Erlich blasts media on Iraq war.

Hellinger, Daniel

Reality has a way of interfering with the best of propaganda," says Reese Erlich, co-author of Target Iraq: What the Media Didn't Tell You. Erlich spoke at Webster University on April 15.

A veteran of the legendary, muckraking San Francisco-based Ramparts Magazine, for 35 years Erlich has contributed reports to "The World" (Public Radio International), Common Ground Radio, the St. Petersburg Times and the Dallas Morning News.

His public radio documentary, "Children of War: Fighting, Dying, Surviving," hosted by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, won the 2002 prize for best in-depth reporting (broadcast) from the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California. In 2001, he produced a one-hour public radio documentary, "The Struggle for Iran," and in 2002, he produced a two-hour documentary, "The Russia Project," both hosted by Walter Cronkite.

Erlich visited Iraq in September 2002 on assignment for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the San Francisco Chronicle. The trip was organized by his co-author, Norman Solomon, founder of the liberal Institute for Public Accuracy. Along for the excursion was actor Sean Penn, who contributed an Afterward to Target Iraq.

The book says that a pliant media allowed itself to be used in selling the invasion of Iraq--not that Erlich has much respect for Saddam Hussein. The opening chapter depicts Hussein's rule as a totalitarian regime with little respect for journalists, even anti-war reporters, such as Solomon and Erlich, or for Penn. Fear and intimidation kept many Iraqis from speaking openly, but in private conversations a more complex picture of Iraqi opinion emerged.

Despite the suffering caused by the Baath regime, Erlich and Solomon contend that the destruction wrought by the first Gulf War (1991) and the impact of subsequent economic sanctions left the Iraqi people with little respect for America. The media largely ignored the perspective of ordinary Iraqis in the build-up to the war. The invasion of Iraq, they predicted, would inflict even greater harm and generate greater bitterness.

Was their prediction accurate? On the one hand, the strategic nature of the bombing, the relatively quick defeat of Iraqi forces and collapse of urban resistance to the invasion spared Iraq the full impact of American firepower. And, the Iraqi troops did not burn oil fields or unleash weapons of mass destruction. To some degree, then, the direct damage to the Iraqi infrastructure was not as great as predicted in Target Iraq.

On the other hand, just as Erlich and Solomon predicted, Iraqis did not greet their "liberation" with celebration. Looting and lawlessness have inflicted great harm, and already many Iraqis are pressing for a quick exit of American troops, just as Erlich and Solomon anticipated.

In addition, the civilian casualties were not slight. Erlich pointed out in his Webster talk that because of hundreds of reporters in the field, an investment of tens of million dollars in information technology and round-the-clock reporting with military experts, finding accounts of Iraqi casualties in the mainstream media was virtually impossible.

Once the war was won, reporters seemed to lose interest in claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was harboring terrorists. Now, the war is presented as a humanitarian exercise to replace tyranny with democracy. "No one wants to go back and look at all the mistaken information reported during the war because it is politically inconvenient," Erlich says.

One of the most egregious errors occurred when network anchors and analysts passed along with little skepticism military claims of having discovered a likely chemical weapons cache that later turned out to be nothing more than agricultural supplies. "Did anyone stop to ask whether it was logical that agricultural chemicals would be found at a depot located close to an important agricultural area?

Instead, the news media emphasized the proximity of the depot to a military base. Of course, it turned out later that the mysterious barrels contained materials for farming," Erlich says.

Erlich predicts that eventually American military or intelligence agencies will claim to have discovered "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction, mostly likely in the form of documents. Given the uncritical repetition of spurious evidence in the war, Erlich anticipates that most of the media will fail to put the claims under serious scrutiny. (Indeed, on April 21, less than a week after Erlich's talk, a front-page story by Judith Miller in The New York Times justified administration charges based solely on information from anonymous military investigators.)

Erlich acknowledges that the media did not march in lockstep to war. Before the war, there was substantial debate about the wisdom of going to war because of three factors: disagreements among American elites, including officials associated with the administration of George Bush I; the opposition of several important European allies; and the successful mobilization of popular anti-war sentiment, which could not be completely ignored.

Once the American attack was launched, critical assessment of its purposes disappeared, especially in the electronic media, and political debate was muted. "Once you go to war the parameters narrow. You get (quotes from) former officers, Navy Seals, and Green Berets," Erlich says. The extensive use of retired military officers resulted not only in bias but also in a shift from political and diplomatic issues to a focus on the fighting.

Although the anti-war movement was too large to be ignored, it did not receive fair coverage from the media. A good example, Erlich says, are the "human shields," peace activists who voluntarily went to Iraq to station themselves at key elements of Iraq's civilian infrastructure. Their stories became of interest only when the activists clashed with Hussein's attempts to place them at military sites or under the control of Republican Guards.

With the war over, some of the divisions over Mideast policy began to surface once again as the administration began to threaten Syria, Erlich says. Once again the media were allowing themselves to be spun by Donald Rumsfeld's agenda-setters. However, divisions within the administration, especially between the Pentagon and the State Department, meant that there was room for debate.

Erlich believes that journalists operating on their own produced much better coverage than did "embedded" reporters. These embedded journalists and their cameras could literally show only one side of war--the view from their side of the battle lines. He criticized the firing of Peter Arnett by MSNBC and National Geographic, noting that Western reporters had no compunctions about openly identifying with U.S. objectives during the war. He contended. that even critical journalists find themselves self-censoring reports rather than jeopardizing their jobs or chances of advancing careers.

As a freelancer, Erlich must earn his living on selling stories to editors. The necessity of selling each story piecemeal might have an even more telling impact than the pressures experienced by attached reporters. Does he ever find himself self-censoring his own work?

"Sure, all reporters (would admit they) do, if they're honest about it. It's better to get out a piece of a story than do nothing at all."

Erilch finds himself reformulating stories to fit the requirements of different outlets. "You take the same information, repackage it as many times as you can. That's necessary to make a living but also reflects the receptiveness of media in different countries. Canadian, Australian and British outlets tend to be more open than American ones."

The presence of reporters operating independently of military units produced tensions with the military, and perhaps more deadly consequences, too. Erlich believes the artillery shelling of Al Jazeera's headquarters in Baghdad on April 8 was probably deliberate because the news outlet had provided the building's coordinates to the Pentagon to prevent a mistake.

Similarly, the shelling on the same day of the Palestine (Marriott) Hotel, which was filled with un-embedded Western reporters, was probably deliberate, judging from the video and first-hand reports.

Erlich predicts that the coming period will be difficult' for the U.S. occupation. However repressive the old regime was, it offered free healthcare and education, which are likely to be regarded as matters for the market and private sectors in the new Iraq molded by the occupation authorities.

In contrast to the other Gulf states, women in Iraq enjoyed much greater freedom, including educational and professional opportunities. If conservative Islamists take control of key areas, women will suffer the most.

Dan Hellinger is professor of political science at Webster University.