"This is a checkpoint." "Here is what is interesting." "We all have guns, right?" "I don't have a gun, but my driver has a gun my security guy has a gun, and they're looking for guns." "And so, they're going to search us." "So now they start to, and then when I say, Hey, look I am American, they kind of go Oh, and let you go." " You all keep going." " It is a free country." " Where are you all from?" " I'm from LA, I'm with CBS News." " CBS?" " Yah." "Fair Use:(Far-yüs), Function:noun 1." "The non-competitive right to use copyrighted material without giving the author compensation or to sue for infringement of copyright." "There is a school of thought that says we should have given the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge and flatten the place." "Then the war would already be over and we could have done that in two days." "Fair Use:" "2." "The common and accepted practice of permetting use of brief excerpts of news footage for legitimate purposes of media criticism and analysis in furtherance of freedom of press and opinion" "One of the things we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country." "Target Iraq." "Operation Iraqi freedom." "Are we gonna fix that technical problem?" "Tick tock its time for shock." "Are you bored?" "It's time to get awed." "ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/FOX News" "Breaking news" "Faking news/ Da media war" "It's time to get sore" ""Read my Apoca-lips" March 2003" "Wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war." "And there they start moving into Iraq." "We got rockets coming in on us." "Tom, we're under attack right now." "PFC Jessica Lynch who being held..." "The battle of Basra is still raging along this way..." "The invasion of Iraq has invaded my brain." "It's like i am under attack " "War is all i see." "I dream of an endless desert dissolving into bombs falling, into tanks rolling, into soldiers shooting, into people dying, into reporters reporting " "If that is what they are really doing." "Just this second, we've crossed over the border into Iraq." "Talk about embedding..." "Even my bed offers no escape from the 24-hour news cycle, spin cycle, iraqi freedom cycle—the pentagon has invaded my living room." "Their generals have taken over my tv set." "Is it news or propaganda?" "Or in this age of media mergers, has the media merged with the military?" "You don't have to go into the jungle anymore to find the horror." "It has come home!" "I feel like i'm living through my own media apocalypse " "Under fire on the polluted river of tv news." "This is media war without end." "I'm a media critic..." "My job:" "To dissect the news." "There were two wars going on in Iraq one fought with soldiers, bombs, shock and awe." "The other was fought alongside it, with cameras, satellites, and armies of journalists;" "They were fighting a media war - that was the one i covered." "Throughout the war i was "self-embedded" at this computer, writing about media coverage worldwide for the mediachannel. org website." "Every day i read newspapers and magazines, sifted through websites, listened to the radio, and studied the tv coverage." "Right in front of us, an amazing sight..." "It's just like out of an action movie, but this is real." "The war went on for 720 hours." "I watched as much as i could stand, and was not the only critical journalist." "So, was this journalism or was this coverage?" "There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage." "And getting access does not mean you're getting the story," "It just means your getting one more arm or leg of the story." "And that's what we got." "Live coverage of a war, is... to describe that, as live journalism is, I think, an oxymoron." "I think it's bad journalism." "I thought the entire American media, print as well as audio and video, was seduced by this run up to the war." "There was an envelopment in the American flag, a patriotic sweep." "Say what you like about Robert Murdoch's Fox network - it's strange intimacy with God and the US administration but it takes real flair to put this on national television..." "Using the facilities when there aren't any facilities." "How are you going to the bathroom, buddy?"" "So the reporter called the soldier over..." "You want to demonstrate for us how you sit on that shovel?" " Yes." " You want me to do it?" "Go ahead." "There you go, there you go." "Isn't that something?" "In the second Back of the Book segment today, a book called The More You Watch, The Less You Know." "With us is the author of The More You Know Danny Schechter, who has had many TV news jobs, including being a producer for 20/20." "Years ago i became a network refugee, challenging the superficiality of mainstream news, especially in its treatment of war." "Even when covering wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, i also critiqued the coverage." "I did the same when i worked at CNN and ABC news, and then with colleagues on globalvision's tv series about South Africa that told unreported stories." "Ditto for human rights coverage of Bosnia and Saddam's terrible crimes and abuses." "Warring with the reporting of war has been an obsession for years." "I lambasted media failures during all the hoopla around the first gulf war." "The majority is saying thumbs up, y'know...and I like that!" "So here i go again..." "THE PAST IS NEVER PAST" "UPI Cameraman Abe Keller came down with the GI's took these dramatic scenes while the dead and dying covering the floors..." "It was this history of covering wars that led me to look at the relationship between the media and the military." "To understand why people rally around the flag the way they do, you have to consider the information that shapes their opinions and impressions." "How wars are covered, or covered up, is key." "I can say without reservation that these magnificent young Americans are as fine as any fighting men our nation has ever sent into battle." "The pentagon's efforts to control press coverage were a response to the loss of the war in Vietnam." "Many of the military to this day believe that the media coverage was responsible for America's defeat - not the armed forces or the policy." "In that era, reporters were far more aggressive in exposing war crimes and duplicity." "Peter Arnett was one of them." "In Vietnam, the reporters did not get on the team." "We challenged generals, governments." "We challenged, we demanded their accountability, we challenged their findings." "Vietnam is seen by the right wing as a war in which the American media sold out to the communist side." "Well, you should be a pain in the ass," "I mean any reporter, in a time like Vietnam i mean, you ought to be a pain in the ass, because that's when it counts." "Generally, it is my belief that Richard Nixon was much more of a national security threat to the United States than any reporter I know." "After Vietnam, The Pentagon limited media access to its wars, while improving outreach to journalists with training exercises like this:" "I'm sorry ma'am, I'm really busy, I need to attend to these people." "Excuse me please." "Remember everything you say is on the record." "If the camera is off." "It doesn't matter;" "it's on the record." "You say it, it can be used." "Ma'am, basically all the soldiers here are heroes in one way or another." "Wars may destroy people and countries, but they can be profitable to cover." "CNN won the 1991 Gulf War in the sense that its coverage propelled a struggling cable news operation known in the industry as the Chicken Noodle Network into a top global news brand;" "revenues followed as ratings soared." "Iraqi forces in Kuwait." "Iraq claims the attack is failing." "And so did patriotic fervor even as media objectivity eroded, that old truism " "Truth is the first casualty in war was never more true." "Journalists were denied access to most of the 1991 Gulf War... writes CNN's Christiane Amanpour:" "Behind our backs, behind the backs of the field reporters, field producers and crews on the ground our bosses made a deal with the establishment to create "pools" what i call 'ball and chain'," "handcuffed, managed news reporting." "The result?" "We later learned the Smart bombs used then were not so smart only one out of five hit targets." "Most U.S. casualties were caused by friendly fire." "I've covered enough wars to be in a position to say this, that we have never, I, including me, have never shown the viewer what it's really like " "What and how horrible war is." "And partly you can't show it, because the camera can't capture it, but even at a certain level the camera may capture it and they won't let you show it." "There are certain kinds of close-ups that we won't show, there's certain blood spatters, dead children that we don't show people partly because it violates certain long-standing practices:" "Don't put gore on television." "The coverage of the Gulf Wars lacked more than gore:" "context and background were missing." "Like the role the us played in putting Saddam Hussein in power and arming him for years." "America's war on Iraq did not end with the end of that war." "Washington initiated, and the UN imposed sanctions which, coupled with the cruelty of Saddam's regime reportedly led to a million children dying..." "And the spread of new diseases a mysterious Gulf War syndrome struck veterans..." "The US and Britain imposed no fly zones, using them as a cover for war-like bombing raids years before the 2003 invasion..." "None of these stories received the full coverage they deserved." "Oh my God!" " And then came 9/11" " Huge explosion now raining debris on all of us;" "we better get out of the way." "The Bush administration used the attack as a pretext to put in place secret plans to invade Iraq, drawn up before 9/11." "The media was mobilized behind the war on terror..." "In post 9/11 america, a patriotic correctness swept through the news business." "Tv anchors put flags in their lapels." "I wrote a book showing how the coverage advanced the government's plan to respond militarily." "Some stories explaining why they hate us gave way to this:" "It all became very personal with 9/11." "I was in command of my battalion at that time." "I mean i was in the training meeting when that happened." "The unspeakable acts against pillars of strength being hit by aircraft." "You can imagine what it was like." "It all became, you know, very, very personal." "Much of the coverage fueled demands for