UNH professor looks back on five years of war coverage

It’s been five years since the war began, and the U.S. military is still operating in Iraq. The war, which many believed would be a short-term engagement, has turned into a long-term disaster. If Americans had foreseen such a lengthy involvement, would they have been so eager to invade Iraq? If more accurate information had been available before the invasion, would support for the war have been so strong?

Joshua Meyrowitz is a professor of media studies in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. His research explores how the war in Iraq has been covered by the American news media, the challenges faced by U.S. journalists covering this conflict and how changes in the news industry have tied the hands of war reporters.

In advance of the five-year anniversary of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq on Wednesday, March 19, Meyrowitz discusses his findings with The Wire.

First, could you describe your research methods?
I looked at the headline coverage, the topics that dominated, and I looked at the stories that were on the back pages or buried on Web sites and the information that was available online, including information where people were re-circulating the stories that were on the back pages.

What was the difference between the stories that were in the headlines and the ones that were in the back pages?
There were two different definitions of objectivity operating. The headlines were objective in the narrow, technical sense that the officials quoted really did say those things. Unfortunately, what they said and what they were quoted as saying and what dominated the headlines was not true. In the stories on the back pages, which were many fewer in number, the journalists used a different definition of objectivity. They used the definition that’s closer to what we think of as scientific objectivity. That is, they asked whether the claims made by officials were true or false. And what they found was that they were all false. I should also say that the claims were all disproved before the war started. As an example of the contrast, on September 7, 2002, President Bush, with Tony Blair by his side, made a widely televised statement that an International Atomic Energy Agency report stated that Saddam Hussein was six months away from an atomic weapon. Then Bush said, “I don’t know what more evidence we need.” This was during the Congressional debate for the use of force. Only one journalist that I know of in the country did the next step toward scientific objectivity. His name was Joseph Curl and he worked, ironically, for the ultra-conservative Washington Times, which normally is very supportive of the administration. But he’s an honest reporter, and when he called up the IAEA and they said there is no such report, he wrote up the story. But it didn’t appear until three weeks later, on September 27, and it was buried on page 16, and no other newspaper that I know of picked up the story. That’s just one of dozens of examples. Every major claim that was in the headlines—chemical weapons, anodized aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuge, satellite photographs about rebuilding at nuclear sites, germ warfare labs in mobile trucks and trains, links to Al-Qaeda—every one of these stories was false and they were all disproved by journalists within the mainstream and, of course, by hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, in the independent media and people doing independent research, as I was, which didn’t actually take that much effort.

In your opinion, informed by your research, why were these stories pushed to the back page?
The mainstream media, unlike (independent media), are extremely dependent on their relationship with authorities. It’s very convenient to go to the authorities. They give you the news at a scheduled time. They invite you to press conferences and give you handouts that are timed to your deadlines. You get inside scoops. You don’t get attacked by powerful authorities for printing what they themselves want you to print. And the disagreements in the mainstream media tend to be mostly disagreements between authorities. Newsweek had a cover story that said “The War Over the War,” which you might think meant that they were going to have a story about the millions of people who were protesting the war in this country and around the world. But no, it was the war between the war-eager Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the war-wary Secretary of State Colin Powell. That’s the range of debate that was presented in the news media. So, when Colin Powell came onboard with his U.N. address calling for war, that was the end of debate in most of our media. They gave virtually no attention to the arguments that were being presented by the millions of protesters around the world. No attention was given to the real experts on the weapons of mass destruction, the historians that know about the history of U.S. and British interventions in the region and anthropologists that know about cultural differences—all those people, who would have said clearly, “These stories about WMDs are false” and “The Iraqis are unlikely to embrace the British and U.S. invaders as liberators,” and so on.

