[Media-watch] Hotel journalism gives American troops a free hand as the press shelters indoors

[Antony Wright]

*Hotel journalism gives American troops a free hand as the press 
shelters indoors* by: Robert Fisk

"Hotel journalism" is the only phrase for it. More and more Western 
reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the 
streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by 
hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices 
from which their editors refuse them permission to leave.
Most use Iraqi stringers, part-time correspondents who risk their lives 
to conduct interviews for American or British journalists, and none can 
contemplate a journey outside the capital without days of preparation 
unless they "embed" themselves with American or British forces.

Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by reporters in so distant and 
restricted a way. /The New York Times/ correspondents live in Baghdad 
behind a massive stockade with four watchtowers, protected by locally 
hired, rifle-toting security men, complete with /NYT/ T-shirts. 
America's NBC television chain are holed up in a hotel with an iron 
grille over their door, forbidden by their security advisers to visit 
the swimming pool or the restaurant "let alone the rest of Baghdad" lest 
they be attacked. Several Western journalists do not leave their rooms 
while on station in Baghdad.

So grave are the threats to Western journalists that some television 
stations are talking of withdrawing their reporters and crews. Amid an 
insurgency where Westerners - and many Arabs as well as other foreigners 
- are kidnapped and killed, reporting this war is becoming close to 
impossible. The murder on videotape of an Italian correspondent, the 
cold-blooded killing of one of Poland's top reporters and his Bulgarian 
cameraman, and the equally bloody assault on a Japanese reporter on the 
notorious Highway 8 south of Baghdad last year have persuaded many 
journalists that a large dose of discretion is the better part of valour.

/The Independent/, along with several British and American papers, still 
covers stories in Baghdad in person, moving with hesitation - not to 
mention trepidation - through the streets of a city slowly being taken 
over by insurgents. Only six months ago, it was still possible to leave 
Baghdad in the morning, drive to Mosul or Najaf or other major cities to 
cover a story, and return by evening. By August, it was taking me two 
weeks to negotiate my dubious safety for a mere 80-mile journey outside 
Baghdad.

I found the military checkpoints on the motorways deserted, the roads 
lined with smashed American trucks and burnt-out police vehicles. Today, 
it is almost impossible. Drivers and translators working for newspapers 
and television companies are threatened with death. Several have asked 
to be relieved of their duties on 30 January lest they be recognised on 
the streets during Iraq's elections. In the brutal 1990s war in Algeria, 
at least 42 local reporters were murdered and a French cameraman was 
shot dead in the Algiers casbah. But the Algerian security forces could 
still give a minimum of protection to reporters. In Iraq, they cannot 
even protect themselves.

The police and the Iraqi National Guard - much trumpeted by the 
Americans as the men who will take over after an American withdrawal - 
are heavily infiltrated by insurgents. Checkpoints may be manned by 
policemen, but it is now unclear just who the cops are working for. US 
troops operating in and around Baghdad are now avoided by Western 
journalists, unless they are "embedded", as much as they are by Iraqis 
because of the indiscipline with which they open fire on civilians on 
the least suspicion.

So questions are being asked. What is a reporter's life worth? Is the 
story worth the risk? And, much more seriously from an ethical point of 
view, why do not more journalists report on the restrictions under which 
they operate? During the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, editors often 
insisted on prefacing journalists' dispatches from Saddam's Iraq by 
talking about the restrictions under which they were operating. But 
today, when our movements are much more circumscribed, no such "health 
warning" accompanies their reports. In many cases, viewers and readers 
are left with the impression that the journalist is free to travel 
around Iraq to check out the stories which he or she confidently files 
each day. Not so.

"The United States military couldn't be happier with this situation," a 
long-time American correspondent in Baghdad says. "They know that if 
they bomb a house of innocent people, they can claim it was a 
'terrorist' base and get away with it. They don't want us roaming around 
Iraq and so the 'terrorist' threat is great news for them.

"They can claim they've shot 600 or 1,000 insurgents and we have no way 
of checking because we can't go to the cemetery or visit the hospitals 
because we don't want to get kidnapped and have our throats cut."

Thus, many reporters are now reduced to telephoning the American 
military or the Iraqi "interim" government for information from their 
hotel rooms, receiving "facts" from men and women who are even more 
isolated from Iraq in the Baghdad Green Zone around Saddam Hussein's 
former republican palace than are the journalists. Or they take reports 
from their correspondents who are embedded with American troops and who 
will, necessarily, get only the American side of the story.

Yes, it /is /still possible to report from the street in Baghdad. But 
fewer and fewer of us are doing this, and there may come a time when we 
have to balance the worth of our reports against the risk to our lives.

We have not reached that point yet. So far, we still see a little more 
of Iraq than the people who claim to be running this country.

[ENDS]

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