retaliation." "There was often more debate in the streets than on tv." "The same hatred that killed so many people." "Many networks said they didn't want to get ahead of public opinion, or be baited as soft on terrorism." "They don't love me and I don't love them, okay." " Love they neighbor?" " Okey." "This confrontation at Ground Zero in New York shows what happened when a peace activist called for global understanding." "What about us?" "Do you care about every human being here?" "It's September 11, you're at Ground Zero." "If they do something to us, we're not going to do nothing back?" "We're not going to do nothin' back?" "They didn't do anything." "Iraq did not do shit to America." "So you're saying it's okay to kill innocent people." "Listen." "If it's for a better good." "Let's do it." " Yeah I Volunteered." "You know why?" " To keep your ass free." "To keep your hippie ass free, he puts his life on the line." "Don't forget the American media is based in NYC." "Every reporter in NYC saw the World Trade Towers collapse " "They took it personally." "There was a sense of revenge and fear and that was reflected in the coverage of Afghanistan War and the War on Terrorism." " We may be wrong about some of the things we pass along..." "CBS's Dan RATHER September 222001:" "I am willing to give the president and the military the benefit of any doubt." "As we moved into Iraq, a more pre-emptive strike, the media maintained this sort of romance, you might say, with government." "THE RUN-UP TO WAR" "But the fact that they allowed the Bush administration to manipulate the truth so grossly and so nakedly in the run up to the war made the war possible." "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." "All the while Washington insisted Iraq had to be disarmed, that it had proof that saddam had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world." "The demonization of Saddam went on for five months." "During the run-up to the Iraq war," "American media outlets including most tv networks and the NY Times relayed the adminstration's spin on the threat posed by Iraq without much question." "Without their cheerleading, there could have been no consensus for war." "In May 2004, the New York Times acknowledged its pre-war reporting had been deeply flawed." "A Times editor called it an institutional problem indicting editors and reporters who quote, coddled sources and practiced hit and run journalism." "He admitted America's self-styled newspaper of record had not just reported the story but was part of it;" "quote, covering the war was not the times at its best." "Only now of course we're learning so much of the stuff that we simply assumed must be accurate wasn't accurate at all." "The ombudsman of the Washington Post later admitted:" ""It's clear now that the press, as a whole, did not do a very good job in challenging administration claims." "Critical perspectives, perspectives about alternatives to war, all the kind of efforts and discussion of the peace movements virtually disappeared from the media at that very point where, notionally, a society was making up its mind as to whether to go to war or not." "The media monitoring group fairness and accuracy in reporting or "fair" studied 1,617 on-camera sources between March 20th and April 9th, 2003." "They found 71 percent of all sources were pro-war only 3 percent antiwar." "I saw a figure the other day." "I forget the exact figures but something like there were 800 experts used during the war on all the American broadcasts outlets." "And only 6 were opposed to the war." "Now, that seems a pretty odd state of affairs." "In this period, i was hoping war would be averted." "UN deliberations were covered but dismissively." "International opinion was not taken seriously." "The media frame became us versus "them."" "There was a buzz here for many weeks, one journalist told me." "That buzz is gone." "Instead, there is a pall, a feeling of total frustration." "The united nations wanted to give the arms inspectors time to finish the job." "But the Bush administration bypassed the UN claiming to act in its name by launching a preventive war." "Unilaterally, as an act of self-defense." "Britain and a few other nations joined what was officially branded a coalition of the willing;" "critics called it a coalition for the drilling." "How can the United Nations survive this failure?" "The United Nations is more important than ever." "We need collective responsibility." "When countries like France called for more UN inspections, they were denounced as cheese eating surrender monkeys in some media outlets." "And despite the fact that we have no weapons of mass destruction, the US armies have crossed the Atlantic and they have prepared hundreds of thousands of other soldiers." "The United States insisted they were there." "What happened to those weapons?" "Well, I think it has been destroyed." "It has been destroyed by the Iraqi government." "Because they felt at that time that there is no need for it." "Anyway they cannot use it because if they would like to use this chemical weapons, the other side will destroy the whole Iraqi people and the whole Iraqi country." "So I think they did realize that, and for this reason they destroyed it." "And they destroyed earlier '91-'92." "This claim, ridiculed by media then, is largely accepted now." "An exhaustive March 2004 University of Maryland study on the coverage of WMD's found that threat was exaggerated, reported inaccurately and irresponsibly." "After the invasion phase of the war ended, journalists debated their role in fueling a war climate." "On one panel Harper's Rick Macarthur challenged Times's Michael Elliot." "Afterwards i spoke with both..." "Is it the news culture?" "Is it lack of critical thinking?" " Is it economic interests?" "Is it all of the above?" " Well, it's all those things, but it's mostly owners who don't care about journalism." "I think the American media has done a fabulous job since September 11th." "Wasn't this a media system that was cheerleading for the war?" "I think, undoubtedly, what you saw in the war was a sharper distinction between the print media and the TV media than I've ever seen before, maybe I should have said that in the session just now." "They have got to watch what they say." "If Michael Elliot gets up there and says," "Yeah, Time didn't do a very good job covering the war, or covering the run up to the war, he's out of a job." "He's getting in trouble with his bosses." "I can say it because I'm a publisher." "MUZZLING DEBATE, MARGINALIZING DISSENT." "In the run up to war, dissent was marginalized, debate was limited, protest and protesters seen but rarely heard." "More than a million demonstrators turned out in London." "The march is thought to be the largest ever in Great Britain." "Sadly, the coverage was at its worst in the period when it mattered most." "The period bracketed by the worldwide demonstrations on February the 15th and actually going to war was one in which British public opinion turned 'round from being approximately 60-40 against the war to approximately 60-40 in favor of the war." "Washingon Post ombudsman Michael Getler blasted his own paper for: underreporting or poorly displaying coverage of big demonstrations here and abroad." "There was fairly decent coverage of the fact that there was an anti-war movement." "What there was not decent coverage of was the analysis or what our... we were trying to say about what was wrong with the war, why we never should've gone to war, why the war needed to end," "what was driving sort of the motor force behind the war." "That analysis never got into the mainstream media." "It was freezing in New York during the huge February demonstration." "The Turning Point:" "No War In Iraq" "It's ironic it's taken George W. Bush to revive the progressive movements in the United States and Western Europe." "SMUSH BUSH!" "South Africa's bishop Tutu was a featured speaker." " What do we say to peace?" " Yeah!" "The mainstream media sort of ghettoizes this kind of coverage, and doesn't allow it to really enter into the mainstream discourse." "I think that they'll report it." "They'll show the crowds as a mass." "They might show some sound bites, but they won't really get into what the significance of this movement is." "At later protests, i spoke with journalists and activists about the coverage we were then being bombarded with." "The purpose of journalism is to question the prevailing wisdom..." "The journalism we see in this country for the most part in the mainstream media does not question anything." "But that scares me to think that here it is, it's a war, people's lives, the whole world is changing, and most of us are just watching it like another entertainment channel." "If we invade Iraq, there's a UN estimate that says there will be up to half a million people killed or wounded." "Do we have the right to do that to a country that has done nothing to us?" "Frozen out of the news, activists tried to buy airtime for anti-war commercials like this:" "No nation under God has that right." "It violates international law." "It violates God's law." "Most networks wouldn't run the spots, even for the money." "Many activists soured on mainstream news, turning to hundreds of internet sites." "They also turned to foreign tv outlets especially the BBC." " Iraq" " Saddam" " Iraq" " Saddam" " Iraq" " Saddam" " Iraq" " Saddam" " Iraq..." "Many young people abandoned the news altogether, preferring satirical newspapers like The Onion and comedy news shows." "Hey everybody." "Many turned to alternative, independent media." "It's up to the media to challenge those in power, not to cozy up to power." "So you have this media that's embedded now in the government, in the military." "And, yet at the same time there's hope, because there is a response to that, and that is the independent media movement." "THE MEDIA INVASION" "A global news army was put in place before war erupted on all sides of the conflict, media outlets were spun or controlled by governments." "In Baghdad, mainstream journalists say it was tough to get the truth;" "sometimes, independent reporters were able to do better." "Every foreigner is followed by the secret police, but journalists are watched even closer, there was an army under Saddam Hussein of government officials whose only job it was, to spy on journalists." "So, you have no way to avoid being under the control of the Iraqi Ministry