The Silha Center’s Spring Forum: A New Kind of Warfare Demands A New Kind of Journalism: Rethinking Journalists’ Wartime Ethics

By Anna Nguyen, Silha Research Assistant

Members of the Twin Cities’ media and law communities, as well as students and members of the University of Minnesota faculty, grappled with media ethics during wartime at the Silha Center’s 2003 Spring Forum on April 14, 2003. Focusing on the changes in media ethics since Sept. 11, 2001, discussion topics ranged from the Boston Phoenix’s decision to make a videotape of journalist Daniel Pearl’s execution available online to the Bush administration’s embedding policy for journalists covering the war in Iraq.

Journalist and author Peter Y. Sussman led approximately 40 participants through these and other issues in a workshop entitled “A New Kind of Warfare Demands a New Kind of Journalism: Rethinking Journalists’ Wartime Ethics.”

Sussman is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) National Ethics Committee and one of the co-authors of SPJ’s code of ethics. He was also an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for over 30 years and co-authored a book, "Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog with Dannie M. Martin."

“At such highly charged times, popular passions, legitimate military security concerns, government strategic interests, public preferences and journalistic responsibility are often on a collision course,” Sussman said in his introduction.

In times of war, ethical conflicts can become more pressing as journalists are asked to suppress information such as strategic military plans. The SPJ code advises journalists to “seek truth and report it” and to “minimize harm,” but these two objectives are frequently in conflict, according to Sussman. He explained that the SPJ code should not be taken as a set of hard and fast rules, but rather as a reference point for the media.

After Sept. 11, 2001, journalists need to reflect when the “war on terrorism” has no clear end in sight. “Our challenge is to define the news media’s wartime obligations so that journalists can fulfill their ethical obligations and ensure that a perpetuating state of so-called war does not keep our citizens in a perpetual state of ignorance,” said Sussman.

During the workshop, participants debated how to balance accountability against independence; whether seeking truth and reporting it needed to be balanced against minimizing harm; to whom reporters, editors and journalists are responsible; and whether patriotism gets in the way of reporting news in wartime. Sussman further suggested that news outlets might sometimes consider alternatives such as delaying release and explaining to readers why information was omitted.

In response to each ethical dilemma, Sussman asked the participants to assess their motivation to publish or suppress information; the government’s motivation for suppression; and the reliability of the information.

“The more information the government places off limits, the more responsibility we have to evaluate the propriety of publishing the information we can obtain,” he said.

One of the issues raised by Sussman was CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan’s disclosure in the New York Times on April 11, 2003, that he suppressed information about Hussein’s regime during 12 years when CNN was reporting from within Iraq. (See related story, “CNN’s Eason Jordan Allegedly Withheld the Truth of Hussein’s Regime” in this issue of the Silha Bulletin.) Most members of audience did not agree with Jordan’s decision, believing that a better solution would have been to disclose what information CNN knew, even if doing so meant expulsion from the country.

During the workshop, Sussman cited an ABC News/Nightline poll in January 2003 that reported 60 percent of Americans believed that the government’s need to keep information secret is more important than releasing the information for the media to disseminate.

Kathy Easthagen, a University of Minnesota journalism student and freelance photographer, said that the workshop drove home the importance of a journalist’s obligation to inform the public about why information about the government and the military needs to be readily available in a democratic society. “Journalists need to educate media consumers that it is imperative that the media act as watchdog. This means questioning the government and military and pushing for answers,” Easthagen said. She added that the workshop helped her further understand the need for journalists to maintain their independence, especially for those reporters and photographers who are embedded with military units.

The workshop was co-sponsored by the Minnesota Journalism Center, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Minnesota Pro Chapter of Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). The workshop marked SPJ’s observance of its first “Ethics in Journalism Week.”

Journalists Prepare for War: Journalists Attend Boot Camp to Prepare for Combat Conditions

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

In preparation for their assignments embedded with U.S. forces, a number of journalists went through “training camps.” Run by organizations ranging from the Pentagon itself to the British organizations Centurion Risk Assessment Services Ltd. and the AKE Group, the sessions trained journalists to deal with a variety of situations they might face in combat, including how to stop bleeding, how to safely get on and off a helicopter, how to detect land mines, how to blend into a crowd, how to recognize different types of artillery, emergency procedures at sea, and protective measures in case of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons attack. The Pentagon’s sessions were held at Fort Benning, Ga., Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Fort Dix, N.J. Some of them involved the use of “live fire,” meaning that actual ammunition was used in some of the training exercises. Sessions were generally taught by instructors with military experience.

One of the reasons news organizations require their journalists to attend such sessions is the awareness of the danger associated with reporting from locations involving combat or terrorism, most notably in the case of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered.

Newsday reported that by the end of January 2003, CNN had sent 450 journalists through training; CBS had sent 70. ABC and NBC had also enrolled journalists in the program, but Newsday reported no statistics on those networks. The Boston Globe reported that journalists from Al-Jazeera, the Arab TV news network, had also sent some of its journalists through training programs.

According to “Combat School for Journalists” on National Public Radio’s Web site, the main goal of the training sessions was to “teach reporters how to stay out of the way of fighting soldiers and stay safe on the battlefield.” The article is available online at http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/ feature_921503.html.

Jerry Zremski of the Buffalo News in New York attended a training session. He wrote that reporters arose at 6 a.m. and worked 12-hour days. Their time was filled with classroom instruction that was then put into practice with field exercises. “For the vast majority of us,” he wrote, “it was a revelatory learning experience. Now we know the difference among a division, a battalion and a company. Now we know how to inject the antidote if we get hit with nerve gas. And now we know what mines look like and how to avoid them.”

Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon’s deputy spokesman, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “The primary reason we’re [embedding reporters] is because it’s what editors and reporters want.” But the Pentagon also hopes that the stories filed by embedded reporters can fight enemy propaganda. “Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar,” Whitman continued. “What better way to combat disinformation on the battlefield than to have you report objectively about what the situation really is?”

The New York Times further noted that the military can no longer control the flow of people on a battlefield, including journalists, nor can the military control the flow of information coming from a battlefield, which satellite technology has made both inexpensive and instantaneous. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the commanding officer at Fort Benning, told the New York Times, “This legacy of distrust from Vietnam has simply got to go away. This isolation serves this country poorly. You are going to get the story, one way or the other.”

Stephen Griffin, a constitutional law professor at Tulane University, agrees. In an article in Stars and Stripes, Griffin said, “[The military] have to be dragged kicking and screaming back to a reality that not only is this a First Amendment right, it’s simply good sense. If the American people get the feeling that they’re not getting information, they can easily turn against an operation.”

However, there can be problems inherent in embedding. John Burnett of National Public Radio wrote that “One veteran war correspondent warned us of the greatest threat: After spending weeks with the same soldiers under harsh conditions, he said a journalist must remain independent and always remember, ‘I’m not one of them.’”

James Crawley, one of two military reporters for the San Diego Union-Tribune told the Hartford Courant, “Having us with the military keeps us close to the vest, and it’s easier to watch us. [The military are] not being altruistic here. There will be a lot of propaganda and anti-American press, and if they don’t have independent reporters with the U.S. military, they won’t be able to tell that side of the story.”

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," told the San Diego Union-Tribune that “[The military is] trying to pre-empt complaints by making it look like they’re bringing people along. They will make sure the reporters don’t see anything. It’s PR to placate the D.C. press corps, which officially wants access but is willing to take crumbs.”

Time magazine’s Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson warned that journalists should keep their sense of perspective about the embedding program. Thompson told the New York Observer, “The sort of reporting that bothers the Pentagon comes from the Pentagon, not from the front lines. . . . The problem comes back to issues of strategy . . . and that tends to come from Washington more than the tip of the spear.”

Journalists Prepare for War: Journalists Participate in Embedding Program

By Kirsten Murphy, Silha Fellow

The war in Iraq presented novel challenges to reporters working in the region. With the war came the Pentagon’s offer to U.S. and international news organizations to “embed” reporters and photographers with U.S. military units in and around the battlefields in Iraq. Over 600 journalists participated in the embedding program.

In past wars and conflicts, journalists have traveled with troops, similar to embedding. In World War II, Ernie Pyle lived with American soldiers, and was killed by a Japanese sniper while covering the war. During the Vietnam war, correspondents were given access to and roamed on the front lines with considerable freedom. Such flexibility changed when public opinion turned against the war. Government officials blamed the press, resulting in tighter control of the press’s access to information about military action in subsequent conflicts. The Pentagon’s current embedding program is a very recent change in the military’s attitude towards journalists, and many hope that this program signals a more open relationship between the Pentagon and the press.

Overall, journalists, news organizations and the military responded favorably to the program. But many media critics warned that a cozy relationship with the military and the Pentagon could hurt reporters’ objectivity because the Pentagon had its own agenda in supporting the embedding program – an agenda likely to conflict with objective, independent reporting of the war.

Although the military’s public relations plan focused on open access for the news media to information and coverage of the war in Iraq, the Pentagon provided journalists with embedding “Guidance Policies and Procedures” (hereinafter “rules”) which specified the policies and procedures journalists would be expected to follow while living with the military units. Some of these rules contradicted the promise of openness.

For instance, the rules state that there is no procedure for military review of correspondent copy. However, the rules further specify that military commanders will inform reporters whether they can report certain unclassified security information and “when in doubt, media will consult with the unit commander or his/her designated representative.” The rules also allow commanders to grant access to reporters to “sensitive” security information, but only if the reporters agree to a “security review” of their copy. The rules also included prohibitions preventing journalists from reporting the dates, times, places and outcomes of military actions, except in general terms. In addition, the rules require that all interviews with service members be “on the record.” The rules are available online at http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2003/gulf03/embed.html.

Former New York Times Vietnam war correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg argues that a requirement that all interviews must be on the record “has the possibility of shutting people up,” – military personnel might not want to be interviewed if they know their statements will be attributed to them and read by their superiors. See Greg Mitchell, “Schanberg’s Take on the Pentagon’s Media Rules,” Editor and Publisher, February 24, 2003. The article is available online at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/ article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1823830.

Most of the embedded reporters have now left their units. Although news organizations have reacted positively to the program, critics point out that the program was not strained by adversity. CNN’s Walter Rodgers told the Associated Press, “If there had been a whole bunch of snafus, I do think that it might have gotten frayed around the edges or if they were fighting a first-class army instead of a fifth-class army.” But many news organizations whose reporters were embedded printed and aired in-depth reports of life among U.S. troops. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Sharon Schmickle and Mike Zerby, embedded with the First Marine Expeditionary Force, produced a library of video and audio reports for online readers available at: http://www.startribune.com/iraq.

Journalists’ accounts of their experiences as embeds create a general impression that although they had access to the troops and to combat and were not censored, embedding provided each journalist with only a microcosmic view of the war. As the Chicago Tribune’s Evan Osnos observed, “the isolation freed me to write in detail about the small, intense universe of 12 men riding together through their first firefights. But that isolation also left me groping for a greater understanding of the war’s progress, an unfamiliar sense of unawareness in the era of round-the-clock news.” See Evan Osnos, “A Small Slice of the Big War,” The Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2003.

Satellite telephones and other technical problems and challenges
Journalists and the military also clashed over the use of satellite telephones. U.S commanders banned the use of all satellite phones from Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Co., of the United Arab Emirates, because these phones have built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) features. U.S. commanders ostensibly feared that the phones could be used to track the positions of U.S. troops. Many journalists who relied on Thuraya phones had to scramble to replace the phones with its rival, the Iridium satellite phone, which does not contain GPS features.

