The Doordarshan anchor put her finger on the pulse. The
problem is not embedded journalists performing their patriotic duty
on behalf of their respective countries, in this case Britain and
the US. If we were fighting a war, our journalists would be every
bit as patriotic, fudging figures of casualties, playing up the
skill of our pilots, and so on.
The problem is the projection of American patriotism in the
context of globalisation, the capacity of CNN to penetrate my
drawing room with a view of the war from inside an American tank,
beamed out in the voice of Walter Rogers, a fine journalist
otherwise but, in that moment of patriotic fervor, spewing
patriotism at a hysterical pitch. The uninitiated viewer, not having
access to alternative footage, becomes the passive recipient of
images controlled by London or Atlanta (Georgia), ultimately the
Pentagon.
Meeting Peter Arnett in Baghdad was a revelation. From the roof
of Al Rasheed hotel in 1991, he had described operation Desert Storm
and all its gory spectacle for the CNN, ushering in an era of live
coverage of wars. I was surprised to find that Arnett was now
working for NBC and Discovery because he had been fired by the CNN
under mysterious circumstances. The CNN had done an investigation in
1998 on the American army having used nerve gas against deserters in
Vietnam and that quantities of such agents were part of the American
arsenal. Arnett had anchored this sensational report. The Pentagon
did not respond for ten days. But soon Ted Turner, who owned CNN,
was pressurised to fire the entire investigating team, including
Arnett.
He had barely told me the story when once again he fell victim to
notions of patriotism which American journalists are being
increasingly invited to uphold. Iraqi TV, identifying him as a
veteran of Operation Desert Storm, asked him how the present
conflict, (then in its second week) was proceeding. He said what
every journalist was writing at that stage: things were not going
according to the American plan. He was instantly fired by the NBC
because saying such things on Iraqi TV was ‘‘unpatriotic’’.
Management of the media by the Pentagon on such jingoistic lines
would have succeeded had there not been so many well equipped Arab
TV units and a lively Doordarshan presence, operating outside the
‘‘embedded’’ regime. While the Anglo-American electronic media
brought to bear on the proceedings the CENTCOM’s perceptions (by and
large), Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi, Al Arabia brought out graphic images
of Iraq’s agony. The balance was provided by Doordarshan’s Satish
Jacob and Noh Nizami, living through the air strikes over Baghdad,
V.K. Shashikumar, driving unescorted from Kuwait to Om Qasr, Basrah,
Nassiriya, Najaf, Karbala, Baghdad. Ahmad Kazmi took one’s breath
away with his mobility — from Tehran to Arbil, Kirkuk, Mosul,
Tikrit, Karbala, Najaf, Baghdad — all without any support structure
to back him, either at CENTCOM or among the Iraqis.
The global media (particularly TV) will never be the same again
after the Iraq war. The body blow that American TV has taken in
sheer loss of credibility is the surest guarantee that the
propagandist path will be discarded in comparable situations in the
future. The strength of American democracy will ensure that
manipulation of the media on such a gigantic scale must not be
tolerated in the future.
Dick Cheney and Rummy Rumsfeld may smirk but it is a crying shame
that half of America has been manipulated into total darkness on the
aims of the war and its consequences. The trigger happy troops in
Falluja are victims of the same brain washing which informs middle
America: that Saddam Hussein, Iraqis and Al Qaeda are all guilty of
having brought down the twin towers!
Driving across rural Uttar Pradesh during an election some years
ago, we stopped at a village outside Mahmudabad. A wizened villager
got up from his charpoy and waved us away with his hand. ‘‘I shall
tell you nothing’’ he said firmly ‘‘unless I have heard the BBC
Hindi service’’. He said he had heard the views of the two
candidates, the local Hindi newspapers and now he was looking
forward to an ‘‘independent outside view’’.
There are two lessons in this anecdote. First, compare the robust
common sense of a poor villager in a developing country with the
population of the world’s richest democracy subjected to persistent
dumbing down by its media. Secondly, how the BBC is wasting its
currency of goodwill and trust I have seen it enjoy in such places
as war torn Afghanistan or Sierra Leone. After the way the BBC has
covered recent conflicts, I bet there is room for All India Radio,
or something resembling it in an enterprising part of the world, to
expand the base of their respective world services on the basis of
one, non-negotiable word: credibility.
That precisely is the word towards which American TV, under the
influence of its much more laudable print journalism, will gravitate
even as the hold of Cheney and Rumsfeld weakens as it must in a
democracy.
The Doordarshan anchor put her finger on the pulse. The
problem is not embedded journalists performing their patriotic duty
on behalf of their respective countries, in this case Britain and
the US. If we were fighting a war, our journalists would be every
bit as patriotic, fudging figures of casualties, playing up the
skill of our pilots, and so on.