of Information." "They tapped my phone in my office, my hotel room." "There was a small camera in my hotel, which watched my every movement." "I used to have to go to the loo to get changed." "I determined that the best thing was to not get accreditation as a journalist in my visa and to go in as a humanitarian worker." "They are not near Baghdad don't believe them." "They are nowhere." "This is silly." "Iraq's media minders worked for minister of information..." "Mohammed Al Sahhaf, known in the west as comical Ali for his false claims." "Most of his threats of Iraqi resolve were treated as a joke." "Later, as resistance emerged, some now seem almost prophetic." "The bribery system was appalling." "Some television crews were paying up to $5000 per visa." "So, in the case of Rupert Murdoch he has a tremendous number of media outlets, probably the most of any single other company of person in the world operating in Iraq under Saddam Hussein." "And one colleague who works in a Murdoch news operation estimated that Rupert Murdoch was giving as much as half a million dollars to Saddam Hussein's government during the lead up to the war, just for permission for his news outlets to operate there." "And there was a running joke that Rupert Murdoch was the second greatest source of cash for Saddam Hussein second only to oil smuggling." "There are pockets like Tikrit..." "If Iraqis were corrupt so were some western media outlets New York Times correspondent John Burns and others accused western media companies of competing through corruption literally buying access for their correspondents and cameras," "while not covering human rights abuses and the suffering of the people." "CNN later admitted that it did not report abuses of its own staff members in order to keep its office open in iraq." "Few of the journalists who covered the war covered the way it was really covered." "Independent reporter Robert Young Pelton, author of this best selling travel book the world's most dangerous places had his eye on the media eye." "There was never any sense that we might go to war." "It was always like," "We're gonna attack Saddam Hussein and here's why." "There was very much a script on how this war was handled." "There was a kick-off." "War In Iraq:" "The Road Baghdad." "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours." "And then there was a countdown you got 48 hours to get out of town." "Then it was like everyone tuned in for the opening kickoff." "As the war progressed, it was done on linear scale." "We're going from here to there." "It's almost like we're running a pass." "There were people actually drawing diagrams, generals drawing diagrams on a map that looked just like a football play." "You know, We're gonna go sneak around here and do this, and we're coming up there and doing that." "This sports metaphor offered a simplified narrative mimicking a familiar tv format." "When Pelton was delayed getting into Iraq, his focus became the press." "So, I ended up being the only person embedded with journalists during the war in a fancy hotel in Jordan." "Right now there's apparently 4000 journalists " "Everywhere from Kuwait to Baghdad, to Jordan, to Syria to Turkey" " All waiting for the war to start." "And some of these people had been sitting around for nine weeks." "They lived in very nice hotels." "They were all on expense accounts." "They met at the bar every night." "They worked 24-hours a day." "The President will address the nation at 10:15." "My fellow citizens at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger." "The level of protection would be minimal, and if I were... a news president or a news executive, right now," "I would be pulling my people out." "When the war had finally begun, the networks began pulling their reporters out of Baghdad." "Peter Arnett was in the Iraqi capital with a National Geographic documentary team." "He decided to stay." "Covering wars are a dangerous business." "You can die." "And those companies feel responsible for their people in harm's way." "They sometimes order them out." "I think there is something to be said for staying, however, from a news executive standpoint, the risks are enormous." "I sort of have a genetic tick that allows me to go into dangerous areas without too much concern." "The interesting thing was, is that the American military were trying to intimidate these journalists." "They were saying, You know you're going to be a target." "And the journalists were working overtime to say look we're here, this is our coordinates, don't fire and everybody knew the journalists were at these hotels." "That's why they were at these hotels." "It was also known that if you're going to have shock and awe, you need somebody to record it." "I mean the one thing that they left out was that they needed the media to fight this war." "The war was set up to be filmed and recorded by the media." "So there was this bizarre symbiotic relationship." "When the awesome bombing of Baghdad began what was shocking was the way news anchors lovingly described lethal weapons" "They became boys with toys." "Should they have used more?" "Should they use, a MOAB, the mother of all bombs, a few daisy cutters?" "You know lets not just stop at a couple of cruise missiles." "I want to see them use that MOAB." "PENTAGON MEDIA MANAGEMENT" "CBS's David Martin at the Pentagon is following the planning and has the latest on a possible plan..." "To promote its war, the Pentagon made media management a priority." "Their strategy was sophisticated, clever and almost always covert few media outlets exposed it." "Most participated willingly for their own political and economic reasons." "Pentagon strategy went beyond traditional pr, using marketing strategies and perception management." "Administration officials likened their war planning to a product roll-out." "It was all to guarantee there would be only one storyline in the media, and in the minds of Americans:" "theirs." "A Pentagon advisor told me it was intentional." "They knew that tv networks prefer story telling to sloganizing." "Their story line became a master narrative, defining Iraq as the problem and US military intervention as the only solution." "Traditionally propaganda is targeted at the enemy, in this war, it was smoothly infiltrated into the news aimed at American and global public opinion." "...There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know." "There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know." "But there are also unknown unknowns;" "there are things we do not know we don't know." "This platform is not a platform for propaganda; this is a platform for truth." "In his war plan, Tommy FRANKS, The US military commander described the press, once known as the fourth estate, as the fourth front." "He knew that a supportive media was essential for victory, ...and he cultivated one." "This will be a campaign unlike any other in history." "The Pentagon focused on winning the media war, leaking their plan to reporters they could trust." "We knew the plan." "And..." "I think the military benefited as far as positive coverage during the war, because we knew what the plan was." "So we reported that things basically were on plan or we weren't worried when we were delayed two or three days because we knew overall it was very successful." "Earlier, when the media pressed for access," "Frank's team came up with the idea of embedding reporters." "A former corporate pr professional turned Pentagon official ran the program." "One of the things we did, it wasn't rocket science, but it was hard work." "We took the same kind of planning and training and discipline that you put into military operations and put it into this aspect of the military operations." "And Rumsfeld and Myers being enlightened guys had included people like me in the war plan from the very earliest stages." "Victoria Clarke got major networks and news organizations to sign the twelve-page contract agreeing to certain ground rules that actually kept the Department of Defense, ...public affairs people in the driver seat." "And you got reporters in with these young, idealistic troops who really believed all the spin of what we going on, were going to liberate Iraq..." "That the reporters would overall identify with the troops and their reporting was very positive." "When we get there, any sort of incident happens, please keep calm and remain on the bus." "We will deal with the situation, no matter what it is, as swiftly as possible." "What news organization do you work with Tim?" "Sat Eins, German Television Network." " BBC" " CNN" " LA Times" " Japan Broadcasting Corporation" "I'm Gwendolen Cates and I'm here on assignment for People Magazine, and I'm embedded with the 200 205th battalion 165th." "I was the only journalist embedded with a Military Intelligence Unit." "They were part of the fifth corps based in Germany." "And I was invited in fact to be embedded by this unit because one of the commanders had gotten to know me and felt that I could be trusted and would really tell the story." "These are your atropine injector kits." "Should you become contaminated and start to feel the symptoms of nerve poisoning." " The Pentagon put the embeds through a training course ostensibly to teach them how to survive " "But it went further..." "It on there so when you pull it tight." "Journalists were given exaggerated fears of chemical attack designed to reinforce the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction." "The propaganda was also aimed at the military." "It was a threat that wasn't there." " Ready to go?" " You look lovely." "I lived, ate, slept with the soldiers." "And the bond that was established between us very very strong and very personal." "And we shared the sandstorms together and the lack of food and people talked to me about their fears and their children they left behind and their fear of death and all those things." "So I became very personally involved with them as individuals at the same time i was observing this with journalistic detachment, but I did place their safety above any sort of journalistic responsibility i had professional responsibility I had and I would not have done anything to endanger any of them." "What we're saying is, help us tell the truth of what happens..." "Unmentioned by most media:" "the plan actually betrayed an earlier agreement made after the first Gulf War that said quote open and independent reporting will