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: CNN’s Eason Jordan Allegedly Withheld the Truth of Hussein’s Regime

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

While the war with Iraq was still being fought, CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan published an op-ed column entitled, “The News We Kept to Ourselves” in the New York Times. In his April 11, 2003 column, Jordan made the startling confession that he was “distressed” by things he saw and heard during visits to Baghdad in the past 12 years, but in certain cases elected not to report them. Reporting such events, he wrote, “would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.”

Among those things that Jordan found “distressing” included the abduction of a CNN cameraman, an Iraqi national, who was kidnapped and tortured in the mid 1990s in an effort to force him to confirm the suspicion that Jordan actually worked for the CIA, not CNN. Jordan further stated that CNN feared for the safety of even those Iraqis who were not on CNN’s payroll, because simply broadcasting stories about abuses carried out by Hussein’s Baathist regime could place them in additional danger. Not all incidents of torture and beatings went unreported, however; Jordan cited one report of a woman who was murdered for various offenses, including speaking to CNN by phone. Jordan twice stated in his column that what lay at the heart of his decision was his concern for the safety of the Iraqis who were suffering the abuses of Hussein’s regime.

Jordan’s confession triggered numerous responses in columns and editorials, in the press and online. Some of them expressed doubt that Jordan’s main concern was simply saving lives. At one end of the debate, Rush Limbaugh wrote in an article posted on his Web site that Jordan’s decision to keep silent about the torture was part of a conspiracy involving the media and certain members of Congress to “oppose the use of military force so that the suffering of others might end.” The article, “CNN Knew of Saddam’s Evil, Did Not Report,” is dated April 11, 2003 and is available online at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_041103/content/truth_detector.guest.html.

In “CNN: The Mother of All Cover-Ups,” written by Michael Reagan and posted on the FrontPageMagazine.com Web site, CNN and the rest of the “liberal media” are accused of “covering up similar horrors elsewhere.” Reagan cites a report posted online at the Media Research Center’s Web site which argues that, as in Iraq, CNN is keeping quiet about atrocities occurring in the totalitarian regime in Cuba. The Media Research Center concluded its report by saying, “CNN could have used its unique bureau to add to the American public’s knowledge of the only totalitarian state in the Western hemisphere. . . .” The Media Research Center’s report is available onine at http://www.mediaresearch.org/SpecialReports/2002/sum/exec20020509.asp.

Dante Chinni, writing for the Christian Science Monitor in “About CNN: Hold Your Fire,” on April 17, also questioned the validity of Jordan’s decision and its impact on the information presented to the American public. Commenting on Jordan’s claim that there was information about Hussein’s regime that CNN journalists knew but could not disseminate, Chinni stated that even though reporters are often told things that are “off the record,” what they may have learned as a result of the interview affects their outlook on the topic. “Just because a reporter can’t use that bit of information in the story, he can look for other ways to report it,” Chinni wrote, adding, “The public record was already full of stories about [Hussein] gassing and torturing his own people.” Although acknowledging that information about Hussein’s abuses is readily available (for example, see the U.S. Department of State’s 2001 report, “Myths and Facts About Iraq,” available online at http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/01fs/3935.htm), Chinni argued that many people do not make the effort to seek out such information, preferring to get their news in quick doses from TV or radio broadcasts, newspapers or news magazines.

Neal Conan, hosting National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” on April 16, interviewed Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. When questioned about the stories CNN chose not to tell, Rosenstiel responded, “Omitting these specific stories is not necessarily a problem, but withholding the larger true story, the full picture about Baghdad and Iraq would be a journalistic sin.”

Bob Steele also interviewed Jordan himself and wrote, “The Secrets He Kept,” posted on the Institute’s Web site at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=36&aid=30323. Steele stated that Jordan’s decisions were “morally complex and pragmatically complicated. There were many factors in the calculus he faced, including competing principles and conflicting loyalties.” According to Steele, Jordan was trying to balance not only CNN’s best interests in a competitive market, but also human lives. “At one level,” Steele wrote, “Eason Jordan chose to deal with the devil. . . . [H]e continued his negotiations with Saddam’s regime to ensure that CNN could continue reporting from Iraq.”

Steele described Jordan’s justification for the compromise between CNN and the Hussein regime: “that lives needed protection, that CNN was otherwise rigorously reporting on the atrocities and brutalities of the Hussein regime, and that these exceptions to ‘tell the truth’ principle were few.”

Those critics who take the position that CNN was “soft” on Hussein, Steele wrote, “fail to embrace the moral complexity rooted within this issue.” The strong reactions of such critics “might deter other news organizations from coming forward to discuss compromises they had made in Iraq.”

Steele recommended that decisions about whether or not to make a story public should not be made by one person alone. “These decisions require considerable vetting with many choices, including those who raise contrarian notions.” Steele reported than when he asked Jordan whether he had consulted others, Jordan replied that he did discuss the implications of his decisions with other CNN journalists as well as other individuals he trusted outside the news organization.

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: Journalists Pay the Consequences of Revealing “Too Much”

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Philip Smucker
The first reporter to be expelled from Iraq by the U.S. military for revealing military secrets was Christian Science Monitor reporter Philip Smucker. According to the Associated Press, Smucker revealed the location of a Marine unit during a television interview on March 26, 2003 with CNN. The Los Angeles Times reported that Smucker also revealed similar information during an interview with National Public Radio. A freelance journalist, Smucker worked not only for the Monitor but also the Daily Telegraph in London. He was traveling with the First Marine Division, but was not officially embedded with the unit.

Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, wrote in a statement to the Christian Science Monitor, “My understanding of the facts at this point from the commander on the ground is that this reporter was reporting, in real time, positions, locations and activities of units engaged in combat. The commander felt it was necessary and appropriate to remove [Smucker] from his immediate battle space in order not to compromise his mission or endanger personnel of his unit.”

Christian Science Monitor editor Paul Van Slambrouck disagreed and defended Smucker in the newspaper’s March 28 edition, writing “[I]t does not appear to us that [Smucker] disclosed anything that wasn’t already readily available in maps and in U.S. and British radio, newspaper, and television reports.”

“We are disappointed Smucker has been removed,” Van Slambrouck continued. “He is an experienced war correspondent who understands the gravity of such situations and would not knowingly put U.S. troops – and himself – in jeopardy.”

Before he was expelled to Kuwait, Smucker’s belongings were searched and his equipment was confiscated by Marines. A photographer who was accompanying Smucker, Andy Nelson, was allowed to stay in Iraq with the division.

Peter Arnett
As a result of critical remarks made during a March 30, 2003 interview on Iraqi state television, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Peter Arnett was dismissed from NBC News and MSNBC’s “National Geographic Explorer.” According to the May 2003 issue of Air Force Magazine, Arnett stated during the interview with Iraqi television: “It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.”

Arnett continued, “Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . The first war plan failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan.”

Initially, Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman with NBC, issued a statement in support of Arnett. It said, “His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy. . . . His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more.”

However, overnight NBC was inundated with e-mails and telephone calls complaining about Arnett. According to the New York Times, Gollust followed her first statement with a second one 14 hours later that read: “It was wrong of Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV, especially at a time of war. And it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview.”

NBC News President Neal Shapiro also issued a statement, saying, “When you give an interview to a guy in an Army uniform who works for a dictator whose government we’re at war with, it raises some real questions about your judgment.”

On March 31, Arnett was interviewed via satellite on NBC’s “Today” show. “I want to apologize to the American people for clearly making a misjudgment,” he told interviewer Matt Lauer. “I created a firestorm in the United States, and for that, I am truly sorry.”

Although born in New Zealand, Arnett stated that he has been an American citizen for 25 years, adding that he is neither anti-war nor an Iraqi supporter. However, Arnett cited other journalists who have issued reports critical of the war effort, including NBC’s Tim Russert, a political analyst who had given a report immediately preceding his interview with Lauer, and comments by Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes” questioning the need for U.S. involvement in the war. Kelly McBride, an ethicist with the Poynter Institute, was quoted in an April 1 Hartford Courant article as saying, “It was the particular combination of what he said and where he said it,” that resulted in Arnett’s being fired.

Arnett may have agreed to the interview on Iraqi television in order to maintain access to Iraqi news sources and avoid expulsion, a possibility suggested by the Hartford Courant. However, Walter Cronkite wrote in an op-ed piece that ran in the April 1 edition of the New York Times, “Clearly Mr. Arnett, in granting the interview, was cozying up to the sources he depended on . . . . In this regard, Mr. Arnett was a valuable correspondent in the enemy’s capital. . . . It is even conceivable that his inside look was of some value to our own military. . . . . His long experience make it all the more difficult to understand how he could have been so grossly irresponsible in granting that interview. He besmirched his reputation, offended a nation and lost his job . . . . ”

Arnett’s career has been marked by similar episodes. According to the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., Arnett was expelled from Indonesia for “angering despots” before the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam war. He won the Pulitzer for “telling the truth in Vietnam when most journalists followed the government line,” and is credited with quoting an Air Force major who said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Such reporting “enraged” then-President Johnson.

Arnett continued to be controversial. During the 1991 war with Iraq, Arnett was the only Western reporter in Baghdad for some time. Arnett reported that U.S. forces had bombed a “baby milk factory” which the United States claimed was actually a biological weapons factory. A 1998 report Arnett helped prepare contained claims that during the Vietnam war, the U.S. military killed 15 to 20 defectors; killed approximately 100 members of a single Laotian village; and used nerve gas. The report was later repudiated by CNN, and in 1999, the network did not renew Arnett’s contract.

According to the New York Times, Arnett was then hired by BNN, an independent production company, to cover the Afghanistan campaign. In the latter part of 2002, “National Geographic Explorer,” which is shown on MSNBC, sent Arnett to Baghdad. In February 2003, when war appeared imminent, MSNBC and NBC News reached an agreement with National Geographic to use Arnett as a reporter. There was speculation that Arnett was trying to redeem his tarnished reputation when he swore to stay in Baghdad even after NBC, CBS and ABC ordered their correspondents out. As bombs fell on Baghdad on March 21, Arnett was one of the only two reporters for American networks on the scene, and he filed a live report on the air with Tom Brokaw.

Only hours after his dismissal from NBC and MSNBC, Arnett was hired by the British tabloid the Daily Mirror, which informed its readers with the headline, “Fired by America for telling the truth.” In his first article with the Daily Mirror, Arnett wrote: “I report the truth of what is happening in Baghdad and will not apologize for it. I am still in shock and awe at being fired. . . . The right wing media and politicians are looking for an opportunity to be critical of the reporters who are here. I made the misjudgment which gave them the opportunity to do so.”

The New York Post reported that in addition to the Daily Mirror, Arnett also began working for VTM, a Belgian television station that broadcasts primarily in Dutch, but which has many viewers who understand English. Arnett has also agreed to broadcast reports for a state-run television channel in Greece.

Geraldo Rivera
On March 30, 2003, Emmy Award-winning Geraldo Rivera, correspondent for Fox News Channel, began drawing a map in the sand to illustrate his report during an interview via satellite by Fox News anchor John Gibson. Rivera’s map depicted the location of the unit with which he was traveling, the 101st Airborne, as well as the direction the unit was heading. This appeared to violate ground rules set by the military for embedded journalists.

According to a posting on the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Web site, Rivera was not embedded with the troops, but was told by military officials that he was “no longer welcome” to accompany the 101st Airborne.

However, the Bergen (N.J.) Record reported that Rivera made another broadcast from the Iraqi desert, surrounded by members of the unit, denying reports that he had been expelled. “It sounds to me like some rats at my former network, NBC, are spreading lies about me . . . trying to stab me in the back. . . . MSNBC is so pathetic a cable news network they have to do anything they can to attract attention,” Rivera is quoted as saying.

