[Media-watch] US battles for public opinion through media

[Julie-ann Davies]

The Carl Conetta report: "Disappearing the Dead. Iraq, Afghanistan and the
idea of a "New Warfare" can be found here:
http://www.comw.org/pda/0402rm9.html#1

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This article:
http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp;:407adee4:ef209fd542bc9f1?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4804894

U.S. battles for public opinion through media in Iraq
By Fiona O'Brien

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Impartial information is increasingly hard to come by in
Iraq.

As fighting has intensified on the ground, U.S. authorities have stepped up
a separate battle for public opinion, tightly controlling the flow of
information to journalists whose ability to move freely in Iraq has been
limited by increasing danger.

The U.S. military, battling Sunni Muslim insurgents to the west of Baghdad
and Shi'ite militants to the south, holds almost daily briefings and issues
statements from offices in Baghdad.

But gaps between statements read from the briefing room podium and
information coming from the ground has widened in recent weeks. Many queries
to the army press office remain unanswered, and sometimes official reports
emerge days after an event.

"I think it's important to understand that they view public information as
an area of battle," said Carl Conetta of the Project for Defence
Alternatives, author of a report on how Washington has been trying to manage
news coming out of Iraq.

"They call it a battle space.

"They understand that both within Iraq and outside the direction of public
opinion, the weight of public opinion, is very important in terms of what
freedom they have to act."

Nowhere is the media war more evident than in Falluja. U.S. Marines launched
a crackdown in the Sunni town last Monday, in response to the killing and
mutilation of four American security guards there. Negotiators are working
to secure a truce.

Deflecting questions about civilian casualties, the army's chief Iraq
spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt has described the Falluja operation
as "tremendously precise, tremendously circumspect and well within the rules
of engagement".

The few independent pictures that have come out of the besieged town of
300,000 would suggest otherwise. Reuters footage that took a day to make it
from Falluja to Baghdad showed dead children, old men and women lying
wounded in overfull makeshift clinics.

Hospital directors in Falluja estimate about 600 people have been killed in
the past week, many of them civilians. More than 1,000 have been wounded.
Doctors say ambulances have been shot at. Residents say air strikes have
killed families.

"CHANGE THE CHANNEL"

Kimmitt said he has no accurate information about the civilian casualties
and denies the United States withholds information about its military
activities.

"We have never actively held back information, the only thing I hold back
are those things that are classified. I think we run an extremely
transparent operation here," he said.

He told a news conference on Sunday that news outlets which said American
forces were responsible for large numbers of civilian casualties should
simply be ignored.

"On the images of American and coalition forces killing innocent civilians,
my advice to you is change the channel...The stations that are showing
Americans killing women and children are not legitimate channels," he said.

While the issue of Iraqi casualties is problematic for an operation aimed at
maintaining Iraqi support and that of other Arabs and U.S. allies, there
appears also to be an attempt to manage the dissemination of information
about Americans hurt.

When residents of Falluja burned and kicked the corpses of the four
Americans, the graphic pictures shocked America and seemed to play a part in
polls showing shrinking support for the Iraq war and for President George W.
Bush's re-election.

At a background briefing at the U.S. Central Command five days later,
officials seemed to be trying to limit the damage.

"It's worth mentioning that in Falluja, when that occurred, I mean, there
were obviously a lot of people out on the streets, but they didn't stay for
very long," a senior U.S. official said at a media briefing, a transcript of
which is on the Internet.

"When we went back over the area about an hour afterwards, most of the
crowds had dispersed. And the crowds were not nearly as big as they are when
you put them on camera and show a scene over and over again."

Yet journalists who were in Falluja that day saw children and men playing
with the bodies hours after they died. The mob mutilated the corpses and
hanged two of them from a bridge. There were no U.S. troops or Iraqi
security forces in sight.

FREEDOM TO MOVE

The U.S. stresses its might, saying it will also "destroy" the army of
radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr which has seized parts of several Shi'ite
towns -- a message analysts say is intended to scare the enemy as much as to
keep allies on side.

U.S. spokesmen play down the size of that insurgency and the increasing
criticism of U.S. tactics by leading Iraqi politicians. In the new Iraq,
officials say, every one is entitled to his own opinion.

It used to be relatively easy for journalists to move around the country to
see events for themselves. But the new threat of kidnapping and familiar
dangers of being shot by U.S. forces or Iraqi guerrillas has left many
journalists trapped in Baghdad.

The U.S. military has urged the media to join Marine units around Falluja -- 
"embed" with the troops, in the jargon -- to see evidence that it says will
prove its critics wrong. Some reporters have done. The Marines say they can
now take no more.