be the princpal means of coverage." "The Pentagon signed off on that policy on March 1, 1992." "There is an interesting issue, of conflict of interest there because one of the standard rules of journalistic ethics is that journalists should not accept anything of value from the sources they're covering." "Well, all of their transportation and indeed their very lives were being protected by those soldiers they were covering." " And how old are you?" " I'm 21" " What is your birthday?" " 3rd of 10th 81" "Because we want to send you a birthday card..." "How do you spell your last name?" "When I was there it's funny because I was not so much scared for myself," "I thought what, how would I be able to handle it if one of my soldiers dies or is injured?" "I kept thinking about that." "How will I be able to handle it?" "The idea of embedding is essentially the Stockholm syndrome." "If you take an unarmed individual and put him amongst armed people, he becomes sympathetic to their cause." "So the idea was, look, slap a helmet on these guys, stick them in a jeep or a Humvee, head them in that direction and let them do whatever the heck he wants, and he will become sympathetic to our cause." "Many embeds did a conscientious job but they only could only provide a limited and ultimately misleading picture." "The debate from the left and right about embedding " "From the left that these were going to be lapdogs of the Pentagon, from the right that this was going to be loose lips sinking ships " "I think neither proved to be true." "But we haven't had the debate about what the embedding process did to our understanding of the war." "Stay down!" "Stay down!" "Far too many journalists were gung-ho about covering the war..." "Some romanticized it, seduced by the spirit of adventure;" "Others sought glory as Canada's CBC explained in a stunning special Deadline Iraq." "During the war no US network ran anything like it." "I think so many journalists have this fascination" "I must do this and then I can call myself a war correspondent the rest of my life." "It's as if they had a checklist of things to do in their life, and this is one of them." "But they are absolutely not prepared for the reality." "People didn't want to miss this war, and it had a lot to do with people's careers, there is no question." "This is a thrill ride if you want to turn it into a thrill ride." "I mean you can go to places in order to get shot at, in order to have excitement of felling what its like to get shot at." "I mean, you can go play in the traffic, too, if you want." "There were few embeds with the military planners, with the covert action teams, The CIA, Special Ops, or with the air war." "The US military units that did the most damage were covered the least." "I mean it looks like this was disinformation at the highest level." "Later, CNN's Cristianne AMANPOUR admitted her own network muzzled the news:" "Yes, I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press selfmuzzled." "I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to an extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News." "And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did." "Talk about letting people know that ratings have gotten under your skin." "Nothing could be further from the truth obviously and I will let the news media defend themselves but I promise you, five, ten," "15 years from now people who study these things will say, you never saw such real, you never saw such accurate, you never saw such hard-hitting coverage of military conflicts..." "A week later CNN hired the Pentagon's media flack Victoria Clarke as an on air contributor." "It seems that gunfire has been coming from the police station down there." "I think a lot of journalists did lose courage." "A lot of embedded journalists did lose their ability to be critical, to emphasize the fact that there might be problems going on here because they didn't want to be kicked off the team." "They wanted to stay embedded, and I think that was part of the problem." "Look you do what you can do with what you are given I did the best I could with my assignment covering the 2nd brigade." "I think overall if you have, what were there, 600 journalists embedded throughout, that is definitely a plus." "By and large people who are covering this story who were at the frontlines actually doing the actual reporting did an admirable job, they were doing what they were send out to do." "However, they don't have ultimate control - the control is someplace else, the control might be back in Washington or in New York, or in edit bay in Qatar." "Once this war started we wanted the US to win..." "We got to know the soldiers as people and wanted them to be successful." "NEWS BUSINESS AS SHOW BUSINESS" "If the Pentagon had an agenda, the networks had one too." "And, it went beyond attracting audiences." "When I was in network news here at ABC, I watched the closing of foreign bureaus, the downgrading of documentaries, the dumbing down of news." "There is nothing like the scary threat of WMD'S and a good war to provide the basis for action-oriented TV coverage." "Time magazine's Saddam cover was modeled on an earlier Hitler cover," "Bush was presented as an avenging angel." "War is one of those action-oriented spectacles that tv news lives for, and thrives on in a post journalism era." "All the networks wanted to have was a countdown to war, if you looked at every network it was virtually indistinguishable." "Fortyeight hours to war, dun, dun, dun, showdown to Saddam." "With encouragement from the Pentagon, the news networks fashioned their... coverage to maximize production values, to make it exciting." "Time magazine called the approach:" "mili-tainment." "Journalist Robert PELTON describes how it was done:" "I was in some of the initial phone meetings between New York and the people in the field, and this was being set up like a movie shoot." "There was a channel called, 'Best of the Bombs'." "That's exactly what it was called 'Best of the Bombs', and every piece of good footage from any network would be tossed onto this feed, this is satellite feed, so if you're doing story about," "Hi, I'm standing in the middle of nowhere and let's roll to the footage, you would have this feed that had only good explosions." "Secondly, they told people to take the camera off the sticks." "We want to have that cinema-verite look, you know" " Move it around, move it, we want to see where you are." "We want you to walk and talk... and make people feel you're in the middle of something..." "This is true." "A defense department memo urged military commanders to encourage action coverage quote:" ""Use of lipstick and helmet mounted cameras on combat sorties is approved and encouraged to the greatest extent possible. "" "If you were to pick a generality, they were there for the big story." "And keep in mind that Iraq is unusual because in the early days of CNN, one of the most memorable images were people like Peter Arnett sitting on the roof top, calling the war like a football game." "This is the sixth cruise missile to have come over our head in the last half-hour." "The entire population of the planet focused on one journalist." "So this was a wet dream for any journalist that went to Iraq." "To be in that spot for a well known predicted war to happen." "If you're the guy holding that microphone, and that thing happened behind you, that's what you're known for." "You're not known for careful research for, for" " It's the face." "It's all about the face." "And where that face is a measure of who you are." "So they were looking to get bullets flying, bombs going off, and that microphone, and that face on TV." "Music:" "Danny SCHECHTER/Polar LEVINE #got remote control to chose the show# #but the more we watch the less we know# #ignorance grows on the spirit like a tumor# #...till freedom is a rumor#" "#news goo- all we need to know# #news goo- all we want to know we got news goo- all we need to know#" "#got remote control to chose the show# #but the more we watch the less we know# #ignorance grows on the spirit like a tumor# ...and that's what generates money." "I mean you look at who moved up the food chain in the journalism world over the last four or five years, you have basically two fast tracks:" "you have entertainment or war." "And entertainment" " Who cares." "If you're a journalist really you focus on war." "The networks worked overtime to produce socalled Video Enhancement elements like graphics, promos and special music." "They were preparing for what they called News Immersion." "Their war was for, ratings and revenues." "A CNN graphics designer in Atlanta confided to a friend that he was told to 'sex it up. '" "War coverage soon developed its own routines " "With anchors tossing to constant updates from embed reporters and in-studio analysis by network Generals." "One result:" "Glitzy round the clock fast-paced coverage that was often misleading, inaccurate and rarely corrected " "Just more mili-tainment." "These entertainment values stimulated a demand for even more excitement " "From video game makers like kumawar. com, who turned the war into an interactive commercial experience." "Through British eyes, the US channels lacked journalistic distance." "By and large in the American networks, you would hear people talking about We." ""We" as thought the American, as if the network was actually in the war." "In the States, as far as I can ascertain there is a presumption that politicians are right and honest and truthful." "That is the default from which everything else operates." "Some UK journalists like John PILGER and Robert FISK opposed the war, others felt constrained." "If say, for example, you cease to base your news agenda on the words and deeds of official sources, of the Prime Minister, of the government and start to base it instead on gathering alternative perspectives," "on gathering news from unconventional sources." "Then you will be somehow exposing yourself to the risk that you will be accused of being biased." "Even as the military encouraged action coverage," "Pentagon advisor John RENDON recognized the dangers." "There is a convergence of content." "News, information, and entertainment need to be separated." "Right now there is a blurring of the lines on all three and if you could just think about it just in terms of how music it changes the dynamic and if the vehicle that delivers this information is all the