On March 31, the Pentagon’s Bryan Whitman initially said that Rivera was being expelled. But following the Pentagon’s announcement, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes called the Pentagon and afterwards, according to the Record, Whitman said the situation was under review. The Associated Press reported on April 2 that Rivera volunteered to go to Kuwait where, according to the New York Post, he was assigned as a “general war correspondent.”

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rivera issued an apology from Kuwait, saying, “I’m sorry that it happened, and I assure you that it was inadvertent. Nobody was hurt by what I said. No mission was compromised. I should have been more careful.”

In a satirical column in the Hartford Courant, Jim Shea wrote that the Pentagon was too hard on Rivera. Citing a report Rivera had filed during the war in Afghanistan, Shea reminded his readers that Rivera had stood on the place where Americans had died as the result of “friendly fire” and wept, saying he was standing on “hallowed ground,” but which later was revealed to be a location hundreds of miles away from the place where the incident had really occurred. “After reviewing the tape of his latest misdirection,” Shea wrote, “we think Rivera is innocent. We think the video clearly shows that rather than the 101st Airborne, Rivera is actually embedded with an Israeli army unit in the Gaza strip.”

The incidents with Arnett and Rivera resulted in a short-lived promotional battle between Fox and MSNBC. The New York Post reported that MSNBC fired the first volley, airing a spot that stated: “We won’t report anything that puts our troops in harm’s way.” Fox responded with an ad showing Peter Arnett and stating, “[Arnett] said America’s war against terrorism has failed. He even vilified America’s leadership and he works for MSNBC. Ask yourself, is this America’s news channel?” Fox officials reportedly said that the rivalry was a momentary distraction from the “grim reality of war coverage.”

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: Doctor-Journalist Performs Operation While on Assignment

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Sanjay Gupta, a medical correspondent with CNN, made headlines in early April when he operated on a wounded two-year-old Iraqi boy. Gupta, who is also a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University in Atlanta, was accompanying the U.S. Navy’s “Devil Docs” unit, a mobile operating room working near the front lines.

According to the Associated Press story, a taxi carrying a two-year-old Iraqi boy drove through a U.S. Marine checkpoint south of Baghdad without stopping. The Marines opened fire on the taxi, killing the other two passengers and sending shrapnel into the child’s head. He was brought to the unit with which Gupta was traveling. As the only neurosurgeon available, Gupta was asked to operate on the boy. He agreed to do so, and CNN televised pictures of Gupta scrubbing his hands in preparation for the surgery as well as working at the operating table. No images of the child were shown.

Although the child died of his wounds, Gupta said he did not regret his decision to step out of his role as a journalist and into a role as a practicing physician. “I felt it was my medical and moral obligation to help out in that situation, which I did. It was not an elective operation, but a heroic attempt to try to save the child’s life,” Gupta said during a CNN news report via videophone.

Gupta attended to other patients as well. On April 9 the New York Daily News reported that Gupta had also treated two U.S. military men and a 45-year-old Iraqi soldier.

Gupta’s actions prompted comments from media ethicists.

“Journalists are there to cover the news and shouldn’t get involved with the story, but I think in this case, Gupta was right,” Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy told the Boston Globe. Tom Rosenstiel, director of Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism agreed. “You don’t leave your humanity behind when you put a press pass around your neck.”

Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute, wrote “The Journalist/Physician: Can He Be Both?” available online at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=36&aid=28574. In his article, Steele asked, “How does Gupta the reporter and Gupta the doctor reconcile his competing roles and competing obligations? Does the Hippocratic oath duty always trump the journalistic responsibility to gather information and report stories?”

In an effort to find an answer to this question, Steele interviewed Dr. Art Caplan, Chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “[H]is medical duty always trumps his journalistic role,” Caplan said. “There would be some gray areas when there are non-life threatening [cases]. Diagnostic and chronic ailments are different. You can say someone can wait. [But] if you are the only one available to help, you’ve got to put down the pen and pick up the scalpel . . . you’ve got to go to the Hippocratic oath first.”

But another of Gupta’s actions evoked a different response from media ethicists. The Boston Globe reported that on April 3, Dr. Rob Hinks, the officer in charge of the operating unit with which Gupta was traveling, appeared on CNN and welcomed Gupta as an “honorary member of the Devil Docs.”

The Boston Globe quoted Rosenstiel as saying, “[Gupta] should discourage them from talking about him as an honorary member of the team, for the simple reason that already the public has a lot of questions about how objective and skeptical the embedded reporters are. If he can’t reimpose his journalistic distance, CNN needs to reevaluate his assignment.”

CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson told the Boston Globe that the network has no plans to transfer Gupta, and that there are no specific rules about Gupta’s role with the medical unit. “If the same situation arose, I’m sure [Gupta] would do it again. We fully support it.”

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: Images Create Special Ethical Problems When Covering Combat

By Kirsten Murphy, Silha Fellow

Media coverage of violent crimes, war, and catastrophes often involves decisions regrarding whether or not to show images of the victims. The war in Iraq has revived an old media ethics question: should media organizations show images of the war dead, such as the tape made by the Iraqi government showing killed and captured American soldiers?

The war was televised to the American public virtually in real time. Embedded journalists and advances in technology made it possible for this war to enter American living rooms with a new immediacy. However, once the images of American soldiers, killed and captured by Iraqi troops, arrived in U.S. newsrooms, news executives were forced to decide whether to air them.

The Arab television station Al-Jazeera, based in Doha, Qatar, broadcast just such a tape in full on March 23, 2003. Later that same day, CBS and other U.S. networks began airing copies of the tape. However, after a request from the Pentagon to suspend broadcasting until the families of the soldiers had been notified, all the networks, including CBS, refrained from airing any further portions of the tape.

The Pentagon was expected to release the names of those captured and killed at a press conference on the evening of March 23. However, when the press conference was cancelled, NBC decided to broadcast part of the tape, which showed a clip of the interrogation of Army Spec. Joseph Hudson. According to the New York Times, NBC decided to show the images of Hudson because his mother had already learned of his capture from a broadcast carried by a Filipino television station in Alamogordo, N.M. CNN, Fox News and ABC broadcast portions of the tape, but decided not to air the full version. (For additional information about Al-Jazeera, see “Al-Jazeera Television,” on page 21 of this issue of the Silha Bulletin.)

Those who oppose broadcasting or publishing graphic or violent images argue that such images are disrespectful to the dead and humiliating to the captured. But those who advocate the use of such images counter that public opinion can be shaped through communicating the truth about war, and that the press has a duty to avoid censoring the harsh realities of battle.

In an article on Poynter Online, Aly Colón posits that U.S. news organizations must make thoughtful, independent decisions about what to show and when. He suggests that journalists consider such questions as: “What purpose would you have in showing such images? What consequences do you foresee from depicting such images? Will such pictures help the audience to understand the truth(s) of this war? Will the images help make the audience more knowledgeable about this war?” The article is available at http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=26594.

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: Los Angeles Times Photographer Loses Job over Manipulated Photo

By Anna Nguyen, Silha Research Assistant

An editor’s note in the Los Angeles Times on April 2, 2003, revealed the newspaper had published an altered front page news photograph in violation of its own policy. The photograph, published on March 31, 2003, showed a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from Iraqi fire on the outskirts of Basra. The headline beneath the photo read, “In Basra, Panic as a Tactic of War.” The published photo was a composite of two separate images he had taken.

The altered photo and the two photos used to create it were shown on page A6 of the Los Angeles Times’ April 2 issue. In one of the original photos, an Iraqi is holding a baby in a blanket near a British soldier. In the other photo, the soldier is signaling to the crowd, but the baby is less visible.

The photo was shared with other Tribune Company properties using Newscom, the Chicago-based company’s internal picture distribution service, according to a column by Kenny F. Irby with contributions from Larry Larson at the Poynter Institute Online (http://www.poynter.org/content/ content_view.asp?id=28082). The Hartford Courant and The Chicago Tribune placed the photo prominently in their publications on March 31.

Thom McGuire, the Hartford Courant assistant managing editor, decided to use the photo on the front page after reviewing 500 photos from various news sources. “It was a great image,” McGuire told Poynter. “[But] I missed the manipulation, and I feel bad for everyone involved.”

A Hartford Courant employee looking through the images found that several civilians in the background appeared twice.

The Los Angeles Times reached the photographer, Brian Walski, by telephone in southern Iraq on April 1. Walski said he had used his computer to combine elements of two photographs. Walski, a Los Angeles Times photographer since 1998, was dismissed from the staff as a result of this manipulation.

Managing Editor Dean Baquet called the decision both “painful and easy,” according to the Washington Post. “Any time you make up anything at all, you shouldn’t be working at a newspaper. He made this picture something we’re not even sure occurred. He heightened the drama of the picture. It’s like changing a quote to make it more dramatic.”

“We’re baffled,” Baquet told the Washington Post. “His explanation was that he wanted to improve the picture. It’s heartbreaking. People believe that newspapers screw around with pictures for political reasons. In his case it was an aesthetic thing.”

The Guardian of London reported that Walski, an award-winning photographer, has covered international stories including the Gulf war, the famine in Somalia, the funeral of Princess Diana and the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Kashmir.

Irby’s Poynter column further reported that Walski wrote an e-mail to the entire photography staff admitting to his lack of judgment and accepting responsibility for his action.

The article also contains links depicting how the two photographed were combined.

Irby further states that Poynter questioned Don Bartletti, another staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times working in Iraq, about the effect of fatigue and other war conditions that could have affected Walski. Bartletti said, “[Walski] got into a zone. He was on a head roll, making fantastic images, and it got out of hand. He told me that he did not plan to send the image, but he did it. With all that he was facing, how did he have the presence of mind?”

Los Angeles Times spokeswoman Martha Goldstein told the Associated Press on April 2, “In all these situations, you rely on the good judgment and integrity of the people who work for you. . . . This is a very, very rare instance.”

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: Clear Channel Radio Stations Sponsor Rallies

By Anna Nguyen, Silha Research Assistant

In March and April 2003, Clear Channel Worldwide Inc.’s radio stations in several U.S. cities sponsored major “Rally For America” events in support of the military and war in Iraq. The stations paid for advertising and hiring musicians for the rallies, the Guardian of London reported on March 26.

Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, Texas, is the nation’s largest owner of radio stations. It operates about 1,225 radio and 39 television stations in the United States and has equity interests in more than 240 radio stations internationally. Clear Channel also operates approximately 776,000 outdoor advertising displays, including billboards, street furniture and transit panels. Clear Channel Entertainment, a division of Clear Channel Worldwide, is a promoter, producer and marketer of live entertainment events. Clear Channel also owns athlete management and marketing companies, such as SFX Sports Group.

The New York Times reported on March 31 that Clear Channel’s competitors have criticized pro-military rallies organized up by Glenn Beck, whose talk show is syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks, a Clear Channel subsidiary. Beck, based in Philadelphia, told the Washington Post that he organized the rallies in part to counter antiwar comments by celebrities. An April 6 article in the Washington Times stated that those who disagree with “Rally for America” events label them “pro-war rallies.”

Beck said that he got the idea for the rallies from KLIF-AM Dallas talk show host Darrell Ankarlo, whose station is owned by Clear Channel, according to the Washington Times.

Ankarlo said he decided to organize a rally to support the troops after his 21-year-old son asked why he was hearing so many reports of anti-American sentiment but so little news supporting the troops. Ankarlo told the Washington Times that after he announced the idea on the air, he received more than 300 e-mails in 40 minutes. The first gathering drew about 3,500 people in a Dallas suburb in March 2003.

Amir Forester, a spokeswoman for Premiere Radio Network, a part of Clear Channel, told the Guardian that the rallies, which the company calls “patriotic” and not “pro-war,” were Beck’s idea. “He’s paid to express his opinion, just like a newspaper columnist,” said Forester.

