Media Coverage of Iraqi Election

[Moses]

January 26, 2005


In Iraq Election, Tense Media Put On A Short Leash

by Joe Hagan

In case television news producers barricaded in fortified hotels in Baghdad needed to be reminded that Iraq is unsafe, the country’s Ministry of Interior issued a memo on Jan. 18 warning that Iraq would not assume liability for any American media outlets on the scene for the Jan. 30 elections. "News agencies that decide to cover elections will do so with the full understanding that the situation in Iraq is atypical," the memo explained.

But on Election Day, the situation for reporters in Iraq will be even less typical. U.S. and British military forces will be out of sight, held back as "reaction forces" in case of emergency. Sensitive to how images of U.S. troops hovering at polling centers might play on Arab TV sets, the Iraqi government has assigned the security detail to its own beleaguered police and military forces—whom one TV correspondent referred to as "cannon fodder."

And the new security arrangement is just one of the obstacles to showing U.S. audiences the Iraqi election process. Already, TV news organizations are barred from filming election offices and poll workers, who are afraid of being identified by anti-American insurgents—and voters too will likely be off-limits.....


The Election Day "media-access policy" drafted by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has made coverage even more difficult. It requires that all news organizations mark their vehicles with press decals to identify themselves—on a day when only authorized cars are allowed on the road. Insurgents will certainly be watching.

"They want to stop suicide bombers," said Mr. Wright. "I think we’re going to have to think twice about driving."

The rules also state that TV crews "may only approach and enter one of the specifically enabled electronic media approved polling centers," which means that satellite trucks will be parked outside select and well-publicized voting sites.

"If you’ve got a satellite truck in front of a school for three days," observed Mr. Wright, "and it’s known in advance where TV cameras are going to be, where do you think the bombers are going to go?"

Even if news crews choose to go to those locations, there’s no guarantee they’ll get much usable footage.

"Even the guy who is manning the metal detectors is generally wearing a ski mask," continued Mr. Wright. "They don’t want to be recognized."

To help make up for the restrictions, the military has held special pre-election press junkets—-overnight and week-long stays that include transport, food and shelter—to Falluja, Basra, Tikrit and Mosul. The British military recently offered a three-day excursion to Basra that was billed as an "Embed and Breakfast." According to a recent count by the Pentagon office in Baghdad, 182 American journalists were embedded with either the U.S. or British military during the weekend before the election.

It’s quite a change from a year ago, when better security conditions allowed freer movement and fewer reporters chose to be embedded. Back then, the press was engaged in a bitter standoff with the Coalition Provisional Authority over the focus of network coverage. Helicopters were being regularly shot out of the sky by insurgents, and reconstruction offered scant images of progress worth broadcasting in half-hour evening newscasts. The C.P.A. went so far as to develop its own satellite feed to bypass networks and provide local affiliates the "good news" message directly, straight out of the Green Zone.

Now the challenges of striking a balance between "good news" and "bad news" was no longer the dominant issue, said Chuck Lustig, director of foreign-news coverage at ABC News. News organizations just want to get an interview and leave in one piece.

"If you can get to the interview, if you can get to the event, then that is a great thing," said Mr. Lustig. "It’s more a logistical challenge now, maybe, than an editorial challenge in terms of getting your information. To get to a particular location to get your editorial information is a large part of my bureau chief’s day."

With the emboldened rhetoric of President Bush’s Jan. 20 inaugural address—and a second-term State of the Union just days away—the U.S. military has pushed to get reporters past the bullet-ridden barricades of downtown Baghdad so they can aim their cameras at democracy in action. And the relationship between the U.S. military and the press has become necessarily cozy in recent weeks.

"I think we’re dependent on each other," said Mr. Lustig. "It’s a mutual benefit. It helps them get more of the country covered. It’s a 50-50 proposition. There are many more embeds now and many more requests to embed than there were six months ago.