same, then the viewer, the listener," "or the reader will find a hard time distinguishing between the three." "Undaunted the channels produced branding liners, some taking the government campaign theme the war for Iraqi freedom as their own." "One proposal to call the war operation Iraqi liberation was discarded because that spells oil." "Music:" "David ROVIC" " Song O-I-L COLLAGE # It's Operation Iraqi Liberation #" "# Tell me what does that spell?" "#" "# Operation Iraqi Liberation: #" "# O.I.L #" "INFORMATION DOMINANCE" "We're about ten miles from the Pentagon, in Virginia, at the home of a retired Air Force colonel who's been investigating the stories of the Iraq War, how they were manufactured, distorted and misrepresented by the media." "When I heard things, I heard military guys say things about the Iraqis..." "There's something wrong here." "I'm Sam Gardiner." "I'm a retired Air force colonel and I had taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, the Air War College, and the Naval War College." "Gardiner did a study that reads like the Pentagon papers of the Iraq war." "He and others revealed how information dominance promotes strategic influence, how it drove the Bush Administration's preemptive war using deceptive information as an integral component of military and political combat." "This goes beyond just influencing what we think, it aims at controlling what we think about." "Corporations seek market share;" "this administration sought mind share." "Every morning at 9:30 they would have the message phone call, and it would involve the White House Office of Global Communications," "The Pentagon Press Office, a media advisor, the people at Central Command, and sometimes the people in the State Department." "And their notion for that day was to coordinate the message, and after that they would talk to the Brits, so that the message in London matched the message in Washington." "One message, one idea, push it out into the media." "Right." "Dominate today's message with and you can almost identify by day what the message was." "Every day, there was live coverage from the Pentagon's hi-tech media center in Doha built by a Hollywood set designer." "Unknown to most tv viewers, the White House directly stage managed the Doha Media Center through, Jim Wilkinson, a republican operative who had worked for a right-wing congressman and then helped run the Bush media operation in Florida in 2000." "That strategy included staging events such as this anti-vote recount protest in Miami." "It looked like a public protest but it was actually led by rightwing political staffers." "Jim WILKINSON." "This is the guy they put in charge of the media operation." "He's the guy that engineered it..." "He is the guy who thought about these things." "Houston chronicle reporter Harvey Rice watched him in action." "He was nothing more than a political commissar." "I mean this is straight out of Stalin." "And that's what he was there for." "He was there to make sure the military and as he put it..." "He said:" "I'm here to keep them on message"." "So, he was running the information about the war like a political campaign." "After the war Wilkinson was brought back into the White House and then picked to run media at the 2004 republican convention." "A missile attack on a residential section of Baghdad that killed 14 civilians, can you confirm that?" "We think it is absolutely possible that this may have been in fact an Iraqi missile that either came up and went down or..." "War watchers may remember media writer Michael Wolff challenging media briefers at the central command." "Why should we stay, what's the value to us for what we learn at this million-dollar press center?" "Wolf was later told to shut the fuck up by a military briefer." "Sometimes your jaw drops and it's hard to figure out why..." "Why are American journalists so, maybe not even uncritical, self satisfied, I think is the word." "So the first day of the war, it's on CNN where they've got this bank of cameras there, and everybody goes in and they're watching these explosions and tanks rolling across and guys with M-16s, M- 14s." "And we go, is the war started?" "And these PR guys there in, the guy i talked says "Sorry, I can't talk to you about that," "I don't want to endanger the lives of our boys." "I said, But it's on television." "If you can give the media more content than they can handle and as far away from the battlefield as possible, they will focus their energies where the source of that fire hose is." "So, Doha is the center of the fire-hose." "And the idea is, you simply have press conferences every day," "And every once in awhile you throw a little tidbit - you hand out videotapes, free coffee, whatever." "So that if you leave, you're gonna miss the story that everybody else is covering...." "Fire-hose coverage and fire hose delivery blocks out all the secondary sources." "My research of the threads of stories from the war, which takes it from the beginning through the end, the way they were created, the way they were used, the way they were repeated," "that research leads me to say that there were 50 or 60 stories that were either created or manipulated for the purposes of distorting the truth." "Gardiner cited false stories, like the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, as well as the Jessica Lynch story, which the BBC also debunked." "What were the two narratives?" "In the American narrative is well known as the great hero, the great heroine who was captured under fire, who was then taken to hospital, potentially mistreated." "American special forces went in, all guns blazing, rescued her against hostile fire." "There was no resistance the Iraqi doctors had been caring for her, given the circumstances as well as could have been." "And, a lot of the more dramatic elements of the story may have been embellished." "That story ended up hanging around for about a week, and that's why she's called a hero." "Well it turns out all of that was wrong." "When Rumsfeld was asked about this the next day he refused to comment on it, although I know he knew that she had not been shot, stabbed, and emptied her weapon on the bad guy." "So it hung around." "Information dominance requires censorship - little attention was paid to US weapons that caused mass destruction, like legally prohibited cluster bombs that target civilians." "It was a cluster bomb." "The bomb would multiple many bombs dropped from an aircraft focusing on targeted areas." "South African viewers learned about how cluster bombs worked." "And what damage they caused." "An underreported fact:" "Half of Iraq's population is under the age of 15." "These young people became a primary target this is what Bagdads pediatric hospital looked like floor after floor of cluster bomb survivors." "This was filmed not by a network but by independent filmmaker Patrick Dillon." "Human rights watch reported cluster weapons caused hundreds of civilian casualties like these." "There was extensive use of napalm-like Mark-77 firebombs." "It was denied at first but then admitted." "More onerous was the almost total blackout on the use of radioactive depleted uranium, which hardens anti-tank weapons." "This is especially ironic in light of Washington's constant claims of an Iraqi nuclear threat." "The issue was covered overseas;" "Arnim Stauth." "A German journalist documented this proliferation in an Emmy-Winning report for A.R.D., in Germany." "Are you aware that this tank is contaminated with radiation?" "No, it isn't radioactive, replied the soldier." "But we have measured it." "No it is not radioactive, not this tank." "It was destroyed by depleted uranium ammunition." "Sorry, but I have to get back to work." "The BBC took viewers to a back room at the coalition media center." "On the wall a list of subjects briefers were ordered to avoid." "Among them was du, or depleted uranium." "There has been a number of studies of misperceptions by viewers that many Americans believe there was an Alqaeda" " Iraq connection." "That many Americans believe that there were Iraqi hijackers attacking the World Trade Center." "I think that is part of the campaign it was a very conscious effort to use terms that would have people connect in their minds Iraq and the incident of 9/11." "You imply that these are the same kind of people and if they're the same kind of people they must have had something to do with it." "Threaten us..." "Threaten us..." "Threaten us..." "Had they done an hours worth of research they could have sad a paragraph in their story that said that the Pentagon says this "however" there were no however paragraphs." "The new information dominance strategy worked thanks to advice from marketing experts," "Hollywood producers and commmunications specialists like John RENDON who were monitoring the media worldwide." "Their job was to keep the public well propagandized." "There were five wars in Iraq." "There really was the reality of combat operations from the air, on the ground and from the sea." "The second war was the war the United States saw, the third war was the war that Europe saw." "The fourth war was the war that Arab audiences saw." "And the fifth war was the war the rest of the world saw." "And as we monitored that in real time, we found that none of them were ever in alignment." "When you look at the war in Iraq it's at times impossible to separate media," "CIA, public relations firms, government propaganda." "It all came together." "THE FOX NEWS EFFECT" "# What is the problem here, Danny?" "#" "Danny..." "Danny..." "Danny..." "So what is the problem here?" "I'm at the Fox News Channel, [We Trust Fox News" " American's watchdog] inside Fox and Friends, a program I monitor every morning" "That's been the most extreme in its coverage of the war." "I'm waiting for the make-up lady to come," "I going the air to talk about a conspiracy that happened forty years ago" "The Kennedy Assassination." "I made a film about that." "Fox is not interested really in the conspiracy that happening now in terms of the media, the military and the administration, but that's not the subject they have me here to talk about." "The past somehow can be handled safely, the present is another matter." "You know what they say?" "That FOX is not really Fair and Balanced, that it's not even news." "Do you watch it?" " No..." " No?" " Don't scrunch your face!" " I'm sorry..." "You are the third person I'm talking to who