Do you think the war is portrayed differently by media outlets in other nations?
In the British media, before the war, they did publish stories about the history of British imperialism in Iraq after the First World War, so that the British public was very much opposed to the war, because they knew of the failed British policy there. As soon as the recent war started, the British and the European media covered the civilian casualties, while the American media tended to show American soldiers blowing bubbles with bubblegum and sunsets and giving candy to the kids. It was almost like a Disneyland image of the war. When the Saddam statue was pulled down by a small group of Iraqis with American help on April 9, 2003, the U.S. media just kept playing the statue’s fall over and over again. Yet, even the European branches of the American media, like CNN International, juxtaposed the statue’s fall with the pictures of civilian dead and wounded. Within 10 days of the statue coming down, there were huge protests in Iraq against the U.S. invasion that didn’t get the same amount of coverage. When you have that kind of slanted, skewed coverage that’s all just supporting one narrative, one story about what’s happening, that really moves the reporting from news to propaganda. If the news media had done a better job of simply reporting what was very accessible to anyone who pays attention and was reported widely in the European media, the American public would not have believed all the lies about the weapons of mass destruction before the war and they would certainly not have believed that the Iraqi people would welcome the British and the Americans as liberators, given the history of British and U.S. involvement in Iraq long before the new war.

Is there any good news, in terms of accurate war coverage?
The good news in all this is that unlike in earlier eras, like in the Vietnam War or even in the first Gulf War, where people still don’t know a lot of the true stories, the Internet has allowed citizen journalists and citizen researchers, and certainly scholars, to very easily get a whole other set of information. Although there’s certainly a lot of misinformation on the Internet, it’s actually very easy to find very accurate information and to find out a different and usually more accurate story of what’s happening. Therefore, while many Americans still believe phony stories about invading Iraqi troops pulling Kuwaiti babies off incubators in 1990, or Iraqi troops and tanks massing on the Saudi border and threatening “our” oil, the latest phony claims have been discredited more quickly and widely.

What sort of challenges do mainstream journalists face covering this war, either at home in their corporate headquarters or on the ground with the U.S. military?
As you probably know, it’s no secret that the newspaper business and journalism in general are in real financial trouble. And it’s the flip side of the power of the Internet to inform average citizens, that people are less in need of buying or paying for their news. And some of the news on the Internet is just simply repeated from the mainstream media, but for free, so that’s helpful for the public, but it’s damaging to the news media. Many news organizations have been firing reporters. The Boston Globe has just been encouraging 60 people to retire and be bought out. News organizations are closing news bureaus around the world, which were never that extensive to begin with. They’re feeling a lot of pressure not to write stories that distract from or contradict the advertising. Apart from this, almost all major U.S. media are owned by giant corporations, who are legally obligated to maximize profits. And the sense of public service is diminished by the corporate need for high returns on stocks. Because of the economic pressures, the political pressures, the implicit filter of patriotism through which mainstream journalists report, there is a kind of self censorship that operates that is becoming more and more obvious to the members of the public who pay attention.

It seems like there’s a lot of information out there, so the onus is on members of the public to find out what’s really happening for themselves. Do you think that’s true?
Yes. In addition to critiquing the news media, I would also critique the many members of the American public who don’t pay sufficient attention to matters that affect them and will affect their children and grandchildren. To the public, when they hear the phrase “authoritative sources,” it sounds like people who are experts on the topic, but that’s not how journalists usually operationally define it. It’s functionally defined as the people in the highest positions of authority, which are often not people who know the most. And even when they know a lot, they don’t always tell the truth about what they know. And they often strategically time their releases of news to try and get a story more or less attention. And they often strategically withhold and release information to support their policies. It’s a bad combination for the mainstream media, but at the same time you have a burgeoning array of information available online to citizens who want to make use of it, as well as to independent journalists who are willing to use all the digital archives to construct a different pattern, a different story that can give us a wider range of perspectives and views about trends, history, continuity and policy. And there are many journalists, even in the mainstream, who are working very hard to send clues and give information to the public, and I think they must be extremely frustrated that the public doesn’t pay much attention or as much attention as they ought to. Instead of fighting over the right to bear arms, we ought to fight more to arm ourselves with the information we need to have a functioning democracy.