Former Federal Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson told the Chicago Tribune, “I can’t say that this violates any of the broadcaster’s obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing of the news.”

The sponsorship has attracted attention because most other major media companies have confined their war-related activities to reporting and the occasional editorial comment, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, wrote on March 25, “most pro-war demonstrations around the country have been organized by stations owned by Clear Channel. Why would a media company insert itself into politics this way?”

Krugman answered his own question by citing the company’s top management’s history with George W. Bush when he was the governor of Texas. Tom Hicks, the current vice chairman of Clear Channel, and Lowry Mays, the current chairman of Clear Channel, both were associated with the University of Texas Investment Management Company also known as Utimco. Under Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university’s endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998, Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Governor Bush a multimillionaire.

According to the New York Times, some of Clear Channel’s critics also point out that several of the company’s country music stations stopped playing music by the Dixie Chicks after its lead singer, Natalie Maines, told fans in early March during a concert in London, “We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” However, the New York Times also reported that not all Clear Channel country radio stations have banned the Dixie Chicks.

Clear Channel’s critics in media, political and legal circles have implied or even said outright that Clear Channel’s actions are calculated to build support within the Bush administration at a time when the Federal Communications Commission was considering regulations regarding how many radio stations a single company may own, according to the New York Times.

John Hogan, the president and chief executive of Clear Channel’s radio division, told the New York Times that the idea of a corporate political push as “laughable,” saying, “I won’t kid you and tell you that Clear Channel is above criticism, but the brush that is painting us as evil and mean-spirited, and with some sort of onerous political agenda is one that I have a hard time getting my arms around.”

Clear Channel’s stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Antonio, San Diego, Richmond, Va., and other cities have also sponsored rallies that, according to official estimates, were attended by up to 20,000 people each.

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: Journalists Grapple With Conflicts of Interest

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Journalist fired for participating in war protest
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Henry Norr was arrested the day after the war began, on March 20, 2003, at a war protest in San Francisco. He was one of approximately 1,400 protesters at the event. Along with his wife and daughter, Norr was charged with being a pedestrian in the road and blocking traffic, according to the Boston Globe.

When Norr filled out his timecard the following day, he marked his time off from work on March 20 as a “sick day.” “I did so because I was sick – heartsick over the beginning of the war, nauseated by the lies and the arrogance and the stupidity that led to it, and deeply depressed by the death and destruction it would bring,” Norr wrote in a letter to Jim Romenesko’s Web site at Poynter.org. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Norr said, “If they had a column on the time card for ‘jail day,’ I would have put that.” Norr also stated that his manager signed his time card, apparently without questioning it. According to the New York Times, Norr had also organized peace marches during the Vietnam war before he became a journalist, and had initially filed a request in March asking for a month’s leave in order to protest the war full time. Norr has said that his request went unanswered.

The San Francisco Chronicle pulled Norr’s next technology column and, according to the Associated Press, the Chronicle suspended Norr on March 26, then fired him on April 21.

The Associated Press reported that on April 2, the newspaper’s editors sent an e-mail to its staff, saying “our responsibility as journalists can only be met by a strict prohibition against any newsroom staffer participating in any public political activity related to the war.”

On April 3, the San Francisco Chronicle’s readers’ representative Dick Rogers wrote in a column that “the situation [with Norr] illustrates a larger issue – the balancing act between a journalist’s desire to be politically active and the paper’s need to establish and hold the public’s trust.” Saying that it “was the advocacy, not the position,” Rogers continued, “If you become a political advocate and then try to write even-handedly about your passion, will readers think you and your paper are fair?” He also stated that on April 2, the newspaper had “strengthened its policy to prohibit public political activity related to the war.”

According to the Boston Globe, Phil Bronstein, editor of the Chronicle, cited the “falsification” on the timecard and Norr’s “improper claim for paid sick leave” as grounds for dismissal in Norr’s termination letter. “Your personal political activities are no excuse to permit a false claim.”

Bronstein continued, “Even if you had not claimed a paid workday, we would not permit you to return to work in the Chronicle newsroom. To do so would irreparably compromise our journalistic standards and the expectations we have for everyone in the newsroom.”

Sheryl McCarthy, writing for Newsday on April 28, likened Norr’s asking for a sick day but going to a war protest as running into one’s boss at the beach after saying he had a doctor’s appointment. “Getting arrested along with 1,400 others called attention to his newspaper and cast doubt on its objectivity,” she wrote. “I share Norr’s convictions, but his judgment was off, and it cost him his job. I can’t blame the Chronicle for that,” she concluded.

According to the Boston Globe, the local newspaper union and the Northern California Media Workers Guild have filed grievances against the San Francisco Chronicle for Norr’s suspension and termination, as well as the changes to the newspaper’s ethics policy.

Journalists and souvenirs of war
CNN.com reported on April 23 that several American journalists were caught trying to smuggle stolen pieces of art and other Iraqi artifacts into the United States. Benjamin J. Johnson, a satellite truck engineer with Fox News, and Jules Crittenden, a reporter with the Boston Herald, and four others who were not identified, were reportedly found carrying souvenirs of war. Johnson and the unidentified journalists entered the country at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C.; Crittenden returned via Logan International Airport in Boston.

On April 17, Johnson had tried to enter the country with a large cardboard box containing twelve paintings from one of the palaces of Uday Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein’s sons. The paintings depicted Saddam and Uday, according to the Associated Press. Johnson also had 40 Iraqi Monetary Bonds and a visitor’s badge from the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. Johnson initially told customs agents that the paintings had been given to him by “people on the streets of Iraq,” but then confessed that he himself had take some of the paintings from various presidential palaces, and bartered with a U.S. soldier for two others. He said he planned to give one to his employer and keep the others for decoration.

According to the New York Times, Johnson was charged on April 22 with smuggling items into the United States and for making false statements. Criminal charges were filed against him in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com.

Fox fired Johnson when they “learned that he had admitted to the acts described by the Customs Department,” according to a report on CNN.com’s Web site. Johnson had worked for the network for six years.

Jules Crittenden, who had been embedded with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division, had been writing not only for the Boston Herald, but also for the Poynter Institute.

(In one of his Poynter pieces, “Embedded Journal: ‘I Went Over to the Dark Side,’” Crittenden recounted an episode when, while traveling with U.S. forces, he pointed out the location of Iraqi soldiers so that American forces could fire on them. Three Iraqi soldiers lost their lives in the episode. Crittenden wrote, “Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three human beings in the war I was sent to cover, I’m sure there are some people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc. I’ll keep the argument short. Screw them, they weren’t there. But they are welcome to join me next time if they care to test their professionalism.”)

According to the Boston Globe, Johnson tipped off custom officials to the fact that Crittenden would be returning to the United States with several items. When Crittenden arrived at Logan Airport, he declared to customs officials that he had a painting and several ornamental items. According to a story posted on the Boston Globe’s Web site, officials took the five-foot painting as well as the other items. All items will be returned to Iraq. However, officials have said Crittenden will not be prosecuted because the artwork has been valued at less than $15,000. Boston Herald editor Andrew Costello said, “What he had were clearly souvenirs and he declared them,” the Boston Globe reported. The Boston Globe also noted that Crittenden would not be fired.

Poynter Online editor Bill Mitchell issued a statement on Poynter.org in which he wrote, “In agreeing to our request that he write the Embedded Journal for Poynter Online, Jules knew he was signing up for plenty of scrutiny. I haven’t talked with him about what he brought back from Iraq, but it’s pretty clear he should have left that stuff behind in Baghdad.”

In his article posted at Poynter.org, “Embedded Journalist Returns Home, Searched by Customs,” Crittenden himself wrote, “I understand and share the world’s concern about the disappearance of legitimate Iraqi national treasures that are in fact treasures of human civilization. I also share the concerns about the regrettable failure of some soldiers to resist temptation when faced with the riches of a lifetime. However, those are matters separate from the time-honored tradition among soldiers of bringing home reminders of some of the most intense experiences of their lives. There was no exception to that historic practice in this war until we began arriving home.” Crittenden also said that federal agents told him that all reporters and soldiers would be subjected to similar searches.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Bush administration is taking a tough stance on the topic of war souvenirs. Michael J. Garcia, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was quoted as saying “These items are not souvenirs or ‘war trophies,’ but stolen goods that belong to the people of Iraq.” But the article went on to question such policies, saying that in comparison to the priceless artifacts stolen from the Iraq Museum, most of the items brought back by soldiers and journalists have little value.

Nevertheless, Bryan Whitman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, said that the embedding policy regarding journalists traveling with U.S. forces should have taken the topic of war souvenirs into consideration. “I guess we’ll have to put that in for future agreements: ‘When we win the war, you are not allowed to loot,’” he told the Los Angeles Times.

In another incident, a security officer at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan, identified by the Seattle Times as Sgt. Ali Sirhan, was killed when he found a hand grenade in the baggage of Japanese journalist Hiroki Gomi. The New York Post reported that Gomi works for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. Gomi said he did not know the grenade was in his bag. Gomi and three others were injured in the incident.

The Associated Press reported that a Jordanian court sentenced Gomi to one and a half years in prison, convicting him of negligence resulting in the death of the security officer and of accidentally damaging property at the airport. He was acquitted of illegal possession of an explosive device because there was no evidence that he intended harm. Yoshiaki Ito, deputy managing editor of Mainichi Shimbun, was quoted as saying that the trial was fair. However, he also stated that there are plans to petition Jordan’s King Abdullah II for a special amnesty on Gomi’s behalf.

Journalists Face the Challenges of Wartime Ethics: CNN Correspondents Used Armed Guards

By Anna Nguyen, Silha Research Assistant

CNN footage on April 13, 2003 showed CNN correspondent Brent Sandler and a CNN convoy of SUVs, complete with its own armed guard, approaching Tikrit, Iraq, intending to cover the ef- fects of war in that city. After assessing the damage outside the city, the convoy was stopped at a checkpoint by a group of suspected Saddam Hussein loyalists.

At the checkpoint, the group of men told the convoy to stop filming unless they had permission from the governor’s office of the local Baath Party. In addition, they told Sandler that coalition bombings were still occurring and the city was under the control of Saddam Hussein loyalists. Moments after passing through the checkpoint, Sandler reported they were under fire by suspected Saddam Hussein loyalists in the city.

CNN convoy’s armed guard pulled his machine gun and returned fire on the loyalists as the convoy exited Tikrit. CNN producer Maria Fleet was hit by flying glass, but was not seriously injured. Newsday reported that CNN said about 100 rounds of gunfire were exchanged.

The potential consequence of using an armed guard has drawn concern from news outlets and media groups. The Associated Press reported that the CNN incident is believed to be the first time an armed guard used a weapon while accompanying a media crew. The Geneva Conventions state that reporters should not carry weapons in war zones, but several news organizations have hired armed guards in dangerous areas.

Barbara Levin, a spokeswoman for NBC, told Newsday that the news organization has hired about a dozen local militia as armed guards in northern Iraq. NBC, like CNN, has also employed British security firms as advisers. “The safety of our journalists, producers and crews is paramount,” Levin said.

Although many U.S. news organizations forbid their journaists to carry weapons, the policy is not universal. However, embedded journalists cannot carry weapons.

“The reporter in the field is in the best situation to assess the requirements for safety,” said Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for Al-Jazeera, told Newsday. However, he added, “I don’t think that anybody’s safety is enhanced by either carrying guns or hiring armed guards.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released a statement stating that the practice of hiring a private security firm is “against all the rules of the profession” and sets a “dangerous precedent,” according to Agence France Presse.

“There is a real risk that combatants will henceforth assume that all press vehicles are armed,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard said in the statement.

