Page 230 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

220 Chapter 9

the U.S. government's statements and promises. In the United States' assault on
Falluja, for example, unembedded journalists for A1 Jazeera evoked the anger of
the Bush administration as they filed reports that American soldiers had killed
Iraqi civilians-reports that traveled throughout the Arab World and incited
hostility toward the U.S. government. As one of the most influential news or-
ganizations in the Middle East and the world, A1 Jazeera receives the most atten-
tion in this chapter because it has presented perhaps the most powerful challenge
to U.S. legitimacy in Iraq, considering its massive audience of tens of millions
throughout the Arab World.

ProgressiveLeft Media

Saturday, July 12 2003 marked the death of the seventeenth Western journalist
in Iraq between the period of March and July of that year. Twenty-four years
old, Richard Wild had traveled to Iraq from Britain in order to fulfill his dream
of becoming a war reporter. Shortly after interviewing the director of the Bagh-
dad museum of natural history, Wild was gunned down on a busy street across
from the museum while attempting to hail a cab. Wild was in the middle of
completing a news story chronicling the looting of Iraq's precious antiquities
during the March U.S. invasion. Sadly, Wild died shortly after he was taken to a
nearby hospital by a local who witnessed the attack.' While the shots were fired
from within a group of students, Wild's attacker, nonetheless, was not identified,
and was able to escape in the confusion.
Many reporting on the incident suspected that Wild had become a target due
to his communication with American troops on the streets of Baghdad and his
apparent "military style" dress-both of which may have made attackers think
he was an American ~oldier.~ The British government's response to the attack
evoked outrage amongst journalists who knew Wild, and particularly amongst
his family. In response to his family's criticisms, the British Foreign Office an-
swered that British forces were, as the Telegraph of London reports, "powerless
to act at the time because coalition forces and Iraqi police had been too busy"
with other military operations.10
Wild, like many other unembedded journalists working throughout Iraq,
was at a security disadvantage in that, unlike embedded reporters, he did not
enjoy the protection of American or British military forces. His death is a re-
minder of the danger that unilateral journalists place themselves in, in order to
report free from government influence and censorship. Aaron Glantz, a unilat-
eral reporter in Iraq for Paczjka Radio, reflects on the death of two journalists in
mid-2005 at the hands of American forces: "Hearing these stories I think about
my own time as an unembedded journalist in Iraq. In six months reporting from
the ground, I never once had a gun pointed at me by an "insurgent," but on two
occasions I felt personally threatened by an American soldier's machine gun.""
Independence from military censorship and guidelines comes not only at the
cost of a reporter's physical safety, but with other disadvantages as well. In re-
porting outside of the corporate media establishment, journalists suffer from a