[Media-watch] Richard Keeble / Independent on Sunday

[Darren Smith]

Richard Keeble: We see more and more of the conflict, but we know as
little as ever

Most of the US/UK's important military action is covert, away from
prying TV cameras and the public's gaze

Independent on Sunday, 30 March 2003

Propaganda is a vital ingredient of military strategy during the
conflict with Iraq. The enemy is manufactured, its leaders demonised,
and its strength grossly exaggerated. Yet the media are not part of a
massive conspiracy. Rather, the war myth is the result of profound
geostrategic, ideological, social, political and economic factors.

Most of the important military activity by the US and the UK is covert,
away from prying TV cameras and the public gaze. But our screens are
filled with images of the war. Constantly repeated – and tightly
controlled – battlefield images of coalition forces in action feature as
never before on TV, while seemingly endless speculation by military
commentators only serve to crowd out the views of oppoenents to the
aggression by the US and the UK. Horrific images of the dead and wounded
shown by the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera are not being allowed to
disturb the sanitised representation of the conflict for British
viewers.

Today the most obvious contrasts with the 1991 coverage arise from the
access to the frontlines for the 600 US and 128 UK journalists
"embedded" with the troops, and the round-the-clock television coverage.

Not surprisingly, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, was quick to praise
the "embeds": "The imagery they broadcast is at least partially
responsible for the public's change of mood with the majority of people
now saying they back the coalition." And those distant shots, from an
eerily static camera, of huge mushroom clouds erupting over Baghdad
following yet another night-time aerial bombardment only seem to
acclimatise the viewer to the everyday ordinariness of the horror.

In contrast, during the first Gulf conflict, reporting pools were used
to keep journalists huddled in packs in Saudi Arabia away from the
frontlines, although the war in the Gulf had to be seen. The US
desperately needed to fight a "big" war to help "kick the Vietnam
syndrome", to legitimise its enormous military budget and to reinforce
the power of the military/industrial/intelligence elite.

In the end there was nothing more than a series of massacres bureid
beneath the myth of heroic warfare. Colin Powell, then chair of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported in his autobiography that 250,000

Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict – compared to just 150 in the
US-led forces (most of them through "friendly fire").

Reporters such as Robert Fisk of the Independent and Peter Sharp of ITN,
who dared to operate away from the pools, were intimidated by the
military and some of their journalist colleagues. Most of the crucial
military action in 1991 came from the air, and since journalists had no
access to fighter jets, the conflict was kept largely secret.

This time a repeat of the same kind of media controls was never feasible
since the Middle East has been swarming with thousands of journalists
for months. In any case, military censorship regimes always serve
essentially symbolic purposes – expressing the arbitrary power of the
army over the conduct and representation of war.

For their part, mainstream journalists, influenced by professional norms
and conventional news values, can usually be relied upon to apply
self-censorship. All the mainstream print and broadcast media, just
before the bombing of Baghdad on 20 March, were happy to highlight
Pentagon leaks that suggested 3,000 missiles and precision-guided bombs
would be dropped on Iraq in an early "shock and awe" campaign.

Now, as the UK/US tanks build up outside Baghdad, countless unnamed
Iraqi troops and conscripts are being killed away from the TV cameras.
When civilian homes are destroyed, such tragedies are "inevitable", the
fault of "Saddam" or simply "mistakes" – blips in an otherwise
smoothmilitary operation rather than moral outrages.

Take, for instance, the coverage of the bombing of the Baghdad market on
26 March. How many were killed? "At least 14," say the media. But they
remain anonymous – dehumanised "targets". We can expect no profiles of
the Iraqi dead or their grieving families.

Richard Keeble is professor of journalism at Lincoln University, and the
author of 'Secret State, Silent Press' (John Libbey), a study of press
coverage of the 1991 Gulf War