doesn't watch it and you work here..." " You just deal with what's on top of people's heads, right?" " Right." "You don't deal with what's in their heads, right?" "Truth does have a way of coming out." "And sometimes it's suppressed for a long time, new documents emerge, historians reveal things that weren't revealed before." "I believe so;" "I believe the American people deserve the truth." "BOYCOTT FOX[Friends]" "I had hoped to confront Bill O'reilly but he wasn't there." "He is one of the loud mouth talk show hosts that defines Fox's angry white man attitude " "Well calculated as a tool of polarization politics well practiced on right wing radio." "After a year of uncritical reporting, to his credit," "He admitted that the was wrong about WMD's." "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury I have come, not to bury Rupert Murdoch, but to praise him!" "Fair and balanced coverage, The Fox News Channel!" "[We report." "You decide. ]" "Fox news may seem a fun place to its fans and a cartoon to its critics " "But its ideological zeal is serious and carefully calculated, as long time former producer Charlie Reina revealed on a media website:" "Quote;" "The roots of Fox News channel's day to-day on-air bias are actual and direct..."" "...they come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing "what stories will be covered, and often, suggesting how they should be covered... "" ""... the memo is the bible. " Charlie Reina." "Fox's response:" "This charge is unfounded, people want to work here." "Fox coverage included overly dramatic reports by Geraldo Rivera and Iran-Contra conspirator, Colonel Oliver North." "I will tell you right now council and all the members here gathered that I misled the congress." "Colonel North's war stories were blatant exerices in cheerleading and denounced the anti-war movement." "This is the city garbage dump." "I wonder why all the peace protesters never protest this kind of stuff..." " They could be planning to attack westerners." " What was called the Fox Effect drove all the tv coverage to the right." "No network wanted to be accused of being unpatriotic." "Arnett gave an interview to Iraqi television in which he criticized American war planning and said his reports about civilian casualties and Iraqi resistance was encouraging to Anti-war protestors in America." "The American War Planners misjudged..." " ... the determination of the Iraqis..." " Veteran correspondent Peter Arnett was targeted by Fox News for his decision to say on Iraiqi Tv what he was already saying on Msnbc." "If I'm wrong, you didn't go on Iraqi TV to say," "I support Saddam Hussein did you?" "You didn't endorse..." " ... one side or the other?" " Of course I didn't endorse one side." "It was a part of the hysteria that developed surrounding this war." "Now there is a degree of hysteria about every war that America participates in, gets involved in." "This was part of a hysterical reaction and I was basically, you know, swept up in that incredible explosion of anger." "There were about 157 cartoons of me in the newspaper the next morning, most of them in bed with Saddam Hussein." "Management called up and says the pressure is too great, we've had thousands of e-mails and calls and its time; we have to drop you historic anti-American traitor Peter Arnett..." "I want that BASTARD..." "What i've learned and has gone unreported until now is that those emails were not from the public at large but part of an orchestrated campaign by free republic, a right wing online network." "We Were Freeped, an official at National Geographic told me explaining that 20,000 emails calling Arnett a traitor bombarded their executives who then panicked and discharged him." "He was fired!" "... that Arnett was FIRED!" "The freepers boasted of their success." "WhooHOOOO!" "Way to GO FREEPERS!" "Now we got to work on that Columb..." "Before the war MSNBC fired popular anti-war talk show host Phil Donahue, replacing him with strident right-wingers in a move to outfox Fox." "An MSNBC executive called fox:" "The Patriotism Police." "We report." "You decide." "The rest of the world looked at my firing you, know, as a, you know another example of American media caving into government." "What about Al Jazeera publishing those gruesome pictures of the dead soldiers?" "I think there was something that is culturally Arab about that." "News: fair, balanced, and unafraid." "But all of the networks more or less signed on to the official rationale." "Terrorist could be planning..." "A study found widespread misperceptions among viewers." "The people with the most misinformation watched the Fox News Channel, although viewers of other channels were also receptive to inaccuracies." "Public broadcasting viewers and listeners were misled the least." "This Canadian study highlights another misperception about media itself...." "Quote, Most Americans were not aware of how one-sided and biased the coverage had been." "They believed the news media had served the country well." "Nothing like this has happened..." "The war in Iraq continues, and no one takes you closer than CNN live." "In this war what had once been known as the CNN effect had faded but CNN was still a news leader." "I learned that CNN mounted two news teams." "One for the U.S. channel and one for the rest of the world, on CNN International." "Was it just different strokes for different folks?" "Explain to me why CNN had one type of coverage for America and one type for the rest of the world." "I'm not so sure it was different." "The content was the same, the presentation sometimes is different." "American audiences have certain expectations of how the news is given to them." "People aren't gonna hang out on the screen forever and watch your long explanations." "They want to know quickly what happened because they have a job to do too." "And..." "You know that..." "Our job is to give them that." "For me it's a huge difference being able to get international news." "One of the benefits I had living in Atlanta was I was there in the heart of an international newsroom." "Soon as I stepped outside, domestic media never gave me that." "It's a real shame, actually." "Especially for the world's most powerful nation." "POST-WAR WAR" "In just three weeks, the US military seized Baghdad with a small army of journalists tagging along." "Robert PELTON, operating unilaterally now, observed the network news operations." "When you're a journalist in Baghdad, you live in a fancy hotel, you're hooked to the internet all the time." "You've got people in New York making decisions for you, sending you story ideas that you are gonna go out and do." "You get up in the morning, you got a driver, you got an airconditioned GMC, you've got a driver, translator, a cameraman, you got a security guy, a little kind of British guy with tattoos on his arms," "and off you go to shoot the story." "You know you put your vest on, you get your sound bytes, you come back in time to cut it together, then the talking head does the stand-up, then boom off it goes." "Goodbye Saddam!" "Thanks to a recently released US army report we now know, this most dramatic image of the Iraq war was engineered by a psychological operations unit that made it seem like it was spontaneous." "Many tv outlets reported the stunt as evidence of the freedom which was now said to be Iraqs." "Mission Accomplished proclaimed president Bush in a scene out of the movie "TTTop Gun. "" "Washington Post military reporter Tom Ricks disagreed with this assessment." "I think the single biggest media failure was a failure that the Bush administration committed and the media..." "On April 9th we said game over." "It turns out the game was half over." "The post invasion storyline quickly changed from liberation, to occupation, to resistance." "There was massive looting." "There were pro sadam protests and daily attacks on US soldiers;" "Almost none of the invasion coverage anticipated this post-war chaos." "While some tv crews remained, most of the embeds were withdrawn," " upsetting military commanders like Scott RUDDER." " You know, 15 April when everyone left, a new breed came over." "These individuals were not part of the war, very excited about getting the information, getting it there." "In the Sheraton Hotel as well as the Palestine Hotel, you can imagine huddles of reporters around high paid taxi cab drivers to launch out, to get the story, to show up in your unit without any type of," "any type of coordination or efforts." "You can imagine them huddling around a bearcat scanner for the bad news." "The search for WMD's was getting nowhere fast." "No one asked me to come here and fight for someone's oil..." "You know what, cause half my company doesn't even own a car." "You know why we came here and fought?" "We came here and fought for all the beautiful ladies back home and an ice-cold coke." "That's why we're kicking off on somebody's butt." "Thanks a lot." "WMDs "Do not exist"" "By year's end, when no WMD's were found." "Officials called it a moot point and sought to change the subject." "By then the post war claimed more American lives than the invasion." "SO WHAT'S PLAN B?" "Stephen Marshall of Guerilla News Network went to Baghdad in October 2003." "Each of the major networks sort of has one crew who travel around from bombsite to bombsite." "It's all sort of guarded by the military with huge checkpoints... .. and you know, concrete barriers;" "which doesn't give them the opportunity to cover what I would call the Arab street or you know, the true sort of experience of the Iraqi people." "The reporting from Iraq quickly degenerated into a catalogue of incidents." "That's really happening now is that you have a situation where there's a bombing, a suicide bombing, say at the Baghdad Hotel, where we were at and all of a sudden everyone gets in their truck and whips over there with their security guards and everyone is on scene." "Most of the people there are sort of adventure journalists." "They're the guys who, you know, really they're stringers who get paid quite a lot of money to go work in these countries, and they are simply there to get the best pictures they can." "And in many ways I found it to be very cynical." "We met a lot of photographers and shooters who, were really there, and only wanted to find the next disaster..." "Get there on time, get the right footage, get back to the Palestine hotel and start drinking beer." "You know, really