Page 23 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

12 Toby Miller
whereas U. S. media presented the camps as containing refugees from Taliban
oppression and the dangers of civil war.
(Kellner 2003: 125)
Perhaps next time the BBC should insist on including voice-overs as part of the
package.
As the invasion of Iraq loomed, Murdoch said ‘there is going to be collateral
damage...if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now’
(quoted in Pilger 2003). The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s analysis of
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox found that in the opening stanza of the Iraq
invasion, 50 per cent of reports from the 1,000 journalists working embedded
with the invaders depicted combat. Zero per cent depicted injuries. As the war
progressed, the most we saw were deeply sanitized images of the wounded from
afar, in keeping with the 50 contractual terms required of reporters in return for
their ‘beds’ (Boyd-Barrett 2004: 30–31; Sharkey 2003). Coverage of the impact
of the invaders was dismissed by PBS News Hour Executive Producer Lester
Crystal as not ‘central at the moment’ (quoted in Sharkey 2003). NBC corre-
spondent David Bloom astonishingly offered that the media were so keen to
become adjuncts of the military that they were ‘doing anything and everything
that they can ask of us’ (quoted in Carr 2003), and WABC radio’s N.J. Burkett
compared soldiers preparing their weapons to ‘an orchestra on an opening night’
(quoted in Rutenberg 2003). Marcy McGinnis, senior vice-president of news at
CBS, claimed that the networks brought ‘this war into the living rooms of
Americans...the first time you can actually see what’s happening’ (quoted in
Sharkey 2003) and Paul Steiger, Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal,
divined that US media coverage of the invasion of Iraq ‘was pretty darned good’
(quoted in Friedman 2003). What counted as ‘happening’ and ‘darned good’ was
extraordinarily misshaped and unbalanced – in fact systematically distorted. This
contrasted drastically with what other nations received.
No wonder Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s thought-disordered remark
about Baghdad – that ‘It looks like it’s a bombing of a city, but it isn’t’ – received
much uncritical US coverage. Statements by the International Red Cross and
many, many other notable non-Pentagon sources detailing Iraqi civilian casualties
from the bombing-of-a-city-that-wasn’t, received virtually none (FAIR 2003d;
Wilkinson 2003). Nor did memorable Congressional speeches against this blood-
thirsty militarism by Senators Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy (Schlesinger 2003).
First-hand accounts of an unarmed family in a car being shot by US soldiers were
overridden by the desire to promote the Pentagon’s strenuous insistence that the
protocols for shooting an unarmed family in a car were followed (FAIR 2003e).
There was no mention on any network of the US military’s use of depleted
uranium and virtually no consideration of the impact of cluster bombs – both
major stories everywhere else and subject to serious complaints by Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch. The US claim to have dropped just 26
cluster bombs was belied by the thousands that had to be ‘cleaned up’, but this