“Journalists can and must try to protect themselves by such methods as travelling in bulletproof vehicles and wearing bulletproof vests, but employing private security firms that do not hesitate to use their firearms just increases the confusion between reporters and combatants,” said Ménard.

RSF’s statement is available online at http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6078.

CNN said although it bars journalists from carrying weapons, providing armed security in the most dangerous situations is appropriate, according to Newsday.

Matthew Furman, a CNN spokesman in Atlanta, told Newsday, “Our policy is first and foremost to do what it takes to protect our staff. If that involves having an armed guard, then that’s what we will do.” He said about 20 armed guards have been stationed at CNN’s northern Iraq compound of Erbil since before the war started.

“If you did not have an armed guard with you, there would be some situations like Somalia, like Afghanistan and like northern Iraq where it would simply be too unsafe to report,” Furman said.

Some media watchdog groups have agreed with CNN. “If the alternative is getting shot by Iraqis, I don’t see that that is a very good option,” said Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, according to Newsday.

Joel Campagna, Mideast program director for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told the Associated Press that he could not recall another incident where a reporter’s armed bodyguard had to fire his weapon.

“Journalists pose the question of whether they should sacrifice their security for the perception of neutrality. I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.

Experts Assess Media’s Coverage Of the War in Iraq

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Before the war with Iraq officially began, journalism school deans, professors, independent editors, journalists and authors sent an open letter to major media editors, publishers, producers and reporters. Signers included retired New York Times columnist Tom Wicker; former New York Times reporter William Serrin; Ben Bagdikian, the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana Robert McChesney; and authors Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal.

The letter highlighted six “patterns” of media coverage that deserved attention, according to the signers of the letter. They advocated avoiding what they called the “Horserace syndrome,” that is, presenting a “grave matter as though it were a high-stakes sports contest;” failing to protest government control of information; failing to maintain an arms-length relationship with the government; failing to question the official story; failing to present a diversity of viewpoints, and the failure of radio to encourage orderly debates with varying viewpoints. The text of the letter is available online at http://www.commondreams.org/news2003/0304-01.htm.

The May issue of the American Journalism Review (AJR) was dedicated to an analysis of the coverage of the war in Iraq. In her article, “The Television War,” available online at http://216.167.28.193/ Article.asp?id=2988, Jacqueline E. Sharkey cited a Los Angeles Times poll that showed that 70 percent of Americans got their news concerning the war from cable television. The poll also showed that Fox was the “most-viewed” cable news channel, with an average of 3.3 million viewers per day.

Part of the reason for television’s popularity as a news source is the developments in technology, including, according to Sharkey, “communications systems that provided instant battlefield coverage, and satellite imagery and software that enabled the networks to swoop in from space and look at sites that have been hit by bombs and missiles.”

Despite the ability to show anything that can be framed within a camera lens, Sharkey wrote that the American version of the war was sanitized, omitting graphic pictures of the violence of war and criticism of the administration and the military. “Some commentators believe one reason that many news organizations didn’t provide more complete coverage is that after [the terrorists attacks of] September 11, opposition to the administration became widely regarded as unpatriotic. This made it difficult for the press to carry out its constitutional role of acting as a check on the government.”

But a poll conducted by USA TODAY, CNN and Gallup over March 29-30, 2003 showed that 38 percent of those polled rated the job the news organizations have done with regard to the war in Iraq has been” excellent,” and 41percent thought the job done by news organizations was “good.”

Nevertheless, many Americans turned to international news sources to obtain information about the war in Iraq. The (London) Guardian reported that UK news Web sites experienced “huge increases” in the number of visitors from the United States. Most of them were looking for coverage of events leading up to and during the war in Iraq. The statistics were collected by an Australian company, Hitwise, which measures the popularity of Web sites based on analysis of data from Internet service providers. Hitwise claims to have measured over 25 million Web users globally.

Hitwise reported that the most popular UK news site has been the BBC’s at news.bbc.co.uk, followed by the Guardian’s at Guardian.co.uk. Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian’s Web site, told dotJournalism, “American visitors are telling us they are unable to find the breadth of opinion we have on our web site anywhere else because we report across the political spectrum rather than just one perspective.” The article is available online at http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story576.html.

Other Internet surfers turned to war Web logs – or blogs. Blogs are Web sites where people post their thoughts and observations in a journal or scrap book-type format. Some journalists working for news organizations were discouraged from keeping their own blogs posted online. According to an article posted on the Online Journalism Review, Kevin Sites, a correspondent with CNN; Joshua Kucera, a freelance correspondent for Time magazine; and Denis Horgan, a writer with the Hartford Courant were forced to “shutter,” or shut down, their blogs. The article’s author, Mark Glaser, cited “many online commentators” as saying that news organizations such as the Hartford Courant are able to require their reporters to do so because the news organizations “have the right to police the activities of employees because of potential conflicts of interest.” Glaser’s article is available online at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1051593413.php.

According to the Chicago Tribune, some of the more popular war time blogs have been:

• “Live from Kuwait . . . A Civilian War Diary” available online at http://www.zaydoun.blogspot.com
• “L.T. Smash: Live from the Sandbox,” purportedly written by a U.S. military officer stationed in the Persian Gulf, available online at http://www.lt-smash.us
• “Command Post,” a popular war news blog available online at http://www.command-post.org

Another blogger, using the name “Salam Pax” – the words for peace in Arabic and Latin – documented the war from the point of view of an Iraqi civilian, writing in a witty and sometimes irreverent style about driving around Baghdad streets to inspect the war damage done to the city, and of the disorganization behind humanitarian efforts to aid the country. Although his last name has not been revealed – his first name really is Salam, according to the Los Angeles Times – the person behind Salam Pax is real. Identified as a 29-year-old architect, Salam served as a translator for freelance journalist Peter Maass during the war. “He’s a lot like us but he’s not us,” Maass reported. “Salam sees what’s happening around him – the tragedy or the absurdity and he communicates it in a human voice that most journalists don’t have.”

The Salam Pax Web site is available at http://dearraed.blogspot.com.

It wasn’t until later that Maass realized his translator was the person behind the popular blog. In an article appearing in the online magazine Slate, Maass wrote, “Working alongside – no, employing – a star of the World Wide Web and being blissfully unaware of it is a lesson about the murkiness of today’s Iraq, a netherland of obscurity in which you cannot know who was a Baathist and who was not, or whether the man in the middle of the street with a gun is going to shoot you.” The article is available online at http://slate.msn.com/id/2083847/

On June 6, the Guardian of London hired Salam to be a columnist.

The Media and the Military: U.S. Military Hampers the Work of Journalists

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Foreign Journalists Claim Mistreatment by Coalition Forces
U.S. military police were accused of mistreating four foreign journalists following their arrest the night of March 25, 2003.

Reports from the Associated Press, Newsday and Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiers, RSF) identified the four journalists – two Israelis and two Portuguese – as Boaz Bismuth, a reporter with the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot; Dan Scemama, a reporter with Israel’s Channel One Television, and Luis Castro and Victor Silva with Radio Televisao Portuguesa. Working as non-embedded journalists, the four were traveling together in a jeep. They were about 60 miles south of Baghdad, between the cities of Karbala and Najaf, when they decided to stop and sleep. An unidentified U.S. unit was camped nearby.

Scemama stated in an interview on Israeli radio that although all four journalists were carrying press cards, U.S. soldiers arrested them, accusing them of being “terrorists, spies and Iraqi intelligence. They made us lie on the ground with our face in the sand for hours before we were given a thorough body search.” The journalists claim they were also denied food and water for extended periods of time and forced to stand in a cold tent in silence. Scemama further stated that Castro was beaten, thrown to the ground and kicked after asking to be allowed to call his wife. The four journalists were then kept locked in their jeep for 24 hours outside the base.

In a letter dated April 7 to U.S. Central Command’s Commander in Chief, Gen. Tommy Franks, the acting director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Joel Simon, wrote that a first lieutenant, identified only as “Shaw” came to apologize to the journalists, saying, “Try to understand, my men are trained like dogs – they just know how to attack. No hard feelings. God bless you.” The journalists were sent to Kuwait, where their material was returned to them. “[U.S. soldiers] want all the journalists in Iraq to have one of their liaison officers with them to supervise the footage they are broadcasting. There is no doubt that this is why they treated us so cruelly,” Scemama said in his interview with Israeli radio. He also claimed that U.S. forces were trying to keep journalists from moving freely inside Iraq.

CPJ and Jose Rodrigues dos Santos, the news director of Radio Televisao Portuguesa, have called for an investigation into the incident. The Associated Press reported that Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said that the journalists posed a security threat, and that there was no indication of mistreatment. He did, however, say the incident would be investigated.

Iraqi Television Station Hit by Coalition Forces
On March 26, 2003, U.K. and U.S. forces carried out air and missile strikes, hitting Iraq’s state-run television station in Baghdad. The international satellite station, which normally broadcasts 24 hours a day, was unable to air programming for eight hours.

The International Press Institute (IPI), based in Vienna, protested the strikes in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, saying that “the attacks violated human rights conventions and set a dangerous precedent,” according to the Associated Press. IPI cited Article 52 of the Geneva Convention which states that “Attacks shall be limited to strictly military objectives” and also Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that everyone has the right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

A report on the IPI’s Web site states that military officials claimed that the attack on the television station had been instigated because it was determined that the station was part of a “command and control center” and that the station was housed in a “key telecommunications vault” for satellite communications. But IPI maintains that attacks like these may result in the blurring of the line between civilian and military activities, “thus making it more likely that in the future the destruction of a country’s news-making facilities will become a central military aim in any conflict. If this were to happen, the media would face deliberate targeting from either side and risks to journalists would be greatly increased.”

IPI also wrote a letter of protest to David Howard, Head of Communication Planning at the Royal Ministry of Defence. He responded in a letter dated May 16, saying: “International law defines [attacks like that on the television station] as those which, by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action. It is common knowledge that Saddam’s regime used the TV network for military command and control purposes. The network thus became a legitimate military target.”

Howard concluded, “I can assure you that the UK fully supports the free press and all that it stands for.”

IPI reported that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and RSF have also protested the attack on the television station.

IPI’s report is available on its Web site at http://www.ifj.org.

Marines Raid Journalists' Rooms in Palestine Hotel
On April 15, 2003, masked U.S. Marines claiming that they were searching for Iraqi fighters performed an early morning search of the guest rooms at the Palestine Hotel where many foreign journalists were staying. The Associated Press reported that the raid resulted in the arrests of four Iraqi men who were not bearing proper identification. The raid reportedly began about 7 a.m.

According to Agence France Presse, Marine public affairs officer Cpl. John Hoellwarth said that room searches were conducted after reports were received by military intelligence that Fedayeen paramilitary fighters might have been hiding in the hotel. However, Hoellwarth did not elaborate.

“We reacted to security concerns that arose from intelligence reports. The Marines are always ready to protect the security of journalists, Iraqi civilians and Marines on the hotel premises,” Hoellwarth stated.

The Marines had keys to the rooms, but kicked down those doors that were bolted. Footage from Associated Press Television News shows Marines pointing M-16s in journalists’ faces.

Jean-Paul Mari, a journalist with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, told Agence France Presse that three Marines entered his room and ordered him to lie at gunpoint on the floor. They checked his press credentials, then searched his room for 10 minutes. The three left, followed by another Marine who offered an apology for the intrusion. But he was soon followed by another wave of Marines who searched Mari’s room a second time.

Shingo Kinawa, employed by the Japan-based Kyodo News services, told Agence France Presse that his offices in the hotel had also been searched. “[The Marines] explained they were searching for a cache of arms,” Kinawa said.