in Iraq, it's the, the truism has never been more absolute that "if it bleeds it leads. "" "The only thing they want to get out of Iraq are bloody civilians, or, in the best-case scenario, military officials or military, or soldiers who have been hit by bombs." "That's the images they want to get, which is ironic, because for the administration, to administration, those are the worse types of images." "And then Saddam HUSSEIN was captured" "TIME magazine took Jesus off of its cover and put Saddam on." "Every network played it big." "As if it was the second coming." "Ladies and gentlemen." "We got him." "[AMBASSADOR L. PAUL BREMER]" "Capture of Saddam" " HUSSEIN Saddam HUSSEIN captured near TIKRIT, IRAQ" "The footage was supplied by the Pentagon it was a major propaganda coup for Washington even though it was later reported in the region that it was the kurds, not the Us military who first found the Iraqi leader in that hole." "Inside a small wall compound..." "This is a picture of an Iraqi prisoner of war." "The pornography of violence took an unexpected turn when these prison photos surfaced showing abuses by us soldiers of detainees in a notorious Iraqi gulag." "CBS broke the story in late April 2004." "But also admitted, holding it up at the Pentagon's request for two weeks." "Their report permitted a US general to shift blame on to a few individuals without exploring the systematic abuse documented..." " ... in a military investigation." " We are appalled as well, these are our fellow soldiers, these are people we work with every day." "They represent us." "They wear the same uniform as us." "And they let their fellow soldiers down." "CBS's report aired in the end of april..." "By early july, the Pentagon had still not released its full investigation... or torture videos..." "And the press was no longer pressing them to do so." "Why did it take so long for this story to surface i later found this video of the same prison shot by Amnesty International in JULY, 2003." "They were alleging torture then." "We have documented or heard allegations of mistreatment or torture of prisoners." "Well, most of the world was shocked by the pictures, administration supporters were minimizing the well-documented torture." "It was like a hazing fraternity prank, [Limbaugh: "They were just having*** to stack up naked..." "***a good time and blowing***" "Exactly – exactly my point." "***some steam off"]" "We don't do body counts." "General Tommy Franks US Central Command" "# Music:" "National Anthem #" "Coalition Casualties: 1168+ Source:" "CNN, September 2004" "Coalition Wounded:7000+ Source Deparment of Defence, September 2004" "Overall Iraqi soldiers dead: 7,600- 10,800" "Source:" "Project on defense alternatives, SEPTEMBER 2004" "Iraqi civilian casualties: 100,000 Source: iraqbodycount. org, September 2004" "Cost of tv coverage: $35,000,000+ Source:" "Broadcasting and Cable JULY 200" "Profits made on war coverage:" "Unknown" "Numbers of WMD found:" "The war is still going on." "Its outcome is still undetermined." "The United States has not won this war." "VIEWS IN THE ARAB WORLD" "The war you saw depended on where you lives." "The Arab world saw a different war than the one we did." "Ironically, many U.S. networks relied on Arab outlets:" "Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi tv and other networks for footage of the bombings." "They showed their coverage stripped of their narrative." "Al Jazeeera financed its coverage with fees paid by US networks." "# U.S. CEENTCOM CONFIRMS ATTACK ON "LEADERSHIP TARGET" #" "Addition of Al-Jazeera this time around was as important as the addition of CNN to the rest of the world in 1991." "Al Jazeera was formed by former BBC journalists as a commercial satellite channel." "It promotes itself dramatically and was fiercely committed to offering diverse perspectives." "Although in the US and Britan, it was falsely denounced as a onesided propaganda organ." "Its correspondents were often brave and took risks." "They saw themselves as independent and balanced, although their style was much hotter and more audacious than their western counterparts." "Before 9/11, many government- controlled networks news or newspapers used to call Al Jazeera the Israeli-CIA, -backed network, because we put Israeli officials on the air, we invite Americans," "we put Bush more than any other leader in the Arab world." "So we were suspected to being the Israeli people trying to divide the Arab world, the opposition against the government." "And the media was so positive about us before 9/11 here." "But immediately after we put the bad guys for America, as for the balance, they behaved the same way that other government-controlled media in the Arab world did to us." "The arab media also was debating the coverage." "For a deeper understanding their perspectives, i went to Dubai in the Gulf region." "Welcome to the Arab media summit." "Hundreds of journalists from around the region debated coverage issues, often disagreeing with each other and their western colleagues." "It was there i met tv anchor, Nema Abu Warda." "She rose to challenge CNN correspondent Nick Robertson." "Now my second comment is to you," "CNN, regarding Amanpour's comments," "Amanpour said that CNN was muzzled." "She talks of an atmosphere of fear of reporting with what's going on, of collusion perhaps, is what she's insinuating between..." " ... the Bush government and CNN." " That is absolutely not what she said." "These were private comments she made outside of CNN." " These were comments made on a TV program, I understand..." " Outside, outside of CNN..." "But it's not private when it's on television, live television." "Thank you very much." "Let me answer your first question." " Do you think he was uncomfortable talking about it?" " Oh extremely uncomfortable." "He turned away." "I was going to say, are you gagging me?" "Because that's exactly what he did." "He dismissed me." "I was dismissed." "Swat." "You know just swatted like a fly on the wall." "Nima told me about the tv coverage of the war she watched:" "I would flick English-Arabic and Arabic-English and you would be comparing/ contrasting stories and just seeing the angles and what was being said because ultimately you get different stories from the different perspectives." "On the Arabic TV stations I would see what war is really like the blood and gore, the mess that really happens when a bomb hits a building." "Ten percent are the so-called dumb bomb." "On CNN you would see more of the strategic stuff." "The viewer in this part of the world thought only one side, or a lopsided version of the war was being given." "We are refugees going from one place to the other, and we can't reach our homes." "We came from Umar Q'ulsar, and God knows what has happened in Umar Q'ulsar." "Look what is happening to us, look at my children." "Well, one of the things that's missing is indigenous Voices to freely and openly be shown, be allowed to appear." "You don't get people from the area really given proper hearing." "People have to take responsibility." "There is a moral responsibility." "I think journalists have to take on more of that burden, more of that responsibility." "It is your profession, your chosen profession, after all." "JOURNALISTS TARGETED?" "# Globe Reporter Killed in Iraq #" "#Al Jazeera Tv Correspondent Killed in Baghdad Raid #" "Journalists and media workers were targeted in Iraq." "Was it deliberate, to keep the story on message by intimidating nonembedded journalists?" "How did the media industry challenge these killings?" "Some were killed by so-called friendly fire – others, victims of calculated attacks, missiles, tank shells and bombs dropped on or near journalists." "Some media critics concluded it was intentional, although the Pentagon denied it." "before the war, the BBC's Kate ADIE Reported she was told by the Pentagon that independent journalists could be targeted." "The Arab media center in Baghdad whose coordinate has been given to the Pentagon was bombed." "Al Jazeeras Tariq Ayoub seen here sitting on a roof watch the plane that would soon kill him come closer and closer." "Welcome, A US tank shelled the Palestine Hotel, which is crowded with the journalists, killing two cameramen:" "One of them works for a Spanish network, and the other one works for Reuters." "Now, another incident—look at this:" "An American tank on the bridge across from the Palestine hotel in Baghdad." "A soldier would later claim his tank was fired on." "Listen carefully, there are no sounds." "We moved to Palestine Hotel because the Pentagon asked our organizations to let us leave Al-Rashid hotel because it was a target, and when we moved to the Palestine Hotel our organization told the Pentagon that we where at the Palestine Hotel so that every news organization." "Again, minutes later, no sounds were heard, no one firing at US soldiers." "Suddenly, without provocation..." "You know, suddenly we saw an orange glow and this is basically the tank shell that hit our office..." " Help!" "# France 3 News Report #" "Come on, come on, come on guys..." "You know you can imagine the panic..." "We were wounded." "It was me and another photographer." " My God." " Are you okay?" "Get the fuck out of here...." "I can't imagine that they would target journalists, you know." "I couldn't believe why they would target us." "What have we done to them?" "# International Federation of Journalists. #" "After the war press freedom groups were still demanding a real investigation." "The Pentagon's Victoria Clarke told me there was a report that showed that the soldiers were acting in self defense." "Is there any attempt to find out the facts independently or a thorough investigation?" "No, the Pentagon never interviewed me personally,or anyone." "I don't think any foreign colleague was interviewed by the Pentagon." "Samia's company reuters demanded an independent investigation, but most media companies did not even press on this issue." "No one was held accountable." "It was all passed off as an accident;" "The fog of war, and all that." "So what about damage to you personally?" "I was hit in the brain." "I had a brain operation." "It took me a long time to recover, but you know i was blessed i survived." "But it gave emotional damage and physical damage." "But you know, mostly emotionally." "I lost a colleague we covered a war together." "And he was next to me and he died." "# Arab Journalism Prize Ceremony