It seems like, what many people in mainstream media see as the demise of their industry, you see as the savior of journalism, or even democracy.
I actually share the concern about the demise of the mainstream media, because as much as they tend to toe the line, if you know how to read them and listen to them and watch them critically, there is an enormous amount of information there. And you can get signals of where the government is heading and what country they want to invade next or bomb or put sanctions on. So, there is a lot of information there and I don’t think that it’s good that their financial basis is deteriorating. But I see it as a double-edged sword, in that part of the mechanisms that are chipping away at their foundation are also broadening the access to information that the public could use to be more effective citizens.

How will the media’s coverage of the presidential candidates and their stances on the war affect the outcome of the Democratic primary and the general election?
Well, the media immediately decided that any of the candidates who were against the war from the start and who were against U.S. intervention in other countries—in other words, who were really arguing for a whole different, broad policy—were beyond the pale of serious consideration. Republican Congressman Ron Paul, Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and former Democratic Senator Mike Gravel were all treated by the media as jokes. They were marginalized in the debates that they were included in, for example, by hardly giving them any questions or by asking what advice they would give to the other candidates. And then, the media, as quickly as they could, excluded these candidates from the debates. Therefore, what you have now is this very bounded debate among three candidates, whose images of the U.S. in the world are fairly similar overall. The real diversity has been removed. The media will sometimes say that Obama and Clinton have very similar policies, just different styles. The hard news has moved to the style section, in effect. To me, the important question is why we don’t have a real debate in the country. And the media are so constrained in their narratives that they actually force the candidates to be more like each other, or they’re described as off the page of legitimate discourse, debate and conversation.

What are some of the implications of having such poor coverage of the war in Iraq?
Our standing in the world has declined dramatically. Even prior to this, when I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve found that citizens in other countries know much more about U.S. foreign policy than American citizens do. Most people in other countries know that the U.S. overthrew a democratic, secular government in Iran in 1953. In this country, the story of the U.S. and Iran starts when they did something to us, when the students took over the U.S. embassy. Most of the rest of the world knows that the U.S. has invaded scores of times in Latin America on the side of authoritarian governments and not democratic governments. Most of the rest of the world knows that the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein, encouraged and supported his invasion of Iran and gave him a wink about invading Kuwait. They also know that we’re the most powerful country in the world, that we spend more on the military than most of the rest of the world combined. And they see American citizens as somewhat innocent and naïve in this, or irresponsible. So, the image of the United States in the world is quite sullied. I think they sort of can’t believe how naïve the American public is to keep falling for the phony stories that have been in the press for years. The U.S. also alienated its allies in Europe, France and Germany. There’s astonishment and anger and dismay over U.S. actions that have gotten considerably worse with this unprovoked attack on Iraq, which had nothing to do with September 11, and which was, in fact, a natural enemy of Al-Qaeda. So, the consequences internationally are severe, and there’s no easy way out of Iraq now. And, also, in terms of Americans, the latest estimate is the Iraq war will cost $12 billion a month. Meanwhile, you have cutbacks in social services, threats to Social Security, cutbacks in student loans, bridges collapsing and millions of Americans without basic health care. Our economic future is in real question. The national debt and budget deficits are extraordinary. And, you have the short-term and long-term devastating impact on the families in the military, almost 4,000 military people killed, tens of thousands wounded physically and psychologically, you have different estimates of the number of Iraqis killed ranging up to the hundreds of thousands, you have 4 million Iraqi refugees. So, you have a really disastrous policy that is opening a really dark future for most Americans, who also ought to be asking who is gaining monetarily from this. American citizens need to pay closer attention to the tight relationship between the mainstream media and officials. They need to pay attention to the clues journalists, even in the mainstream, are trying to give them deep down in stories or in the back pages. My critiques are not about individual journalists, who are struggling very hard and operate under a lot of constraints to do a good job and are frustrated by the lack of public attention. The public should also look at alternative news sites. And they should also pay attention to where the money goes.