty-five years."

NEWS IN A PENNY ARCADE

The matter of FNC's political orientation or lack of it is, in fact, a sideshow issue in the fierce rivalry raging between CNN and Fox, with MSNBC a distant third. In January 2002, FNC for the first time began attracting larger audiences than CNN. In prime time, the network is averaging 1.4 million viewers to CNN's 901,000 and MSNBC's 379,000. On election night 2002 between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. Eastern Time, Fox enjoyed a 35 percent increase in its audience size over the 2000 election night. CNN was down 59 percent and MSNBC fell off 65 percent. Fox's emergence as the most watched cable news network is the more remarkable because CNN reaches 9 million more homes. (Fox's viewers are also more affluent, with $64,500 average income among 25- to 54-year-olds, versus $62,000 for CNN and $59,500 for MSNBC. And CNN's viewers are a lot older: 61.1 years on average, to Fox's 57.4 and MSNBC's 52.3.)

But the big story in cable news is the effect that supercharged competition is having on the quality of the prime time cable news schedule. All three networks are battling with the same weapons: talk, opinion, punditry, debate - not to mention the psychedelic, color-saturated graphics, a rataplan of computer-generated sound, and screens so crowded with info-bits, including a traveling zipper of text across the bottom, that they look like pinball machines in a penny arcade. (CNN's Lou Dobbs and Aaron Brown don't disguise their disdain for the so-called "creepy crawler," which challenges people to read, listen, and watch video all at the same time. Dobbs has encouraged viewers to block out the bottom of their screens with duct tape. Brown responded to the news that CNN research showed that 67 percent of viewers prefer the crawl: "Prefer it to what? Freeze-dried coffee?")

Robert Lichter, president of the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs and a paid consultant to Fox, says: "I've never been able to figure out how competition makes cars better and television news worse." He means that the struggle to grab viewers is currently dragging the whole cable news environment down. "In other industries, competition creates new and different products. In television, it makes all the products look the same. That's weird."

Weird or not, TV watchers are showing up in ever greater numbers for the nightly circuses on cable news. Phenomenally, the average audience has doubled just in the last two years from 1.1 million to 2.2 million, according to Nielsen Media Research figures. It now appears that by 7 p.m., many Americans have ingested all the news they care to hear - on car radios, the Rather-Brokaw-Jennings programs, the Internet - and are ready to settle back after dinner to enjoy gladiatorial slugfests and verbal duels to the death about a narrow range of news events (snipers, Gary Condit, Winona Ryder, JonBenet Ramsey, Elian Gonzalez) rather than detailed, substantive reporting about what's really going on in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and here at home.

Thus, at 7 p.m., CNN's Crossfire, with Robert Novak, Paul Begala, Tucker Carlson, James Carville and guests, stages an OK Corral political shootout between Left and Right, marked by shouted crosstalk before a live audience. Fox's Shepard Smith fronts the network's flagship newscast of the evening, a grab-bag crammed with more than a hundred news and news-feature snippets, many of them just seconds long, interrupted by pounding tympani, terrifying bursts of video-parlor graphics and sound, along with the oft-repeated mantra "We report, you decide." At 8 p.m., Fox's Bill O'Reilly, the king of prime time cable, plays the angry-white-male defender of commonsensical values to an audience (2.4 million) that leaves CNN's Connie Chung (739,000) and MSNBC's hapless, overcaffeinated Phil Donahue (379,000) with the crumbs. Other loudly confrontational tussles arrive at 9: Fox's right-wing Sean Hannity and left-leaning Alan Colmes, opposite MSNBC's hardballing wonk, Chris Matthews. Over at CNN at that hour, Larry King's relatively somnolent style makes him seem increasingly like a senior citizen who has wandered into a heavy-metal concert. Bracketing CNN's prime time schedule at 6 and 10 is a pair of substantial, more traditional newscasts: Lou Dobbs Moneyline and NewsNight with Aaron Brown, with reports from CNN's bureaus around the world. Fox's curtain-raiser at 6 is a newscast cum pundit-fest, orchestrated by the network's main man in Washington, the conservative anchor Brit Hume, with panelists Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke, and Mara Liasson.

So how come Fox's schedule is the big crowd-pleaser? The network's success is arguably more the result of packaging and personalities than right-wing politics.

