COLUMN: Warmongers can’t only read newspapers
It is distressing, these days, that warmongering has become almost as American as rooting for the home team.
Peaceniks are derided as spoiled children who simply don’t understand what the political grown-ups have to do. They are scoffed at as ill-mannered beneficiaries of true patriots who preach the homily of freedom to the world.
To make their case against the pacifists, the hawks turn to what appears to be their only repository of information, the popular press. They devour their daily dose of partisan rhetoric, and then proceed to spit it back out, somewhat incoherently, at those who disagree with their point of view. Rationality is debunked as twaddle.
What the hawks fail to comprehend is that the popular press is challenged during this war. It is lost on them that there are facts behind the news that sometimes get left out as reporters scramble to cover stories and as they struggle with the complexities of “embedded reporting.” These details are vital to developing a complete understanding of the situation on the ground in Iraq.
Let me illustrate.
I listened intently to a National Public Radio story Monday morning, which told of the domestic support for allied troops in Iraq. The reporter, with the aid of a 22-year-old military translator, interviewed an Iraqi Muslim whose acreage has been occupied by U.S. forces. The man is only happy to play host, the reporter was told.
“He says he believes that Saddam Hussein can be defeated,” the translator said. “He says that when U.S. forces came, they took down a picture of Saddam and replaced it with a portrait of Ali, their prophet.”
That line, announcing Ali as prophet, changed my whole perception of the story. Ali is the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. The Shiite sect originated as a political movement to support his succession to the caliphate. They argued that Mohammed had designated Ali as his successor. Sunni Islam disagreed, thus driving a wedge between the two groups.
In Iraq, Shiites have been subjugated by the Sunnis, and most notably Hussein, since he assumed leadership of the country in 1979. Small wonder, then, that the interviewee was eager to see the dictator ousted.
The Shiites have detested Hussein for decades, long before he fell from grace. Their opposition to the Baath Party was strong back in the late 1970s, when the United States found in Hussein’s totalitarian regime a worthy ally to quell the fundamentalist forces of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
The NPR reporter omitted any reference to the different Islamic sects and their political preferences. I picked up on a subtle detail in the story, due in large part to my personal experiences with the Islamic faith in India, and discovered that there wasn’t a significant shift in Iraqi loyalties after all. The Sunni Muslims in Tikrit aren’t crying out for deliverance, even if the Pentagon wants us to believe that.
The hawks, on the other hand, are persuaded by such distortion. They point to speculative news reports that merely mouth the Bush administration’s line. Consider the news flashes in the run-up to this war, for instance.
We learned of the alleged connection between Hussein and the al-Qaida. We watched Colin Powell address the United Nations with “evidence” of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Headlines screamed war, and we swallowed the hoopla whole.
This was propaganda at its best – blatant and hollow.
Listen to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd writing in The New York Times: “In pursuit of what they [the administration] call a ‘moral’ foreign policy, they stretched and obscured the truth. First, they hyped CIA intelligence to fit their contention that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked. Then they sent Colin Powell out with hyped evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Then, when they were drawing up the battle plan, they soft-pedaled CIA and Pentagon intelligence warnings that U.S. troops would face significant resistance from Saddam’s guerrilla fighters.”
Unfortunately, Dowd’s insightful commentary is an exception to the standard fare.
But the hawks don’t know this. They point to news stories from the front, and suggest that the peaceniks have it all wrong. That these accounts of the battle come from so-called “embedded reporters” doesn’t concern them.
It should.
While a “resident reporter” in an army unit is privy to the inner workings of war, he is limited in his ability to provide balanced reporting.
“They have become very close to the troops they are covering – maybe too close,” professor Joe Angotti, chairman of the broadcast department at Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism told The Daily Northwestern. “They spend 24 hours a day with them, they eat with them, they sleep with them. And when it comes time for them to be critical or ask tough questions, I think it may be difficult for them to ask those tough questions and report negative news.”
Utah State University professor and author Michael Sweeney, a wartime journalism guru, agrees. He says news organizations should ideally have a mix of embedded and independent or “unilateral” reporters in Iraq. That way, the coverage is not reliant mainly on reporters whose view of the war is limited to the army unit with which they are traveling.
In addition to these obvious problems, respected independent correspondents in Iraq face tremendous resistance from networks as they endeavor to provide uncharacteristic perspectives on the war. Take the case of NBC’s Peter Arnett.
The network fired Arnett for granting an interview to Iraqi government-run television, in which he said the war effort was failing because of unforeseen Iraqi resistance.
This has triggered debate in academic circles.
“Arnett’s mistake was that he put himself in a position where he could be manipulated,” Angotti said. “By going on Iraqi television … his words could be taken out of context and used as a propaganda tool.”
Others disagree.
Professor Richard Schwarzlose, also of Northwestern University, said journalists owe their viewers insight.
“If all we can offer is the pabulum of facts, if that’s all there is to it, we are shortchanging our readers,” he told The Daily Northwestern. “If all you are going to do is give them the facts, then it seems that you are denying your audience your expertise.”
The outcome of this discussion is important, but not central to my argument. Essentially, the point I seek to make is that dismissing the peace movement as absurd, based simply on a handful of facts gleaned from a couple of news outlets, smacks of foolishness more than arrogance.
The words of Thomas Jefferson come to mind: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
Leon D’Souza is a senior majoring in journalism. Comments can be sent to leon@cc.usu.edu.