Linda Roth, a producer for CNN, told the Associated Press that she opened her door to armed Marines who ordered her to get down while they searched her room without any explanation. After they left, she said she saw three men who appeared to be Iraqis being guarded in the hallway by Marines. The three men were sitting cross-legged, their hands behind their backs, Roth reported.

The Associated Press reported that the raids occurred on the 16th and 17th floors where journalists from CNN, Turkish TV, Japanese TV and other networks were staying. It was unclear how many rooms on the 18th floor might have undergone searches.

The Media and the Military: U.S. Military Fires on Journalists’ Hotel

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

On April 8, 2003, a M1A1 Abrams tank from the 4th Battalion 64th Armor Regiment fired at what was believed to be an enemy lookout in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad where a number of Western journalists were staying. As a result, two journalists, José Couso, a cameraman with the Telecinco channel in Madrid, and Taras Protsyuk, a cameraman from Ukraine, were killed in the incident. (See “Journalists Who Lost Their Lives” in this issue of the Silha Bulletin.)

An investigative report, “Permission to Fire,” compiled by Joel Campagna and Rhonda Roumani for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) concludes that the incident was avoidable, but not deliberate. Their report is available online at http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2003/palestine_hotel/palestine_hotel.html.

Campagna and Roumani interviewed military and civilian eyewitnesses to the event and reviewed military and civilian statements, reports and video in order to compile their report. Their report describes how the 4th Battalion 64th Armor Regiment and Iraqi forces were fighting near a bridge crossing the Tigris River. The Palestine Hotel offered a good view of the fighting, and many journalists had gathered on the hotel’s balconies to watch.

Chris Tomlinson, a reporter with the Associated Press who was embedded with the Regiment, was one of the eyewitnesses to the event interviewed for CPJ’s investigative report. Tomlinson had also been monitoring the Regiment’s radio communications from a U.S. command center established in Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace located on the west side of the Tigris River. Tomlinson was able to hear the conversation among some of the Regiment’s officers, including Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp, the Regiment’s commander, and Capt. Philip Wolford, the officer who later admitted giving the order to fire.

According to Tomlinson, U.S. forces were attempting to discover the location of the enemy’s “forward observer” – the person in charge of directing the enemy’s ground forces or artillery fire. The military received a report stating that a person with binoculars was inside the Palestine Hotel and might have been directing the fighting against them. Tomlinson has said that just the day before, fighting had forced journalists to move from the Al-Rashid Hotel to the Palestine Hotel, and he believed most of the commanders of U.S. forces were aware of the fact that the journalists had moved.

While looking for the “forward observer,” brigade Cmdr. David Perkins approached Tomlinson and another reporter, Greg Kelly from Fox News. Knowing that journalists were in a hotel in the vicinity of the fighting, Perkins asked Tomlinson and Kelly if they could identify which of the buildings along the river housed the journalists. Tomlinson said he tried to call the Associated Press office in Dohar to obtain a description of the hotel, then call the journalists and ask them to hang bedsheets off their balconies so that the building would be identifiable to U.S. forces.

In the meantime, one of the tank officers radioed that he had seen someone with binoculars in a building on the east bank of the river. Following this report, Capt. Wolford gave the order to fire, and the Palestine Hotel was hit, killing Couso and Protsyuk. Both were taken to an unidentified hospital in Baghdad. Protsyuk later died of abdominal injuries. Couso, who had been wounded in his jaw and leg, died following surgery.

Three other journalists were injured in the incident. A satellite dish technician, Paul Pasquale, was on the same balcony as Protsyuk. Two other journalists, Gulf bureau chief Samia Nakhoul and photographer Falek Kheiber, were on another balcony. All three journalists were on assignment with Reuters.

According to CPJ’s investigative report, witnesses to the event say the amount of time between spotting the supposed forward observer and the order to fire varies from seconds to several minutes.

When U.S. commanders realized the hotel had taken the hit, Tomlinson said that they screamed at one another angrily over their radios. DeCamp told Wolford, “You’re not supposed to fire on the hotel.” According to the CPJ report, DeCamp then drove his tank to where Wolford was located, and the two held a face-to-face conversation rather than using radio communications. Tomlinson was too far away to hear what they said.

The Associated Press later identified Sgt. Shawn Gibson as the soldier who actually fired the tank’s shell. Later that day, CPJ wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld which stated, “while sources in Baghdad have expressed deep skepticism about reports that U.S. forces were fired upon from the Palestine Hotel . . . the evidence suggests that the response of U.S. forces was disproportionate and therefore violated international humanitarian law.” CPJ’s letter further called for “an immediate and thorough investigation into these incidents and to make the findings public.”

On April 11, the Los Angeles Times quoted DeCamp as saying, “I’m sorry to say it, but I’m the guy who killed the journalists. I’m really sorry, and I feel badly for their families, but I had no choice. My soldiers’ lives were in danger.”

In an April 21 letter responding to Spain’s request for an investigation into the matter, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that the U.S. tank had fired on the hotel due to “the hostile fire appearing to come from a location later identified as the Palestine Hotel.” According to the New York Times, Rafael Permuy, Couso’s uncle, who is acting as spokesman for the cameraman’s family, has also demanded an investigation into the incident. Permuy, himself a major in the Spanish reserves, is further demanding that the U.S. military pay compensation to Couso’s widow and children.

On May 28, the Associated Press reported that Pilar Hermoso, an attorney representing the Couso family, filed a lawsuit in Madrid’s National Court against Wolford, DeCamp, and Gibson, accusing them of war crimes and murder. Hermoso said that the suit was filed there because Spanish law allows that court to try crimes committed against Spaniards outside the country. A suit was not filed with the International Criminal Court in the Hague because the United States does not recognize the tribunal’s authority over U.S. citizens.

The Media and the Military: Questions Surround Rescue Operation of Pfc. Jessica Lynch

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Nineteen-year-old army supply clerk of Pfc. Jessica Lynch was captured in southern Iraq on March 23, 2003, when her convoy made a wrong turn and was ambushed. Nine members of 507th Maintenance Company were killed and five were captured. Lynch reportedly “fought to the death” in order to avoid capture, suffering multiple gunshot and stab wounds. Nevertheless, she was caught and taken to Nasiriyah General Hospital where her captors allegedly used force to interrogate her. Eight days later, tipped off to her location by an Iraqi lawyer who risked his life to pass the information on to U.S. forces, Army Rangers, Marine commandos and Navy SEALs descended on the hospital just after midnight. Lynch was scooped from her hospital bed and whisked to the safety of an American hospital in Germany.

The story of “Saving Private Lynch” made headlines on April 2. It was a “feel-good” story from the war with Iraq, centering on a young woman characterized as an attractive and spunky young Yank.

But as early as April 15, the Washington Post reported that, “Iraqis Say Lynch Raid Faced No Resistance.” Some of the doctors at the hospital where Lynch was held were interviewed for the story. Although they said that the rescue contained elements of “Hollywood dazzle,” none of them mentioned any gunfire. They did say, however, that U.S. soldiers broke down some doors in their search for Lynch.

On April 20, Michael Getler, ombudsman for the Washington Post wrote an editorial on the rescue operation entitled “Reporting Private Lynch.” He wrote, “[W]hat really happened is still not clear. In the sweep of this conflict, the episode is just a footnote. But let’s hope an authoritative public account emerges . . . .”

In mid-May, John Kampfner, a reporter with the BBC, revealed the “true” inside story on Lynch’s release on the television program “BBC Correspondent.” According to Kampfner, Iraqi doctors said they provided Lynch the best possible care they could, given the difficulties of wartime. None of them could be accused of mistreating her in any way. She was given the only specialist bed in the hospital, and one of only two nurses on her floor was assigned to her care.

Dr. Harith Al-Houssona stated Lynch had a broken arm, a broken thigh, and a dislocated ankle, characteristic of a “road traffic accident.” Lynch had no bullet or stab wounds that would be indicative of a “fight to the death.” The Guardian of London also reported that Al-Houssana said Lynch was given transfusions requiring three bottles of blood, two of which were donated by Iraqi hospital staff themselves.

On May 20, Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer wrote about the controversy. Comparing the Lynch rescue to the 1998 film “Wag the Dog,” where phony war footage was created to generate public sympathy for a manufactured war, Scheer pointed out many discrepancies between the official U.S. and British media versions of events.

Scheer cast doubt on the credibility of Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, the attorney who informed U.S. forces of Lynch’s whereabouts, saying that he and his family were “whisked” to the United States, granted political asylum, and assured a job with a lobbying firm run by former Rep. Bob Livingston that represents the defense industry. Al-Rehaief has also been promised a $500,000 book contract with HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox Network, Scheer reported. Fox “did much to hype” the story of the war in general and Lynch’s rescue in particular, Scheer added.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke issued a statement that appeared May 26 in the Los Angeles Times. “I take strong exception to the accusations in Robert Scheer’s tirade on the Jessica Lynch rescue. . . . No one within the Department of Defense ‘manufactured’ the news about Lynch’s rescue. A joint team of U.S. military forces put their lives on the line in a hostile area during combat operations to accomplish the mission. Official spokespeople in Qatar and Washington, as well as the footage released, reflected the events accurately . . . .To suggest otherwise is an insult and does a grave disservice to the brave men and women involved,” Clarke said.

Clarke concluded: “That Scheer would simply repeat the BBC’s claims without talking to the Defense Department or independently verifying them make it clear he is more interested in spurious charges than in the facts.”

On May 29, Scheer addressed some of Clarke’s accusations in a commentary in the Los Angeles Times, stating that the Chicago Tribune and the London Daily Mail have “independently verified much” of the BBC’s story surrounding the Lynch rescue.

On May 29, Associated Press writer Scheherezade Faramarzi reported that Dr. Wajdi Al-Jabbar told her that he offered the Americans a master key to the hospital, but they refused it, and instead shot at doors and kicked them down. The director of the hospital, doctors, and even a patient were restrained and handcuffed.

Dr. Khodheir Al-Hazbar told Faramarzi that he and his family, staying together in the hospital for safety’s sake, were surrounded by about 20 American soldiers firing their guns. “They were shooting indiscriminately, everywhere, at windows, between our legs, on the floor. We were terrified.” But when he realized no one was getting hurt, he surmised that the special forces were shooting blanks. “They didn’t shoot real bullets because they knew there was no military force in the hospital,” Al-Hazbar concluded.

On May 29, CNN International host Nic Robertson interviewed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Bryan Whitman, and John Kampfner. In a transcript of that interview, Kampfner said that the Lynch rescue was “a professional mission but it should have been basically spun in a low-key fashion.” He suggested that the Pentagon should have said, “we went in there, we anticipated hostile encounter, none was forthcoming . . . end of story.”

Whitman responded that American soldiers did encounter fire in the compound surrounding the hospital, but maintained that the soldiers did not fire inside the hospital itself. He further stated that the basement of the hospital contained ammunition, mortars, maps and terrain models showing the positions of U.S. troops, indicating that the facility was being used as “a command post by the Saddam regime.” Defending the use of force by U.S. soldiers, Whitman continued, “It was not an established fact that there was no longer Fedayeen operating out of that hospital. We know that the Fedayeen was [sic] not in uniform all the time, that there were enemy combatants that were in civilian clothes.”

Kampfner has asked the Pentagon to release the raw footage of the rescue operation so that the American account of events can be verified. To date, the Pentagon has refused. On June 2, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), ranking minority member of the House Subcommittee on National Security, also asked that the raw footage be released, and that questions regarding the rescue operation and the state of Lynch’s health be addressed officially by the Defense Department.

