July 15, 2003, the Scott Room,
Guardian/Observer Archive & Visitor Centre, London, UK
A Reporting the World commentary
Since the war on Iraq there has been an active debate, unique in recent times, among
media professionals about how it was reported, the problems and challenges, and lessons learned for covering future conflicts.
Reporting the World convened, on Tuesday July 15, probably the most senior of several gatherings over the past few weeks. We were joined by the Editor of the Guardian; Heads of News from both the BBC and CNN International; Foreign Editors of the Times and Guardian, Group Political Editor of the Mirror and several distinguished correspondents who followed events either in Baghdad or in embedded positions with forward units.
What follows is a Reporting the World commentary on the issues raised during this discussion, and some important problems, but it should be prefaced by a recognition that much coverage of the Iraq war story has been of a noticeably higher standard than that seen in previous wars.
The justification for war - with its attendant misrepresentations - has been scrutinised, and kept alive as a matter of vital public interest, perhaps more fully than ever before. Think back to the first Gulf War, when the US Congress, along with the rest of us, were duped into believing that Iraqi soldiers had been switching off incubators in the premature baby unit of Kuwait City hospital.
The accuser -presented, by a PR agency, as a nurse recently smuggled out of the occupied capital - turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, who had not been to her own country in years; the story itself, a pack of lies.
Back then, the case for war acquired fresh urgency both from this fraudulent tale and also when Iraqi troops were reported to be massing on the border with Saudi Arabia
-another lie, as it turned out. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait took place, it eventually proved, only after he’d been briefed by April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Baghdad, that Washington would not really mind.
The difference is that, in 1991, pursuing these angles was very much a minority media pursuit; the truth took a long time to emerge and made all the impression, on most people’s view of the conflict, of a toothpick on a block of granite.
There have been other significant changes, too. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger drew attention to new difficulties with the “dehumanisation and demonisation- of the Other, essential to warmaking for reasons explored in the Conflict Analysis section of Reporting the World
-the book.
That became much harder to do, he said, because of distinguished reporting on the people of Baghdad, their hopes and fears, by correspondents such as the Guardian’s own Suzanne Goldenberg and three of our participants
-Lindsey Hilsum of Channel Four News, Anton Antonowicz of the Mirror and David Chater of Sky News.
Reporting the World’s partners in offering this event were the security think-tanks, Saferworld, BASIC and ISIS. They also teamed up to offer a web-based information service, www.iraqconflict.org to journalists, NGOs and government officials.
Ian Davis of BASIC explained, during the discussion, that their initial intention had been to offer an alternative news service, expecting that mainstream coverage would turn out, as in 1991, to be biased and misleading. Actually, he said, there was enough good and challenging reporting to make this unnecessary, and they altered the focus of the site accordingly.
Commentary on the discussion of July 15
Here, we identify, from a Reporting the World point of view, the outstanding issues to emerge from this discussion, as problems requiring solutions if we are to offer a better service in covering any future conflict. Devising workable solutions will be a complex process and different in different media, but we make a series of recommendations as to how such a process might start.
Summary of recommendations:
1 Do not report a ‘line’ from an official source without obtaining independent evidence as to its likely reliability. If, once evidence has been obtained, the reliability seems questionable, stop repeating the line
2 Arguments are best tested by being juxtaposed with, and weighed against, alternative, countervailing arguments. If these do not issue from traditional sources, be on the lookout for opportunities to explore them by going to non-traditional sources.
3 Think long and hard about ‘conduit’ journalism. Things politicians say are not necessarily news; what they do not say may be more newsworthy. Prepare to point out omissions from what is being said, or elisions of key questions.
The problems
THE IRAQI THREAT -were readers and audiences misled? How?
The main concern of many participants was the glaring discrepancy between the impression given, of the threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, in coverage before the war; and the evidence available afterwards.
Ed Pilkington, Home News Editor of the Guardian, and the paper’s Foreign Editor during the war, demanded: “how did we allow Tony Blair to get away with telling us that he had his own special intelligence, and we must trust him and he knew the truth? And we now know that he didn’t have his own special intelligence, and in fact virtually the entire lot of it was at least four years old and pre-1998, and we let him get away with that.-
Richard Sambrook, Director of News at the BBC, said: “we’ve been through the developments of the last few weeks wishing perhaps we had raised some of these questions last autumn or in the early part of this year and tried to sort them out then, but we didn’t.-
And Lindsey Hilsum, Diplomatic Correspondent for Channel Four News, recalled being taken by the Iraqis to sites around Baghdad which, according to the American and British authorities, had some connection with chemical or biological weapons programmes: “because I do not have the technical knowledge I cannot get up and say, ‘what a load of old toss, this obviously isn’t evidence’. I can say ‘well it doesn’t look like it to me’. We only really understood the extent to which we were being sold a pup a few days before the war when the Americans suddenly got very excited about a drone, which they said the weapons inspectors had hidden in their report but this drone was a terrible threat to the future of the world.
Now, the drone was like something out of Aeromodellers Monthly, it was made out of the fuselage of an aircraft, it was done up with duct tape… it was only when we got to that point that we felt bold enough to say, ‘hang on
-I don’t think so’.-
COMMENTARY - There was some media discussion about the claims over Iraq’s weapons, and their validity, before the war, but this was one of those occasions when the effectiveness of a message may have relied on repetition.
To take just one of these claims - once the demand had been raised by the Foreign Office, that Iraq account for 10,000 litres of anthrax from 1991 to prove it was cooperating with UN weapons inspectors, it was then repeated far more often than it was examined. (It found its way into lots of television graphics, for instance).