"If you want to travel elsewhere in the country safely without hiring private security guards and a fleet of a thousand armored vehicles," he added, "then you have to go through the embed process."

Television correspondents seemed happy to have the military access. "In my view, that’s a good thing," said Ms. Amanpour. "It’s not perfect, but it’s better than not covering it."

"If anything, they’ve gotten a better comfort factor with us and we’ve gotten a better comfort level with them," said Mr. Wright, who was about to accompany the military on a press tour to Mosul for a few days. "Nobody’s trying to force a storyline on us. They just want to facilitate our ability to get out of Baghdad. And that’s great! We’ll go down with the military and embed with the Shiites."

Mr. Wright said that he didn’t feel his objectivity was compromised. And he added that part of the network’s job was to relay the condition of American troops back to the States.

"Part of our job here is to cover what they’re doing," he said. "Both as a service to their family members back home, because they’re our guys, but also it doesn’t stop us from asking them tough questions."

The alternative to going out with the military has been to grab footage from foreign news agencies and Iraqi stringers able to venture out without fear. On Tuesday, Jan. 25, ABC News broadcast the third installment of its series "Iraq: Where Things Stand," a wide-ranging quality-of-life report. The report was created using teams of Iraqi trainee journalists from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Bill Wheatley, vice president of news coverage at NBC News, said that despite the security limitations, his network too would piece the story of the election together with the aid of stringers and non-NBC footage from news agencies. "I’m reasonably optimistic that we’ll be able to tell the story of the election," he said.

Considering the political stakes in getting Iraqi democracy off the ground, the U.S. authorities seemed much less antagonistic toward the press than they’d been a year ago. Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, the director of the Combined Press Information Center, judged that American TV coverage had been mostly fair.

"The stories that they cover, I feel they’re covering accurately and are pretty balanced," he said, although he added that "there were times that we questioned the accuracy on specific stories, because we felt there were times the media were being used to further the terrorist propaganda means."

Mr. Boylan complained that the use of Iraqi stringers sometimes resulted in slanted images that gave outsized credence to anti-American views. "They would use the words out there that the insurgents were using, especially when it came to killing women and children," he explained. "At least from the video that came back—that that was the only thing we were killing. I attribute that to a Western journalist having eyes on the situation. That was the exception rather than the rule."

Asked to grade the output of American news networks, Mr. Boylan gave them a B-plus for accuracy and a C-minus for getting the complete story—he still wanted some of those "good news" reconstruction segments to air. (He also insisted that 14 out of 18 provinces in Iraq were perfectly secure.)

"There is one network that does quite a bit more than the others, of course," added Mr. Boylan: "Fox."

NBC News’ Mr. Wheatley said that relations between U.S. authorities and the media had actually not improved dramatically.

"I wouldn’t use the term ‘improved’ or ‘better,’" he said. "The American networks and others have come forward and had discussions with the military leadership there about various safety issues that affect the press. It’s less tense than it is straightforward. I don’t think there’s love lost in that situation."

Mr. Wheatley also balked at the characterization of press-military relations as "cozy."

"I wouldn’t describe our relationship with the military as cozy," he said. "We’re doing the job, and in some instances we’re embedding. That’s not unusual in war. Look at Vietnam.

"Well, some people see similarities," he added.

For the benefits of embedding, Mr. Wheatley pointed to the incident in which NBC News cameraman Kevin Sites, the correspondent embedded with the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, shot footage of a U.S. Marine killing a prone Iraqi during a raid in Falluja.

"We go on some military embeds, but we’re free to use the material as we wish," he said. "Look at coverage over the last year: Do you feel that there’s been some sort of positive situation emerging from Iraq? Quite the contrary."

Meanwhile, the network anchors weren’t taking any chances in all of this. NBC News’ Brian Williams was said to be staying in an extremely well-fortified bungalow owned by NBC parent company General Electric, which is under contract to rebuild power grids in Baghdad.

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