On May 30, Tom Brokaw interviewed NBC reporter Jim Avila on “NBC Nightly News.” Reviewing file footage from televised news broadcasts covering the Lynch rescue, Avila pointed out that the Pentagon never accused anyone on the hospital staff of mistreating Lynch, and no U.S. soldier fired blanks inside the hospital during the rescue operation. Avila concluded, “No one from the Pentagon ever said on the record that Jessica had fired her weapon or had been shot, but a steady stream of leaks built a dramatic and false impression, an erroneous report often repeated.”

In fact, the New York Times had reported on April 5 that Col. David A. Rubenstein, the commander of the American hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, stated that none of Lynch’s wounds resulted from either gunshots or stabbings.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s readers’ representative Lou Gelfand, wrote in a column on June 1, “The American press in Iraq defaulted on this story. The time to interview the hospital personnel was when the BBC, the London Times and the Washington Post did. And the failure of the American press to jump on the Post story is equally embarrassing.” Gelfand also added that the Star Tribune had elected to run the Scheer column from May 20, but did so on the op-ed page of the newspaper because “it was too opinionated to merit a news page location.”

An editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer on May 30 expressed a similar view. “Now [the story of the Lynch rescue] must be traded for some complicated questions about the sticky entanglements of a rah-rah Pentagon, a thirsty press, and a public desperate for some good news. . . . Stay tuned – perhaps decades from now – for the real story. To journalism’s credit, the original, faulty stories sometimes get revised when the facts finally become clear.”

U.S. Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Deportation Hearings Case

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

On May 27, 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided it would not review the constitutionality of closed deportation hearings despite a split decision in the Sixth and Third Circuit Courts. (See “Sixth, Third Circuit Courts Split on Deportation Hearings Question" in the Fall 2002 issue of the Silha Bulletin.)

The order, docket number 02-1289, North Jersey Media Group et al, v. John D. Ashcroft, is posted at the Supreme Court’s Web site at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/02-1289.htm. The decision not to hear the case apparently was unanimous. The Supreme Court did not issue any statement related to its decision not to hear the case.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 766 immigrants were taken into custody, most based on allegations that they may have violated immigration laws. Chief Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ordered all “special interest” cases to be closed to the press, public and family members. To date, 611 deportation hearings have taken place, resulting in 505 actual deportations, Solicitor General Theodore Olson stated, according to the Associated Press. Other detainees have been turned over to the authorities for criminal prosecution.

The Sixth Circuit had ruled that hearings are traditionally open, and that open hearings also are required by a constitutional guarantee of access to the courts as well as other branches of government. “Democracies die behind closed doors,” Sixth Circuit Judge Damon J. Keith wrote in his opinion. Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit disagreed, writing that immigration hearings are administrative, rather than judicial, and that therefore openness is not required.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the North Jersey Media Group and the New Jersey Law Journal argued, “[T]he public has a critical need to know how its government is responding to the events of September 11, and, more generally, how the government enforced the nation’s immigration laws.” The groups were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Solicitor General Theodore Olson urged the Supreme Court not to grant the petition, contending that only one “special interest alien” remained who might be subjected to a closed deportation hearing. The Advocate in Baton Rouge quoted Olson as saying that the Justice Department’s policy on closed hearings is “currently under review and will likely be revised to reflect the government’s practical experience in dealing with these unique cases.”

ACLU senior staff counsel Lee Gelernt told the Associated Press, “We’ll be watching very closely to see if they actually change the policy, and if they don’t change the policy, there’s nothing to prevent us from bringing further litigation.”

Responding to the high court’s decision not to hear the case, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft posted a press release on the Department of Justice Web site, stating “The Supreme Court’s decision today refused to disturb a Third Circuit ruling that is an important victory in support of our work to secure the nation. . . . Justice Department regulations dating from 1964 have expressly allowed select deportation hearings to be closed to protect public interest. This authority to close hearings is an important, constitutional tool in this time of war, when we face unparalleled threat from covert and unknown foes across the globe.” The press release is available online at http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/May/03_ag_312.htm.

Journalists Who Lost Their Lives in the War with Iraq

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Fifteen journalists have died in the war with Iraq. Five of them died as a result of friendly fire from Coalition forces; four died in car accidents; two were victims of enemy fire; one died after stepping on a landmine; one died in a suicide bombing; one died from a pulmonary embolism; and one died under accidental circumstances.

Paul Moran, died March 22, 2003. A freelance cameraman working for Australia’s ABC News, Moran was killed when a suicide bomber detonated a car at a checkpoint in northeastern Iraq. Eric Campbell, another Australian journalist, was injured in the incident.

Terry Lloyd, died March 22, 2003. A veteran news correspondent for ITV, Lloyd was killed by friendly fire while driving to Basra in southern Iraq. He had been traveling in a marked press car outside Basra when it came under friendly fire from Coalition forces. ITN reported that Lloyd was the first correspondent killed in the news organization’s 48-year history, as well as being its longest-serving reporter, having been with the organization for 20 years.

Gaby Rado, date of death unconfirmed. A Channel 4 News (Great Britain) journalist, Rado was found dead on March 30 in the parking lot outside the Abu Sanaa hotel where he had been staying in Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq. In a press release from Britain’s ITN network, the producer of Channel 4 News stated that it did not appear that Rado’s death was related to any military action. There was speculation that Rado fell from the hotel roof. Hotel staff stated that Rado had asked them directions to the roof after checking into the hotel. Another witness reportedly had seen him walking alone on the roof the evening before his body was discovered.

Kaveh Golestan, died April 2, 2003. An Iranian freelance cameraman working for the BBC, Golestan was killed in the town of Kifrey when he stepped on a landmine while leaving his car. Three other journalists traveling with him also suffered injuries in the incident. Golestan had worked for the BBC for three years. He had previously worked for Associated Press Television News and Time magazine. He had been acclaimed for his 1988 coverage of Iraq’s gassing of 5,000 people in the Kurdish town of Halabja.

Michael Kelly, died April 4, 2003. An editor-at-large of the Atlantic Monthly and a Washington Post columnist, Kelly was killed when the Humvee in which he was riding plunged into a canal while trying to escape Iraqi fire. He was traveling with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division at the time of the accident. Kelly had previously been the editor of the New Republic and the National Journal. Earlier in his career he had been a reporter for the Cincinnati Post, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times and had written for the New Yorker. He had also worked as a freelance magazine journalist during the Gulf War and gathered his writing into a book, Martyr’s Day. He was the first of 600 embedded reporters killed in the war with Iraq.

David Bloom, died April 5, 2003. A reporter with NBC News, Bloom died of a pulmonary embolism while embedded with the U.S. 3rd Army Infantry Division. Known for developing a “jiggle-free” video by using a gyrostabilized camera, Bloom frequently broadcast live from a specially adapted M-88 tank retriever that was nicknamed the “Bloommobile” while traveling with U.S. troops as they moved north toward Baghdad. Riding in the vehicle may have contributed to his death, because it required him to keep his knees bent, a position that can lead to the formation of blood clots. He had been packing his gear when he collapsed. He was airlifted to a field medical unit where he was pronounced dead. Bloom had joined NBC in 1993 and served as a White House correspondent in 1997. He covered presidential races, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Washington-area sniper shooting, and the September 11 attacks on the United States. He was also co-host of the “Weekend Today” show on NBC.

Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, died April 6, 2003. A translator with the BBC, Muhamed was killed as a result of friendly fire when a U.S. warplane dropped a bomb on a convoy of Kurdish soldiers. Two other journalists, John Simpson, a veteran correspondent, and Tom Giles, a producer, both with BBC, were wounded in the incident.

Julio Anguita Parrado, died April 7, 2003. A reporter for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Parrado was killed in an Iraqi missile attack. Parrado had been embedded with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division.

Christian Liebig, died April 7, 2003. A journalist for German Focus magazine, Liebig was killed along with Parrado in an Iraqi missile attack. Like Parrado, Liebig was embedded with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division.

Jose Couso, died April 8, 2003. A cameraman with Spain’s Telecinco, Couso was killed when a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine Hotel where he and other international journalists were staying. Reportedly, the tank fired on the hotel after Iraqi fighters located in bunkers at the front of the hotel fired first, using AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. As dozens of journalists stood watching from the hotel’s balconies, the tank returned fire, hitting the hotel’s fourteenth and fifteenth floors. Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp, commander of the tank unit, apologized for the incident, saying “I’m sorry to say it, but I’m the guy who killed the journalists. . . . I feel sorry for [the journalists’] families, but I had no choice. My soldiers’ lives were in danger.” When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at a news conference in Madrid, some members of the television crews present wore T-shirts imprinted with Couso’s likeness and the word “murdered.” Powell has said that there will be an investigation into the incident. (See “U.S. Military Fires on Journalists’ Hotel” in this issue of the Silha Bulletin.)

Taras Protsyuk, died April 8, 2003. A Reuters cameraman from Ukraine, Protsyuk was killed in the same incident as Couso.

Tereq Ayyoub, died April 8, 2003. A Jordanian cameraman with Al Jazeera, Ayyoub was killed when U.S. air strikes hit Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad office.

Mario Podesta, died April 14, 2003. A free-lance journalist and veteran war correspondent who worked for Argentina’s America TV, Podesta was killed in a car accident. He had been traveling with a convoy on its way from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad when gunshots were heard near Ramadi, 60 miles from Baghdad. Trying to avoid what he perceived as an attack, the driver of the car lost control when a tire exploded, causing the car to roll several times. Podesta was killed instantaneously.

Veronica Cabrera, died April 15, 2003. A camerawoman working for Argentina’s America TV, Cabrera was killed as a result of the same accident as Podesta, although she died in a Baghdad hospital the following day. She was the first female journalist to die in Iraq.

Elizabeth Neuffer, died May 9, 2003. A reporter for the Boston Globe, Neuffer was killed in a car accident when the driver of her car hit a guardrail while returning from Baghdad to Takrit. An award-winning journalist known for her work in promoting human rights and bringing war criminals to justice, Neuffer had received the 1997 Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a 1998 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, and an Edward R. Murrow Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. She was the author of a book, "The Key to My Neighbor’s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda," published in 2001. While working in Bosnia, she was credited with finding indicted war criminals. Matthew V. Storin, editor of the Boston Globe at the time of the war in Bosnia, was quoted as saying that “[Neuffer] knew how to be good with military. She knew how to deal with refugees. It’s rare to be good with either. To be good with both is very unusual.”

(Information for this article was taken from the (London) Guardian, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Associated Press; as well as from the Web sites of the Freedom Forum, Editor and Publisher, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and ITV and BBC television.)

The Media in Iraq: Al-Jazeera Television

By Kirsten Murphy, Silha Fellow

Established in 1996, with financing from the emir of Qatar, Al-Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting organization in the Arab states and is watched by 35 million people in the Arab world. The satellite station has a total of 65 million viewers worldwide. But critics have accused the station of being everything from anti-American to anti-Arab to pro-Osama Bin Laden.

NYSE and Nasdaq
On March 24, 2003, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) withdrew credentials from Al-Jazeera’s two economic correspondents, Ramsey Shiber and Ammar al Sankari. This is the first time the NYSE has withdrawn credentials from journalists since it began granting them in 1994. The NYSE gave no specific reasons for the revocation, citing security and working space concerns.

The next day, the Nasdaq stock exchange followed suit, informing Al-Jazeera that it would no longer allow its journalists to use Nasdaq facilities to broadcast live reports. Nasdaq, however, said that its ban was based on Al-Jazeera’s decision to air images of American soldiers killed and captured in Iraq.

The Los Angeles Times reported on March 26 that Nasdaq spokesman Scott Peterson stated, “In light of Al-Jazeera’s recent conduct during the war, in which they have broadcast footage of U.S. POWs in alleged violation of the Geneva Convention, they are not welcome to broadcast from our facility at this time.”