"They're fast, they're funny, and they're furious," says Reese Schonfeld, the founding president of CNN. "They're also very slick and beautifully produced." He thinks that Ailes - a former adviser to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush One - performed remarkably in overtaking an established brand like CNN in just six years.

WALTZING WITH MSNBC

An evening of cable news watching can leave one overstimulated and underinformed - endless garbaging of opinion with little hard information except for scraps of news at the top of the hour. (More hard news is conveyed in the daytime, when audiences are tiny and the stakes lower.) No long-form documentaries on subjects of crucial importance to the nation interrupt the weekday prime time personality parade. Long gone is a CNN newsmagazine, NewsStand, which utilized the massed firepower of Time Inc. to bring a jot of variety to the schedule. Creating documentaries and covering news is expensive, says Richard C. Wald, a long-time ABC News executive, now a professor at Columbia's journalism school. "Talk is cheap."

CNN's boss, chairman Walter Isaacson - the former editor of Time, drafted in July 2001 by AOL Time Warner to energize CNN - is at pains to build space between his network's talkers and those of the other two. Nobody tunes in Connie Chung and Larry King to learn their opinions, Isaacson told cjr. The task of the ChungKing shows is to elicit the guests' (usually fervent) views. In the same time period, O'Reilly and Hannity & Colmes on Fox and Donahue-Matthews on MSNBC market their own views as the stuff and substance of their programs. "We've moved away, while the other networks have moved toward, the idea of giving opinions," says Isaacson. "We want journalists who are there to listen to other people's news and information and opinions. To say that all talk is the same is missing the point of what cable is about and what the mission is about." Point taken, Crossfire notwithstanding.

The big mystery over at MSNBC is: How come that network, with its enviable pedigree, has demonstrated so little audience appeal that experts are wondering if there's really room in this combat zone for three cable news networks? In April, Erik Sorenson, the president of MSNBC, told USA Today: "Fox is doing the tango while CNN and MSNBC are waltzing. We're doing a beautiful waltz, but the tango is the dance of the day." In October, GE's chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, dissed his own journalists when he appeared on Fox to announce his dismay over MSNBC's performance. "I think the standard right now is Fox," he told Neil Cavuto, the network's business anchor. "I want [MSNBC] to be as interesting and edgy as you guys are." The remark sent morale at MSNBC even lower. Microsoft's ceo, Steve Ballmer, has confessed several times that if he had it to do over again, Microsoft wouldn't team up with NBC News. The company had put up $500 million to buy into cable news, and continues to pay GE a $30 million license fee each year for access to NBC News coverage. The question becomes: Will Microsoft continue its partnership with GE indefinitely, and if so, why?

The idea behind a Microsoft/GE liaison was that NBC News would be the newsgathering mother ship for multiple appendages - MSNBC, CNBC, MSNBC.Com, the NBC affiliates - and that synergy (a term now in some disrepute) would make the whole greater than its parts; also, the deal would usefully conjoin computers and television in marvelous new ways. That structure was brilliant in theory, says Merrill Brown, former editor-in-chief of MSNBC.Com, but the partners are still struggling to figure out how to make it actually work. Unlike the other two cablenets, MSNBC has virtually no capacity of its own to cover major events, and relies almost entirely on NBC News for major stories like wars and election nights.

In July, MSNBC revamped its prime time schedule, banishing Brian Williams and his respectable 8 p.m. newscast to CNBC and thrusting Phil Donahue into combat against O'Reilly and Chung. It was a disastrous misstep, sending all the wrong messages about the network's putative dedication to news. Removing Williams - destined to be Tom Brokaw's successor after the 2004 elections - "reduced the journalism quotient of the entire network," says Jack Myers, editor of the trade journal The Myers Report, "depriving it of a journalist who had visibility and credibility." Donahue started strong, then quickly lost most of his audience, leaving him with a viewership almost too tiny for Nielsen to measure. Barring major improvement, Donahue will disappear from MSNBC's schedule early in 2003, possibly replaced by former Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota.