United Arab Emirates #" "The debate about killing of journalists continues the respected media historian Phillip KNIGHTLY concluded "I believe that the occasional shots fired at media sites are not accidental and that war correspondents may now be targets. "" "The media war had drawn blood." "GOVERNMENT POWER AND MEDIA CONTROL" "If you want to know why the war was packaged and reported the way it was, you have to know something about our American media system." "It's a system dominated by just a handful of companies, and they're all around me here in the chaos of Times Square." "All the big brands:" "MTV, Viacom," "Bertelsmann, ABC, NBC, Reuters." "They surround me physically." "What they represent is the power of media power to promote economic and political agendas." "What they represent today is a merger of news biz and show biz." "What they represent is a consumer culture." "To them, the war was a product." "They sold it, and we bought it." "# GE Building New York City, October, 2003 Rainbow Room NBC Studios #" "Most networks remain uncritica I of their coverage." "NBC won the US media war as the highest rated network." "NBC's Coverage on broadcast, on cable was simply first rate." "The network celebrated its victory in Iraq with a party in the posh rainbow room in a building named after a general:" "General electric, their parent company." "GE won contracts for Iraqi reconstruction worth $600 million." "Source:" "Harper's Mag." "They released a book and dvd on the war for Iraqi freedom." "Anchor Tom BROKOW paid tribute to a popular correspondent," "David BLOOM, who died in iraq." "I'm so proud of the men and women of NBC news, who had the common bond of courage and determination to go into the heart of darkness..." "I caught up with Tom BROKAW at the museum of radio and television." "I asked a question from the floor." " I want to go to the audience now if we can..." " Please raise your hands..." "Danny Schechter I know has a question right down here, we might as well get it out of the way...." "How could the media, your institution particularly, have done a better job of being a little bit more skeptical and a little more critical?" "I think your suggestion is your suggestion is that we took the pipe." "And if you go back and review the coverage on network television, newspaper, the Wall Street Journal," "the New York Times certainly, and any other publication in this country..." "During that very vigorous time of the UN debate for example, there were lots of other voices that were heard, great skeptical Voices." "But many times people hear what they're inclined to hear..." "And the idea that somehow it's packaged and spun back at corporate headquarters to fit some sort of greater agenda..." " I personally find outrageous and ridiculous." " But listen i'm not being conspiratorial cause I worked at ABC news for 8 years." " Sure." " Right." " So I've been in the control rooms I've been involved, I worked... .. at CNN before that..." "I'm not making this up I'm not inventing it." "There was clearly an approach." "There was an identification by much of the American media with the American military." "I think that's sort of undeniable." "How can you even deny that?" " If you look at the critics and how many critics there were..." " I can't speak to the critics..." "All I can say is, I can't speak for the entire American media." "Ok, talk for ABC..." "Talking for ABC, I think that we told it straight ahead." "More Americans get their news from ABC News." "There was a suit here who I spoke to here, a vice president of ABC News." " Oh really?" " And, you know, he was, you, they criticize us on the left, they criticize us on the right, so therefore we must be doing it the right way." "In other words, you know, it's a kind of a conventional knee-jerk response." "I've used that line myself, I can't tell you how many times." "But what's missing from it, is it true?" "Well, dead bodies are missing from it." "ABC News: unique, brave, provocative, unmatched." "Remember, Disney does not want ABC to be in the news business." "It's so much pressure on these news organizations to be something, not rock the boat, not be a problem..." "Pentagon is following the planning and has the latest on a possible timeline." "Jessica Lynch is no longer a prisoner of War..." "The efforts to keep the supply lines running north of Baghdad." "One of the reasons I think why the media fell so easily into this pattern of the war is that really is what the American media is designed to do is to sell things." "It's a commercial media; it's a propaganda system and everyone knows it." "Our system of broadcast media is regulated by the FCC:" "A government agency originally set up to protect the public interest." "Today that regulatory body promotes deregulation more power to media moguls." "# The FCC Jeopardizes Media Diversity#" "The head of the FCC justifies media concentration on the grounds that only big companies can cover a war like the one in Iraq." "Just before the war in Iraq began, American media companies began lobbying the FCC for rule changes that would benefit their bottom lines." "There was a question raised:" "Did the FCC agree to waivethe rules if the media companies agreed to wave the flag?" "You don't go in and report critically on an administration that you hope will give you billions and billions of dollars in new policies." "We have been in this business long enough to be very careful." "But I am sure working in, and hoping that being support of the war would get them that deal." "Remember what Rupert Murdoch did when he was in China." "He was the only one defending China despite all their abuses of human rights, because he was working for a TV deal, which eventually got in China." "The reason the coverage, in part was so tepid, was so timid was because these same media companies like news corp." "Fox, GE, NBC, Viacom, CBS, were trying to curry favor to win the support of the Bush administration for this huge give away on media ownership." "This is not something that happened yesterday." "It didn't happen over night." "It has been going on here in the United States for about two decades at least." "#Tonight:" "The Propaganda War Crossfire#" "And it's been processed; it's been an organized, concerted, thought-out, well-planned, and well executed process." "Going back to the Reagan administration, flowing through the first Bush administration, and now being picked up successfully so far by the second Bush administration." "Power generally, not just media power;" "power tends to go with power." "Primarily they want to support whoever is in the White House, they want to support government, they want to support large, other large corporate interests." "They don't want to rock the boat, generally." "This is a plan, it's a plan, its not serendipitous, it doesn't happen accidentally." "It's what they want." "They want to be able to control the political discussion." "Who was the FCC commissioner with whom they were trying to curry favor?" "Who was acting on their behalf during this period?" "It was Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell." "#The FCC Minister of Information#" "#The FCC Minister of Information# #Famous For Great Lines Like:#" "The evils of media consolidation will never get past our fortifications." "#The FCC Minister of Information#" "I think it's very clear that the major media companies in this country had business before the government." "Boom, it's a conflict of interest." "In my day, there was no, there was really a wall between news and the rest of the organization." "It becomes sort of a, you scratch my back, I scratch your back." "Did you see any coverage on television about the whole controversy?" "About the FCC and the new rules?" "I mean there was hardly any to speak of." "There must have been some somewhere that I missed." "But it was so minor, and so ineffectual in terms of informing the public of what's going on." "The people need to try to take back the airwaves;" "They need to try to restore the democracy to the airwaves." "LESSONS LEARNED AND WORK TO DO" "Iraq quickly became the apocalypse i feared." "As ghosts of the crimes of Vietnam seemed to be coming back to haunt us." "All over the world, people came to see the United States not as heroic liberators but brutal occupiers." "I found these graphics stenciled on the walls of Barcelona:" "I saw how media outlets supress scrutiny of policies, preferring to show images rather than expose interests." "Major media covers the world through the eyes of those in power-downplaying the brutal impact of war and its own role in promoting it." "In JULY 2004, a senate committee..." "#Senators slam CIA on Iraq intelligence# ...blasted the CIA for misreporting on wmds in Iraq." "It criticized what it called group think." "Couldn't the same phrase be applied to other wmds?" "Media weapons of mass deception." "The lesson is don't trust the mainstream media, if you want to really find out what's really happening, you can't be a news consumer, you have to be a critical thinker." "TV is not the same medium it was ten years ago, or twenty years ago." "You don't really have the luxury of providing detailed analytical coverage of the war." "You basically get an eyeball shot, and that's it." "It's one thing to talk about this war but as you look to the future if you didn't like this you're really not gonna like what gonna..." "Just as there is an investigation out now as to the failure of the intelligence community, we need an investigation into our journalistic community." "Media hasn't really been taken to task at all." "There is no global watchdog that's saying you didn't do you job well." "Media people seem to to be more comfortable repeating the words of politicians, repeating statements that come out in press, etc., than actually probing and trying to find out what it really means..." "Is it true?" "Is it true?" "Can we fight back against deceptive news, massive media concentration?" "Can we fight back against jingoism posing as journalism?" "Can we afford not to fight back?" "Should they – you know – use the MOAB – the Mother Of All Bombs?" "I joined the media to spotlight the problems of the world and came to see that the media is one of those problems." "I believe in freedom.." "...of the press but not just freedom for those who own the press." "What can we do to hold the media more accountable?" "Think about it." "Now i've had my say..." "It's your turn."