Critics of Al-Jazeera’s decision to air the images of the soldiers assert that the station violated the Geneva Convention by subjecting the dead and captured POWs to “public curiosity.” Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention states that “prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.” However, the Geneva Convention applies only to signatory states, not to independent media organizations.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated in an interview with CBS News on March 23 that Al-Jazeera is “not a perfect instrument of communication in my view, obviously is part of Iraqi propaganda,” when asked about the images aired by the station. At a Central Command News Conference on March 23, Lt. Gen. of Central Command John Abizaid, chastised an Al-Jazeera correspondent: “You’re from Al-Jazeera television. I’m very disappointed that you would portray those pictures of our servicemen. I saw that, and I would ask others not to do that.”

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) denounced the NYSE and Nasdaq decisions as acts of censorship that will hurt American journalists working abroad. The SPJ asked the NYSE to reconsider its decision. In a press release, SPJ president-elect Mac McKerral stated: “A decision to deny Al-Jazeera reporters credentials does nothing to support our country’s image as a place where free exchange of ideas and information serves as the foundation for everything America does.” The press release is available at http://www.spj.org/news.asp?ref=312.

The station’s decision also sparked debate over whether it is ethical for news organizations to show graphic images of war dead. Al-Jazeera has defended its decision, stating that the media should not hide reports and images of war casualties from the public. In a March 30 interview with John Ydstie of National Public Radio, Al-Jazeera’s spokesman Jihad Ballout responded, “I think the question is: What should media report? Should media report what it is asked to do? Should media report what it’s not asked to do? Or should media report what actually happens, especially in cases of unfortunate conflicts such as the one we have at the moment? War by itself is horrible. I think media would be deceiving its audience if it was to doctor or dress up or edit or censor any of the information that actually make people aware of all aspects of whatever unfortunate stretch you are in.”

Hackers Attack Al-Jazeera English-language Web site
On March 25, 2003, computer hackers attacked the English-language version of the Al-Jazeera Web site using a so-called denial-of-service attack, which means that hackers bombarded the website with false requests to the Web servers, overloading them and making the Web site temporarily unavailable. The attack came the day after the English language page of the Web site debuted on the Internet.

It is believed that the hackers are in the United States because the servers that host Al-Jazeera are located in France and the United States, and only United States servers were attacked.

The Web site became available again within about 24 hours after the attacks. However, two days later, on March 27, the site was hacked again. Visitors to the site were redirected to a page picturing an American flag and the words: “Let freedom ring.”

According to a March 31 Wired News article, some hackers have condemned the Al-Jazeera attacks, calling the perpetrators “crackers” and “script kiddies” who use their computer skills irresponsibly.

Iraq Bans Al-Jazeera Reporters in Baghdad
On April 3, 2003, Al-Jazeera announced that the Iraqi Information Ministry had banned its reporters from broadcasting from Baghdad, Iraq. The Information Ministry ordered Al-Jazeera’s Reporter Diar al-Omari to stop reporting, and correspondent Tayseer Allouni was forced to leave Iraq. Al-Jazeera said no reasons were given for the ban. The station announced that it would suspend all correspondents’ reports from Iraq and only continue with the minimum service of broadcasting images from Iraq. The next day, the Iraqi Information Ministry lifted its ban on the two journalists.

The Media in Iraq: Iraq Faces Possible Imposition of a New Media Ethics Code

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

In the weeks since the fall of Hussein’s regime, the media in Iraq have experienced phenomenal growth. L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. Civil Administrator for Iraq, told the Washington Post, “There’s been a welcome explosion of new media in this country . . . 15 new newspapers in Baghdad alone in the last couple of weeks.” According to the Washington Post, the number of publications in Baghdad alone has reached 70. All of the newspapers advocate an independent Iraq, and most seem to favor democratic-style reforms. A report by the BBC noted that many publications are affiliated with political parties.

But the content of the newly-free media can be controversial. For example, one newspaper, Al-Haqiqa, has published excerpts from the anti-Semitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” according to the BBC.

According to the Associated Press, the U.S.-led occupation authority is devising a code of conduct for the independent Iraqi press. Coalition officials say that the ethics code is not intended to censor the media, but rather is meant to stifle speech that could incite violence and curb attempts to cultivate a civil society. “There’s no room for hateful and destabilizing messages that will destroy the emerging Iraqi democracy,” Mike Furlong, a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, told the Associated Press. “All media must be responsible.”

The Associated Press reports that Iraqis have protested the imposition of an ethics code, saying it is too similar to censorship under the old regime. “How can they say we have a democracy?” asked Eshta Jassem Ali Yasseri, the editor of a new satirical weekly, Habezbooz. “That’s not democracy. It sounds like the same old thing.”

Hamid Al-Bayati is a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an organization that publishes a newspaper critical of the coalition’s occupation of Iraq. During an interview with the Associated Press, Al Bayati asked rhetorically, “Is there a media code of conduct in the U.S. or U.K.? [Then] why should there be such a thing here?”

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) issued a press release stating that occupation forces in Iraq should not “impose any official controls on the content of the news media in Iraq.” The organization argued that inciteful or hateful speech can be moderated in “the marketplace of ideas” and that “any efforts at censorship will backfire and add to the suspicion, resentment and hatred of occupying forces.”

Instead, SPJ encourages self-regulation. As the press release stated, “Self-enforcement is the main tenet of the SPJ Code of Ethics.” SPJ president Robert Leger is quoted as saying, “Whatever code is established should be voluntary. It could, for example, encourage Iraqi media to point out poor performance by other Iraqi media, such as reprinting false or anti-Semitic material.”

A new ethics code may not be the only change in store for the media of Iraq. In early June 2003, an international group of media experts met in Athens to discuss a plan to promote a free press in Iraq. Approximately 70 participants attended, including Iraqi, Arab and Western media lawyers, media policy experts and journalists, according to a PR Newswire release.

The conference was organized by Internews Network and Internews Europe. According to a posting on its Web site at www.internews.org, Internews is a non-profit organization that “fosters independent media in emerging democracies, trains journalists and station managers in the standards and practices of journalism . . . and uses the media to reduce conflict within and between countries.”

Press releases posted on Internews’ Web site spell out key proposals for a new media framework, which purportedly would “complement efforts of the U.S. administration in Baghdad.” The framework includes enacting laws guaranteeing media freedom, abolition of censorship, recommendations for creating an independent broadcasting authority in Iraq, and regulation of broadcasting frequencies. According to the Associated Press, key proposals included:

• Adopting media laws with penalties for “offenses” such as defamation, incitement to violence and hate speech. Penalties would range from public apologies to closure of the media outlet.
• Establishing a council to create a code of conduct for journalists and to resolve media complaints.
• No licensing of individual journalists, newspapers or magazines.
• Granting the public and the press access to all documents and decisions concerning U.S.-led interim governing authority.
• Allowing private Internet service providers to operate.
• Turning government newspapers over to independent and private owners.
• Transforming state-owned radio and TV into a public broadcasting system with editorial independence.

A PR Newswire story identified the sponsors of the meeting as the Greek Foreign Ministry, the European Commission’s Department of Communication, the German Foreign Office, the Russian Ministry of the Press, UNESCO, the World Bank Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency involved in Iraq’s reconstruction. Non-governmental sponsors included the Arab Women’s Media Center, Association AINA, the BBC World Service Trust, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Indonesia Media Law and Policy Centre, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research.

The Media in Iraq: New Media Outlets Growing in Iraq

By Elaine Hargrove-Simon, Silha Fellow and Bulletin Editor

Although the war with tanks and planes may have ended in Iraq, another war continues. But rather than being fought with bombs and gunfire, this war is a war of ideas, and will be fought over Iraqi airwaves.

The battle actually began before bombs began falling on Baghdad. Radio Sawa, a service of U.S. International Broadcasting, is operated and funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an agency of the U.S. government. Radio Sawa began broadcasting in the Middle East a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Radio Sawa is the brainchild of Norman J. Pattiz, the founder of the Westwood One radio network. In October 2002, Forbes named Westwood One as one of the year’s “200 Best Small Companies.” At its Web site at www.westwoodone.com, the company describes itself as “the largest domestic outsource provider of traffic reporting services and the nation’s largest radio network, producing and distributing national news, sports, talk [and other programs], in addition to local news, sports, weather, video news and other information programming.”

Former President Bill Clinton named Pattiz to the BBG. According to the BBG’s Web site, the organization is “a nine-member, presidentially appointed body which supervises all U.S. government-supported non-military international broadcasting, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio and TV Marti, and WORLDNET Television.” According to the New York Times, the organization was created to be a “firewall,” preventing the administration from dictating program content to the BBG.

RAND, the nonprofit institution specializing in research and analysis, posted an article on its Web site stating that Pattiz, the only radio professional on the BBG’s board, reviewed the “broadcast environment” in the Middle East, traveling to the area and analyzing the effectiveness of Voice of America (VOA) on the region. He found that only 2 percent of people living in the region had heard of VOA, and fewer listened to it. The Middle East itself was experiencing a “media war” with “many broadcasters promoting misinformation and messages meant to incite hatred and violence against the United States,” according to the RAND report.

Pattiz hired a marketing firm to find a receptive audience in the Middle East and to analyze how to appeal to it. He learned that 65 percent of the people in the region were 25 years of age or younger, and that they lacked a radio station that catered to them. Pattiz also learned that the young people preferred music driven formats interspersed with topics about dating, entertainment, and computers. VOA, with its short-wave radio broadcasts and all talk format, did not appeal to them.

Working with “moderate” Arab governments, Pattiz gained access to FM frequencies and created Radio Sawa (taken from the Arabic word for “together”) with a blend of popular music and news. Studies have shown that the station has steadily increased in popularity. The (London) Guardian stated reported that 94 percent of 17 to 20 year olds are tuning in to Radio Sawa. The Bush administration has requested nearly $22 million for Radio Sawa for the 2003 fiscal year.

Another RAND article quoted Pattiz as saying that an “overwhelming majority” of Arabs get their news from television. He depicted current news programs on Al-Jazeera as being similar to “CNN meets Jerry Springer.” Discussion programs, according to Pattiz, “are really screaming or yelling matches. . . . If Al-Jazeera had a slogan, it would be ‘all intifada all the time.’”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Pattiz said that the Bush administration has now asked him to launch a nightly news program to be televised in the region. Tentatively named “Iraq and the World,” the program will feature contributions from CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS and Fox News. (CNN declined to participate in the project, the Los Angeles Times reported.) Programs will be translated into Arabic and will initially be broadcast in six-hour blocks because the transmitting must be done via Commando Solo, a fleet of U.S. military cargo planes that fly over the region. Six hours is “how long the plane can stay up,” Pattiz told the Los Angeles Times. But he also said that ground transmitters should be set up relatively quickly, eliminating the need for the program to be broadcast from the aircraft.

The mission of the programming is “a journalistic one,” Pattiz said. “Our mission is to promote freedom and democracy through the flow of accurate, reliable, and credible news and information about America to audiences overseas. Our mission is to be an example of a free press in the American tradition.”

RAND states that key members of House and Senate authorizations committees have “signed on” to the idea of Middle Eastern Television. The Orlando Sentinel reported that President Bush plans to launch the television network by the end of the year. Reportedly $30.5 million in taxpayer funds has already been designated for start-up costs, and Congress is being asked to designate another $30 million for 2004.

But not everyone agrees with Pattiz’s assessment of the programming.

“If we want to demonstrate the robustness of democracy, we should also be beaming the BBC and half a dozen other sources of international news with this effort,” Marty Kaplan, associate dean at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the director of the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Let’s show [Iraqis] that democracy involves this kind of glorious noise in which people disagree with each other all the time.”