Enter Jerry Nachman, hired by MSNBC in May as vice-president and editor-in-chief. Nachman, a rough-and-tumble hard-news guy, a former editor of the New York Post, has been a TV news director, radio and TV street reporter, and staff writer on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, and owns a Peabody and an Emmy. What's MSNBC's strategy for getting into the ballgame? "I honestly don't think there is a strategy yet," Nachman replied in mid-October. "But the hole in the middle of that line of scrimmage is so big - between what Fox does with its daunting, jangly pinball machine, and what CNN offers - that somewhere in there is the right place for us to be. Some mix of opinion and hard news." Viewers gravitate to O'Reilly, Nachman says, irrespective of the day's topic. "They want to see him. We don't have anyone like that yet."

The people who have owned and operated MSNBC are afflicted with what Nachman calls "impulse control disorder" - they mess with the schedule and don't give programs enough time to find their audience. O'Reilly earned low numbers on Fox for years, Nachman recalls, but the network stuck with him and eventually he became the most popular figure on cable news. "When the viewers go to Fox or CNN they pretty much know what they're going to get. We've been a work in progress too long. We need to work it out sooner rather than later."

WAR BRIDE?

Even though CNN runs second to Fox in the ratings, it is number one in credibility among all television news sources - broadcast or cable - according to a Pew Research Center poll released in August. Thirty-seven percent of Americans who have an opinion on the matter say they believe "all or most" of what CNN tells them. MSNBC gets 28 percent and FNC 24 percent. Isaacson, who took over the reins at CNN in July 2001, is happy to expand on that. "Just because you're getting the highest rating," he says, "doesn't mean you're doing the right thing. Ratings don't necessarily translate into money or success or respectability or good journalism. I could get extremely good ratings by putting on every car chase, plus wrestling and SpongeBob."

Moneyline, in fact, attracts a smallish audience at 6 o'clock, but its affluent viewers are highly desirable to advertisers, so the program is a major money maker. For such reasons - and others, relating to CNN's presence in more cable households than its competitors - the network boasts higher revenue than both Fox and MSNBC. "Under most ways of defining who's winning," Isaacson says, "we're very healthy, very profitable, and growing, opening more bureaus around the world." CNN's global reach is, in fact, far greater than that of any other TV news organization: forty-two bureaus, thirty-one of them abroad. CNN International, launched five years after CNN, is the world's only global, twenty-four-hour news network, reaching more than 160 million households in 212 countries and territories. For years, CNN has enjoyed pride of place in hotspots like Baghdad and Havana.

The threat of war in Iraq is the armature for a mega-merger that could forever alter the balance of power in the cable news wars. Covering the conflict would drain tens of millions of dollars from news budgets. ABC News is the latest suitor for CNN's hand in a marriage that might save each of them $100 million a year. It would create a news powerhouse that would combine the star power of ABC News - Jennings, Koppel, Sawyer - with the global reach and 24/7 ubiquity of CNN. Experts differ mightily on whether it's a good idea or a dreadful one. The decision to wed or to break off the engagement will be made for monetary reasons, not journalistic ones. Michael Eisner, chairman of Disney (parent of ABC), wants the nuptials badly and so do top-echelon executives at AOL Time Warner, parent of CNN. The question is: Once in the bedroom, who will do what to whom? Who gets to be on top? Who gets operating control? A deal would give ABC News a global audience and CNN would get access to virtually all 110 million U.S. TV homes, rather than just the ones it reaches now via cable and home satellite. CNN's operating profit of $200 million on revenues of $1.6 billion dwarfs that of ABC News.

Eisner's devotion to news is famously minimal: he tried to bump Ted Koppel from Nightline and hire David Letterman; insiders suspect he'd dearly love to be rid of ABC News. Both Disney and AOL Time Warner shareholders are mutinous at the calamitous decline in the companies' stock values. A merger would signal Wall Street that they are serious about taking dramatic action. Trade union issues are a roadblock: much of ABC News is unionized, much of CNN isn't. Also: the combined salaries of ABC's handful of news "stars" - some of them in the $10 million a year range - equal a large percentage of CNN's entire operating budget.

A few Wall Street analysts are leery of the whole idea. Tom Wolzien of Sanford C. Bernstein can claim special insights because, as an NBC News executive for sixteen years, he was involved in three unsuccessful attempts to marry CNN to NBC News. An ABC deal with CNN might not produce the savings both imagine, he believes, or generate the expected spike in the companies' stock prices. In a research report, Wolzien identified two possible cost-saving options: ABC News remains a Disney property but shuts down many of its foreign and domestic bureaus and gets most of its news from CNN. Or: Disney divests itself completely of ABC News and hands the whole news operation over to CNN. Either way, Wolzien concludes, "the marriage could easily turn out to be less than one made in heaven."