This was one of the less credible claims because if, as ‘litres’ implies, the allegation was that Iraq had kept anthrax in liquid form, then, as any biochemist could have said, it would have had a shelf life of a couple of years at the most, ie it could not still be a threat 12 years later.
The drone, in particular, should have rung alarm bells because of the steady dripfeed of ‘germ weapon threat’ stories over the years, almost always attributed to nameless intelligence sources, which centred on drone aircraft.
Any of these stories could have been knocked down with one simple fact -the range of the aircraft in question. In the mid-1990s, it was a slightly more sophisticated version, an M-18 Dromeda, capable of flying some 250 miles or so. It means that if, for instance, stories about threats to New York or Sydney were to stand up, it would have to be refuelled around 20 times en route from Iraq.
RECOMMENDATION -Do not report a ‘line’ from an official source without obtaining independent evidence as to its likely reliability. If, once evidence has been obtained, the reliability seems questionable, stop repeating the line, or, if you do repeat it, always remind readers or audiences that independent evidence casts doubt on it.
It might have been as well, in this case, to remind readers and audiences from time to time about the history of dubious claims of an imminent threat from Iraqi chemical or biological weapons; and to make provision to hear from experts on the question of whether Iraq could have projected them, in this way, beyond its own borders.
ENABLING DEBATE - Did we do a good job of equipping readers and audiences to form their own views on the merits - or otherwise - of attacking Iraq?
This is where the coverage could have benefited from a much more innovative and creative approach, particularly during the period
-bracketed, roughly, by the big demonstrations of February 15, and the invasion itself
-when the debate was arguably at its most relevant.
The BBC’s War Guidelines, issued in January, describe concisely a task many journalists who’ve attended Reporting the World discussions
-both from the corporation and elsewhere -would recognise as a core function. We should “enable the national and international debate-, they say, by “allow[ing] the arguments to be heard and tested-. They continue: “all views should be reflected to mirror the depth and spread of opinion.-
Key arguments in favour of war on Iraq boiled down to four essential propositions:
1. The crisis -later, the war -is really ‘about’ WMD and the threat to world security
2. The only way to rid the world of this threat is regime change
3. Regime change is the only way to alleviate the grim humanitarian situation in Iraq
4. The only way to bring about regime change is war
Of these, the one most effectively tested was the second. Crucially, the Franco-German call for the inspectors to be given more time offered an alternative, allowing readers and audiences to juxtapose what they were hearing from the US and UK governments with a countervailing proposition, and weigh them in the balance.
In all the other areas, countervailing propositions attracted little or no coverage. In the first, a large cross-section of the public believed all along that the crisis was not, or not primarily, ‘about’ WMD at all, but about a US agenda to install and maintain compliant governments in the world’s main oil-producing region.
In a survey for Channel Four, which presented respondents with a menu of possible explanations, the ‘security threat’ topped the poll, with 22%; but only by a narrow margin from the most popular alternative view. Fully 21% told pollsters they thought it was really all about oil.
A second poll, for the Pew Research Center, setting up the question in a different way, found the oil theory was shared by fully 44% of the British, and much bigger majorities in many other countries.
Far from being “reflected to mirror the depth and spread of opinion- this was almost entirely absent as an analytical factor in coverage of the build-up to war.
Likewise, with propositions three and four, there were plenty of ideas circulating, for bringing about regime change without war (learning from the process which eventually brought down the iron curtain) and for improving the human rights situation of Iraqi people
-but these, too were largely excluded.
Why were these perspectives, on three out of the four key arguments for war, so conspicuously missing from most coverage? At least partly because countervailing propositions, in these areas, were being put forward by what one participant, BBC World Service Europe region editor Bill Hayton, called “non-traditional sources.-
RECOMMENDATION -Acknowledge that the important job of testing arguments is best done if they are juxtaposed with, and weighed against, alternative, countervailing arguments. If these do not issue from traditional sources, be on the lookout for opportunities to explore them by going to non-traditional sources.
THE LOBBY -A fascinating input from Mary Dejevsky, diplomatic correspondent and foreign leader-writer on the Independent, highlighted the use of the Parliamentary Lobby in news management.
Key security stories, including the September dossier on Iraq’s weapons, were handed out to Political Correspondents
-bypassing specialist reporters who might have polluted the message by raising, at the outset, some difficult questions.
Dejevsky drew rueful chuckles of recognition from participants when she described herself as “the proud possessor of a denunciation email from John Williams at the Foreign Office who accused me of ‘consistent negative coverage’ and how I need to call up more frequently to ‘check the line’ with the Foreign Office, as a lot of my colleagues do.-
This well-known technique of news management rests on a symbiotic relationship within the Westminster village. Compliant reporters get a steady dripfeed of exclusive stories from official sources; spin-doctors get a reliable conduit for their message to enter the public realm on favourable terms. But it proved, in this story, a major obstacle in the task of conveying a proper understanding to readers and audiences.
The effect is exacerbated by television news -particularly 24-hour news - in which a set-piece speech, statement or press conference by a senior politician is automatically treated as ‘news’
-regardless of whether what is being said addresses, or evades, the important questions.
RECOMMENDATION -All newsrooms genuinely interested in offering a service to the public must think long and hard about ‘conduit’ journalism. Television news, including, of course, 24-hour news, is actually bound by public service requirements. Precautions should be taken in advance to have reporters and commentators ready to point out omissions from what is being said, or elisions of key questions.