[Media-watch] Don't mention the blood!

[Andy Rowell]

>From New Statesman, published 31st March - www.newstatesman.co.uk

By David Edwards, editor of www.medialens.org

The ability to overlook horrors committed by the west and its allies is
a key job requirement for mainstream journalists. A Nexis database
search showed that between 1990 and 1999 the Los Angeles Times, New York
Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Time used the word "genocide" 132
times to describe the actions of Iraq against Kurds. Over the same
period, the word was used 14 times to describe the actions of Turkey
against Kurds. We all know what Iraq did to the Kurds at Halabja and
elsewhere, but how many people know about the 50,000 Kurdish dead and
three million refugees, victims of Turkish military assault? Who knows
that 80 per cent of the arms were supplied by the US, including M-60
tanks, F-16 fighter-bombers, Cobra gunships, and Blackhawk "slick"
helicopters? As Turkish commandos slip now across the border into
Northern Iraq, the BBC's John Simpson comments: "Of course the Kurds are
very nervous about the whole thing." If an enemy and not a Nato ally had
been involved, we might perhaps have been given a little information on
the detail behind the jitters.

Hiding the horrors committed by the "good guys" becomes harder during
wars. On 21 March the whole world watched as 320 cruise missiles erupted
in the heart of Baghdad, an impoverished city of 5 million people. "In
over 30 years of covering these stories, I have never seen anything of
this magnitude," said the CNN veteran Wolf Blitzer. The intensity of the
bombardment was genuinely shocking - there was the same sense of
ordinary life being overwhelmed by hellish violence as there was on 11
September. Yet the BBC anchor Maxine Mawhinney felt able to declare the
following day: "It's difficult to verify who's been hit, if anyone."
Taking a look inside a hospital was one option to explore. When the
BBC's Hywel Jones managed it, he commented on one small, wailing boy
with head injuries: "It's impossible to verify how he received his
injuries." Perhaps he walked into a door! In fact, doctors with the
International Red Cross were quickly able to verify that patients'
injuries had been sustained from blast and shrapnel - the
Iraqi regime claimed three deaths and 207 hospitalised civilian
casualties.

If the reality of the horror can't be challenged, it can at least be
kept out of sight. Steve Anderson, controller of ITV News, responded to
complaints that the horrors of war are being sanitised: "I have seen
some of the images on Al-Jazeera television. I would never put them on
screen." The BBC's head of news, Richard Sambrook, feels the same way.

The images in question were indeed horrific -  a young Iraqi boy with
the top of his skull blown off with only torn flaps of scalp remaining.
Too much for the British public to bear, we are told. Instead we are
trained to admire the Jeremy Clarkson side of war: the muscular curves
of Tornado bombers, the cruise missiles ripping at the sky. "This is
seriously hardcore machinery going in", drooled one BBC "military
expert".

At the extreme, debate is simply censored. Sir Ray Tindle, chairman and
editor in chief of Tindle Newspapers Ltd, owner of 130 weekly titles,
relayed orders to editors on the eve of war: "When British troops come
under fire. . . I ask you to ensure that nothing appears in the columns
of your newspapers which attacks the decision to conduct the war."
Tindle's papers will be "liberated" at the same time as Iraq:
immediately a "ceasefire" is agreed, he advises, "any withheld letters
or reports may be published".

Then, if Baghdad lies in ruins, and the deserts are drenched in blood,
we shall be free to discuss whether somebody should have tried to stop
it.