Consumer activists are standing on tiptoe, shouting responses to the question: "Does anyone know any reason why this couple should not be joined in matrimony?" Jeffrey Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based watchdog group, expresses sentiments echoed by Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, and other activists. The marriage would harm the public interest by reducing the number of news outlets, he claims, and besides that, Disney promised when it bought ABC - and AOL vowed when it acquired Time Warner - that the deals would add depth and diversity to Americans' news diets. They're reneging on those promises, says Chester, and the Justice Department and the FCC should block the merger.

Others object for less lofty reasons. "I think it's an awful idea," says Reese Schonfeld. "The problems can be worked out on paper but never in the real world." Says Jack Meyers: The plan is "culturally inconceivable."

Will CNN and ABC News actually hook up and thus permanently alter the balance of power in the cable wars? The answer: a firm "maybe."

HAMMERING THE BIG STORY

Cable news generates far more buzz than broadcast news, even though ABC, CBS, and NBC have most of the marquee names and a total audience that makes the cablenets look like scrawny new kids in the neighborhood. Rather-Brokaw-Jennings attract an average of 34.7 million unique viewers. That's more than ten times the 3.2 million people watching CNN, FNC, and MSNBC - plus CNN Headline News and CNBC - from 6:30 to 7 p.m., according to figures compiled by CBS News. But cable news is edgier, noisier, more outrageous, more tendentious - and it's there all the time.

For three weeks in October, for example, the cablenets virtually ignored all other news except the search for the alleged snipers, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. Nielsen figures showed that viewers immediately switched to a rival network whenever one of them bailed out of that story to give other news. Cable's producers read the handwriting on the wall - as they had many times in the past, with O.J., Monica, Chandra, and others - and remorselessly hammered the sniper story, giving short shrift to the coming November elections. It paid off. Cable news won its largest average daily audiences of 2002; on October 24, the day of the capture, 1.7 million people watched FNC, CNN attracted 1.3 million, and MSNBC got nearly 700,000, all record numbers.

CNN's Isaacson admits that his network sometimes runs too hard with a story. Every time he'd tell his producers to scale back coverage of the snipers, however, another victim was shot. "Everybody in the newsroom would go nuts, and I'd say, 'Okay, Okay, never mind.'" Cable news networks have learned to lie in wait for the next big story and then smother it. One such mega-story lifts all boats. In between, their ratings sag. Says Robert Lichter: "The problem for cable journalism is that, too often, all resources are funneled toward the one story that's increasing ratings for everybody. The same journalists who claim to be proud of their high calling will shrug and say, 'The Nielsens made us do it.' There's a hypocrisy there. Economics trumps quality."

The next real test of the power balance in cable news looms, as war with Iraq becomes more likely. CNN, with far greater reach and resources, wants to own the story, as it did in the Persian Gulf in 1991 before FNC and MSNBC were born. That conflict made CNN a major player in global news for the first time. If, as CNN expects, viewers defect to it in droves during the action, the network could once again become the cable news leader by holding onto a percentage of them when the war ends. Eason Jordan, the executive who oversees CNN's international newsgathering, is leading a full-court press in the effort to assure that the network will dominate coverage in a war on Iraq. "It's a struggle every day to maintain our presence there," he says. Hard-line factions within the Iraqi government view all journalists as spies. On one of Jordan's dozen trips to Baghdad, a member of the so-called Revolutionary Command Council accused him not only of spying but of being the CIA station chief for Iraq. Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour, and Richard Roth are among CNN correspondents who've been banned from the country for coverage the Iraqis deem unfriendly.

"If the balloon goes up in Iraq," says Garrick Utley, a CNN contributor, "it will be fascinating to see who comes out on top in the ratings." The old-line warhorses at ABC, CBS, and NBC will be moving their heavy chariots into position, making it a six-horse race instead of three.

But cable news practitioners feel sure that they are the future and that the Rather-Brokaw-Jennings axis is increasingly an anachronism, despite the current numbers. "At this moment, we're in the early stages of a big changeover," says Jack Abernethy, Fox's executive vice president. He's wagering that cable, not broadcasting, will become the principal source of television news in peace as well as in war.

That sounds like a good bet - if you plan to be around long enough to collect.

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